Keyboard uses for future episodes
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...
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...
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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.
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.
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.
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...
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).
At least that's what I thought with EMI
Definitly!
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?
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.
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.
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.