I don’t really see the downside to this if it were optional?
It would make the game much more enjoyable for people who prefer fluid and independent movement and mouse targeting.
That’s why. This would be significantly better than the current control scheme so it would become the required playstyle if it were available.
Required by who? It might be better but how does that make it required?
We didn’t stop the invention of the bicycle because it would require walkers to use a bicycle. We made a bicycle and improved peoples lives. And, some people still walked.
By anyone who wanted to do better.
This is true. I’ve been trying to find a buggy whip to enable me to drive my buggy (/horse & cart) into central London to work but I just can’t find any! All of the highstreet names in the buggy whip manufacturing scene appear to have gone out of business somewhere around the late 1800s/early 1900s. I can’t for the life of me fathom why! And don’t even get me started on trying to find a new steamboat.
You are right, some people will always want to do things in a particular way, even when it’s clearly less effective, but min-maxing is a thing & an aweful lot of people (I won’t be so disingenious as to pull some numbers out of my arse to quantify it) like getting more shinies quicker, plus it’ll work well for streamers so they’ll publicise it by simple fact of it working well for them so it gets adopted by a higher % of the population.
OK, so lets stay in the cave smashing rocks together instead of progress because if we come out of the cave some other people might have to come out of the cave.
Makes total sense.
It’s more options. It’s a better way to play. You aren’t even denying that. I’m having a hard time understanding though why anyone would be against it. If you think it’s new fangled technology that is scary then just don’t do it…
If it means more people start using a better input system then so what? Good for them. It is their CHOICE.
Video games used to be controlled by atari controllers and pong sticks but better ways were figured out. So, why would you not want to adopt a better way to play a game? If you want to make LE stand out as good then why not make it as good as you can? I really don’t get it.
The problem is that WASD has two forms.
Twin-Stick (what I believe your asking for) where you aim at the mouse but can move freely in all directions with WASD. This WILL become the definitive form and render all boss fights in the current form of the game obsolete. Forcing EHG to balance around this WASD form, rendering the current traditional ARPG control of mouse to move significantly worse.
Or
Simulate holding down left click in the direction you’re pressing. This is how the controller works currently. Holding left on the thumbstick simulates holding left click to the left of your character. Because you have 360 degree movement with a controller it’s not so bad. But with WASD you’ll have janky 8 directional movement instead of smooth movement from a controller. This makes WASD significantly worse than mouse movement.
So you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. Rebalanced the game around WASD or give players a shitty form of controller movements.
3 Likes
I can’t find the source or Mike’s response during one of their dev streams, but I don’t think they’re fundamentally against WASD but as with everything it comes at a MAJOR opportunity cost for development. At least this is now the case post-1.0. Pre-1.0 I believe they did say “nah” to the prospect. But things have changed:
PoE2 and their massive team of hundreds of developers (EHG has sub 100 employees, not all of which are devs) has already had to delay their beta due to their introduction of WASD into the game recently.
The issue is that the mechanical complexity of many things in the game would be trivialized and would need to be rebalanced if you had completely free movement, even while casting, and the precision that WASD allows vs click to move. Though I’m not a game dev myself, wouldn’t the animations and otherwise need updated as well for the combat to feel seamless?
The feedback GGG received on WASD in their latest PoE2 testing and talk in LA (a few weeks ago) was nothing but positive and they really upped the difficulty of the bosses and timings/animations (literally Dark Souls style levels of punishment for missed mechanics) of all of their skills etc in order to implement it.
Due to this success and feedback I personally believe it will be something EHG and the genre as a whole strives for as we hear more on it etc. But Jonathan Rogers has been very open about the strain it put on their development team and the crunch (which GGG are fundamentally against) required to have WASD even remotely ready for testing at this event.
Give it time and continue the constructive feedback.
1 Like
Yeah the idea that they can’t or shouldn’t do it because it would make bosses too easy is just silly. After all that’s saying you want the difficulty of a boss to be directly tied to the use of a deliberately inferior control scheme. Having a boss be hard because you don’t have good control over your character or their actions is just… bad. Objectively bad. The better the control you can have over your character and their actions, the better the game is. Things which stand in the way of good control are obstacles, not features.
That said obviously I upvoted, I would love to see WASD or twin stick, and welcome any increase in difficulty they find necessary or supportable associated with the better control we would thus have over the characters.
While I like some WASD or free controller movement and using skills without stopping to do so, this is a fundamental gameplay shift that will take months of hard work to implement. LE basically becomes a new game.
I also like point&click movement, and it doesn’t feel outdated for me. But once a game is designed/balanced to work with fluid WASD movement and skill use, point&click becomes inferior to the point of constantly dying because you didn’t stay in motion.
1 Like
Yes this is one thing mike said about the characters rigs. This would need to be changed or the animation will just look bad.
Skills would also have to change to a point animations not sure for skills
1 Like
More options doesn’t mean it’s always better. Options (or the lack of them) are a part of a game’s identity and the players that it will attract are based on that.
For example, you could add options to dark souls games to have quest arrows so you know where to go next. And could add an option to have a minimap and enemies painted on it. And if you did, a lot of the dark souls playerbase would leave. Because the playerbase of dark souls games (and the playerbase FromSoftware wants playing their games) doesn’t like easy options.
There was a post about this just a couple days ago (because it’s easier to make a new post rather than search existing ones). And in there this video was posted that clearly shows that WASD is a superior choice and makes bosses a LOT easier.
So this has the issue that devs would need to rebalance their game around this. And also the issue that players that don’t like to use WASD would effectively be forced to use it, even if you place it as an “option”.
2 Likes
They spent this time not for implementing WASD, but for improving the game to utilize it more. Don’t hide mouse when using controller and I will implement WASD for 5 minutes.
1 Like
Because it becomes a different kind of game, or at least a different kind of feelings when playing.
Mind you, I am not exactly “against” it. I believe it will come, the only question is not “IF”, it is “WHEN”. And Last Epoch will still be a very good game, just a different one, not relating anymore to the good old diablo-likes they wanted to emulate in the first place.
I play quite a few games with WASD. Some others with mouse. I like that games feel/play differently from each other.
For me, bringing uniformity everywhere by making every single game controlled in the same way is a bit sad, it will feel like the death of some genres. The end of an era.
But I realise it is unavoidable, mostly due to new generations fed on consoles and controllers.
Edit: for exactly the same reason, not really rationnal but just about feelings, I consider adding “evade” an absolute joke. It is not a bad mechanic by itself, it works in some games, but it doesn’t belong in the diablo-like genre and it is a step away from the Last Epoch identity I loved.
2 Likes
In order for WASD’s implementation to occur, the game needed to be improved. We’re saying the same thing I think yeah 
I think EHG recently has really changed their hard stance against WASD after hearing how well the initial testing went in PoE2. I’d love to be able to strafe on a marksman in LE while shooting bow abilities (and buff bow abilities too lol), the boss mechanics could be a bit harder etc.
The implementation of Evade into the game next cycle I think sheds some light on EHG wanting to have more dynamic boss fights already so WASD and the combat feel you can achieve with that (and PoE2 being the guinea pig for the industry) would be the next step towards furthering that dynamic feeling of combat and cooler boss fights.
All of this however as with anything costs a lot of dev time and isn’t their core focus right now but I’d be lying if I didn’t vote for having it in the game eventually!
If you have an idea and you cannot see any downside to it, it’s usually a pretty good sign that you don’t really understand what you are talking about.
4 Likes
No. Of course, it’s always good to improve the game, but for implementing WASD, it is not necessary. It is literally question of less than a hour for the one coder. All people who can’t bear playing with mouse movements would be totally satisfied, if this simplest version of WASD implementation would applied, with nothing else. No animation changes, no skill changes, just letting people to use, for example, key “A” as alternative to clicking a mouse left to your character. It is already implemented, for joystick support. Now we only need to add mouse to it, that’s all. Like they did in D4, for example. I personally would really enjoy playing LE then, I wish I could.
Not sure the devs agree with that, but hey, what do they know…
I am quite sure that devs would agree, that not removing mouse cursor when joystick is attached is a quite simple task. We could rebind keys ourselves, if rebinding keys is hard (from stick to wasd), we just need mouse cursor to aim abilities. And LE already support mouse, so it can’t be too hard. Devs wouldn’t need to implement mouse or implement joystick, just combine them together.
I keep being amazed by how such simple concept is literally impossible to explain to almost anyone.
Probably because you don’t understand that very complex systems that are interlocked and interact with each other can behave unexpectedly when you change one of those systems.
In a game like this, nothing is done simply in an hour with just one dev. Least of all a system that has an impact in navigation (menus, inventory/stash, skill trees, blessings choice, etc) as well as gameplay.
Even changing text isn’t something you just do without then having to check if it didn’t screw up something, like overflowing on a border, or showing up weird in MG UI, etc.
The most infuriating thing for a programmer is someone that isn’t a programmer coming up and saying “that’s easy, it just takes 5 minutes/an hour”.
If you’re so sure it’s only an hour, just offer your services to EHG and go do it. Though don’t be surprised if you end up working on it for over a week.
5 Likes
When they implemented joystick, one of things they done is hiding mouse, right? If they spent weeks on hiding it, then they probably spent months if not years on implementing joystick. And unhiding it back will take another few weeks. Yes, I guess it makes sense.