I lately bought Battlefield – Bad Company 2 and I really dislike how they implemented mouse input control. The game doesn’t feel like the majority of the games I own, and here is the reason why:

Instead of using mouse input directly from Windows (including every feature it has on the desktop such as acceleration etc), they read out the mouse movement from the hardware instead, so they can fuck around with it. This is a really bad idea because it will make every game doing the same feel differently due to different implementations. That’s stupid. The right way would be just taking the mouse input of windows and multiplying it by a sensitivity multiplication for the game (and adding a checkbox which temporarily turns off Window’s mouse acceleration for those who need it).

This brings me to Mouse Acceleration: Many gamers like to say “disable it“, where I like to have it enabled: This allows me using a small sensitivity for precise accuracy while a fast movement maneuver gives me the ability turning around by 180° without moving the mouse 5 times over the pad. Sadly some games force acceleration off with no option to turn it back on.

Here is a small list of games which do it right:

• Half-Life 2, Left 4 Dead 1/2 and every Source Engine bases game
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
• Crysis
• Killing Floor

And these are now some of the black sheep:

	Battle Field – Bad Company 2 You can at least turn on mouse acceleration and adjust the acceleration parameters. But you can neither modify the acceleration threshold nor switch back to “Windows”-like input. So any settings you do here in order to make it feel like in other games are condemned to fail or take ages until you found the one you need.
	Unreal Tournament 3 Here you even can’t enable mouse acceleration at all. You can only try messing around with a config-file but this hasn’t revealed any settings for me yet which allowes me making it feel like e.g. Half-Life 2 (which uses Windows mouse input).