Design Trends and Dead Ends: Melee Combat with the Analog Stick

The early 00s standardized the idea of having two analog sticks on a console controller, with the Dual Shock such an anomaly in the late 90s almost nothing used the right stick. The industry ultimately standardized that the right stick was really best saved for camera movement but there are definitely some evolutionary dead ends. Notable in the mid 00s was the attempt to make the right analog stick the method of directing melee attacks. I want to reminisce about this weird evolutionary dead end a bit.

The idea of using a second stick for ranged attacks has a long long history though, the "twin stick shooter" is a genre with roots dating back to at least Robotron 2084 all the way back in 1982. Here, for those unfamiliar, left joystick of the arcade cabinet moves, right one aims (and also fires because there's no reason to not be firing). It's very simple but allows for an arcade game where you can be surrounded on all sides and it can still be fair and surmountable as a challenge. This genre would reemerge in the late 00s in the early period of downloadable digital releases on consoles. The idea took off for aiming in First Person Shooters in the early 00s, popularized by Halo after having been experimented with by games such as Goldeneye and Alien Resurrection. This control scheme is now so standard that it would be essentially impossible to release a new fps that didn't offer the option. It's even typically in rereleases of Doom, a game that doesn't allow aiming up and down. In both these cases, being able to aim distinct from where you're moving is very important and so a second stick makes perfect sense. So, it was reasoned, the right analog stick may make sense for games where you want to precisely attack in a specific direction.

Exhibit A in this failed triad: Jet Li's Rise to Honor. This was a... fairly generic beat-em-up with shooter segments featuring action star Jet Li. Sony published it on the PS2 in that 04-05 period where it got middling reviews and, to my recollection, became a staple of bargain bins. Not a terrible game, but outside its controls pretty unmemorable. Here though was a major game using the right analog stick not for the camera but for attacking. It kind of immediately shows the flaws in the premise. To keep attacking you have to keep slamming the stick because otherwise attacking feels too automatic, this is an irritating movement to make repetitively. It also doesn't actually help with precision that much. Say you're surrounded by human sized enemies, they have about 8 reasonable angles of approach without crowding each other out and your stick has 360 degrees of actual movement. Now instead of fixing a problem, it's actually created new ones. A typical action game will give you at least one attack with enough radius that you can reasonably expect that looking in an enemies direction and hitting an attack button will cause you to hit them. Here though the developers had to come up with a system to interpret whether you were aiming for that enemy in that direction and fine tune how much to autoaim your attacks. To their credit it works just fine but so would an attack button. It was an interesting experiment but, even well implemented as it is here it's just not that interesting.

Exhibit B in this failed triad: Grabbed by the Ghoulies. Pulling this out feels almost like bullying to an at the time very struggling Rareware. This thankfully largely forgotten title (which yes is playing on British slang to mean "grabbed by the balls") was a cartoony little beat-em-up with a haunted house theme released in late 03 on the original Xbox. Immediately unloved and mocked immediately by future titles by its own developer the game is about as dull as could be. It also doesn't always have the benefit of a fixed camera unlike Rise to Honor so the right stick fight controls are genuinely a problem. Grabbed by the Ghoulies has a million other problems than its combat (long sections where you have to hit buttons during uninteractive cutscenes to have your cartoon man not be scared to death by a painting or something spring to mind) but the combat wasn't helping. It's quite tedious and feels sloppy and imprecise, poorly tuned for the odd experimental control scheme it's been given. I don't blame the developers. Ghoulies was like a sacrificial lamb, to make sure the team had something out relatively soon after the Microsoft buyout. Experimental features like this need long dev cycles to really iron out and it just wasn't going to happen. They also weren't going to rush out any of their other projects at the time so this poor implementation is just one of the many straws that broke this game's back.

Exhibit C in this failed triad: Too Human. The development team here lives in infamy and I'd rather not talk about them much. Suffice to say though this game came out in mid-2008, by this point there were multiple reasons to assume this kind of controls were an evolutionary dead end. Worse, Too Human would have benefited from a user controllable camera. The actual premise, cyberpunk reinterpretation of Norse mythology, was certainly novel at the time, but the game's a mess, and its creator has a thirty percent chance of one day finding this via google and yelling at me. This game has both melee and ranged combat so presumably they wanted a unified control scheme and settled on using the right stick for both. It's a somewhat reasonable gamble that didn't pay off, the combat in this game's not terribly interesting taking on an almost Diablo-esque "click click click" except instead of precision mouse clicks you're just slamming the stick in the direction of enemies. It's a dull game with a lot of wasted ambition.

Was this idea unsalvageable? Eh I don't know, it lacks a certain tactile joy that I think just regular button pressing has, I think there's a fair reason no one tries this anymore. The irony is I think the idea being pursued here was actually better pursued by a Sony published game from a few years before any of them, 2001's "The Mark of Kri" (I have strong feelings about that game so it may see its own article later). The Mark of Kri had the  second analog stick used to select the targets for melee attacks which were then assigned to buttons, this allowed up to 3 enemies to be targeted, allowed the player to attack enemies behind or in front of them specifically, and sidestepped the question of over or undertuning precision compensation in the analog stick itself. That method did seem to have some sort of patent behind it, but to me it represented a more nuanced solution than the actual direct mapping of the analog stick to attack.

These kinds of dead ends are often used to mock games, they tried something weird and out there and it just didn't end up happening, but I think they're important to highlight. This was not an unreasonable idea in a world where the uses of a second analog stick were far from standard. Pursuing novel ideas is the only way for game design as a discipline to grow, and it's better to consider the options available than for a team to just make an assumption that the most common scheme is the most suitable for any given project. While these ideas didn't really work out I think they were worthy experiments. Going against the grain is worth examining even when it doesn't work out.