Be Excellent To Each Other

I'd be arguing the same about, for example, resident evil 4. Change the control scheme that fundamentally and you completely change the game.

I really rather disliked what I played of RE4.

How is this me being a dick? I very much doubt he'd deny the extent of his fanaticism, but might disagree that the height of it precludes reasonable debate about its negative aspects.

I will still attempt to play it, and still attempt to like it, but I'm not going to subscribe to this 'not meant for the PC' bullshit. On basic first principles, originating console and porting arguments aside, I have bought a game for the PC, and it handles like shit, is hard to play, and references controls that don't exist natively on a standard PC set-up. That is fucking poor and no amount of 'It's still awesome on the Xbox' humping is going to ameliorate that.

I'm just thinking about what Westwood EA did for Command and Conquer 3. To me RTS is completely alien to a console because that style of play, to me at least, is only effective using a mouse to finely point and click.

Now, I'm sure EA could have thrown out a dirty release, and let you use one of the sticks to torturously drag a cursor around to click on things as you would with a mouse, but that would be an exercise in slow, maddening frustration. They could have done that and left it to fanboys to honk about inalienable, PC-specific style of play.

Instead they redesigned the control interface to make it essentially the same game that allowed for relatively smooth control with a gamepad. It was tidy, and as far as I can ascertain, very successful, much to the enjoyment of fans. Did they have to redesign the game to do it? No. Is a manifestly different game as a result? No.

Would such an adjustment have been that fucking hard for Dark Souls if they'd really wanted to? No. The comments here make it sound like they moved heaven on earth to get it onto the PC, and despite their very best, consummate efforts, it's the STYLE OF GAME that makes the result a jerky, blurry, pile of wank. You know that's just not true.

Bear in mind I'm not calling the game shit. I'm calling the port shit. There might be as much awesome hiding here as you maintain, but I'm struggling to access it and it's really not helping me out. The style of play might not be PC-optimised, and I could agree with that too, except for the fact they didn't even try to adjust it even a little for a completely different control interface. If I could at least switch between my items using the 1-4 keys that would be something, but even that is denied me. It's bobbins, Sir, total bobbins.

Notice how they didn't repeat it for C&C4. That should really tell you all you need to know. But also it was planned from the start. Putting things in early is cheap. Putting them in at the end... not so much.

On a budget. Yes. Doing something that wasn't planned for, that you have no expertise at, on an engine designed for the PS3 and you don't want to risk spending much money on because although you have an online petition, such things quite often tend to count for jack. Yes, I'd say that's quite hard.

So they had three options
1) Don't release anything
2) Release it as it is
3) Spend lots on a complete unknown.

For a relatively small, niche developer, 3 isn't an option. Given I'm typically more interested in the game rather than what platform specific features it has, I really can't see 2 as a bad thing.



Key remappers are your friend in that case. See: What I did with mapping keys onto my mouse. The same is possible for keys.

They didn't even put in decent PC controls for that - terrible game all round and one of the worst buys I've ever made, and I fucking love C&C.

I'd have prefered 1), to be frank, rather than the illusion of doing it properly. If all they base their market feasibility on are internet petitions, they've got serious problems.

As has already been repeated, 2) is fine if you sell it for a price that reflects the effort. £30 is not that.

Third-party apps that can do key/mouse button trickery are also not mitigating arguments towards the port being good, which is what we're discussing here.

I'd rather 2 - Too often people try to be all things to all people. Which means you don't see quite a lot of interesting things because doing so is hard.

Do you mean 1?

Nah, release something that meets the needs of some rather than not release it because it doesn't meet the needs of everyone. It's not like a small amount of looking at reviews and or previews doesn't state what the case is.

I'm not clear. Are From Software a business or a charity?

I AM SCARED OF THIS GAME. I killed the big fat demon at the start but I AM TOO SCARED TO CONTINUE.

Hang on 'ear.

Mr Dave are you playing the Prepare to Die version on PC with the, fairly soon to be released, DLC stuff? Have you got to the DLC stuff? What's the crack? Or Criac? Or Craic? Or whatever the kids are sniffing these days.

But spoiler tag any new content discussion! I want it to be fresh when the DLC arrives. Also I suppose it might even be a good thing to start spoiler tagging original game discussion again seeing as folk like MrPSB seem to be playing for the first time.

I am. I haven't reached it yet - don't know where it is.

Last time I checked, creating stuff on a budget to a niche audience was a perfectly valid business plan. Worked well enough for Demons souls and its sequel.

The game could never live up to this thread, decision made FOREVER!

Jesus, I think I've only just noticed that the Black Knight on the box set box art is reflecting off the knights helmet. Stupid thicko. Lovely though. The artwork around this game is generally awesomez.

Wow, this game is awesomely designed.

Beat the training dungeon, and got dropped off where some knight dude is sitting. Tried to skip dialogue and ended up accidentally twatting the guy instead. Guy turns aggro, and kills me instantly.

Game reloads at bonfire, next to guy. Guy is still aggro. Kills me instantly.

Game reloads at bonfire, next to guy. Guy is still aggro. Kills me instantly.

And so on.

As this game auto-saves, I can't roll back to an earlier slot. I only have one slot. Game is therefore fucked, and I must now restart. If I try to run from the guy he follows me tirelessly making it impossible to walk around that whole area. Genius.

That's not a flaw; it's superior game design.

[/Mr Dave]

I did that too, because of a message telling me to.
I managed to kill him in the end with constant parrying. It was fucking hard, though.

You could try running up to the sewer pipe and kicking him off.

What message? I at least wanted to read what he was saying but not have to listen to the dialog. Since I can never work out what fucking button does what, it was pretty easy to accidentally hit him mid-sentence.

Not finding the graphics or gameplay particularly captivating either. Will probably leave it another couple of days before I can be arsed to try this again.

One left by another player.

Skip the dialogue? There are about five lines in the entire game!

But also... The dialogue button is A, if I recall. Combat is the shoulder buttons. How did you manage to twat him? Is everything mapped to spacebar?

Helpful comments, since I'm playing on the PC.

The default mapping on the PC to view notes is Q. A logical key to skip dialogue, you'd think, except it doesn't. Q also doesn't remove pop-ups such as 'This door is locked' - that requires the return key. All nice and logical. So I experimentally pushed other keys and didn't expect it to allow combat during conversation.

I might just sack this off and pretend I paid £65 for Skyrim, because that would still seem like decent value.

Just because you're playing it on the PC doesn't mean you should be trying to play it as if you were on a PC though... or something. And you should have known this from the price. (Am I doing this right Dark Souls types?)

Obviously I was talking about the console version. But my point is, if you'd read instead of jumping on the defensive immediately, that the "skip dialogue" button and all of the combat buttons are entirely different, and therefore you must've been mashing the keys like a spaz to hit the guy.

Hence why I said "are all of the buttons mapped to the space bar?". I know you're playing on PC, but one would imagine there are corresponding keys for each controller button...

I mean, don't games come with button instructions anymore? One would think you'd have checked them by now seeing as the controls are all you've been talking about since Friday!

It should be Q? No, D, for dialogue skip. Oh, so S then. For skip. Or maybe T for traverse text quickly. Oh its Q for quickly. No, it's PRNT SCRN. Oh, so it must be P. No, R, no, N, no ... etc.

Does this game not come with a fucking manual for the PC or what?

Edit: Gah, WTB got there by mere seconds. *shakes fist at router*

Lesson learned: Next time read a damn review before spending lots of money.

Like any sensible person would.

--

Anyway, I have now discovered the new content. Or at least the beginning of it.

It's... not very easy. Really not very easy. Indeed, the boss I have reached is currently making all the other bosses in the game look like scared pansies. This could take a while.

although maybe not this one

I thought we'd all previously gnashed our teeth and wailed about games not coming with any kind of manual worth the paper it's printed on any more like in the good old days (especially Ian IIRC)... so the whole "isn't there a bloody manual, why aren't you reading the manual properly you clod?" line seems a bit... odd.

It's a Steam game anyway (unless he bought the physical version, which I don't think he did). We're not referring to a paper manual. But I don't know of any PC game that doesn't have a controls menu or something that at least resembles a controls list.

CG just borrow or pick up a wired xbox pad....make it worth playing tbh

Yeah I have a local mate who is an enthusiastic Dark Souls owner and is going to come round and try to demonstrate how this shit is supposed to be done with a pad, as he also maintains that it's great. I'd love to be turned on (fnarr) as to why that's the case.

Short answer to keyboard whining: While you can look at key mappings in the settings, none of them afaik have a 'skip dialog' notation. So like any reasonable person you're left to guess, and therefore assume it could be the same key as another key that confirms a pop-up dialogue elsewhere in the game. Also in most games it's not possible to attack someone while you're speaking to them, so I had no reason to worry that tapping keys experimentally would actually attack the fucking guy.

Well excuse me. My rationale for buying was not a little bit because you have been harping on for fucking months in the Skyrim thread about how awesome this game is supposed to be. I am truly sorry that I didn't automatically assume that a port would be an unplayable load of shite.

Just picked this up for the PC the other day. What a fantastic game. I am terrible at it.

You forgot to tell me I'd have known all that if I'd done my research.

You wouldn't buy a car without researching it - it's madness!!!

I thought the Beex Hivemind position was that game reviewers were dicks, that game websites are shit, and that everyone is much better off relying on word of mouth where you can trust the source and know they haven't been bought off by advertisers and pressurised by editors?

This is Dark Souls, Doc.

Abandon objectivity all ye who enter here.

No one here had played Dark Souls on PC before EBG, as far as I know.

In any event, I support the freedom to criticise Dark Souls. I also support the freedom to disagree with that criticism.

It's pretty obvious that it's a shit port of a great game. The only argument appears to be that Dave thinks it's fine to make a shit port and sell it for full RRP, and others don't.

Eurogamer: 9/10
Metro: 8/10
PC Gamer: 89%

Only the Metro mentions the mouse and keyboard issues ("laughably bad")*.

What more wisdom can you give us, wise sage?

* PC Gamer touches on them, but in the context of "ho ho, this game is hard", which is strange.

Aha, GameSpy hates it: http://uk.pc.gamespy.com/pc/dark-souls/1225854p1.html

So I guess if you read that one you'd be okay. Which kind of makes the others seem a bit, well, odd.

No, no, you have to read the right reviews, see.

Like RPS's lengthy hands-on: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/08 ... ore-119215

It has one sentence about the broken controls:



Oh.

The PC port seems fine to me. You definitely want to grab the resolution fix mod so that it's not just upscaled blurry 720p, and I found the keyboard and mouse controls to be basically unusable. No major complaints beyond that, really.

It's obviously not had anything done to it to take advantage of the potentially more powerful hardware PCs have, and they've not rebuilt animations systems to support anything higher than 30fps, but I've certainly played worse ports. Performance is basically fine.

It's the same game that was on Xbox 360 and PS3. Very little has been changed at all.

Amazing. The resolution is shit and the controls are unusable. So it's fine.

I appears that it's fine if you have a 360 pad to use with it. But many PC owners seem opposed to those on ideological grounds so they should perhaps have made this clearer.

How can people possibly be defending a piece of software that is sold in a box for real money and tells the player during the tutorial to press the "A" key, which on the default mapping is actually mapped to "Q"? It blows my mind. That would be unbearably sloppy if it was freeware, for fuck's sake.

Or maybe they don't already have a pad, and object to having to fork out to buy one just to make their new game vaguely playable?

Soul Calibur does this too. You have to use a cypher on the left to discern the controls.