I just played this game for a couple of hours or so and noticed a few things that bugged me about an otherwise absolutely wonderful game. The one that struck me as the worst and one I'm posting about here is that I didn't really like the controls very much. While I am no stranger to the mouse + keyboard control (I've been using it since Epic Megagames released Unreal back in 1998 or so) it just doesn't really feel right for this game. I actually feel like this game would even play at its best on a good dual analog gamepad. I don't have (nor want) an Xbox360 control though. What I do use is a PS2 USB adapter that lets me plug in my PS2 controller (and the PS2 controller is basically just like an Xbox360 controller except that the left analog is closer to the player's left thumb and the d-pad is about 2x better or more in nearly all models -- lol, no offense to Xbox360 owners, just it's generally known among even happy Xbox360 users that the d-pad is rather less than ideal to say the least.) This is basically just like an Xbox360 controller, only, since I have a lot more options, I get to use a controller that actually suits my hands far better. Just like an Xbox360 controller, it features two analog sticks, a digital directional pad, and ten buttons (or twelve if you want to count when you press down on the analog sticks, but I really don't like to use those as buttons.) All of these are mapped automatically by the USB adapter to a standard Windows gamepad driver with the analog sticks using four axes (that's plural of axis, lol) for the two analog sticks and the POV switches for the digital pad. Sadly, the game appears not to support any but the first two axes, nor does it support the "POV switches." Well, it seemed to allow use of the right stick for aiming a bit, but I noticed that it only allowed me to aim up/down and behind me, no angles and never in front of me. I wasn't able to bind the other two axes to anything in the control settings at all though. This is probably the biggest issue for me since it makes it impossible for me to ever aim on my own nearly while autoaim is less than perfect if you want to fire at orbs or that sort of thing.
But besides that, there are the issues that I think probably apply to users of standard Windows gampads as well (most of which have the same basic design as the PS2 gamepad even if they may occasionaly use different mappings compared to a PS2 adapter -- then again, some may be the same.) I noticed that when trying to do a few things like the singing it's extremely hard to actually control. I think the problem is that the game seems to be treating the normal analog stick as if it were digital, but is a little too sensitive at times or something. I've played a few games with a radial control and a few with a gamepad and I know it can work better with this gamepad. (And, btw, with the mouse I'm not sure it wouldn't be better served by having a bit more distance between the player and the radial for a bit easier selection. At least, I know I had less troubles with, say, Neverwinter Nights, than with this.) I can think of one other solution to this though if that proves to be too hard to tweak to being just right. It occurs to me that the singing radial might actually work better with a dual analog controller if it were actually split up into two seperate radials using only up/down and left/right on each. One could then easily control the singing using the two sticks with no worries over accuracy. I guess that would have to be a toggle control since it might not be suitable to everyone's wants.
I think that it should allow the user to map pretty much anything they want -- specifically, the POV switches may be useful for this or that. Well, maybe everyone won't agree, but I think it would be nice if the settings menu would let you set these. In particular, I noticed that it would not allow me to set the second two axes to even the second x/y controls (though the defaults do seem to work ok.) I didn't need to I guess, but it might be useful if someone had, say, a gamepad where different axes are used for the right stick or something like that.
Finally, I think there should be a way to unbind buttons/keys in the control configuration. In particular, it can be kind of troublesome with two of the buttons being mapped by default to act as mouse left and right despite the fact that everything the mouse left and right can do can be done seperately via other bindings. This makes them sometimes conflict.
PS. It seems to me that it would be a lot less confusing and work better if the menu controls worked less digitally so to speak and just simply used the left stick as a mouse. While this is obviously not super accurate and thus you can't exactly fire off quick recipes in half a second this way, I don't think it's needed anyway since the game is paused while menus are up. IMO it would be less confusing and more natural feeling this way.
BTW, I realize that gamepad control has never been a big focus of the devs, but I really think it could improve how this game plays for many of us and make it a lot more fun. (Also, I think it translates to being easier to port if the devs should ever actually find some way of working out getting it on other systems. I can't help but think that this would make a wonderful console game with a far better conversion than, say Alien Homonid.)
EDIT: I just played around with the configuration XML a bit myself. I found that I could unbind stuff manually there. More importantly though, I played around with things a bit and when I decreased the deadzone a fair bit it seemed to really improve the controls by quite a lot. Still a bit of inaccuracy while swimming (though I think I have enough now) but more importantly I'm having far less trouble with the radial it seems. Perhaps these more advanced settings should be offered in the control settings?
EDIT2: Upon playing around with the XML a little more I discovered that the reason it wasn't letting me aim at all with the right stick is that the X was not bound to a correct axis. When I changed it from 4 to 2 it began working perfectly. Yet another argument in favor of allowing control of this via the controller settings menu I think since not everyone is going to know how to edit the file manually. So I guess the reason it seemed to only aim behind me when I pressed anything other than up or down was the simple fact that it was not detecting any left/right movement... BTW, isn't it a little odd to have the default direction of shots being behind rather than in front of you?
