A simple tweak to make Overture's combat a bit more accessible?

[masa2009]

Penumbra Overture was pretty well liked upon release but it's fair to say that the combat faced strong criticism.
Now I'm sure, being on the game's official forums, some people who are going to argue that the combat was fine, and you could master it if you took the time, etc...
Let's just say then, that the majority of users had a problem with it.

I think one could summarize the combat system's issues as follows:

You have to left click, so that moving the mouse doesn't control the camera anymore, but instead controls your weapon swipes.
The problem it creates is that once you've left clicked and mouse movement is applied to the weapon, your viewpoint is "frozen" and you can't adjust your aim according to the enemy's movement.
So you'll often miss and get hit, because the enemy has moved between the moment you left click and the moment you actually slash the weapon.


Then couldn't a fairly simple modification be worked out, that could make combat more accessible to newcomers? Just a few thoughts.

First, make crosshair always enabled.

Then, if your crosshair is positioned on an inanimate objet (basically pointing at a static element of the level), it would behave like in the current game we know.

However if you'd point your crosshair at a living, moving creature, the crosshair would change color, for example turning red.

Now if you'd left click on the mouse while the crosshair is red and positioned on a moving target, instead of freezing the viewpoint entirely, it would lock the camera onto the enemy. A square/box could maybe appear around the crosshair to signal that the enemy has indeed been locked.
This way, the camera would stay centered on the enemy as he moves towards you, and the problem of missing an enemy because his position relative to to the crosshairs changed after you left clicked would be negated. The player could still move around with the camera being locked onto the enemy, and would only have to focus on the distance between himself and the beast to time his strikes.

It seems to me that such a change could be fairly easy to implement, and would significantly streamline the combat.

Personally I know that when I played Penumbra, I dropped Overture after the first enemy encounter and jumped right into Black Plague after reading that combat had been axed entirely in the sequel.
Only after playing Black Plague did I come back to Overture, but the more frequent enemy encounters were still a problem. I think if left click had allowed you to lock onto enemies, it would have made the experience quite a bit less frustrating. New players who will try Penumbra after discovering Frictional games through Amnesia could also benefit from such a tweak to ease them into the older series.

Thanks for your attention.