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Played flying games first. Inverted ever since.
Same, I played this wwii flying ace game on the PC before any other game had movement in 3 axis (axes? axises?) and it just stuck. Even back in goldeneye, inverted. It’s like imagine if the joystick was poking out the top of your head
Tilting your head. I get it yeah! 😝 Makes sense.
Axies* 🙃
Axes* 😉
Axe-a-lot-ls* 😉
Ah it’s one of those sounds different but spelled the same f*ckers.
Every time someone tries and pull out the “just imagine flying a plane” explanation all I can think is motherfucker you’re playing a fucking video game
But I started gaming with flight simulators.
Never heard of the airplane explanation, but I invert both if it’s third person. I’m controlling the camera’s position behind the character, not where they’re looking.
This is how it works: Push down, nuzzle points up!
Push up, nuzzle goes down!
How can anyone play differently?
If the first game you ever played with a stick was a flight simulator, then down is up.
I remember playing the original Rainbow Six game in 1998 inverted. Can’t remember why, or if that was the default, but I got used to it and haven’t been able to use the controls backwards since. Besides, if you lean forward you look down - why would controls be any different?
if you lean forward you look down - why would controls be any different?
By that logic, tilting the stick to the left should either make you look to the right, or just rotate the view without actually changing the direction you’re looking in
Tipping makes sense. Idk it’s like if the joystick is the top of your character’s head.
If you see the stick as the top of your character’s head, you’d have to twist it to look left or right. Tilting it would just rotate the image you see under that mental model
I agree. But it still feels right for up and down which is the only thing at issue.
No reason up and down can’t make sense that way and left and right be for rotating a different axis. Like driving a car with a joystick doesn’t mean if you expect pushing forward makes it go forward then logically when you go left or right on the stick you expect the car to strafe.
Wellllll in most driving games you accelerate and brake with the triggers though, and the left stick does nothing on the vertical axis :P
Okay for real though, I’m not here to tell anyone how to game. Use whatever feels right for you, and having the option to invert stick axes is a great inclusivity feature I’d never argue against! I just have a little too much fun arguing with people trying to rationalize something that really just doesn’t need to be rationalized to be valid.
I just have a little too much fun arguing with people trying to rationalize something that really just doesn’t need to be rationalized to be valid
We have that in common.
It seems like there’s an argument for axes of rotation to be made but I can’t find it. Or at least why a sliding window isn’t the optimal steering strategy for first person gaming but I can’t find the race.
To be fair, I am not even (outside of flight based games like aerofighters assault once upon a time) an inverted thumb stick user…
Mind blown. That actually never occurred to me.
Yep. And for me, it changed. I played fps on controller my whole childhood, I was always standard. I started playing less controller and more mouse and keyboard as I got older.
A few years ago I started flying fpv drones.
Recently tried to use a controller again? Whoops I can only play inverted now 🤷♂️
Same here. But “downward stick is flying upwards”. I play regular, but the horizontal axes inverted when in 3rd person mode. In first person I’m looking the way the stick moves, but in 3rd person I move the camera where I point the stick. Like Lakitu in Mario 64
Same. The first few PC games I played in the mid 90’s were ms flight sim and my dad had the joystick. Then MechWarrior 2. Also inverted by default. Tbh it’s a perspective shift. In most games with 3rd person I usually don’t invert. But if I’m first person I have to invert.
Elite, Wing Commander, and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe shaped me before looking up or down was even a thing in FPS games.
Yes!. I remember when my brother and I played our first 3D fps (half life), we both agreed it made more sense to invert the y axis. I hadn’t even considered all our history playing joystick flight sims as an influence
Also probably if you played Descent
There it is. Old guys unite!
Well first game I played was pacman and down was down!
Or anything on the N64. Nintendo really loved inverted y in the early days of analog.
I was this way up to roughly the Xbox 360 era.
And then it just didn’t feel right any more. In fact neither way felt right for a while.
Now I’m a right way up boy.
Literally just realized this is why I always invert.
Except I have to change from the default in flight simulators too.
Before that the down-arrow key was “up”.
Only when controlling flying crafts.
Even then I leave my view stick verted.
The best games shuffle your controller inputs at random on startup to promote mental flexibility and problem solving skills.
Okay, not nearly the same, but I swear to god KH changes the fucking axis, target, and menu buttons each game, and my ass was fucking tired of it. So if a game changed inputs every save/startup I’d probably cry.
I think it’s the original Halo that asks you to look up or down during the tutorial, and then chooses your input method based on what you press.
Was a neat way of doing it.
I think the third (fourth?) Ratchet & Clank also did that.
2 and 3 do the same diagnostic routine, and Reach asks you to look at a building in the distance.
I was pretty new at console FPS when I first tried that game, and I had never realised before then that people might play inverted. Tripped me out.
This is funny to me, because it took a really long time for me to realise anyone used anything other than “inverted”. I remember when I was first presented with the option, I became very confused, because of course I selected “normal”, but then it turned out “normal” was the wrong way around…
Wow, that’s an interesting way
Me: right stick
Computer: … Welp
I did most of a Dark Souls playthrough with a PS3 controller that was breaking down. There’s a tiny foam block on the inside that, after some years of abuse, will flatten out and trigger spurious inputs if some controls are pressed too hard. This caused an interesting challenge, since after panic-rolling, I would usually stand back up disarmed (d-pad right/left swaps that hand out for an alt item which was empty). It seemed kinda/sorta natural that way, and didn’t know that wasn’t a game mechanic (in this already ludicrously hard game) until I talked to some friends about it.
Edit: I made it through about 75% of the game like this.
what kinda games do you play???
I’ll let you know when I figure out how to get to the title screen.
StarCraft 2 coop has a mode called vertigo, which every 15 sec rotates your camera by a random angle… I had headache for 2 days…
It’s largely an age gap I think. The first generation of FPS games on N64, PS1, etc used inverted controls, so if you’re an old man millennial like me, that’s how you learned to play.
Then in later generations (PS2/3 and on) this changed and inverted became an option, rather than the default (or in some games, only!).
Thus younger gamers are used to “standard” and older gamers used to inverted.
It’s funny, I’m a millennial as well. I remember those inverted games and it feeling wrong to me. Once I started finding “regular” games it always felt better imo
Killzone on PS2 was the first game I played that wasn’t inverted and it took me several hours to figure out why aiming was so hard
I think Mario 64 was supposed to help transition people into 3D games, since they were pretty new, by leaning on the “you’re controlling the camera guy” aspect. You remember that little flying guy they showed following Mario around filming him? So when you aim up you move the camera guy higher which in turn makes the camera look down to keep Mario in frame.
Yeah, that’s why I played inverted for the longest time. Took a break from gaming for a bit and have since switched to standard.
some old-school players because they learned mouse/controller camera movements on simulators. think what a pilot does when they want to tilt up: they pull, so you pull the mouse toward you, ie “down”
To this day I play flight sims inverted like that, but normal FPS feels unnatural to invert the camera
I played inverted for quite some time in the early days. It always made sense to me because i imagined holding someone’s skull, when you tilt up, the eyes go down. I switched when playing games like counter strike 1.4 and on. I can honestly play both equally, i just stuck to “normal”
I exclusively play inverted. I find it also gives better control while playing FPS games.
I like to imagine inverted players control their character by grabbing a stick on the top of their characters head
It’s more like the analogue stick is representing your characters neck. IRL you pull your neck down to look up, and vice versa.
Sure but then with this perspective, shouldn’t left and right also be inverted??
I care more about the vertical inversion than the horizontal one. Not certain why. Have played with horizontal inversion on before and it didn’t bother me much after a minute or two.
Not necessarily, IMO. You tilt your head back to look up, but you don’t tilt your head left to look right.
I think it’s an issue of mapping potentially 6 axes of movement to a 2D plane. They don’t all line up the same way. Left and right in the game line up with left and right on the mousepad, but up and down in the game map to forward and back with the mouse.
Thinking of the mouse being glued to the top of your head works better for me.
No because when you look left your head doesn’t tilt right. When you look up your head tilts backwards
No your using a reference point at the back of you head to say its tilting back when you look up, if you keep the same reference point for the horizontal axis you are turning the head to the right to look left, etc.
I thought the reference point was the top of the head not the back
There’s issues with all the analogies. If I tilt the stick left, if it was my neck, then I would roll my neck to the left and I’d need to twist the stick to look around. Perhaps this is the missing control scheme we’ve been waiting for.
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
You’re a monster
The real monsters are the ones inverting their X-axis.
I only do this for Sims 4
I use inverted Y look with pad controls. Because that makes so much more sense. (Normal mouse look is fine)
I like how many new games show accessibility settings on start but it’s still rare for them to have both subtitle settings and invert Y right there. And always a celebration when they are.
Games that don’t even let you invert Y are hella silly. I’m so glad Xbox lets you force the invert. Gotta figure out if you can do that in Windows/Linux.
In Steam (Windows/Linux) you can set any button on the controller to be whatever the hell you want. Another button, a mouse, a command, keyboard, anything.
That’s part of the appeal.
Videogame cameras in 1st person it’s supposed to work like this:
The REAL inverted would be move stick down and then you see down.
Am I a weirdo to thinks about turning my head to the left, not the back of my head to the right?
This doesn’t seem intuitive
This would imply the X axis has to be inverted too…
Yep, you right. The same rules are applied.
Its two different perspectives. One is controlling a character as if they are controlling a camera from the rear. The other is the more common, where you’re using the joystick to move the point that you’re looking at.
Which way should the text on your screen move when you spin the mouse wheel? :P
You spin the mouse wheel to control the scroll bar, so of course spinning the wheel towards you (down, if you align the mouse with the screen), should make the scroll bar go down.
This was, for a long time, uncontroversial. However, after touch screens became widely used, people started incorrectly assuming that the mouse wheel “moves the screen” (absolutely ludicrous), and decided that down was up and up was down, and that the sane way to scroll with a mouse wheel or touch pad was “inverted” and not “sane”/“normal”.
Mhm, it’s all about perspective. Moving the viewport or the content. The viewport or the viewer, for first person. Ideally you should always have the option to choose.
For me I only accept inverted camera controls for orbiting cameras that aren’t use for aiming.
I’ve never thought about this, but yes. When I play fps games it feels natural to use non-inverted, while for games where you’re not “aiming” but “looking around” it feels more natural with inverted.
If you just imagine that the right stick is their neck you don’t need to postulate a Parasaurolophus horn
The first time someone explained this to me and showed me how to invert controls, it changed my life and made video games more enjoyable (I’m mostly a PC gamer out of convenience but prefer a console/controller). I recently played the ff7 remake and forgot that I could invert controls and was about to quit playing until I remembered I could invert. “Standard” controls don’t make sense to me and kinda make me dizzy or seasick.
You’re right, but somewhere along the way we all got used to the other way
This is so silly. Thanks for making me laugh.
It’s how games with flying should control but that’s the only application it should be used in to me. I believe this since that’s how it works in IRL.
Flying games should have an option to choose regular or inverted.
If you’re into piloting, got a joystick or something - sure, inverted is your choice.
Otherwise it’s just unnecessarily confusing.
I understand that but it’s simply more realistic to be inverted. I am very used to it because honestly most games with flying controls make inverted default anyway.
I’m just completely unable to learn inverted Y.
Any game that doesn’t have an option to make it regular is unplayable for me. Oh, and sadly IRL radio controlled planes are too. I tried two, and both got smacked into the ground and needed repairs.
I can comprehend it when both axis are inverted, but when it’s only one, it doesn’t click.
But why would roll be inverted? For planes you just need to think about the fact you are controlling the airplanes pitch not the camera view, which is why my camera controls are always regular in flight games but then obviously the y axis for flight is inverted. Pitch left roll left, pitch right roll right, pitch forward go down, pitch back go up. I.e. If you tilt the plane to the left it rolls to the left, if you tilt it to the right it rolls to the right, if you tilt the plane back it changes the attitude of the flight path to bring you higher same thing in reverse for pitching forward. I agree with your last statement for fps/tps games though unless both are inverted for camera it just doesnt make any logical sense and instead are trying to map flight controls to a head which just completely looses me.
I still don’t quite get why planes are somehow the exception - likely because something about engineering and use of real planes makes inverted Y preferable, or that joysticks as opposed to mouse/keyboard make inverted Y a bit more tangible? I don’t find the inversion intuitive in any game-related context, at least as a mouse/keyboard/gamepad user.
Up is up, down is down, simple as that. I just piloted a spaceplane in Space Engineers after piloting a dragon in World of Warcraft and both games just have up on up and down on down. To me, this is how it should be, or at least there should always be an option to make it so.
For any casual play, it just adds to a consistent and predictable experience.
But then again, I might be biased because inverted Y just doesn’t click with me, no matter how much I challenged myself to figure it out. Automatic reactions always lead me the wrong way.
Its not so bad, it’s just a context switch. In an fps game you’re changing the direction your character is intending to look. Wanna look left, tilt left. Wanna look up, tilt up.
In a flying game, you’re controlling the attitude of the plane, it helps to think of your joystick being glued to the top of the plane.
I used to play inverted. If it wasn’t inverted, I’d flail around helplessly. Then one day, inverted didn’t feel right, and I had to switch. It’s been that way ever since. Sometime during the PS2 era I think. I played equal numbers of PC and console games up to that point. Dunno why it happened.
