Breaking Sometimes, An Fps Really Is Better With A Controller

FOV 90: Which FPS do most people play with a mouse, but you swear by on controller?

Welcome to FOV 90, an FPS column from staff writer Morgan Park. Every week, I'll be covering a topic relevant to first-person shooter enjoyers, spanning everything from multiplayer and singleplayer to the old and the new.

Greetings from a post-Thanksgiving stupor, FPS enjoyers. I had a nice AFK holiday with family, but in the back of my mind I was riding the high of the night before, when my friends managed to assemble a party of nine Master Chief Collection owners (shout out to the $10 Steam sale) to play classic Halo 3 custom games.

It was a blast, and if you have any fondness for early Forge creations like Halo Jenga (seen below), I can't recommend it enough.

The good times got me thinking about a PC gaming maxim that says an FPS is always better with mouse and keyboard. I was diehard about this for a long time—plenty of shooters feel fine on a controller, but I couldn't imagine a scenario where the precision of a mouse isn't a demonstrably better experience than thumbsticks.

Recently, I've loosened my grip on that perspective. Yes, the mouse reigns supreme when speed and precision are major factors in a shooter, and that is often the case. Echo Point Nova, my favorite FPS of 2024 about trickshotting robots while riding a hoverboard at 80 mph, is a "mouse game" at a molecular level that plays straight up bad with sticks. Doom Eternal is a spiritual experience on a mouse, but a fiddly mess on controller.

But take it from me that when you approach every FPS with a mouse default, you sometimes fail to realize that you've made it less fun for yourself by showing up to the lawn mower race in a Ferrari.

Halo is the ultimate example: A few years back, I replayed all the Master Chief Collection games co-op on mouse and keyboard. We barreled through the Bungie stories on Legendary, pistol-popping waves of grunts before they even noticed us and no-scoping distant jackals with Halo's delightful hip-accurate sniper rifle. It was fun, but not often stimulating. I wasn't magnetized to the action the way I was when I played the series on Xbox, and it got me thinking that maybe those campaigns don't hold up as well as I remembered.

Then this month, I returned to the series again with an Xbox controller, and it was like watching the last piece of a puzzle snap into place. Gunfights felt heavier and more deliberate on thumbsticks, which turns out is extremely important for selling

Source: PC Gamer