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KB/M is not inherently objectively superior in isometric 3D/top-down twinstick shooters.
It can be exasperating. In short, it is caused by control mechanisms with gamepad primarily in mind. Helldivers only came to PC as an afterthought, with Sony assigning minimum resources for porting, and the game is finished. Do not expect this to be fixed.
Two reasons; to make things more interesting, and on gamepad, you use the D-pad keys, which safely assumes you let go of your left thumb stick, so you don't even need to move.
Matter of fact, some players such as myself take pride in mastery of the true control style of this game: gamepad.
I mean, everyone should use the option that he/she prefers, but the truly great Helldiver players, IMO, are using controllers (especially those who play on both PSN and Steam).
and LOL @ the "truly great" nonsense.
It's fine if you prefer a controller. But don't act like the game wouldn't be better if it had a fully fleshed out KB/M control scheme.
At least you can re-map. Holding control while dialing air support with W,A,S,D is awkward.
It's not far from truth.
It's been a while since I did not bother to avoid a silly arguement and it's closing to 3 AM, so let's get to it. Shamelessly stolen off your profile page:
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At this time, keyboard and gamepad control mechanics possess a degree of disparity that grants advantage to one device or another, sufficiently laid out to prevent calling one scheme superior over another. It could be compared to trying to determine if women are better than men in an entirely objective manner. You just can't, unless you're a 4th wave feminist.
One of the debatable points, which is the one you seem to be concerned over, is aiming. Let us now concern just the act of designating our character a chosen point to target, without concerning other gameplay mechanics like throwing power and game-induced targeting delay. It is argued that mouse allows you excellent precision and target acquisition over gamepads. However, due to the nature of twin-stick shooters and some other games on a 2D playing field, any advantage in that regard is entirely redundant, and mouse ends up on even ground. This is caused by the nature of mouse input as opposed to thumbstick input.
The sensor of a mouse detects whether you have shifted the mouse in some direction or another, at a certain rate, and causes the cursor to shift in the adequate direction over adequate distance (depending on sensitivity settings). If you try to perform a fluid motion, the speed of that motion is derived from the samples of distance traveled on the sensor.
To further explain, let us get back to 3D FPS. If you need to target something around you, and you know how far you need to move your mouse, you can flick it there. Flicks can be argued to last about as long no matter how far you actually need to move the mouse. This means target acquisition can be indeed quick, and independent on target's orientation. A great advantage indeed.
Thumbstick on a gamepad works much differently. Its input is not in a form of an absolute distance shift over time, for FPS, it is usually translated into a turning rate. If you need to calculate a distance traveled over one tick, one must integrate the turning rate. Turning rate-based targeting has a theoretical advantage of allowing perfect target leading, but in twitchy gameplay, it means nothing. Target acquisition time in an FPS is highly dependent on target's orientation and attempting to circumvent this with high sensitivity causes frequent overshooting.
This is why KB/M is so superior in many games. It is not the case for Helldivers and other twin-stick shooters.
In those, you stand in a certain place, and operate on a single plane, with little concern for elevation. No matter if graphics are 3D rendered, it plays as a 2D game. In a 2D game, to target a specific point on that plane, you can work in two ways, over Cartesian or Polar coordinate systems.
When you target something on a 2D area with a mouse, you drag the cursor on a given line, and column. X and Y. Cartesian system. In many twinstick shooters, it only matters to shoot in the direction of the target, not to point the mouse right on the target. This means there are multiple solutions in a line, and X and Y can vary in a certain range of values, but you still need both X, and Y. This means that the superb advantage of the mouse is already somewhat diminished; the requirement of pixel-wise accuracy is gone.
When you target something on a 2D area with a gamepad, you imagine a line from your character to the target, determine the angle of the line compared to the right side of the screen, and move your thumbstick in the same angle. That is an application of Polar coordinates; a set of an angle between X-axis and the line joining the zero of the system (your character) and the target, and the distance of the target. The trick being that the latter parameter of the Polar system, the distance, is absolutely irrelevant in the game. This means only the angle matters, and the gamepad is perfectly capable to flick onto that angle in the same amount of time as a mouse would snap onto the targeting line, if not even faster, due to the miniscule physical distance (depending on sensitivity settings of the mouse). This completely nullifies KB/M's advantage in aiming.
In conclusion, target acquisition in Helldivers is, objectively, just as fast on a gamepad as it is on a mouse. The game wouldn't be better if it had a fully fleshed out KB/M control scheme.
And even if PC had an unfair advantage so what? There's no PvP, and there's no cross play.
I'm guessing the devs don't game on PC if they expected people to enjoy aiming with WASD
I am surprised that in spite of me losing Internet for a day and being absent for that long, no one noticed a crucial oversight of mine in what I called an "unfair advantage".
It wouldn't be an unfair advantage. It would actually be balancing things out! On gamepad, you can already walk towards an enemy and fire away immediately. You cannot do this on keyboard as of now because you only have 8 directions to move in. To tether movement to mouse cursor would potentially even things out in this particular regard.
However, this does not mean this would be the solution to the issue Setz originally came up with. There is a reason so, so few games tether movement keys to the mouse cursor; it handles like crap. Therefore, you would introduce this as an option, I might hear. The problem is, there are already numerous discrepancies in how the mechanics handle between gamepad and KB/M, and now you'd add more inconsistency to using a single control device. A fair conniption.
Let me get back to this too, though, as a general idea, not pertitent to the specific talking points at hand:
No, penalty for hipfire is too cheap of a workaround. I wouldn't be afraid to call it the same amount of BS as Ghost Heat in Mech Warrior Online. It's unheard of to use this as a forced limiting mechanic of unaimed shooting in a twin-stick shooter. This is not Call of Duty.
There is no PvP, but that doesn't mean one player should be given advantage over others, and especially by introducing tweaks that grants further-than-normal advantage to using a certain control method. All players should play as equal as possible, as far as game mechanics permit, no matter the controller used.
There is no cross-play, but it seems you heavily, and I mean heavily underestimate how many people use gamepads to play on a PC in general. Helldivers is no exception to this, I encounter gamepad players on a very common basis.
That's pretty stupid. Aiming, and knowing where your character is going to turn should be basic.
Put your surprise face on. I use a gamepad on more than 5 different titles on a PC and I'm not the only one. There are games that simply do not require dozens of keys and mouse and do with just a controller, sometimes even better than a KB/M. When laying back on a big-ass armchair and chilling with some games, I'd pick a gamepad any day as opposed to laying down a plank over my lap to shove a keyboard onto.
It's all about what do you want from your gaming experience. I don't fret playing even FPS on a gamepad when it's tuned up properly (it's hard to nail down the sensitivity and the pacing of the game to match). When it comes to racing games, I whip out my steering wheel. Coming over to flight sims and Mech Warrior, I prep my X52. In fact, I can hardly remember playing a game that I stuck over a 100 hours into in my past year that was played with a keyboard and mouse. When you do find yourself in need of handling the game with a mouse, Steam Controller can fill in for you.
Guess what. When something doesn't work out for people, it dies out. Gamepad's here to stay. It ought to be doing something right. I'm not a competitive gamer, I play games for fun, and therefore want to get comfortable. Do really KB/M gamers never rest their wrist when using WASD? Do they really grip the mouse with their entire hand, and not just with the fingers, even as they maintain their full control and speed as usual? That is what is actually rare. When you grip a gamepad that fits you, that's it. It fits you, with much less effort and accustoming.
Believe it or not, but many gamers aren't playing with ultimate performance in mind. It's a way for them to unwind, and being comfortable with your controls is a big part of that.
I put a part of the quote in bold myself to highlight what I'm nitpicking here. I've played Helldivers for about 160 hours now, and all of them on gamepad, which has no cursor anywhere whatsoever, because I know where my character is going to turn. Yes, what you said should be basic. But that basic lies in the player, not the game. Git gud.