My assumption for the original game's controls is this: think of the X, O, Square, Triangle buttons as another D-pad.
X effectively becomes 'down' and triangle becomes 'up'. Crouching moves you downwards, and jumping moves you upwards. That's what - I assume - was the thinking behind that layout.
While that makes a kind of sense, nowadays, no other games use that layout that I'm aware of. Instead we've seen a huge shift towards a button layout convention that is used in many, many popular games across a range of genres. I wanted to meet peoples' expectations so they could just pick up the controller and have it 'feel right', particularly for people who don't play a lot of games.
The truth is, the overhead in adding multiple control schemes is not negligible. It takes time to implement support for a second control scheme, it takes double the time to balance and test controls, and it takes time to add the menu options. Plus, all of these things add the potential for more bugs. Ultimately, we decided that time was better spent on other aspects of the game (as with everything in game development, how you spend your time is always a careful balancing act).
We have a little more time now the game is shipped, which is why we're able to go back and add these new options!
I'm curious how you guys (as people who continue to play the original game to this day) found the new layout. While it's not what you expected, did you find it problematic to get used to?
Last edited by CrowbarSka; 09-04-2014 at 01:42 AM..
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