Do you feel like top-down point-and-click movement is not precise?
I was watching the IGN overview on “No Rest For The Wicked” and they say that they abandoned the point-and-click system in favor of WASD because it was not precise enough.
I don’t mind it, either way is fine. However I love the League of Legends type of movement, it’s a factor that makes me still play the game.
(DotA has even better and precise movement mechanics but they are less fun I think)
It’s hard to master yeah, with the unlocked camera and all but I feel like you can be very precise and do exactly what you want: it is very satisfying.
What do you think? Do you know other games that use this point-and-click movement?
The advantage that ESDF movement has (boo, WASD uses the wrong keys), is that you can stop movement by just not pushing any keys or buttons. With mouse-based movement there's rarely a "stop movement" button, you just have to click close to where you already are.
But, the bigger difference is that you can dedicate one hand to movement and the other hand to aiming. This is key when you're playing a ranged attacker. With a melee attacker clicking on an enemy is fine because you want to both attack it and move in that direction. But, if you want to stay away from the enemies and attack them from long range, a mouse-based movement system combined with a mouse-based aiming system means you're clicking on one side of the screen to aim and the opposite side to move. That's inefficient and imprecise.
ESDF movement does have its drawbacks though. The biggest drawback is that you can only move at one speed. That's especially bad for certain scenarios, like escort-type missions where you want to move at the same speed as whatever you're escorting, or stealth games / activities where the slower you move the more stealthy you are. But. for those, the mouse isn't any better. What's better is a joystick / thumbstick. With those you can move the stick very slightly to move very slowly.
Often I think the best of both worlds would be a mouse for aiming and a thumbstick for movement.
It underutilizes the pinky, and it's not the home keys.
ESDF still lets you reach tab, caps lock, shift, ctrl and alt, but opens it up so your pinky can also use Q, A and Z. With WASD your pinky can only really hit the "big keys". Everything else can just get shifted over by one. Plus, if you're a touch typist your fingers are already good at finding the home keys so your ring finger is already used to being on "S". That means if you have to stretch to hit a special key, it's easier to get back to the right keys. Plus many keyboards have a nub on F and J so you can find them / verify you're on the right keys by touch.
So, you're unable to type with it? This kind of movement is no different from typing where you have to use the occasional word like "quick", "active" or "zygote".
Also, I feel like needing to hold ctrl or shift is a fairly common requirement in games. I think it'd be too uncomfortable to do that from one column further away
The OP hasn't responded, but I'll hazard a guess that moving the movement keys one set to the right gives you more access to easily reachable keys to the left of the movement set that you can bind things to.