14 DAY TRIAL // I'm always excited whenever a new role-playing game comes out on PC, because I always regard consoles as "those dreadful contraptions that force developers to create their games around old hardware, gimmicky mechanics and the lack of proper controls: mouse and keyboard."
Such was the case with Dark Souls 2, which unfortunately I had to put down merely a couple of hours in, for the sake of my sanity. I can't understand how anyone can play that game, let alone enjoy it, with a mouse and keyboard.
While I spent a good portion of my role-playing time not being able to point out exactly why I felt this aversion toward controllers and console role-playing games, it finally dawned on me, by the time I was busily setting up my 34th bind in World of Warcraft.
First of all, the mouse is a wonderful device that allows you to shift your viewpoint at an approximate rate as you would in real life, from slightly raising and lowering your gaze to quickly turning and checking your six in a fluid motion that allows you to carry on with what you were previously doing.
The keyboard is another useful thing to have in a role-playing game that offers you enough variety so that using a certain skill is not mandatory, unless you want to be a try-hard and kill everyone, of course. Which should, of course, mean pretty much everyone in massively online multiplayer games, for I have yet to meet a single soul that dabbles in PvP and does not wish to become better at it.
A key ingredient in the "getting better at playing the game" potion is the fact that you can bind everything that you might consider even marginally useful to the keyboard and mouse, including several macros that quickly change from a 2-hander to a sword and board get-up or some other such convenient shortcuts.
Having a wealth of crowd control abilities, and both offensive and defensive cooldowns to rely on, allows for a very challenging and rewarding experience, making the way you use them all matter more than your actual gear level, in most cases.
Another thing that I want to stress is the fact that in a game such as World of Warcraft or Dark Souls a victory or defeat can be decided in a handful of seconds. If you time your abilities right in a 3v3 arena, two of your opponents will be feared or otherwise incapacitated, with the last one receiving pain from three different directions.
This kind of thing feels rewarding, especially considering that your adversaries are every bit as lethal as you are, and have roughly the same chance to get you when the match debuts as you have to get them. You have to take many things into account when going for the kill; otherwise, you'll fail and end up on the wrong side of the pain train.
I have often wondered how Dark Souls 2 can feel so rewarding, when you're just mercilessly bullying a poor AI who can't fight back the way you do. So, I wanted to give it a whirl. The first thing that baffled me was the way the character moved.
You don't have full control of the character, instead it moves sort of how the knight does in chess. If you start a certain action, you have to go all the way. You can't stab or swing swiftly, you always have to move your arm like a trebuchet and end the movement by emphatically driving your sword through the air, as if you're waiting for the right time to deliver an '80s action blockbuster one liner to the enemy, midfight.
In multiplayer games, you can't afford that luxury, and unfortunately single-player games are still a couple of years behind the times. The greatest challenge in Dark Souls 2 is fighting the control scheme, not being able to move your character properly and always having to wait for animations to wind up and then wind down before being able to perform anything else.
In Dark Souls 2, the challenge is understanding how someone can ship a product that requires dexterity without a proper control scheme. Instead of feeling like a well-oiled machine that lets you gradually reach a huge potential, it feels like a broken down mechanism that you have to constantly push and prod in order for it not to get stuck on itself.
How that can be rewarding is beyond me. How a game can become famous for the fact that you have to achieve mastery of motion in order to best it and then ship without the most fundamental controls is mind-boggling.
Which brings me to the point of this article. When will a single player role-playing game's control scheme work as seamlessly and as fluidly as it does in most MMOs? Especially on the PC, since that's where it's most noticeable.