THE LARGER POINT BEING MADE
Geralt of Rivia displays his all-consuming torch fetish.
It turns out that in this installment, Geralt has become a mute pacifist who can only communicate through Morse code signaled via igniting and extinguishing torches with his crazy witcher magic. Well, either that or he's hoping to distract the guards with the medieval equivalent of a lightswitch rave. (Strangely, Geralt does not suggest that you use this ability to spontaneously generate fire at no cost to obviate combat by simply burning the guards alive as soon as you see them.)
For those who haven't played the sequence, Geralt is attempting a prison break armed with only a crude wooden club and the glistening abs of a young Brad Pitt. He instructs you to be sneaky for no reason at all--the guards are complete pushovers even on the highest difficulty, which is quite embarrassing considering their armaments and numerical superiority--and then you creep around in the shadows and stealth bludgeon people for a while. While sneaking, you can extinguish and, for some reason, reignite the torches on the walls from a distance, although once again there is no real impetus to do so as it doesn't seem to affect the guards' (in)ability to see you at all.
Unfortunately, in a bit of brilliance that I can only attribute to nobody on the development team ever having played this section of the game, the control for toggling the torches is the left mouse button. You may recognize this as the button used for combat in every video game since the beginning of time including this one, leading to scenes such as the above in which Geralt refuses to fight and instead treats the enemies to an impromptu magic show.
Overloaded controls are increasingly common in games, owing in large part to the fact that the modern video game protagonist needs to be able to shoot, swordfight, toggle running mode, sprint, reload, sneak, stick fiber optic cables under doors, juggle, converse fluently in ASL, crouch, pick his teeth, jump, double jump, spin jump, fire the grappling hook, spin double jump, switch fire modes, change weapons, enter his inventory, use his quick slots, combo skills together, and arm wrestle while modern video game console controllers only have like 8 buttons. Some overloading has to occur in certain cases.
However, "on a keyboard" is not one of those cases. With 40 or 50 buttons at my disposal, there's really no reason for four different functions to be assigned to any of them. Even so, most context-sensitive control schemes are perfectly reasonable, which is part of what makes the other cases* so bewildering. In many cases we could just blame shoddy portsmanship and developers being too lazy to change the control mappings from the XBox, but the Witcher 2 came out on PC first (and in fact, as of the time of this is post, it's PC exclusive). In that light, the decision seems inexplicable. So why would CD Projekt do it this way?
Hell if I know. Maybe they're performing some sort of Polish ritual magic that draws its power from the annoyance and alienation of their fans. It would certainly explain some of their other dubious behaviors.
*Rainbow Six Vegas 2 comes to mind here. "Look under the door stealthily with fiber optic wire" and "fling the door open in such a way as to alert everyone in the room and start a big firefight" are on the same key and actually occur in the same context (looking at a door). The only difference is in the angle of your head: look down just right and you peek under the door like a super spy, or look two pixels above that to perform some Rambo moves instead. Once again, one wonders how something like this made it to the finished product. Was there no QA at all?
Addendum: Crap. Now I'm going to have to think of something else to be upset about when I get to that game.
No comments:
Post a Comment