Call of Duty Warzone raises a classic question: are mouse and keyboard better?

Let me let you know about a press occasion I visited when to preview a Battlefield game. There all of us were, playing multiplayer using controllers attached to our PCs as instructed, me eating one at the hands of my controller-savvy contemporaries who’d humble-bragged earlier across the tea urn that they probably wouldn’t even be world-class anymore, it’d been that long since they’d played Battlefield.

So I pay my pad and I started using the perfectly good mouse and keyboard before me. And I didn’t die for the remaining session, reader. It had been the closest I’ve felt to being Shroud or S1mple, watching with a wry smile at my idiot enemies gently rotating looking for me before popping off headshot after delicious headshot.

I hadn’t seriously considered that preview event for a long time until I started playing Call of Duty Warzone. Its cross-platform servers seem to be populated by a lot of console players, and playing on PC I look at the lobby screen before a fit licking my lips. What chance do they’ve from the mighty mouse and keyboard?

Affirmed, by my very own modest standards, I’m doing better in keyboard for warzone than I ever did in PUBG, Fortnite, or Apex Legends. Not ‘I’m jacking it all in to begin a Twitch channel’better, but a good few kills each game and several wins already. Is my input method affording me a considerable advantage?

I choose to conduct a deeply scientific experiment to be able to find some answers. I challenge my mate to a game title of Halo.

Despite purchasing the recent Master Chief Collection releases of Halo: Reach and Combat Evolved with the fervor of a lifelong fan, I am bad at Halo. I have 83 minutes on record across both games starting this mano-a-mano for the ages. I don’t know some of the maps. All the guns look the same in my experience, none of them seem to attain their target for around twenty full seconds, the powerups certainly are a total mystery, and I’m perhaps not 100 percent what the join is for toss grenade. BUT – I’m a mouse and keyboard player.

The Master Chief Collection, like Call of Duty Warzone, allows us to compete on the same field of battle, each inside our control comfort zones. Unlike Warzone, it allows us to do this 1v1.

Over two matches, one in the iconic Battle Creek and another in Damnation, which might also be iconic for several I understand but unlike Battle Creek I didn’t use to play this one at Chris Smowten’s house in 2003, we fight for the honor of our inputs. Who’ll prevail? On one side experience, game sense, map knowledge, weapon knowledge, mechanical understanding, and a gamepad, on the other: a mouse and keyboard.

Ok, match one. Battle Creek. I don’t need to inform you that Halo wasn’t designed with mouse and keyboard in mind. I recall the furor when Microsoft announced its erstwhile hotly anticipated PC game could be an Xbox exclusive, but looking back I can’t imagine Halo ever having been a PC proposition. Every thing about its timings – the shield regeneration, tool projectile velocity, movement, and leap pace – is perfectly updated for controllers. It is a slow, bouncy, low-gravity affair perfectly matched with the pace of its input devices. Oh, I’ve killed him.

It is a tight match for the duration, him able to choose me off when I’m in a fool position looking for a sniper rifle I half-remember being up a cliffside, me in a position to jiggle CS: GO-style away from his slow thumbsticks when we hit close quarters and have the kill. As the match concludes, I win by one point. If you came here trying to find proof that mouse and keyboard are superior, you can leave now SUMMIT1G Warzone Settings. Don’t bother reading the stuff lower down.

In the second match, I’m beaten. By three kills, too. Damnation’s verticality, you’d have imagined, might play into a flick-aiming mouse player’s expertise but ultimately map knowledge and several well-placed shotgun bullets do the task for Team Controller. I’d like to express it’s the stuff of classic MLG matches, but in truth, both of us miss plenty of sniper shots, throw grenades at no one, and fire outlines of each other without taking a fraction of our shields several times.

So a Halo player can beat me with a station – a sobering thought, but what does it mean for Call of Duty Warzone?

Well, Call of Duty was once a PC-first kind of franchise, when it was about World War Two. You realize, the initial time. In 2003 the PC was the sole sensible home for shooting as bombastic and riddled with genuinely affecting setpieces as Infinity Ward’s debut. Ever since then, and in reality, quite immediately after that first game, things changed.