Especially when PC gaming you usually set up your controls before you start a game, after all you usually have your preferred setups... too bad some games simply don't let you.
Yea, you get to set this and that but then it suddenly arbitrarily disallows you to set certain keys.
Now this might seem like a “that's a problem of the past, not the modern age gaming” issue, but actually no, it's more the opposite.
When I play older games I often find that you can freely bind your keys and mouse however you want. But more recent games seem to have the odd trend to have senseless restrictions, especially disallowing you to freely bind your mouse keys, which is annoying for me as I like to set jump to the middle mouse button.
I think the most infuriating example I encountered was “Tomb Raider Underworld”. Oh yea, there are other games that have even more restricted control settings. But this was especially bad because it disallowed you to set the mouse and some keyboard keys when the to previous games allowed you to do just that... the two previous games that ran on exactly the same engine, had almost exactly the same gameplay and same setups and controls... WHY!?!?
Seriously, why? That really makes no sense at all.
In fact the only possibility to change the controls freely was to hack the game... by importing a control registry file from Tomb Raider Legend that came out almost 3 years earlier. That only means that it would have been possible to have freely changeable controls just by changing a few lines of code. Which in turn means they must have locked the control setup deliberately... WHHYYY!?!?!?!?
OK, before I get too worked up about that one lets quickly tackle something else that fits into this.
Being able to set your controls, but then having secondary controls that are hard coded.
Example here, Fallout: New Vegas. I like the game but one thing that pissed me off personally is that you can't freely set the keys for “take all”, “abort”, “accept” and others for menus like the pipboy or conversations on your keyboard. They're all hard coded and can only be changed through INI hacking... if you're lucky, in all attempts I made it never worked. Which sucks since they are all left side bound for the WASD controls and I'm used to right side bound arrow keys controls.
Now this may seem minor but it is just annoying and something that wouldn't have to be if they simply added those few extra lines of code. I don't see how that would be an unreasonable task to ask for.
I really wonder why that is. Sometimes it just seems like they are malicious and say “either you play like WE intended or not at all”.
However a more serious one, and yes this might sound like I bash on consoles, is that they simply didn't care about individual setups because they designed the game with primarily a console release in mind. There they only have to program one control scheme and that's it. But for PC they actually have to write the extra code to let you bind keys freely. And despite many, many, MANY games in the past being able to do that it's apparently a too great task to assume it's doable.
Well that's all I have to say on that for now. I really don't get it, yea I don't program myself but is making freely bindable controls REALLY such a huge task? More so one to ask from professional game designers?
PS: I posted a request to have freely bindable controls on the EIDOS Forums after playing the TRU demo, the request was simply ignored.
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