I did not necessarily walk away from this thread, just been busy, and feeling shame for the way I acted.
SRB2's default controls always, for all releases, assumed you were managing the camera. This is not something new to 2.2. if you were to go back and re-install 2.0 or final demo, you'll find "turn left" and "turn right" are defaulted to left and right keys. These are the exact same things as we have right now with the camera controls "look left" and "look right". We just changed where they show up in the options menu, and swapped the strafe keys to be move left and move right by default instead. But these are the same strafe functions from Final Demo era.
I mean, I do remember that, but only now that I'm forced to remember it. The moment analog mode was added I turned it on and never looked back. In fact, my memory is hazy given how long ago it was (and I can't remember anything for crap anyway), but I may have been one of the people who originally requested analog mode to begin with, all the way back then.
Like, I have always been going on about this. Always always. I've been writing about SAGE for tssznews.com for more than a decade at this point and even over there, every year, there's at least one game where I have to have The Moment of "Sonic is a platformer, please don't expect me to control this with a keyboard." Unity has built in controller support, Game Maker has built in controller support, Clickteam Fusion has built in controller support, but there are always games that hit me with "Press shift to jump" like it's 1999 and I'm trying to play Super Mario All-Stars in ZSNES.
It's depressing to realize I may have hammering this point for
that long, but it's also still the truth, as far as I'm concerned. I think I mentioned it on my blog, but 30 million users on Steam have connected a controller at least once to play PC games. The numbers are significant enough not to be ignored, and it's only going to keep growing.
Analog was suspecteed to be an issue before doing what we did for 2.2, and is (in part and not in whole) why we killed SA mode.
While I'm not sure if I'm personally, individually responsible for analog mode, Sonic Adventure mode was
definitely something I asked for (I mean,
obviously).
What I saw was actually people finding analog and thinking it was SA style controls. And they would use it, and have a hard time doing lots of things and wonder why things weren't working.
Well clearly the answer is to bring back SA mode and make it even better.
(I'm kidding.)
(Sort of.)
In all seriousness, Sonic in 3D has been a lot of different things over the years now. If people are booting the game up and trying to play it like Sonic Adventure, my inclination would be... so what? Like, even though they share some abilities, you can't play Sonic Generations like Sonic Adventure, either. And I know it's not a great game, but the same could be said for Sonic Lost World, too.
The point I'm trying to get at here is that you can't worry so much if it's reminding people of Sonic Adventure because eventually they'll just learn the other way of doing things.
Going between Sonic Unleashed, Sonic Colors, and Sonic Generations is both very similar and very different with the way they handle trick systems, boost systems, the homing attack, etc. It can mess me up when muscle memory triggers in the wrong context, but it's never really been a problem that should be fixed. It's more on me for getting them mixed up, and and the more I play, the less it happens.
I understand you want to provide the best user experience for new players, but from where I'm sitting this could be a bit of helicopter parenting. Now, obviously, I wasn't there, so I guess I don't know the specific severity of the problem, but it seems logical that if they expect it to play like Sonic Adventure, and it doesn't, once that happens enough times they'll get the message, right?
Figuratively turning the world upside down with a top-to-bottom different control scheme seems a bit blunt. Like, yeah, it works, because you're bypassing that "oh so it plays like Sonic Adventure" muscle memory, but it's a bit of a nuclear solution.
I am a Sonic player primarily, and I am not sure I agree with this. I am very typically able to navigate the character to get him to move in precise lines and curves.
That's not true. In fact, out of all the characters, Sonic might be the most precise.
Okay, this was poorly worded on my part. Let me clarify: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Sonic is so precise that to a certain kind of person he is the most imprecise. As Mystic noted
about my video, I miss some Crawlas by only a few inches. Intentional? Yes, to a point. But when you're moving fast, the window for error on that kind of stuff is so razor thin that it's practically transparent. And it's kind of got to be!
This goes for a lot of 3D Sonic games. That's kind of the fun! Or at least the fun I like to have. That fly by the seat of your pants, I don't know if I'm going to survive this thrill ride. It's the Millennium Falcon flying in to the asteroid belt in A New Hope.
I know what you're going to say to that, and I get it: You want the player to still be in control! Of course you do. It wouldn't be fun if it felt random or too mean. But when it comes to Sonic, I think there's a line to be walked, that feeling like you're on the brink of losing control. You aren't, of course, you're still totally in control, but there's a dangerous feeling that's 100% necessary. That's the magic behind a good sense of speed. And it's that threat of being out of control that kind of goes hand in hand with a feeling of maybe not entirely being precise.
Because, like, F-Zero GX for example is also a very precise game, but it's possible to go too fast and get overwhelmed and even though you have all the tools to save yourself, it's not enough. Your
brain isn't precise enough. The same thing happens in Burnout.
That's speed. That's Sonic. It's threading needles over and over and over at 300mph. At some point there's a part of your body that can't keep up and that's okay.
I think that we shouldn't be looking at "How do we implement platform controls" so much as we should be looking at "How do we bridge the gap between FPS and platformer." The base controls for 3rd person are still very much FPS. You could even reasonably imagine Sonic as the bullet you fire when you thok and the control scheme immediately makes sense.
I think I have a fuzzy memory of someone many years ago, maybe Mystic, espousing the "Sonic is the bullet and you're shooting him" idea and I'd be lying if that did not at least
sound cool.
And I get where you're coming from. I mean, SRB2 just won a Caco Award, you guys are obviously getting all kinds of recognition from the Doom Community now that I don't think has entirely been there in the past. From where I'm standing this feels kind of like a watershed moment where those guys finally stood up and went "Oh wow"
There's a reason to cater to that.
But I guess that just comes down to the core of what SRB2 is supposed to be. Is it really
supposed to be a shooter? Because if you play the singleplayer campaign, it does not contain any shooting. It does not do anything that specifically requires shooter controls. It still undeniably plays like a platformer. If you really want to be bold, and really push the shooter controls, you would ideally design the entire game around them as an absolute necessity. No "I beat the game on a SNES controller."
I mean, like, going as hard as Super Mario 64 was designed for an analog stick. Enemies, and bosses, and level designs that can only be completed using strafing, and maybe even shooting, too. Really push the benefits of that control scheme to the max. Make it so that there is absolutely no question whatsoever as to why it needs to control that way.
But then you'd have to ask yourself: are you still even making a Sonic game at that point? The game isn't called SRB2, it's
Sonic Robo-Blast 2. At what point are you no longer making a Sonic game? Was SRB2 ever a Sonic game? It certainly seems closer to one now, aesthetically and mechanically, than it ever has been in the past. Shouldn't that count for something? Shouldn't the controls reflect that?