Rant: Mobility
Something that bugs me often about various games is how my character or party moves around. This isn’t, strictly speaking, about travel over long distances - though I will get to that - but more about navigating towns and dungeons.
When games entered the third dimension, I admit I expected a lot more of the so-called “freedom” that this provided for exploration. Being limited when there is obviously so much of the world cut off from me is just one of the things that can cause swift disappointment in an otherwise deep and interesting game. This pet peeve of mine recently flared up when I was logging into the EU beta for Y’s Online, where two of my mobility-related nemesis collided harshly: click-to-move, and invisible walls.
Now, first off, I want to say that I do not expect every kind of game to have the action-oriented movement system of the action or 3PS variety. Not every character has to be James Bond, hiding behind cover, crawling along walls, or rappelling down buildings, and not every world needs strafing, dodging, or jumping mechanics… but when a game doesn’t even let me use the keyboard to move and then some other control - like the numpad or mouse - for camera or combat controls, that’s kind of a raw deal for me. Even worse when that is the default, and there are no options to re-bind them.
WoW will be my gold standard for movement, because I can, with only one keybind change (A and D to strafe, not turn) master control of my character’s mobility with ease. The left+right click to move forward gives me an option when I am in need of the keyboard to type or hit a hotey; the keyboard gives me a quick way to stop or backpedal, as well as leap side to side; the mouse + keyboard together let me accomplish tricks such as leaping backwards, with the camera facing sideways, while I spam an ability or two in desperation - keys to some encounters, as well as all PVP combat
And that’s is not, by any means, an extremely fast-paced game. FFXI was my favorite, because everything carried out slower. Spells took, on average, longer to cast than in WoW; the “global cooldown” applied to just about all abilities, so you could not macro a ton of items to occur simultaneously, as you might be able to in other games.
But I digress: travel in FFXI also took longer, in just about all forms. Running across a zone was a good way to kill a half hour of time, when you had to dodge and weave around obstacles and aggressive monsters, and chocobos maybe cut this down to around half that time. Airships and ferries were on distinct timers, so there was no quick way of hopping on a flight point creature and going to make a sandwich. Even teleportation is very uncommon by NPCs, and player-based teleportation can add up to a pretty penny after a while.
The controls for FFXI took some getting used to, but the beauty of it was that it was a console port, so the game was designed with no mouse availability in mind. Sure you could use it, but why would you ever? Numpad toggled auto-run, movement controls and handled panning and zooming the camera, while the keyboard was strictly for typing out text, hitting macros, and navigating menus. It was efficient, and the learning curve is about as steep as teaching someone who uses the hunt-and-peck typing method into knowing what the home-row keys are.
Ys Online does not only have the dreaded click-to-move system, which should go back to the RTS genre and stay there, but also suffers from an infuriating lack of intelligent map boundaries. For example, during the introduction stage, there is an entire town with houses on small inclines that you cannot explore. No way to see if there are any hidden treasures, secret NPCs, or even shortcuts around battles. To draw further attention to this flaw, the game actually will put up an invisible wall to bar your character’s progress before he or she actually makes it to the incline that you cannot walk up! What the hell kind of planning is that? Could the hill not have been a little steeper, so as to discourage jumping?
Oh wait… That’s right. There is no jumping in the game. Sure, you can hit the jump button, and your character does a little leap or twirl, but it is purely cosmetic. That’s right: the jump is an emote. They might as well have just left it off of the entire interface altogether, if it doesn’t actually do anything! It’s kind of a slap in the face of the series’ action/platforming roots to leave it as-is.
I suppose what I’m getting at is, if you are going to deviate from the popular control schemes, developers, you need to give gamers a choice. Dungeons & Dragons Online lets players fully customize just about every aspect of the control scheme, and even toggle mouse-look modes that most games don’t have (which, to be fair, I hate), or Champions Online which will attempt to work with the gamepad you have hooked up to your computer. (Though I hate that style, myself, because of the camera automatically facing forward = failure.) Situational awareness {Do you need it?}
