Ongoing Belkenn52te/razer nostromo battlefield 3 review

BlitzKrieg

Sooo this gamepad has been on my tempted but it costs too much and could end up being useless radar for ages and recently a corroboration of happy events allowed me to purchase one for £20 off ebay (basically the film editor of Kick ass & x men first class said in a lecture that gaming devices make great editing tools and uses a razor nagra himself) so with excuse (its for work!) and a cheap option available to me I picked one up which arrived today, since bf3 is the only game I have allowed myself to keep (thread elsewhere on this) this gamepad is pretty much a purchase for that (and work, it can genuinely help speed up my work with after effects).

This thread will be a series of ongoing posts over the next week or two about how I feel about the pad and if I think it is an improvement for me or not.


So let's start with Day 1


I got it second hand so firstly I had to get the drivers downloaded and spent a good twenty minutes trying to work out how to change to different profiles. I have a R.A.T 3 gaming mouse and I can swtich profiles at a touch of a (rather awkward) button, so I assumed this was the same but could not find a button.

First I looked at what I had:



15 specific buttons 14 on the grid and one odd spacebar like one in the bottom right corner, plus a mouse wheel and a d-pad and another nub button above the d-pad. obviously you can recreate the wasd layout using the grid and it's just a matter of shifting all the buttons around until you find the most comfortable layout for battlefield 3

So I booted up BF3's single player to work out what config will fit most comfortably and quickly learnt that was a mistake as so much of the game was on rails that I could rarely find a spot where all my abilities were in my control that I could test things out safely.

Quit that and found an empty conquest server.

now the default set up pretty much follows the wasd set up, the dpad does nothing neither does the nub and that odd spacebar button is the spacebar.

It also has this adjustable wrist rest which can be adjusted from too damn high and too damn low.

So first impressions where not great, the spacebar was awkward to tap, despite the fifteen buttons some of them were still very awkward to reach, such as prone. Crouch didnt even make the cut in the standard set up so I couldnt crouch at all.

So I started moving things around. Firstly I put the nub and dpad to use, jump went to the nub and crouch came in on the spacebar, the dpad got the 4 standard weapon slots with position 3 (medpack/ammo pack/rpg) being the top and closest, left being my side arm which was very easy to reach on the fly and the bottom was my position 4 (c4/defib/repair tool) which was still reachable but not as immediate as the other 2. Only switchback to main weapon was a bit out of reach being right. Prone got shifted over so it was in a more comfortable position on the grid, but aside from that no major changes up there.

both grenade throwing and changing firemode are on my mouse as middle mouse and button 4, my button 3 was my old prone button, but it has become unreliable lately so I've retired that button.

Tried it out on another empty server, felt much better but I wouldnt know until I put it into some serious action.

So quick warning before you see the ugly, I am very much an assignment whore, I would waste whole matches trying to level up certain weapons or complete certain assignments, so my k/d is rarely pretty and sometimes downright ugly (some players might have seen me the other night running damavand peak trying to shoot a helicopter with an rpg for hours) thankfully my whoring is almost (for the moment) done as I only have a few minor ones left (c4 vehicles, blow crap up with eod bot, spot stuff with laser designator)


So one game down so far:

http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3/battlereport/show/55684115/1/172841481/

(I'm Dekrieg)

For someone who is using a whole new control layout for the first time, this is not terrible, I died a lot trying to sneak up on some tanks and vehicles, but I was happy to say that my thought process using the controller very rarely had me fumbling over buttons or anything and it all came rather smoothly together. Though running with a silenced m249 was not the best choice (it was a layover from a tdm server)

thoughts I had during the game were:

-Did I use the E button in multiplayer? the crouch button is awkward down there and I use crouch more then E, what does E do in multiplayer again? I could move jump to where E is and put crouch on the nub.

2 minutes later

*getting into a tank* oh wait...thats what E does. **** cant move that.

-Moving is comfortable and the new position for prone has me actually using it a lot more as am I throwing out resupply packs easily, though I have fumbled swapping back from my pistol to my main gun when I did a hotswap after running dry. Thankfully that shouldnt be a life or death situation often since I was switching back to reload the main gun.

-God the wrist rest is ****ing annoying, makes it almost impossible for me to use crouch...Whats actually under it? *removes wrist rest* Huh, this is actually much more comfortable...

-HEY I CAN REACH CROUCH NOW!!! without the stupid wrist rest I can tap crouch easily enough...I've set it up so crouch is toggle so it only needs a brief tap, and it stops my horrible habit of holding it down I use to have just so I had somewhere to rest my thumb.


-Huh this nub is really comfortable, I seem to be jumping more, Oh god I going to become a bunny hopper *falls off side of hill and gets stuck behind tree* ok thats killed any urge for me to bunny hop.

-Nice solid buttons, got a few nice multi kills, very easy access to opening the large map to see battlefield and also the tab score, I am strangely playing much more aware of my surrondings.

-Oh **** someone is talking to me in german, god why did I pick a german nickname. crap I cant answer using the nostromo *pulls over keyboard* well thats one issue, I'll be quite anti social with this. Or perhaps I should get back to using teamspeak again?

Game ends.


Honestly first impressions are good, If I had a positive k/d ratio despite spending a good chunk of the game breaking in a new controller, the wrist rest is useless. Though I didnt use many vehicles with it, only a jeep and briefly the gunner on a tank, but overall first impressions are good, if I am matching my usual suckiness when I'm not adjusted to it, once I break it in and shift a few buttons around I should only improve right?


I'll update as I break this in more and try different roles, use vehicles etc


But initial impressions are somewhat good, if you can get it cheap it's worth a purchase. especially if you got big hands like me. there are easily going to be better full keyboards out there that people will recommend, but they are quite expensive, even at its rrp this doesnt come in too high, I cant recommend it at rrp yet, I need to see how it continues to shape up.


Suggestions I can think of if razor ever think of expanding on this in future (unlikely but hey) def put audio ports or usb ports in the back of it under where you rest your hand, it screams to me that you can easily make this more like gaming keyboards with all in one support. I think it would be smarter to make the grid adjustable by perhaps putting it on a gear so you can angle the buttons higher or lower rather then having the adjustable wrist rest, which is useless and gets in the way of the spacebar button which could be made a bit more meaty in size.

BlitzKrieg

ahhh!

I just worked out how to turn on the lights for all the buttons...

(yeah still learning)

Also I have found I can save my layout to the controller itself so if I ever take it to another computer it will remember my setup. Not great for gaming, but for work I will abuse this a lot.