There's nothing worse than having alot of active skills at your disposal only to be able to map only two or three of them at a time to shortcut buttons. Example playing as a ranger type character I use a bow but also melee when enemies get too close. Having both melee and a ranged weapon mapped to my shortcuts in Divinity 2 I only have space for two more skills. This really restricts playstyle on a console by quite a large margin.
How I think it should be done in future titles of a similar genre:
A, B, X, Y used for actions/skills/spells
The left and right triggers used in conjunction with A, B, X, Y to bring up new shortcuts to skills/actions/spells/potions (example you can attack with your sword with A, and press left trigger and A to use a spell, or right trigger and A to use a potion, etc). This allows upto 12 skills/actions to be mapped to the face buttons alone.
On top of this you can map actions/skills/spells/potions to the D-pad aswell as the face buttons. You could potentially use the left and right triggers to shift the D-pad aswell to allow more utility to be mapped to it. This would allow upto 24 skills/actions/spells, etc to be mapped via shortcuts on the D-pad and face buttons, and it really could work quite easily.
The most important thing with the above is let us map what skills, etc we want to what buttons we prefer them to be on. Give the player the advantage of being able to organise what goes where for ease of use.
Interact with the game world on LB (picking up loot, talking to NPC's, etc).
Press Select to bring up a menu wheel (navigate the wheel with one of the thumbsticks and press a button to access the particuar tab). This has the inventory, attributes, information, abilities, map, and quest log tabs, etc, all in one convenient place.
Start to pause the game and save, load, etc.
RB, and the left and right thumbsticks are free for whatever you wish to use it for. You could potentially drop the use of the left or right trigger (as long as you implement shifting on the D-pad aswell) dropping you down to 16 shortcuts and free up another button for use aswell.
This is not entirely my idea, more a reworking from another games shortcut system. This is a similar system as to what was used in Sacred 2 on the Xbox 360. I would definitely reccommend giving that game a look for some design choices when implementing a control system on console when porting from a PC game in the future.
Last edited by Unreal Warfare; 17/11/10 01:24 PM.
