MMO Movement Controls: Is it time to standardize?

[Mister_Rik]

@Blaster_Master

This whole concept seems bizarre to me. I play WoW, and the customizability is a huge part of the play control. Yes, the WASD + mouse is standard, but a lot of high end players don’t use that scheme at all.

I did actually remap my movement keys in WoW to QWES - basically, I swapped the turn keys with the strafe keys: Q & E are now turn left/right and A & D are strafe left/right. I just realized I was a bit inaccurate regarding City of Heroes in my OP - CoH also used Q/E for left/right turning. I got used to it there; during the year I played CoH I hardly played WoW for the first 6 months and then cancelled my WoW sub for the last 6. CoH’s shutdown coincided with the release of WoW’s Mists of Pandaria expansion, which I’d already intended to return for. So when I came back to WoW I realized I preferred QWES over WASD and so I remapped my keys accordingly.

I keep my left/right turning keys because I pretty much play solo. I’m primarily a mouse-turner, but I also use my mouse hand to take a drink and being able to keep steering with my left hand lets me keep moving while I’m taking a drink with my right. I’ve also developed a technique combining mouse and keyboard turning that is useful to me in a few specific situations.

But I like keeping my forward movement on the W key, because I have my characters’ main rotation abilities centered around the 3 key. So when I engage an enemy it’s a simple matter to slide my fingers pretty much straight up from QWE to 234.

@Zeriel

For me, it’s mostly “is it configurable”? Case in point–I remapped my WoW and other MMO controls to the FPS style you mentioned, and I also have one of those custom left-hand controls (Logitech G13, to be specific). The only thing that puts me off an MMO is the inability to tell it how I want to move and look.

Giving it more thought, I guess it’s not so much a matter of which specific keys are used as it is the combination of the physical controls and the way the game’s physics engine handles movement. Which I guess boils down to “feel”. In some games, like WoW and CoH (and to a lesser degree, LotRO and Rift), my character almost immediately felt like an extension/projection of myself into the game world. Other games, like TERA and Wizardry, felt more like I was trying to remote-control a puppet. Another contrast is CoH vs. Champions Online. CO was created by the same main group of people who created CoH, and uses virtually the same movement controls, but CO uses a much newer version of the same engine. And, well, it “feels” completely wrong to me.

[JLRogers]

Don’t most MMO players sink years into their game of choice? That seems like enough time to adjust.

[Airk]

@JLRogers

Don’t most MMO players sink years into their game of choice? That seems like enough time to adjust.

I think the point is that if players get annoyed with your controls in the first hour and never play again, they’re unlikely to make your game their “game of choice”

[Mister_Rik]

@Airk

I think the point is that if players get annoyed with your controls in the first hour and never play again, they’re unlikely to make your game their “game of choice”

Thank you, that’s exactly what I was trying to say

I’ve seen so many MMORPGs released in the last few years. Most of them, at least the “major” ones, have a huge number of subscribers at the beginning, but that number rapidly drops off within a few short months. Naturally, there are many different reasons why people drop games, but my experience is evidence that one of those reasons is “I found the movement controls [not to my liking in some manner]”. And I find it statistically unlikely that, out of however many tens or hundreds of thousands of people tried out these games, I am the one and only player to have difficulty with the controls.

Given that moving your character is virtually the first thing you need to do in a game, the only way I can think of to turn somebody off even quicker would be to completely screw up the character creation process.