Western RPG control schemes: Are they usually this unintuitive?

@ Glen Magus Harvey: .......In TES:Arena you can open a menu with stats, inventory and spell book (not sure about last one) with clicking on the character portrait. The controls are a pain though, but using mouse to move/fight, and my left hand to draw weapon/cast spells/use items/rest/open map worked out for me after I got used to using mouse for moving.

With Baldurs Gate, the problem is that tutorial sucks. It throws gives you fully equipped party with shitton of various spells and abilities and throws you in the middle of fight without much explanation. I learned how to control the game on the first map after prologue, by hunting wolves and little green men with duo of starting characters.

@ Edmond Dante: Unless I failed my ancient game lore check, the first FPS that allowed (and forced) player to look in all 3 dimensions was System Shock 1. The first that allowed to use mouse to do so was Terminator: Future Shock, which single-handedly invented modern mouse-look.

edited 10th Nov '10 12:45:00 AM by Drakovicz

Has a compulsive editing and re-editing disorder.

About RTS control schemes: The "group" buttons are sometimes worse on non-QUERTY keyboards. In Starcraft on a French (AZERTY) keyboard, you have to press Shift-1 to select group 1, and while using Caps Lock works, it disables some other keyboard shortcuts.

"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."

Huh... I found BG to be extremely intuitive. The problem with the tiny screen is a massive pain in the arse, but there are awesome mods to deal with that, and that just put all the BG files through the BG 2 engine. Shit is awesomes. :3

Commie Stuffs

Thank you for apparently being the only person who got that.

Actually, I can't think of a single FPS _other_ than Doom that had vertical space but didn't let you look up and down

I've recently started playing SS1 (the original Mac port) and the non-reconfigurability of the controls is absolutely galling (I think ResEdit might be able to fix that though…). It really puts history in perspective to see so many features (looking, leaning, stances, off-axis aiming,) some of which are uncommon even today, but UI basically consisting of a typical early 90s arcade game with the new features sprinkled all over the keyboard at random.

Eric,

Awww. <3

That is a hard set up OP?

I honestly like the clunky set up, it makes life harder, and more fun.

Like Marathon has a up/down component, but it isn't terribly easy to use :P

edited 10th Nov '10 8:49:40 AM by Lanceleoghauni

"Coffee! Coffeecoffeecoffee! Coffee! Not as strong as Meth-amphetamine, but it lets you keep your teeth!"

Well, they could have used WASD to move and the buttons around it (1 2 3 Q E Z X C 4 R F V) to do different functions.

And even if you don't count that, my point about F1 still stands.

I still stand by you being a wimp :P

What's even better is watching people go from controllers to keyboard. it's the funniest thing in the world.

They try so hard and they just can't do it!

edited 10th Nov '10 12:16:55 PM by Lanceleoghauni

"Coffee! Coffeecoffeecoffee! Coffee! Not as strong as Meth-amphetamine, but it lets you keep your teeth!"

The more you can do in a game, the more difficult it gets to manage what to do.

This is solved with a very convenient control scheme, but other companies feel ashamed of imitating the same one so they make their own.

Custom-keys and toggling are always great options.

Are you sure you aren't forgetting something? Are you sure you shouldn't be somewhere else?

@ Lance: Oh, I used to play computer games.

But this was back when these were the controls:

• arrow keys: move in the corresponding direction
• Ctrl: jump
• Alt: fire (or pogostick in Commander Keen)
  • In Keen games, Ctrl+Alt or Spacebar was fire.
• Esc: control menu (i.e. save, load, quit, etc.)
• F1: Help! (in-game manual)

So yes, I grew up on platformers.

Okay, I also played some point-and-click adventures—all of them edutainment titles from Sierra.

As for other genres, I still haven't really broken into sports or fighting, and I got my start in JRPGs in around 1997 with Super Mario RPG. Got into Nethack (and thus roguelikes, technically) in 2005.

edited 10th Nov '10 12:24:47 PM by GlennMagusHarvey

Ah, Keen... I sucked at that. I liked Jill of the Jungle better. I even beat it. :3

My aunt played Descent with the home row. I shit you not.

evilneko is striking me as either late twenties or late teens. I'm guessing more the former.

Helpful Scripts and Stylesheets here.

Bah, she can't be possibly older than me.

^^ I had thought she already said her age. Or at least said something that made me think I know her age. Either way, I'm guessing it's late twenties as well. Because I remember thinking that she was in her late teens or so, and then being wrong.

Maybe I dreamt it. That would have been weird though. I don't think I've ever had any dreams about tropers. Which is surprising considering how much time I spend here.

edited 10th Nov '10 2:13:14 PM by DYRE

The reason they didn't make the character smaller and the map larger in Baldur's Gate was that the game came out in 1998, when 640x480 was considered a good resolution. The character really couldn't have been much smaller and still be recognizable as a character with distinguishing features, much less movement animations.

(And in any case, nowadays you should be playing that game with a widescreen mod. It does exactly what you're looking for.)

Whoah, someone made a widescreen mod for Baldur's Gate?

Yeah. This◊ is how the game looks on my system (with Tu Tu + WS + BG 1 UI).

So what's Wang Fire doing there?

I may have to dig up my Baldur's Gate discs.

...and now why couldn't they have gone with simplified sprite graphics?

They are sprites... aren't they?

I suppose they could have gone with Pool of Radiance-simplified◊, but all in all I'm glad they didn't. Unlike most games, Baldur's Gate has actually blossomed visually with age (and mods).

The beauty of mods and Source Ports.

Also, if you have Quake, GET THE DARKPLACES PORT, BECAUSE IT KICKS ASS.

"Hipsters: the most dangerous gang in the US." - Pacific Mackerel