Keyboard uses for future episodes

edited November 2006 in Sam & Max
While I love the point-n-click system, I think allowing control using the keyboard in some cases can be helpful for example in the driving sequence (moving the car with the arrows) or even when walking Sam around (and possibly pressing the Shift key so he could run, making it faster to go from location to location).

These are just suggestions, but I think they can work well with the rest of the game, and one can always use just the mouse if he prefers...

Comments

  • edited November 2006
    While i understand your arguments, i do not think the game really needs any kind of keyboard control. It lies in the word point-n-click. The fact that everything can be done by only using the mouse is something i am really fond of, and i think any kind of keyboard control would ruin that. Also, this is not an action game, and to me the controls, while driving the car, worked just fine.
  • edited November 2006
    It wouldn't ruin anything if it were offered as a choice. The option of direct control would not be any betrayal to the format of the game, it would simply be a preference to widen the appeal and cater to different players.

    With only Culture Shock as a reference, the two input schemes seem like they could sit side-by-side, be enabled at the same time, without at least the direct control part interfering with the PnC control part. Direct control players, save some Grim Fandango style 'head turns to face object of interest' convention, will likely have to go for the mouse to use objects but that'd be no problem.
  • edited November 2006
    I think indeed it would be a betrayal to the genre. It's called point-n-click for a reason. Personally i gave up on playing Monkey Island 4 and Grim Fandango for that exact reason. It just seems so inconvenient to use the keyboard, when you have a mouse which was invented for the purpose. Remember again, this is not an action game or a platformer, and therefore shouldn't be controlled like one.

    Also, having keyboard as a control scheme would requite Telltale to design the game around both types which, ultimately, would hurt the overall game experience.
  • edited November 2006
    There are cases in which being able to use the keyboard would be helpful.

    If you take the rat-race in the first Bone game for example. It would have made the sequence a LOT easier to do for people with reasonably unresponsive mice.
  • edited November 2006
    Actually, I'd kinda like the option to use Grim Fandango/MI4 style keyboard controls too.... :p

    I hated them when I originally started playing Grim Fandango was (mainly, I guess because I thought it was so they could start designing adventure games specifically for consoles and leave PC's with cheesy conversions), but by the end of the game I found it make life much easier - No clicking on the edge of the screen to get Manny to walk a couple of pixels further to the left for a screen wrap, etc...
  • edited November 2006
    Moving the car left/right using the keys: /me likes

    Moving Sam/Max with the keyboard as in Grim Fandango and MI4: Please not. In GF it still worked somehow, in Monkey Island 4 you kept getting stuck at invisible corners etc etc and having to hold down the cursor keys all the time is horribly annoying! To go somewhere faster, I'd rather see the double-click option that makes the characters speed up (or switches location right away if the double-click was on an entrance to somewhere).
  • edited November 2006
    I thought there was a teleport function to speed up things?
  • edited November 2006
    I hate keyboard control in adventure games. It takes away from the expirience and you don't fully take in the enviroments in the game without mouse usage.
    At least that's what I thought with EMI
  • edited November 2006
    Steltek wrote: »
    Moving the car left/right using the keys: /me likes

    Definitly!
    Steltek wrote: »
    having to hold down the cursor keys all the time is horribly annoying!

    But... how is that different to holding down 'W' all the time when playing a FPS?

    I guess what I'm saying is that no one is asking TellTale to replace the point'n'click system with a keyboard based one, just that the option would be nice? - Then people can use whichever one you prefer? (I like control within a 3D environment)

    The only problem I can imagine is that the arrow-key controls generally work in an engine where the in-game characters 'look' at usable items as they pass them - Using the mouse point, you only need to pop-up a tool-tip when the mouse hovers over an in-game object?
  • edited November 2006
    BS4 is mouse driven but you can use the arrows to control the character movements, it's fairly seamless.
  • edited November 2006
    elsenator wrote: »
    I think indeed it would be a betrayal to the genre. It's called point-n-click for a reason. Personally i gave up on playing Monkey Island 4 and Grim Fandango for that exact reason.
    You gave up on Grim Fandango because of betrayal of the genre? I'm shocked, and at least one smiley seems to agree with me :eek:

    Here's one thing that sort of bugged me about the point & click: walking. Now I don't think keys would be a great solution. Betrayal and stuff. But! Maybe you guys could consider point & click & hold? Because, in a scene where you want to walk from left all over to the right, and the camera is floating somewhat in front of you like a carrot on a donkey, you have to go click click click, all the time, two feet in front of Sam because that's all the space available for clicking in front of Sam. See, in the old days you'd often have the entire screen in one screen, or at most a partly scrollable screen, but it still wouldn't take ten thousand clicks. Only like two, or so. So point & click simply worked. But now the cameras can float. And boy, are they floating. Right in front of Sam! Or next to, occasionally.
  • edited November 2006
    But... how is that different to holding down 'W' all the time when playing a FPS?
    Simple: In an FPS I need to react to others and be able to change directions or even stop quickly. In adventures I want to go from 'where I am' to B. I don't really care how the character gets there (unless somebody built a stupid puzzle where it mattered) so I prefer to tell the system to take me there and watch the environment in the meantime.

    In addition to that: I don't play FPSs in 3rd person perspective. The name already implies 'first person' view. Moving somebody around in 3rd person perspective gives you two coordinate systems: relative to the character you're trying to move (ie up = forward, down = backward, left + right = turn the character) or relative to the screen (ie up moves the character upwards on the screen, no matter which direction it is currently facing). Both of these have annoying issues: In the absolute system you run into trouble each time the scene changes/switches viewpoints, in the relative system, you bump against walls and obstacles because you have trouble turning the character into the right angle (and usually these games lack strafing, so once you bumped into something you have to stand still and hold left or right for quite a while to turn the character so that he/she doesn't face the obstacle any more). In addition to that, you get issues with characters getting stuck (while 'sliding' along the edge of a bridge for example, if said edge isn't 100% smooth in the computer's memory) or, depending on how you implemented collisions, even turning around (Remember the elevator in Rubacava? Use it to go down, once arrived hold Shift to run and press Up for 'forward' ... and watch Manny do a 180 degree turn, run right back into the elevator, triggering the video sequence for going up and switching scenes and then hear me swearing like a pirate who's had too much grog!)

    Then there's the issue of finding objects with which you can interact. In a mouse controlled environment, I can just walk into a room and look around it by scanning interesting objects with my mouse. In the keyboard controlled variant, I have to walk the character past every object and wall in the room to see whether he/she notices something interactive or not.
    I guess what I'm saying is that no one is asking TellTale to replace the point'n'click system with a keyboard based one, just that the option would be nice? - Then people can use whichever one you prefer? (I like control within a 3D environment)
    Sure, as an option everything's OK. But, for the reasons mentioned above, do not force it onto players. This control system somehow worked for me in Grim Fandango (apart from the elevator issue and one of the bridges in Rubacava) but it really ruined EMI for me (among other things) and I personally think it is fundamentally flawed and unsuited for adventures.
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