Actually I think a Terraria method of input is probably best, because it can form a common baseline almost everyone can use. As much as I think the restrictions & advantages of keyboard/gamepad controls enhance the combat and make more spells accessible at once, I'm willing to sacrifice that for a more unified control scheme. I think WoW-style controls don't really suit this game unless you have a huge mouse, which most people don't. Forcing WoW-style controls into the game makes it hard for people to adjust to the controls, which then causes some people to dislike the combat and in general leads to the extreme fracturing of control schemes we've experienced. And I think it's important for a platforming game to have as uniform a control scheme as possible.
See, my experience has been that people just sit down and play, for the most part. Without explanation, we watched like 300 people do this. They intuitively understood to press button 4 to use whatever ability, and watched it pop out at the mouse.
Granted, we don't have a control group of people that we tried a more Terraria-like control scheme on. But I'm reluctant to make that the default on a hunch, after watching so many people go through the intro mission and figure out what IS there so intuitively. If they can get to the point of playing and having fun without any instruction, and then later tune to their precise preferences, that's really the end goal for me. I think we're pretty much there in the main.
That said, having options for swapping out stuff Terraria-style is not currently supported and clearly should be; because some people clearly would prefer that, and that's great.
In terms of "having as uniform a control scheme as possible," we've had that conversation before and that's just something I intensely disagree with. The experience should be whatever the individual player wants it to be. It's not a competition! They can play on whatever screen resolution, whatever control scheme, and using whatever difficulty level they like.
Also, since this is a thread about totalbiscuit. I'm kind of curious how big a bump in sales you guys got after the video
It's hard to separate that sort of thing out because lots of things happen all at once. But at least a few thousand dollars from the look of things. Perhaps more, but it's hard to judge against the normal background noise of hourly fluctuations and other press that happened the same day, etc.
My favourite part of this was when he used a rock throw spell with a set arc/weight physics thing and complained about it not? hitting where he had his cursor pointed and said the spells were inaccurate.
Maybe if I try really hard I can one day grow up to be as good at the video games as tortleboscuit.
Please let's have a little more respect towards other forum members -- whether they are famous youtubers, game developers, or "just" players, we should all treat each other with respect please.
In terms of the actual complaint about throw rock not going at the cursor, that did bug me also. But what can I really say to that, it was a first impressions piece. For anyone following along, the position of the mouse cursor sets the trajectory of the rock, and then the rock follows a pattern of physics from then on. For most spells which are not affected by gravity, they are perfectly accurate, which is what Tobias was getting at.
Still -- criticizing someone for not noticing that immediately isn't exactly fair either. That was one of the comments I wasn't over the moon about in the video, but in terms of a first impressions piece that was legitimately his first impression. That gets me thinking less about his skills and more about how we could better convey what is going on to the player, to be frank. Some other players have complained about dodgy controls and it makes me wonder if it was some sort of miscommunication like that.