Control feedback?
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[TTG] Yare
Telltale Alumni
Hello everyone!
I'm the engineer responsible for the controls. After you folks play through the demo, I'd like to hear your initial impressions and nitpicks about the control scheme. Then I'd like to hear from you again after you've played through a full episode or two.
Not sure if a readme for controls shipped with the demo, but here's some stuff anyway:
And uhhh... there's probably other stuff I'll post when I remember. We mapped keys everywhere to try and give you guys as many options as possible.
I'm the engineer responsible for the controls. After you folks play through the demo, I'd like to hear your initial impressions and nitpicks about the control scheme. Then I'd like to hear from you again after you've played through a full episode or two.
Not sure if a readme for controls shipped with the demo, but here's some stuff anyway:
- If the inventory is closed, mouse wheel will cycle through your inventory items.
- If the inventory is open, and you have a bunch of inventory items, mouse wheel will scroll the inventory.
- The game can be played entirely with the keyboard.
- Q and E cycle through selectable items on screen.
- Hold Tab to make all the selectable items on screen stand out.
- Shift opens your inventory.
- Space activates items.
- Control skips dialog and backs out of closeups.
And uhhh... there's probably other stuff I'll post when I remember. We mapped keys everywhere to try and give you guys as many options as possible.
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Comments
EDIT: I played with the Xbox 360 controller, gotta try the keyboard too.
I'd like to try a gamepad with it, but the demo didn't seem to recognize my Saitek Rumble Force gamepad.
I have one complain though - I think the behaviour is weird when the camera changes angle - sometimes I found that initially the controls behave strange in the first second after the camera change (like left would suddenly be down etc.). Did this happen to anyone else?
it was easy to get used to the controls, sometimes I felt a bit disoriented as Wallace moved in an unexpected direction, but it may be because I'm too used to playing shooters on the arrow keys. it's definitely worse when Wallace moves so far to the edge of the screen that he isn't visible - though it's a camera change issue in itself.
I am baffled by one thing, though. there are two scenes in the demo - one is the walking-around-adventuring type, and the other is hi-adrenaline action. now, you're direct controlling Wallace in the first scene, where point-and-click would be perfectly adequate, and there's no direct control for Gromit in the second, where it could amplify the heat of the action.
all in all, it seems to be a good control scheme, the players will need a bit of time to settle in it, and I also think there'll be much polishing going into it during the series.
I think that the recommended scheme is whatever the tutorial advises you to do. All of the other control schemes are there as sort of "power user" options. Play however it feels comfortable.
This is an interesting artifact from the way we handle camera relative movement. If you cross from one camera to another, movement is still relative to the old camera until you stop moving.
BUT.
I honestly felt it was a point-and-click game that seemed to unnecessarily demand that you use the keyboard for movement. Really, it just kind of feels unnatural for me to use the keyboard(I tried moving Wallace with the mouse several times). It felt most natural to me when I was playing as Gromit and his movement was limited to animations that played when I selected things(and, as such, used the mouse for everything).
Using the keyboard to open up the inventory was nice.
Using Tab to show all selectable items is alright. It's nice to have everything you can use laid out for you so that it's not a pixel-hunt game. It's something I'll use when I get stuck though, since I like to mess around and see what I can mess with when I first enter a room in an adventure game. I messed with so many objects in Wallace's garden that obviously correlate to other puzzles, and it took me way longer than it should have to achieve that rather simple objective because I was trying to get a million other things to achieve my goal for me. For example:
"Where's that cricket thing? Can I substitute something for it? Oh, perhaps the pinwheel....hey! That's neat. What does this pinwheel do? Oh! Do they do anything different? Does one swing one way? Oh, hey! There's a robot in there! What am I supposed to do with that? I wish I had some items to mess with...."
Anyway, I'm getting off the topic of the controls.
Basically? Mouse control for movement would have been nice, and it seems like it would have worked. Not even as the default, but tucked away in the Settings menu. Because unless there's something I haven't seen in the demo(which is quite likely!), I don't see a reason that Wallace CAN'T be moved by the mouse.
EDIT:
Oh! Another thing I wanted to mention.
I find it EXTREMELY odd that it only tells you what you're interacting with when you are combining items. For example, if you try to combine the crank with the buttons, it'll tell you what they do. But otherwise, you're just gonna press them to figure it out. I don't really see a reason that you can't identify items when you just highlight them with the cursor as well?
I'm sorry to hear that. We would have liked to provide a point-and-click option, but it just didn't work with the more cinematic framing of some of the game's areas. I hope you'll understand and give the game a fair shake for what it is.
I thought about it a bit, and I think I do prefer 100% mouse control for the pc. It's a great adaption for the 360, and I can't think of a better control system for a console adventure of this kind, but on pc, it made walking around and interacting with items harder then it should be. But I do like the movie-like camera angles, an extremely nice chance from what we're used to. I wouldn't want to lose that. It's a difficult issue!
Other than those im very much looking foward to the full release and have the games pre ordered
We're looking into a solution for non-QWERTY keyboard layouts. If you find arrow keys/mouse uncomfortable, you could try playing with just the keyboard. There's a WASD cluster of bound keys, a cluster around the arrow keys, and a cluster on the numpad.
I hope you find something that works comfortably for you while we look into this issue.
Is there any particular reason you can't just let us map the controls to the keys ourselves? Wouldn't that be the best solution for non-standard keyboard layouts or custom control schemes?
I have a thrustmaster (firestorm dual analog 3 gamepad) too, so decided to seee if it would work. I was hoping 'generic' gamepads would be supported, even if not explicitly tested & listed, but the game's not seeing it at all, unfortunately.
If your mouse feels unresponsive, it is most likely because you have your graphics settings up a bit too high. If you turn them down a bit, you will find that the mouse becomes much more responsive.
We didn't have the resources to create a nice keymapping system for this project.
How about giving us an Autohotkey script along with the game?
I tried to get a 360 pad working with it as well, but no joy. Which was odd because I thought they were going to be offically supported.
Did you guys disabled the gamepad support in the demo so you could get more feedback on the mouse and keyboard controls? Or is there something special I need to do in order to play with it?
Wired Xbox 360 controllers and Logitech gamepads should work in the ddemo. I don't think we've tested other brands. Did you have the 360 controller plugged in before launching the demo?
Don't quote me on this, but I believe that Windows does not recognize wireless Xbox 360 controllers -only wired ones.
It's very confusing.
I have one too
Although I had no problems with the controls, and I'm sure it'll work even better when I plug in my gamepad, that's pretty much the impression I got as well.
That's exactly the test I used to know when I'd turned the graphics to the correct level. When the mouse pointer moved responsively without skipping.
While we haven't seen all environments and framing, I do highly question the impossibility of mouse only controls. Keyboard controls are so far proving to be more of an inconvenience, and do not add immersion to the gameplay as I thought they might. Despite this, I am loving that you included the ability to cycle between inventory and selectable items. Such a system is almost better than an in-game help system.
What you have here is a point and click interface thats controlled by arrow keys... It would have been better to just abandon the free roam aspect (there is not much to "roam" in each set anyways) and use the mouse to move Wallace around the room by clicking on sections of it (doing this would also change the POV at the same time)... While it would not be a "node based" control scheme per-se, it would eliminate most problems associated with BOTH control schemes.
This tactic would also introduce a "cinnematic" quality to the games... making them feel more like the shorts and movies. (as moving between the "nodes" could also trigger various animations and dynamic camera moves as well)
But, what do I know...
I tried to play with my Logitech gamepad (ChillStream) but the demo didn't recognize it. why? I plugged in the gamepad before I launched the game.
When playing adventure games I like to lean back and enjoy the game, not hunching uncomfortable over the keyboard. Also my left hand gets tired and aches quickly when using the wasd-controls
At the moment I really regret that I preordered the season already...
Come on, let's not over-react.
This is a pure and straight adventure game. If adventure games were defined by the control method, Grim Fandango wouldn't be an adventure game (and we all know it's one of the best).