I would really really like to see some investment put into making the game's control schemes more effective and more intuitive. It's the #1 thing preventing this game from being accessible to new players, because people are brought into the game and just find the inputs on their keyboard to jump and move, completely oblivious to the fact that there are three very different default control methods, all of them being substantially better or worse from another.
Currently the best control method for this game is WASD+mouse due to the degree of control it provides. Not only can you turn direction at a non-static pace, but you can also strafe, which is absolutely mandatory for moving efficiently. As a bonus you can even look up and down by just moving your mouse a bit, adding some nice camera control to the player's arsenal. WASD+Mouse is excellent for this game and should be our benchmark for quality of control.
Keyboard only is the most common method for new players and is more limited. The characters move mostly how you would expect with its simplified turning scheme, but noticeably absent is the ability to strafe, significantly reducing the player's movement options. Suddenly bosses become a lot more difficult, as you can no longer keep them in your field of view and dodge projectile attacks at the same time. We need to introduce some sort of strafing key or mechanism that allows players to have similar fluidity to mouse users.
Analog is a fucking mess. The movement coding is really binary, so it's completely unwieldy with a gamepad. Second, the camera is atrocious. It turns itself automatically whenever a player moves in a direction,
even if the player isn't inputting the keys to move in that direction.
Let me explain. When you charge forward to attack Dr. Robotnik, you bounce backward after colliding, but you expect the camera to stay forward so that you can focus your attention on him. That's not what happens with analog. Instead, you get
shit like this. It's completely broken, and it spoils what could have been a really fun, Sonic X-treme gamepad control scheme and turns it into unplayable garbage.
I'm suggesting this mainly for the sake of garnering more players that would be otherwise turned off by the unintuitive controls, but I also really really want to see an innate gamepad analog control scheme that works. It's really sad that we just let this go to waste because it isn't default.