Joystick or gamepad?

[Sabi The Worst Player Ever]

Personally, I use joystick since it is plane game after all and I love to make use of my old and trusted MS Sidewinder. However, at the same time I was always at ave when watching precision of control on gameplay videos and some people claim that for that you absolutely need gamepad.

What's general consensus on that matter? I don't think that I would find gamepad controls intuititve in first place at all (would probably instinctively try to yaw with triggers for example). And what's your opinion?

[Kappatalism]

I think you might be hearing some elitist perspectives on input devices, but I can't really judge for myself. There's definitely easier and more intuitive setups than others (flight and driving on a keyboard is always inferior), but when comparing functional/detected/mapped joysticks to gamepads, it's probably 99% preference.

The game is heavily inspired by a console focused franchise and the complexity of controls is geared towards what's available in that setting. I might go as far as to say it's the intended experience. A simple flick of a thumbstick is definitely faster than tugging a flightstick when you need to constantly adjust.

I think triggers are yaw by default, that or it's a preference that carried over from my time in the demo. It's definitely configurable though.

[Jonathan J. O'Neill]

In short, use what you want.

I have a HOTAS (X-55) and I just don't like it on my arcade-y games. I prefer a controller for them. Flight sims, on the other hand, I'll use a HOTAS.

[bingbean]

I played flying game with gamepad long time, but after i buy my first joystick i did not ever come back to controller no matter if it is sim or arcade. However, after switching to the joystick, I needed to deal with head tracking, because controlling the view with the HAT switch was not intuitive enough for me.
At the time I used the gamepad, I didn't need to deal with head tracking at all.

[Jaes]

Usually I play these kind of games with a game pad, but I've found that my X-52 Pro works very well on here so that's what I've been using.

[CEPHY]

I'd say use a joystick, but since amazon refused to accept my usual payment method for it and aboslutely insisted on credit card payment (which I don't even have), I've stuck with my trusty xbox360 controller. Hasn't failed me yet. Works just fine, after some button remapping.

[Det.Bullock]

If you have a joystick use a joystick.
People that manage to be that precise with a gamepad are probably people that use dual analog gamepads since the PS2 era, they are just more used to it.
It's not the type of game in which one or the other is inherently superior, of course many are just so used to a pad that they are better with it and statistically speaking it's much more likely for a youtuber to have experience with a pad than with a joystick.