Diablo, Controller Support, and Lock-on
Before we dive in, bit of the context for those of us who only games on PCs and haven’t had the chance to play on latest consoles: controllers on consoles have evolved to the point where it mimics tactile experiences. It doesn’t just violently vibrate to tell you that you were shot. Now the motors are sensitive enough to simulate weather, like rain, floors, like metallic grills and marbles. Triggers also have adaptive responses, unliked plain spring-loaded predecessors; now you can tell what you are wielding, how much of a blowback it has, and etc. Perhaps the ‘lamest’ part of it all would be the speaker and the touchpad on the controller; games usually use them to simulate radio (walkie-talkie) or in-game touchpad.
And this is where the problem begins. The interface on the consoles are becoming radically different from the ones from PC; on the PC side of the gaming world, regular mouse and keyboard from decades ago are still in active duty. In fact, most gamers, including myself, would still prefer mechanical keyboards, again, the same technology that powered the computers from the ‘70s. Consoles aren’t playing balls either, as most consoles still suffer from not having physical mouse and keyboard. Games that make the most out of the duo often fumble their attempts to port their games over to consoles.
Diablo IV, when it was released, had the shower of praise for its controller support. While I would also give “ok” from “bad-ok-great” rating, Diablo’s implementation doesn’t work for certain classes with ranged abilities, the abilities that would often require a mouse to work properly. This is especially true for any AOE abilities that needed to be aimed at arbitrary locations: not myself, not an enemy, but somewhere between. Lock-on system that is now popular across different genres doesn’t offer a solution for an ability such as this either.
As far as I am aware, Blizzard did not address this issue in any of the Diablo IV patches. For classes that are mostly filled with melee attacks and abilities, the lack of control was almost invisible. Only the classes such as sorcerer were heavily affected. I would assume in the future, as the overlap between the mouse and keyboard grows, there will be other developers that will try their new game convention for ranged attacks. Until then, I hope Blizzard will be part of that group to innovate and take advantage of latest hardwares.