AVWW2 - Controls

[Nanashi]

That's not entirely accurate. He's using Metroid to illustrate Valley 2's platform design and implies that it has good controls by induction. He also uses The binding of Isaac (a completely different genre) for an example of "good controls", which is like saying that Valley 2 should control like Zelda. If he didn't put much thought into it, his post is poorly reasoned and hardly could be described as well-thought out.

Metroid only has 3 directional aiming - upwards, and to the right and the left. You can't shoot down or diagonally in Metroid. Absolutely none of the Castlevania expansions use diagonal aiming for default weapons, and you don't even have control over most subweapon arcs, like the axe. I don't get his point. Even on keyboards, it's very traditional to have jumping and motion on different hands.

Pray tell me which 2D platformer game with excellent keyboard controls puts jumping and motion on the same hand?

Let's go through the first few pages Steam, shall we? Filtering out the games without true jumping (Waking Mars, Nights)

Party of Sin - Nope.
Rayman Origins - Definitely not.
Deadlight - left hand movement, shift to run, space to jump. Yes (mouse and keyboard control)
Giana Sisters - Definitely not.
Cave Story - Certainly doesn't (it has no diagonal fire either).
Sugar Cube - Nope. (Jump with Z or space)
Cargo Commander - Yes - WASD movement,  mouse to aim and fire (mouse and keyboard controls)
Trine(2) - Yes WASD space jump, mouse to aim, etc (Mouse and keyboard)
Awesomenauts - Yes (mouse and keyboard)
Intrusion 2 - Yes (mouse and keyboard)
Ys anything - Definitely not.
Sonic Generations - Nope
Cortex Command - Yes (mouse and keyboard)
Noitu Love (both) - Nope

Notice a trend? Every single game with movement on the same hand as jumping has mouse controlled aiming and firing. Games which have keyboard only controls as a rule don't put jumping on the same hand as movement.

Valley 2 is keyboard only, Valley 1 was keyboard and mouse. See the difference?

[TechSY730]

Oh boy. As someone who has not actually tried the beta of Valley 2 (but has played the first pre-release public beta up to the current version of Valley 1), and as someone who has only read the first three pages of this thread, I can't speak at all authoritatively.

However, from what I can see, it seems that:

1. Default controls mappings for both controller and keyboard are strange, strange enough to put some people off enough such that they won't even get a good enough first impression to try to remap the controls to something more comfortable.
2. Menu navigation is still a bit strange/buggy
3. Many monsters "ported" from Valley 1 have not gone through the balance adjustments yet for the new control scheme
4. As someone insightfully pointed out, the biggest "balance breaker" of the old mouse controlls was the 360 degree aiming. However, mouse controls do not necessarily imply 360 aiming. You can have mouse controls, but keep 8-way aiming, which seems much less impacting to control "balance" and its implication to monster design. Still not perfectly the same balance wise as keyboard or controller based 8-way aiming, as you have movement and aiming controlled by two different devices which may offer some benefits. But if (big if) there is ever a "compromise" on keyboard+mouse controls, allowing 8-way mouse aiming seems like a decent compromise.

[orzelek]

For me point 4 from TechSY730 post would be most important. Trying to target with direction and special modifier keys is very.. unwieldy.
I admit I did not play other similar games but being able to shoot with mouse would make the game much more pleasant to handle.

[tigersfan]

I suspect that this won't please everyone, but, I thought I'd point out that we've made a fairly large change to the control scheme: http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Valley_2_-_Beta_Release_Notes#Retirement_Of_Angled_Shots .

Basically, we're going with 4 directional aiming now. It's a lot more straightforward, and will cut down on a lot of the "finger ballet" especially with those that use the keyboard.

[TechSY730]

I suspect that this won't please everyone, but, I thought I'd point out that we've made a fairly large change to the control scheme: http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Valley_2_-_Beta_Release_Notes#Retirement_Of_Angled_Shots .

Basically, we're going with 4 directional aiming now. It's a lot more straightforward, and will cut down on a lot of the "finger ballet" especially with those that use the keyboard.

In one sense, ouch! That is a big reduction in "controllability"
In another sense, this could be good. 4-way mouse aiming doesn't really give enough extra convenience to be worth trying to implement (unlike mouse 8-way aiming), so this should cut down on mouse control requests. Also, once the monster reblance around these controls is finished, it sounds like it will be much less fiddly.

Just FYI though, I never really found the Super Metroid style diagonal aiming to be all that difficult. The hardest part is remembering which button you mapped to angled up vs angled down, but that isn't too bad, especially with the visual feedback you get.

I'll wait to see how this turns out.

[LayZboy]

I suspect that this won't please everyone, but, I thought I'd point out that we've made a fairly large change to the control scheme: http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Valley_2_-_Beta_Release_Notes#Retirement_Of_Angled_Shots .

Basically, we're going with 4 directional aiming now. It's a lot more straightforward, and will cut down on a lot of the "finger ballet" especially with those that use the keyboard.

I found this part to be a bit odd:

2. On the other hand, if a game has limited functions for aiming, and that makes hitting enemies difficult unless you find ideal positions for yourself, then that's part of the gameplay. "Hitting enemies is hard" is not a bad thing inherently -- if hitting enemies is trivial, then in order for enemies to be a challenge it has to be a matter of your pumping shots into them like crazy. Boring. But if hitting enemies is hard, then lining up fewer skillshots to take them out can be quite satisfying.

That's all well and good but with monsters re-spawning so fast it gets annoying pretty quickly having to hit them perfectly then come back 2 seconds later for it to be there again. Also killing monsters is pretty trivial, since other than a few select times, it doesn't really matter of they are there or not.

 

[Pepisolo]

Just FYI though, I never really found the Super Metroid style diagonal aiming to be all that difficult.

Agreed. On a joypad, using the triggers to change angle worked absolutely fine (after extensive rebinding of the default buttons). On a keyboard, though, I guess it was a different matter. I still believe that adopting a Contra Hard Corps style fixed/free button for controlling 8 directional aiming would have been a better solution than simply excising angled shooting entirely -- indeed to make such a fundamental change to the mechanics of the game at this stage, seems a little drastic.

[tigersfan]

Just FYI though, I never really found the Super Metroid style diagonal aiming to be all that difficult.

Agreed. On a joypad, using the triggers to change angle worked absolutely fine (after extensive rebinding of the default buttons). On a keyboard, though, I guess it was a different matter. I still believe that adopting a Contra Hard Corps style fixed/free button for controlling 8 directional aiming would have been a better solution than simply excising angled shooting entirely -- indeed to make such a fundamental change to the mechanics of the game at this stage, seems a little drastic.

Maybe it seems that way, but, there were a number of people that when they were playing, before we had the bit in the tutorial about the angled fire that didn't even know it was there!

And sure, that's largely because it wasn't mentioned in the tutorial and such, but my point is that there were people playing the game (and enjoying it) without ever using angled fire, so I'm not sure it's really all that drastic of a change.

[Pepisolo]

Maybe it seems that way, but, there were a number of people that when they were playing, before we had the bit in the tutorial about the angled fire that didn't even know it was there!

Well, you covered one of the major reasons for this in your following paragraph; the reason being that the ability simply wasn't highlighted in the tutorials. Another reason (at least for joypad users) would be that the default mappings for these angle change buttons were on the back and start buttons -- completely unusable and almost invisible to the plug and play user. Also, as I understand it, the keyboard controls were similarly unintuitive. But, rather than fix these problems with the original control setup you have instead decided that changing the mechanics of the game would be the better option. I certainly don't agree with this, although I hope in time that it proves to be the correct decision.

As for not being drastic. I don't see how you can change a game from having 8-way directional aim to 4-way directional aim at this stage of its development and not call that a drastic change. The entire mechanics of the enemies will have to be re-thought, re-written and rebalanced. Not that it won't turn out to be the correct decision in the long run (although I'm skeptical) but changes like this usually take place in early or pre-alpha and not in a beta release. 

 

[TechSY730]

Maybe it seems that way, but, there were a number of people that when they were playing, before we had the bit in the tutorial about the angled fire that didn't even know it was there!

Well, you covered one of the major reasons for this in your following paragraph; the reason being that the ability simply wasn't highlighted in the tutorials. Another reason (at least for joypad users) would be that the default mappings for these angle change buttons were on the back and start buttons -- completely unusable and almost invisible to the plug and play user. Also, as I understand it, the keyboard controls were similarly unintuitive. But, rather than fix these problems with the original control setup you have instead decided that changing the mechanics of the game would be the better option. I certainly don't agree with this, although I hope in time that it proves to be the correct decision.

As for not being drastic. I don't see how you can change a game from having 8-way directional aim to 4-way directional aim at this stage of its development and not call that a drastic change. The entire mechanics of the enemies will have to be re-thought, re-written and rebalanced. Not that it won't turn out to be the correct decision in the long run (although I'm skeptical) but changes like this usually take place in early or pre-alpha and not in a beta release.

Well, this is a pre-release beta/late-ish alpha, that just happens to be public. Yea, I am also rather concerned about the amount of work that will need to be done to accomidate it at this high of a version number, but only a little bit less of that amount work had to be done anyways even under the old 8-way aiming system (the monsters had not been balanced around it yet), so really not all that much extra work has to be done with this change in the first place.

Now whether the game is better when balanced around 8-way shooting controls is a better/worse game vs balanced around 4-way shooting controls for what they are trying to accomplish elsewhere is something I am not sure about, either way.

[tigersfan]

Yeah, most of the enemies aren't even in the game yet, so changing them around because of the aiming change will be trivial. We'll likely have a few slices that might need adjusting, and we might have to change a few spells. Also, like I said, there were a number of players who weren't even using that feature, and they didn't have any problems. Truth is, we're not at a point where this is causing a whole lot of added work.

Also, this adds a bit more value to the spells that already do aim in some sort of diagonal fashion. Which I think is a good thing.

[Mick]

Oh, I am a HUGE fan of getting rid of diagonal aiming. I remember not particularly liking that feature back when I played Super Metroid, and I got the impression it was only in this game because of that. Really helps close the gap between keyboard and gamepad players too.

[Panopticon]

Anything that makes the action more immediately accessible is a good thing in my book.

[MouldyK]

Anything that makes the action more immediately accessible is a good thing in my book.

Anything that hushes the negative control threads and allows the team to focus on the bigger problems in the game is a good thing in my book.

[Panopticon]

Anything that makes the action more immediately accessible is a good thing in my book.

Anything that hushes the negative control threads and allows the team to focus on the bigger problems in the game is a good thing in my book.

Eh, who cares about them? Nothing makes that kind of crowd happy once they get going.

If anything they're gonna raise even more hell now. They'll accuse Arcen of removing more options from the game instead of "just fixing it" with mouse controls. Anyone who comes at this beta with an air of entitlement has nothing to add to the discussion in my opinion. Changes should not be implemented to try to bring them in on the game. They've made up their mind and I'll be shocked if anything changes it for them other than just giving them the control scheme that they demand, regardless of the impact on gameplay.