About games controls

I recently played Madballs Baboo Invasion and noticed that despite it was a 3D iso like game, rather similar to a game like Diablo 2 or Torchlight, it borrowed its controls to first person shooters.

Some of the last RPG also borrowed fps controls despite they are team Rpg, ie Drakensang and DAO. You can add to that all RPG that are already shooter like with an over the shoulder view or first person view and only one character.

When I was struggling to try some demo of fps games on the ipad it made me whine for my mouse and keyboard. And then I realized that those "perfect" game controllers was leading PC games to only few controls schemes.

The point is when there's too many keyboard keys in the controls I'm lost and get bored by the game. Typically RTS had pure point and click controls but now anybody know it's illusion and you need master plenty keyboard controls. That's why I don't buy any RTS anymore. I could be wrong but RTS seem decreasing, the cause could be that there's many players like me about controls.

On PC the dominant controls:
- Quake like, only few other keyboard controls than for movements.
- Torchlight like, no handy strafe but more keyboard keys for special actions/attacks. The shift click for long range shooting is a trace from the past but most probably deserved to disappear and replaced by a keyboard key for long range attack.
- Nevewinter Night or Civilization IV like, pure point and click almost no drag controls and keyboard controls can be skip fully.

Menus are still living but seem used less often and replaced when possible by pure point and click and quick slots, drag controls are almost non existent, games requiring plenty keyboard controls are disappearing.

Actually, if there are too many keyboard controls right at the start of the game, it's probably going to be very hard to learn. If they just start with a few then add more over a decent period of time, then it shouldn't be so bad. (Unless you quit the game for a few weeks then try to come back.)

RTS games are fading because the consoles can't do them very well. No consoles means *FAR* fewer sales for your game. That's a big reason why game graphics haven't advanced much in the past five years, too.

I assume that this set of FPS controls has evolved into some kind of "industry standard" already.

At this point, a game would be stupid if it wanted to force players to use other controls than WASD for movement (or point and click).
As an analogy, the DVORAK keyboard might have been better than the QWERTY, but the 'installed' base was just too used to it, so it never caught up.