Control feedback?
 

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:

• 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.

I thought the control system was pretty intuitive, within a few minutes of playing around I was able to complete the demo without having to think "Ok, how do I do this again?". The only problem I found was that sometimes the cycling through selectable items was not immediate but there was a second or so delay. I think that's due to selecting higher visual settings than I should have so I'll try again :P Other than that I can't think of anything else...

EDIT: I played with the Xbox 360 controller, gotta try the keyboard too.

I thought the keyboard layout worked just fine. It is a bit weird after using all of Telltale's other games just with the mouse, but after a few times of trying to move Wallace with the mouse and having nothing happen, I got used to the setup.

I'd like to try a gamepad with it, but the demo didn't seem to recognize my Saitek Rumble Force gamepad.

I used my Logitech gamepad (basically the same as PS2) and it was good enough after I got used to it. I think I'd prefer the mouse only, though.

My initial impression is that I will need to get used to using wasd for movement, I still keep trying to click to move out of habit. I like the fact that I can bring up inventory with the keyboard.

I thought the controls were pretty nice. I jused the keyboard+mouse combo - didn't know you could play using just the keyboard. Is that the recommended scheme?

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?

I liked the controls mostly, although I would like a mouse sensitivity option, since the cursor felt a little floaty. I also found myself trying to click to move instinctively.

here's my two cents:
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. :confused:

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.

Downloaded the demo to try it out, didn't like the controls. I'm sure they're good for this kind of control scheme but to be perfectly blunt, I'd *much* prefer regular point and click controls.

Honestly, it's nowhere near as bad as I thought it could be.

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 can see a couple of problems with pure mouse-control. For instance, when talking to your neighbour (name escapes me, I didn't listen to every conversation, I want to do that in the actual game), you can't see Wallace's feet or the ground, so leaving that camera shot would be difficult. Of course, you could solve this by a simple 'right click to leave the scene' like used in previous episodes, but I suspect there will be other areas where you won't see the ground, or only part of the ground.

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!

i thought control system was very good but i woud lik 2 things fixed before main release:

1. Mouse was very unresponsive . kept dragging behind where it was suppose to be
2. when you were gromit on top of the ladder i found it very hard to click on wallace and not poke the queen bee

Other than those im very much looking foward to the full release and have the games pre ordered

Prefer the old controls, myself.

I thought the controls were very intuitive, after just a couple of minutes I was right into it. BUT there's one big annoyance for me: I can't configure the keys. And since I live in Belgium where our keyboard layout is azerty instead of qwerty, I can't navigate using the WASD scheme. Well, I could of course, but the keys aren't in a good layout to do that, ZQSD would be the working equivalent for me. Now I know I could use the arrow keys (as I did while playing the demo), but due to the way my keyboard and mouse are positioned on my desktop, this is not a really comfortable way of playing. But that's my only problem, the rest is quite nice.

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 thought the keyboard-mouse scheme was very intuitive, and I'm happy using it. Much nicer control than Grim Fandango/Monkey Island 4.

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.