A Reason To Exclude Motion Controls From Your Flying Game

Chatting with the producer of Capcom’s jet-pack shooter Dark Void today, I learned that Sixaxis was not a control option for the game. Why not? “False positives.”

Capcom producer Morgan Gray said that he believes motion controls don’t work well for flight games that include a lot of shooting in it.

His reasoning: Players tend to move their bodies a little when they’re making tight turns in flying games — or even a racing games. If you map motion control to your flight game, then the controller will read those accidental body leans as inputs from the player. The result will be even more movement of the flying character or craft, a “false positive” input from a player who didn’t intend that. That’s bad news in a game that requires you to shoot while flying, he argued. It’s even worse, he said, if you’re being shot at while flying. A little flinching could ruin everything.

I pointed out to Gray that the PlayStation 3 game Flower did just fine with mapping its flight controls to the motion controls of the Sixaxis. But shooting wasn’t required in that game.

Some players would surely like to have options, but as I watched Gray fly Dark Void’s hero through canyons, precisely shooting at building struts and the joints of robots, I could see his point.