Gabucino wrote:
1. Mouse requirement. Why does LoG require a mouse? This genre does not mandate it. EotB was best played from the keyboard with two hands: one hand on the numeric keypad, navigating/dodging, the other on the WASZ+SPACE keys. Most players wouldn't know about these last ones, because they were only available if the player didn't have a mouse (or disabled it). Their function was to jump between the hands of the characters. Using both weapons of the fighter characters were only a mere 3 keypress, and a split second, no eye movement required at all. Playing LoG the player (or at least I) spend more time looking at weapon icons (while painstakingly jerking the mouse around to hit them) than the actual monster! Wanna see what the enemy is doing? Have fun positioning the mouse blindly. This alone is a dealbreaker.
You know I actually did play EOB without a mouse. I didn't have one of those newfangled gizmos back then, but I played it with a mouse on successive playthroughs and it was better. I'll give you though that they should give you the -option- of playing with complete keyboard binds if you want to. No harm in that. They should also support full mouse with no keyboard.
Gabucino wrote:
2. Also, EotB had the 'M' key mapped to manipulating doors, objects, and... yes, hidden switches. And it was still a worthy quest to 'M' all the walls of a dungeon, but not cripplingly so with a mouse. (imagine if Wolfenstein 3D required a mouse to open secret walls.)
That was to get around the limitation of not having a mouse and was not an original design intention of the game. The point of a secret door is that it's a secret. Allowing you to wall strafe while mashing M removes one of the more interesting facets of the game.
Gabucino wrote:
3. Casting. Seriously. Why. After 2 levels I recognized how utterly annoying+unusable the mages are in this game, if I wanted to even try to stay in control of the fighting. And why buy a fantasy game whose botched interface mandates trashing all spellcasters? Using runes made no sense. Why not require a Kinect and have the player do some handwaving? A game (especially in this genre!) shouldn't do needlessly stupid things like this. This is not Minesweeper... Just display a list (and have it navigable by keyboard).
Actually one of the great games of this genre, Stonekeep, handled spellcasting in almost the exact same way. The only difference was that you queued up the runes one time on the staff and it would continue to cast that spell until it changed the runes. If they implemented something like that it would require a chance of fumble though to balance it, as it would remove a significant amount of delay and chance of making an error.
Gabucino wrote:
4. If all the above falls on deaf ears: at least add an "All Attack" on-screen button which was a new feature in EotB3, precisely because players were needlessly annoyed of the badly designed mouse-controlled GUI that LoG has faithfully reproduced...
That wouldn't work in this game for many reasons. Since timing your attacks properly can be used to keep a monster stunned and is a major defensive move. Also different characters don't have the same attack cooldowns. After the first attack they would be completely out of sync and the button would effectively be a single attack.
Try playing the game. It's actually quite good.
