I know, I know, I may get some flack from Mouse/Keyboard purists, but I’m actually very interested in the implementation of Controller support and a controller oriented UI. One reason for this is that I’m sort of a geek for the design of User interfaces (about finished with my BA in Psychology( w/ minor in media and game design)). Interest also stems from the fact that the RTS has long been a tricky genre to translate to consoles and controller and there have been many creative attempts to make the translation with varying degrees of success. I’ve also been playing these games since the original release of Age of empire 1, so the series is pretty near and dear to me.
I know I’m a bit of an edge case, but I am still hoping that the features implemented for the console port are somehow selectable for use on the PC version.
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i believe they will be, but only on windows store version, as thats the version which uses xbox network natively instead of steam, then again, might be wrong, also i’m just as curious how the controller support will be handled, there was a sneak peek of it a while back, looked promising, quite similar to first halo wars
it’ll be more interesting to see how this setup holds up against M+KB setup more typical player will use (M+KB will be available on xbox as well so it’ll be interesting)
Work-shopping and brainstorming my own solutions to the RTS/controller conundrum over the years, it’s cool to see them implement some ideas that I’d also considered. Sounds like they are doing a combination of UI short cuts w/ radial menus and adding a little bit of A.I to handle some of the basic things you would specifically do with precise mouse control. An example they talked about back in October was automatically assigning a Villager to construction when you place a building down.
How they work out the specifics of something like that will be interesting. For instance, does it only select from Idle Villagers? How does the AI vet which villagers to use? how do you go about adding multiple builders to a construction.
These are just a few of many, many, many other considerations and If they manage to find an elegant and intuitive solution, they absolutely deserve a spot in the developer hall of fame.
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I assume it’s gonna be the closest villagers with some but not too much consideration to idle villagers, you don’t want an idle villagers front the other side of the map.
And for farms placement we might get something like aoe4 farm placement
Yea, the bigger issues seem to be with navigating quickly and reliably around the map while managing multiple bases and armies