I absolutely agree with your thesis on the subject. I am old-school pc player too and I feel like wasd would ruin the overall gaming experience for LE. Wasd has to be something in-built for the game to work properly imo and mitigrating into it will only cause problems. If, as you say, it’s only a matter of time until the mitigration happens, at least give the players the option of using either the old-school already known click-to-move action, or the wasd one (given that it is possible).
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I very much miss WASD movement. I played PoE2 and the WASD movement there felt so much better than mouse movement. I always put my spell keybinds on my mouse side buttons so it feels very clunky to also move with the mouse. I need my left hand for that. Right now I only press shift with left hand and do everything else with my mouse which is a bit too much. And I don’t want to swap it because this is how I play every game.
They could implement WASD and make it more accessible for wider range of players at least year ago, after first feedback about how WASD feels in PoE 2. But they are postponing it as long as possible and this is another decision to reduce the playerbase. I think they just made too many small decisions like this, this is why game slowly going down already, though I’m sure it could keep up much longer.
It would require a significant rework of the game & all of the animations to do this, as they have said. They aren’t just kicking the can down the road.
Omg, this topic again 
They even already implemented it, just didn’t bother to release it yet. After the launch of PoE 2, it suddenly became very easy to implement, as I predicted long time ago. Obviously they will not rework any animations and it doesn’t needed. Nobody expects them to implement it at the PoE 2 level, just basic implementation will make LE much more accessible for the people who can’t bare to play in click-to-move style (and after PoE 2 launch, number of such people increased a lot and will continue to increase).
Maybe they will release it in April patch. After all, what a few months for them? Or maybe will wait another year. Time is going differently for ETH. Which perfectly aligns with LE thematic
They have a working WASD internally, but it isn’t up to standards to release yet.
It didn’t. It’s still hard. Which is what they’ve always said and why they still haven’t released it.
That is what you want. EHG wants to release a WASD that actually feels good and that will look nice on screen. That means that the character will need to be looking and where it’s shooting while walking in another direction. That means new animations.
You would be happy with a janky WASD. EHG wouldn’t. They want it to be at least good enough to feel right. Otherwise you’ll immediatly get comments like “WASD in LE sucks, it feels janky, why can’t they make it smooth like in PoE2?”
In many ways, PoE2 releasing a good WASD made it even harder to release WASD in LE, because the standard has been raised.
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Yes, I would be happy if LE would be more accessible and playable, because i think it is still a good game. But instead of making some practical improvements, someone can think about abstract non-existent problems and do nothing. Well, this is exactly what I talked about when I said that management of LE is just too ineffective.
I’m afraid when ETH will meet that standard (after ~5 years maybe?), that standard will already change again. For example, it will probably include camera shifting in direction of the cursor. I guess then ETH will have to spend few more years to match a new standards before releasing anything.
That already exists for a long time, having been implemented in Grim Dawn. Or rather, Grim Dawn implemented camera shifting and then a mod makes it so it always shifts in the direction you’re moving.
But despite camera shifting already existing in an ARPG for some time now, barely any implemented it. It’s not likely to become a standard.
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It exists in many games for many years, but ARPG genre miles behind in this area, for some reason. If you would mention WASD in ARPG a year ago, noone would even take it serious. Shifting camera not even in the agenda yet, but after people will get used to WASD, it would be a natural next step. Don’t know how it implemented in Grim Dawn, but there is no WASD in Grim Dawn and without WASD it doesn’t work. Shifting camera in the direction of moving sounds awful for me. Like, if you are dodging in different directions, camera goes in crazy mode?
Games like Supervive have even more interesting camera behavior, you can go in sneaky mode there which zooming out, also it has field of view so you wouldn’t see monsters behind the wall (or behind you, if they are not very close). Maybe things like that will come in ARPG genre after few years.
Anyway, this is not about LE, all what people can potentially expect for ETH is to implement the most basic WASD or do not implement nothing.
GD only supports manual camera shifting natively. You can see an example in this video.
However, there are mods that either speed it up or automate it. You can see one where it’s automated, following the cursor position, and feels pretty smooth in this video.
The fact is that camera shifting already exists in ARPGs and the fact that it isn’t a standard by now is mostly because it’s not a feature players care about, besides not being easy to implement, having a huge impact on performance.
It’s also the reason why isometric ARPGs have a certain zoom limitation and don’t let you zoom out too much.
I assume by ETH you mean EHG.
Exactly because they don’t want to implement the most basic WASD (which is what you request) and instead want to make something that feels good is the reason we don’t have WASD yet.
For a crappy WASD implementation, D4 is enough.
I am not talking about camera rotation. I mean something like this
And it looks like you never will. But I’m sure they will have to implement “crappy WASD” eventually, if they will want try to keep LE going a bit longer.
I don’t think we’ll get anything like that in a hack & slash ARPG anytime soon, if ever.
Why would you say that? They started working on WASD after it became a popular request in 1.0. They already have an WASD control build internally. If they manage to get it up to standards we might even see it in 1.2.
You’re basically just saying “They haven’t yet done this really hard thing to do in a few months, so they’ll never do it ever”.
First: again, if they wanted crappy WASD they could have already released it. If they can’t figure out WASD properly (not likely to happen, but let’s assume) I’d assume that they’d rather not release it at all.
Second: WASD isn’t vital to keep an ARPG around. Most players aren’t using WASD in PoE2. If you look at the content creators, none of them are using it. If you look at the random PoE2 videos, barely anyone is using it.
That is because PoE2 also made a pretty good point & click control allowing you to keep moving while shooting even with just the mouse.
So WASD only brings more players to the playerbase (those that draw the line at having WASD). It doesn’t kill a game not to have it, because most players still don’t use it, even when it’s done properly like in PoE2.
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I don’t see why not. It’s not much harder to implement in ARPG than in other genres. ARPG players just not used to these kind of things yet.
Well maybe some day you will, sure. Just doesn’t look realistic for me, at least in the near future. And honestly, I am not sure if LE have more than a near future, though I hope it does, I really like a lot of things about this game.
Because a MOBA has a few moving pieces in your screen at any time, normally. An ARPG has dozens at a time. Just like camera shifting or a more panned out zoom, this means you need more resources to handle it. Which is why most ARPGs don’t implement it, because the gains aren’t worth the performance hit and most players don’t really care about it.
Honestly, the fact that they already have an internally working WASD is much more than I was expecting. It’s a lot easier to make WASD when you start making your whole movement controls with that in mind than it is to change it after your whole movement controls are set and dependent on mouse clicks.
So they are already further along than I would have expected. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if they managed it for either 1.2 or 1.3.
This is just another “LE is dead” take and there are plenty of them already. Much like PoE had “PoE is dead” threads since before launch and up to the latest league, even though it’s never been more popular.
In fact, PoE only started really growing 3 years into releasing. Yes, they didn’t have the same competition LE does nowadays, but once they released some really good content, players flocked to it. And PoE was 100% reliant on MTX sales to stay around, which isn’t true for LE because of the upfront cost.
There’s no reason to assume the same won’t happen to LE. If 1.2 is a very significant improvement, and if they then start to get regular seasons, LE has all the required conditions to stay around for years.
I wouldn’t start getting pessimistic about LE until they’ve had at least another really bad year, which I don’t think will happen.
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I don’t think so. More controller improvements for 1.2, WASD - later for sure
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Yeah, I don’t think it’s likely yet either. But I wasn’t expecting them to be so far long as well. I think it’s more likely for 1.3, if all goes well. But I wouldn’t be shocked if they managed to release it in 1.2, was my point.
Have they really?
Everybody expects it to be implemented at the PoE 2 level, if they did a basic implementation people would bitch about it & say it was a waste of time & resources.
If they didn’t rework the animations it would look & feel so phenomenally bad.
They aren’t non-existent problems, they are real problems that need to be thought about before implementing something so it’s not an unmitigated clusterfuck. So say you’re ok with that but you really aren’t.
Nah, that just sounds like a non-existent problem someone would come up with to do nothing.
They do, Mike said so on stream.
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Good lord, I really did not like that. I hope it doesn’t make it ever in LE. I like fixed camera (and fixed minimap) because it allow know where I am and where I go /need to go. Also this was a bit motion sickness inducing.
I don’t like the mod either. But the fact that I can rotate the camera (and the minimap can also rotate with it or not depending on your preferences) is very handy at times, since we all know that isometric ARPGs have “blind spots” that make fighting harder in downward directions.
So being able to change your angle has some advantages, especially when you’re fighting a boss or a tough mob, because you get a lot more room for targetting/evading when you switch the angle.
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