It's PC vs Xbox One in Gears of War 4 this weekend

Scorpus

Posts: 2,156   +238
Staff member

PC gamers will get their chance to show console gamers how it's done when Gears of War 4 trials cross-platform competitive multiplayer this weekend. While Gears of War 4 already supported cross-platform co-op, this special event is the first time PC gamers will be able to fight against those playing on Xbox One.

The trial run of cross-platform competitive multiplayer will last from December 2nd to December 5th. To try it out, head into the special Versus Playlist on either platform, where you'll play Team Deathmatch, Dodgeball, and King of the Hill game modes. As an incentive to try out cross-platform play, the amount of XP you'll gain in this playlist is significantly increased over other modes.

Microsoft and the Gears team hope to use this weekend to gather important information about how PC and console gamers interact in a competitive setting. Balance is an incredibly important aspect of multiplayer gaming, and the data gathered in this test could inform developers on how to craft multiplayer games that can be played by both PC and console gamers.

Community Manager for The Coalition stated that "conserving a fair, competitive environment remains a top priority for us."

Initially it's expected that PC gamers will hold a considerable advantage over Xbox One gamers due to the much more precise controls afforded by the keyboard and mouse. However with tools like aim assist, it's possible for the game to be balanced such that those playing on a controller aren't significantly disadvantaged.

PC gamers could also benefit from better performance compared to their console counterparts, although Gears of War 4 on Xbox One targets 1080p at 60 FPS. How these differences affect multiplayer matches will be discovered during this weekend's test.

Permalink to story.

 
I think this is good. I've tried competitive games on pc using a controller and have found no balancing issues using my living room pc. If you're a good player with a controller you can keep up with keyboard and mouse players with a gamepad.
 
I hope this works out and can continue in other games. Opening up the pool of potential players is always a good thing in my opinion. I just can't see it going that well, as the top 10% of controller players will still get stomped by your average KB+M user. I hope they can truly balance that difference away.
 
I play Gears 4 with my buddy on the PC, we both use Xbox controllers and have no problem keeping up with and more often than not beating all the mouse and keyboard users. I plan to play on the Xbox this weekend to show mouse and keyboard isn't the master race everything thinks it is.
 
In games like Counter Strike any controller user would get absolutely rekt by a mouse user.
This is 1 title that controller could be at a serious disadvantaged. However in games even as fast as unreal tournament, titanfall 2, or Doom I saw my K/D drop only .5 or so. Not a major difference considering. Slower shooters like battlefield 1, Gears 4, overwatch, etc would see very little advantage.
 
No contest. PC gamers are clearly a superior lot... or so I've been told, and read numerous times. Naturally nothing about that statement has any shred of truth in it.
 
I hope this works out and can continue in other games. Opening up the pool of potential players is always a good thing in my opinion. I just can't see it going that well, as the top 10% of controller players will still get stomped by your average KB+M user. I hope they can truly balance that difference away.

That's not true for all games. This is a third person shooter with very few precision weapons. I have a friend who plays Gears 4 on PC with just the controller, he obliterates and is consistently a top player; I suck using a controller and even with mouse and keyboard I can't play at his level.
 
I hope this works out and can continue in other games. Opening up the pool of potential players is always a good thing in my opinion. I just can't see it going that well, as the top 10% of controller players will still get stomped by your average KB+M user. I hope they can truly balance that difference away.

That's not true for all games. This is a third person shooter with very few precision weapons. I have a friend who plays Gears 4 on PC with just the controller, he obliterates and is consistently a top player; I suck using a controller and even with mouse and keyboard I can't play at his level.

I agree.

Third Person = Controller
First Person Shooter = Mouse & Keyboard
 
In games like Counter Strike any controller user would get absolutely rekt by a mouse user.
This is 1 title that controller could be at a serious disadvantaged. However in games even as fast as unreal tournament, titanfall 2, or Doom I saw my K/D drop only .5 or so. Not a major difference considering. Slower shooters like battlefield 1, Gears 4, overwatch, etc would see very little advantage.
Because you playing against people using same controllers?
 
This is 1 title that controller could be at a serious disadvantaged. However in games even as fast as unreal tournament, titanfall 2, or Doom I saw my K/D drop only .5 or so. Not a major difference considering. Slower shooters like battlefield 1, Gears 4, overwatch, etc would see very little advantage.
Because you have aim helpers in console games.
 
Well as always, this didn't take very long to turn in to a Mouse vs Controller flame battle... Why not let the results speak for themselves, personal opinion is irrelevant, Microsoft themselves have tried it before, post on this very forum even. Which may I add resulted in the very same flame war, so lets all go down that road again shall we?
 
Well as always, this didn't take very long to turn in to a Mouse vs Controller flame battle... Why not let the results speak for themselves, personal opinion is irrelevant, Microsoft themselves have tried it before, post on this very forum even. Which may I add resulted in the very same flame war, so lets all go down that road again shall we?

I was just going to find this - I remember this very same thread. And others, pertaining to the same test ran.

It's no contest, really...
 
I'm a hybrid PC player in FPS games. I can't stand using a keyboard but I like a mouse. In my left hand I have a CH Products Flight Stick, right hand mouse. This setup is vastly superior to using a keyboard!
 
I think this is good. I've tried competitive games on pc using a controller and have found no balancing issues using my living room pc. If you're a good player with a controller you can keep up with keyboard and mouse players with a gamepad.

No, you really won't. This should be a heavily one-sided bloodbath.
 
I play Gears 4 with my buddy on the PC, we both use Xbox controllers and have no problem keeping up with and more often than not beating all the mouse and keyboard users. I plan to play on the Xbox this weekend to show mouse and keyboard isn't the master race everything thinks it is.

You're most likely in for a long wait to feel vindicated. LOL
 
Doom life time k/d with controller 2.8+ k/d with keyboard 3.3+. This means with a controller I'm only slightly worse and still 2.8x better than the average k/m player.
That one-sided auto-aim developer authorized aim-bot / hit-box cheat mode sure is effective at faking "accuracy" isn't it? ;-)

Even today, looking at Youtube vids you can usually tell without any prior knowledge of the player who is using a controller vs K&M simply by looking at the 180 degree turn speeds (typically slower 0.6-1.0s thumb scrolling vs faster 0.2-0.3s wrist flicks). And that's why modern cross-platform shooters have become slow as treacle for "balance" purposes and use all sorts of tricks to hide the obvious gap (eg, fewer but more bullet spongy enemies, narrowing the arc of attack in corridor shooters and "cover based" vs "speed is movement" means fewer turns which benefit controllers relatively more, auto-health regen, 2-3 weapon limits or having to pause / slow-down time when using a weapon selection "wheel" vs direct select F-keys, etc). If you know what to look for, it becomes painfully obvious what degree of under the hood "assistance" is required just to make games playable on a "joystick".

Best way of highlighting this is to pick an old fast-paced PC-exclusive FPS designed solely for K&M with zero native controller / xinput support, then create an xpadder profile to map K&M controls onto the controller. That way you'll be testing pure controller vs mouse input differences without any controller specific aim-bot cheats present. 82:0 kill:loss ratio's for the K&M guy aren't pretty when both guys actually have to aim at the enemy and not merely allow only one of them to trigger +500% larger hitbox "kills" by looking roughly at his direction... ;)
 
That one-sided auto-aim developer authorized aim-bot / hit-box cheat mode sure is effective at faking "accuracy" isn't it? ;-)

Even today, looking at Youtube vids you can usually tell without any prior knowledge of the player who is using a controller vs K&M simply by looking at the 180 degree turn speeds (typically slower 0.6-1.0s thumb scrolling vs faster 0.2-0.3s wrist flicks). And that's why modern cross-platform shooters have become slow as treacle for "balance" purposes and use all sorts of tricks to hide the obvious gap (eg, fewer but more bullet spongy enemies, narrowing the arc of attack in corridor shooters and "cover based" vs "speed is movement" means fewer turns which benefit controllers relatively more, auto-health regen, 2-3 weapon limits or having to pause / slow-down time when using a weapon selection "wheel" vs direct select F-keys, etc). If you know what to look for, it becomes painfully obvious what degree of under the hood "assistance" is required just to make games playable on a "joystick".

Best way of highlighting this is to pick an old fast-paced PC-exclusive FPS designed solely for K&M with zero native controller / xinput support, then create an xpadder profile to map K&M controls onto the controller. That way you'll be testing pure controller vs mouse input differences without any controller specific aim-bot cheats present. 82:0 kill:loss ratio's for the K&M guy aren't pretty when both guys actually have to aim at the enemy and not merely allow only one of them to trigger +500% larger hitbox "kills" by looking roughly at his direction... ;)

I didn't realize it until you mentioned it but yeah, only having 2 or 3 weapons is probably due to a controller's limitations. On M&K you have the number keys 0 - 9. Same thing for special powers in other games, where you only have 3 or 4 and you have to use a radial menu to access them. It would be so much easier just to map them to the number keys.

I guess I can blame me not realizing that sooner on that I didn't really have a computer I could game on until I was 13. Sucks being a kid without money.
 
That one-sided auto-aim developer authorized aim-bot / hit-box cheat mode sure is effective at faking "accuracy" isn't it? ;-)

Even today, looking at Youtube vids you can usually tell without any prior knowledge of the player who is using a controller vs K&M simply by looking at the 180 degree turn speeds (typically slower 0.6-1.0s thumb scrolling vs faster 0.2-0.3s wrist flicks). And that's why modern cross-platform shooters have become slow as treacle for "balance" purposes and use all sorts of tricks to hide the obvious gap (eg, fewer but more bullet spongy enemies, narrowing the arc of attack in corridor shooters and "cover based" vs "speed is movement" means fewer turns which benefit controllers relatively more, auto-health regen, 2-3 weapon limits or having to pause / slow-down time when using a weapon selection "wheel" vs direct select F-keys, etc). If you know what to look for, it becomes painfully obvious what degree of under the hood "assistance" is required just to make games playable on a "joystick".

Best way of highlighting this is to pick an old fast-paced PC-exclusive FPS designed solely for K&M with zero native controller / xinput support, then create an xpadder profile to map K&M controls onto the controller. That way you'll be testing pure controller vs mouse input differences without any controller specific aim-bot cheats present. 82:0 kill:loss ratio's for the K&M guy aren't pretty when both guys actually have to aim at the enemy and not merely allow only one of them to trigger +500% larger hitbox "kills" by looking roughly at his direction... ;)

Exactly. Games today are tailored to consoles (unfortunately,) and with aim assist and other design choices today's games are pretty much balanced regardless of input device of choice. That's my point.
 
That one-sided auto-aim developer authorized aim-bot / hit-box cheat mode sure is effective at faking "accuracy" isn't it? ;-)

Even today, looking at Youtube vids you can usually tell without any prior knowledge of the player who is using a controller vs K&M simply by looking at the 180 degree turn speeds (typically slower 0.6-1.0s thumb scrolling vs faster 0.2-0.3s wrist flicks). And that's why modern cross-platform shooters have become slow as treacle for "balance" purposes and use all sorts of tricks to hide the obvious gap (eg, fewer but more bullet spongy enemies, narrowing the arc of attack in corridor shooters and "cover based" vs "speed is movement" means fewer turns which benefit controllers relatively more, auto-health regen, 2-3 weapon limits or having to pause / slow-down time when using a weapon selection "wheel" vs direct select F-keys, etc). If you know what to look for, it becomes painfully obvious what degree of under the hood "assistance" is required just to make games playable on a "joystick".

Best way of highlighting this is to pick an old fast-paced PC-exclusive FPS designed solely for K&M with zero native controller / xinput support, then create an xpadder profile to map K&M controls onto the controller. That way you'll be testing pure controller vs mouse input differences without any controller specific aim-bot cheats present. 82:0 kill:loss ratio's for the K&M guy aren't pretty when both guys actually have to aim at the enemy and not merely allow only one of them to trigger +500% larger hitbox "kills" by looking roughly at his direction... ;)

Exactly. Games today are tailored to consoles (unfortunately,) and with aim assist and other design choices today's games are pretty much balanced regardless of input device of choice. That's my point.

Doom isn't. Doom is M&K designed from the ground up, its horrific with a controller and I think you can tell almost immediately when looking at a video of the game what input the gamer is using.

Gears however for me, is designed for a control pad, I don't play it but I reckon I would use a controller for it if I did. Can't see there being a huge advantage on M&K personally.
 
That was before aim assist became a thing. I'd argue that in Titanfall and CoD the controller players will rule over 99% of the PC players. Then there's that 1% of pc players that are godlike.

Aim assist has come a long way and with those jumpjets being so unpredictable the auto track comes extremely in handy.
But the aim assist is in effect a sort of cheat or at least takes away the huge element of control which is required. A fair comparison would be if for types of control, aim assist is completely disabled. Otherwise, we're just demonstrating how much help controller uses get. Don't get me wrong, I love using my xbox controller on my PC but I will the first to admit it's sloppy for shooters compared to K&M.
 
Back