Your first WASD game

fatcat

I'm pretty sure mine was Half-Life. I had just gotten a Voodoo3 and could play Half-Life in Glide (Best API ever)

I started the tutorial and was very much OMGWTFBBQ, "why can't I use the arrow keys, what is this left hand crap?!"

Now, 13 years later, I pretty much only play WASD games, and if the default controls are not WASD, I make them that way.

What about you?

Myrmidon

Unreal Tournament 2003. At my first LAN party with Cannonfodder, a DIFFERENT guy named 'jimmah!', and two other people I hadn't met - these guys pretty much made high school bearable for me. I was a high school freshman. We played a metric ton of Bombing Run in the Icefields, then switched to the original Ghost Recon. GR co-op multiplayer? Tons of fun.

Up until then, I had only played single player (usually RTS or RPG) games, and flight sims. I was huge into flight sims.

Cheers to that Cannonfodder SOB.

EDIT: Oh man, I'm totally nostalgia-ing right now. Dammit fatcat!

Thrax

Quake 2.

RootWyrm

Catacomb 3-D. You get bonus points if you've even -heard- of it, more if you can name names of successors and developers.

Thrax

The Catacomb Abyss was better.

Tim

WoW and Team Fortress 2 were my first WASD games, and when Starcraft 2 came out with customisable key bindings in patch 1.2, I set up WASD to move the map around. Works really good.

Before that I had to slide the keyboard way to the left, use my left hand on the arrow keys, and reach over to 1,2,3, and 4 for hotkeyed groups. Not optimum, like my new setup.

PirateNinja

It was either Descent, Terminal Velocity, or maybe even that multiplayer mod of Quake with the grappling hook OR Rise of the Triad.

Canti

or



I'm not sure which.

mertesn

Wolfenstein. Not the remake. The original. Ran perfectly on a 486SX 25MHz system.

GnomeWizardd

wolfenstien then quake 2 or descent

primesuspect

Descent

Winga

Doom for me

cola

Hmm, I believe mine was a bootleg copy of Unreal Tournament GotY Edition.

Gate28

Counter-Strike, I think

Starman

Technically, Neverwinter Nights. Realistically, Half-Life 2.

Winfrey

Half-Life: Uplink, the demo mission for Half-Life that came on my PCGamer demo CD. It was the first game that WASD was default that I had played. Haven't gone back to the arrow keys since.

CB

The first game I controlled with the mouse in one hand, and the keyboard in the other was Descent, but I was using the numpad at the time, rather than WASD. I think the first WASD for me was Duke 3D. I remember that I had remapped the controls to be more like Doom, and I was very resistant to change. I still di poorly with it, until I found the Zboard with the special butterfly, and now I refuse to play WASD games without a Zboard.

Myrmidon

Canti wrote:

Dude what? Dark forces didn't use WASD. It used the arrow keys and, like, page up/page down. So did Dark Forces II, right? I mean, shit, if I'd known it used WASD...

...it didn't, right?

CB

Myrmidon wrote:

Dude what? Dark forces didn't use WASD. It used the arrow keys and, like, page up/page down. So did Dark Forces II, right? I mean, shit, if I'd known it used WASD...

...it didn't, right?

It did when I played it, but that was only about a year ago.

Canti

Myrmidon wrote:

Dude what? Dark forces didn't use WASD. It used the arrow keys and, like, page up/page down. So did Dark Forces II, right? I mean, shit, if I'd known it used WASD...

...it didn't, right?

Maybe it was arrow keys. I don't remember, I haven't played it in probably 14 years.

pigflipper

First time I used WASD, for sure, was during beta 1.2 (the AK-47 release) of Counter-Strike. I may have used it in Quake2 earlier that summer, but I can't remember for sure. I also may have used it in Descent (props to Prime for reminding me of that game) on my Dell P90.

UPSLynx

I played with arrow keys all the way up until TF2's launch. I didn't start using WASD until a good year into the game's release. I only changed because moving the keyboard was too annoying. (once you get start setting beers to the side of the keyboard while you play, you can see why this became an issue :P)

Seriously though, I was never at a disadvantage playing on arrow keys. People say that arrow keys limit your area to bind keys - not an issue for me. Because of my XBOX HUEG hands, I was extremely effective because of my reach.

Best example - while playing FEAR multiplayer, I was crouched and leaning right around a barrier and got a sweet kill I wanted to get a screenshot of it. The tricky part were my binds:

Crouch (hold, not toggled): Numpad 1
lean Right: Period key (NOT the point/del key on the numpad)
screenshot: Numpad 0

All three of those keys at once, or else I was a dead man. I was successful, though it did actually put me in pain. This was, and still is, the largest stretch I have ever pulled off on the keyboard. Go ahead and try to hit all three. Tell me how bad that hurts.

Oh, and here is that screenshot.

CB

UPSLynx wrote:

I played with arrow keys all the way up until TF2's launch. I didn't start using WASD until a good year into the game's release. I only changed because moving the keyboard was too annoying. (once you get start setting beers to the side of the keyboard while you play, you can see why this became an issue :P)

Seriously though, I was never at a disadvantage playing on arrow keys. People say that arrow keys limit your area to bind keys - not an issue for me. Because of my XBOX HUEG hands, I was extremely effective because of my reach.

Best example - while playing FEAR multiplayer, I was crouched and leaning right around a barrier and got a sweet kill I wanted to get a screenshot of it. The tricky part were my binds:

Crouch (hold, not toggled): Numpad 1
lean Right: Period key (NOT the point/del key on the numpad)
screenshot: Numpad 0

All three of those keys at once, or else I was a dead man. I was successful, though it did actually put me in pain. This was, and still is, the largest stretch I have ever pulled off on the keyboard. Go ahead and try to hit all three. Tell me how bad that hurts.

Oh, and here is that screenshot.

Sure sure, but that's still keyboard in one hand, mouse in the other. It's impossible to control any 3D FPS games the way we did before the mouse became part of the scheme.

Wolfenstien was arrow keys for moving and looking, ctrl for shooting, number keys for changing weapons, and that was all the controls you got.

By the time we were playing quake, anyone who hadn't at least made the transition to mouse-look was at a serious disadvantage.

As a side note: what I think is most interesting about the FPS controls, is how you can sometimes tell what FPS a person started on, by looking at how they remap their controls. Whatever the first game was that they played extensively, they likely continue to remap the controls to match that game's default scheme years later.

When I start up an FPS for the first time, the first thing I do is go into the options, and remap all the controls.

pigflipper

CB wrote:

As a side note: what I think is most interesting about the FPS controls, is how you can sometimes tell what FPS a person started on, by looking at how they remap their controls. Whatever the first game was that they played extensively, they likely continue to remap the controls to match that game's default scheme years later.

I've noticed that around Quake2/Half-Life came out, default controls seemed to become more standardized and have been locked into the same scheme since.

primesuspect

I still immediately invert my mouse-Y. I cannot play games with an un-inverted Y axis.

pigflipper

primesuspect wrote:

I still immediately invert my mouse-Y. I cannot play games with an un-inverted Y axis.

I'm curious, was this because of Descent? I always invert my mouse (or look controls on console) because I first played flight sims and the inverted controls seem more natural to me.

cola

I always end up swapping crouch from ctrl to the shift key, makes crouching so much easier.

UPSLynx

cola wrote:

I always end up swapping crouch from ctrl to the shift key, makes crouching so much easier.

I do the same. No clue why you'd do otherwise. CTRL is better for sprint.

pigflipper

Interesting, I use space as crouch, shift as sprint, right mouse as jump, thumb one for reload, thumb two for secondary

Jokke

I use c for crouch, space for jump, shift for sprint

NiGHTS

UPSLynx wrote:

I do the same. No clue why you'd do otherwise. CTRL is better for sprint.

...because not everyone's thumb to pinky wingspan is 1'2'', you smug gargantuan you.