Colour Spray
Educated
- Joined
- Jul 7, 2017
- Messages
- 91
They really needed to do a lot more work if they wanted this port to succeed and it's not as though they don't already have a good example, in Final Fantasy XII, to work from. The entire party should immediately become clamped to enemy targets once they've been sighted, because it's not even the amount of micromanagement the game requires, but the precise selection which presents the major obstacle for playing this type of game with a game-pad.
You shouldn't have to use cursor selection at all but rather be 'alt-tabbing,' between targets with one set of the shoulder buttons; and radial menus are a poorer design than ordinary text-box menus found in jrpgs for console games because selecting between an icon at the 2 o'clock position instead of one at the half past 2 position requires too overt of an amount of recall from the player; when remembering that the sixth level spell they want to use is at the bottom of the sixth-level spells menu under magic is easier to handle because you can 'chunk' the information into easier to remember categories and doesn't require a challenge of your spacial memory to find quickly and easily.
This entire thing reminds me of that time before the Dragon Age Origins release, though, where they were making really sincere promises that the PC interface was going to be really good, with a tactical overview and everything. They had an entire team (some Asian fella and his friend) working on it to make sure it worked really well with the keyboard and mouse. Alarming though it seemed at the time, being pretty close to release by then. I mean, that turned out alright, yeah? It's a bit clunky, what with it trying to force 'wasd' movement on you like you're trying to 'steer' your character or something. Almost something like you could do very easily with a gamepad... but if you remembered to zoom out the tactical overview was indeed there. Hey, they even brought the thing back for the games third release.
You shouldn't have to use cursor selection at all but rather be 'alt-tabbing,' between targets with one set of the shoulder buttons; and radial menus are a poorer design than ordinary text-box menus found in jrpgs for console games because selecting between an icon at the 2 o'clock position instead of one at the half past 2 position requires too overt of an amount of recall from the player; when remembering that the sixth level spell they want to use is at the bottom of the sixth-level spells menu under magic is easier to handle because you can 'chunk' the information into easier to remember categories and doesn't require a challenge of your spacial memory to find quickly and easily.
This entire thing reminds me of that time before the Dragon Age Origins release, though, where they were making really sincere promises that the PC interface was going to be really good, with a tactical overview and everything. They had an entire team (some Asian fella and his friend) working on it to make sure it worked really well with the keyboard and mouse. Alarming though it seemed at the time, being pretty close to release by then. I mean, that turned out alright, yeah? It's a bit clunky, what with it trying to force 'wasd' movement on you like you're trying to 'steer' your character or something. Almost something like you could do very easily with a gamepad... but if you remembered to zoom out the tactical overview was indeed there. Hey, they even brought the thing back for the games third release.
