Hello. Recently started playing the game (despite buying it a long time ago) and generally having a blast.
However, I was recently disappointed to discover a lot of jank when it came to control schemes and rebinding inputs, and it goes as far as me mistaking the game having excess frustrating elements in terms of doing things I didn’t want, but in reality it was confused with the control changing features not being properly implemented.
This is confusing because so many of the more complex and exotic elements in the game work fine, but it feels like the code used for controls is some weird spaghetti knot, and/or some of the most basic functions are not being hooked up to variables for modular flexibility. It gives the impression of you guys are juggling flaming chainsaws just fine but you can’t tie your shoes? It’s a problem because the issue specifically is control related - which is very heavily tied to the user experience…and a fundamental interaction with the product. This is a priority to care about.
This is also important because I see news that the game intends to ship to 1.0 and consoles around July. Please, you cannot ship the game to 1.0 on console with this sort of mess affecting specifically controllers. As stated before, the nature of the problems were so non-obvious that it affected my impression of the game and gameplay fundamentally until I understood what was going on.
Let me explain. The default attack is on square and default dodge/sprint is on X. I swapped them to have default attack on triangle, and then dodge/sprint on circle, to be a parallel (and also match a similar scheme to how I play other action games like Nioh 3, because some of those games have manual jump on X and dodge on circle, so it’s comfortable).
This allows me to put interact on X which feels organic, and save square for run/walk toggle or whatever I want. Having the parallel lets me easily use the joint on my thumb for sprint and use the tip to tap the attack button so I can do instant dash attacks from neutral, and swapping up and down on the d-pad for healing and usable items matches other games where I have healing on down.
I did all of this when I first started the game, within the first hours. That’s normal for me, and I’m going to assume for most people who like tweaking controls to their preferences.
A friend of mine I recently convinced to pick up the game, who was watching me play off and on over the past couple of days, started playing on controller himself. It was him just playing normally and offering some commentary on differences he noticed from his experience and mine that led me to actually start doing some testing (Do you guys run QA? Not being mean or sarcastic, genuine question - I remember the news about the struggle and success to keep things going, so it would be understandable if that wasn’t a priority at the time) with the controls just for comparison. This is where the majority of the inconsistencies and problems came up.
One of the key examples of this, was when I was rushing movement, either just confident traversal or rushing due to puzzles, I would constantly lose grip on ledges and just fling or fall to my death sometimes. What I realized on my end, was that if I held the circle button while approaching vines or climbing, if I held the button the entire time, I could do the rushed movements. If I pressed circle to start this rush WHILE I was already scaling something, I would simply let go and die instead because it only recognized the tap, or so I thought. My friend witnessed this happen and asked because it was out of character since I often had good control over what I was doing, and listened to my explanation - but said he had no such issue himself when he was doing it during similar situations on his own.
The next one that pushed me to actually mess around with the control scheme changes and default, was when I went to test plunge attacks when I had some free time, due to him bringing it up before - when he first started (he likes to play mage style) he was using different stuff as he was collecting the necessary gear to support that playstyle. He mentioned using the plunge attacks with big 2 handed weapons, and I mentioned I assumed it just didn’t exist for gauntlets (my preference) because nothing happened when I attacked in the air for me, and we theorized maybe it was some unique attack for two hander category because big weapon or something.
Anyways, we made a co-op realm to try playing together, and he eventually went to have dinner, so in that spare time I began trying out some other weapons I picked up - and I found out none of them would trigger a plunge attack for me.
Turns out, several interactions are exclusively tied to certain inputs or toggled states. Originally I thought plunge attack was exclusively bound to square or something, because it wasn’t working on triangle, but it’s the opposite. Triangle exclusively will not register a plunge attack when it is set as the attack button, but every other face button will. Just my luck, huh?
There is also some forced input remaining with the circle button. When I used the default key of X for sprint/dodge, I was able to speed scale climbing in any direction, even downwards, while actively already climbing, whenever I felt like it. The reason the game kept instantly killing me if I wasn’t holding circle to sprint to transition into fast climbing from start to finish, was because circle is hard bound to forcibly do “drop down” or otherwise cancel climbing whenever you tap it while climbing, regardless of what you bind it to. It happened to be for me, that I bound it to sprint and dodge because I wanted it paired with triangle. Just my luck, huh?
Turns out the game controls better than I thought it did, they just don’t work correctly when changing them beyond default. Which strangely, includes binding “walk/run” toggle to any button. Apparently, when you have “run” toggled on, you are no longer eligible for a plunge attack, even if you have the controls set up to allow it. You MUST manually sprint off of a ledge with HOLD sprint input, or roll off a ledge with walk enabled and return to neutral midair at a certain height, for the game to register a plunge attack. Sprinting with a hold input versus sprinting with a toggled sprint, despite being the exact same thing to setup a plunge input, doesn’t give the same result. It’s specifically the toggle, because if you “un”toggle sprint back to walking MIDAIR, you can suddenly plunge attack again immediately while in the air. You would basically have to constantly mentally manage toggling it off every time you wanted to do a plunge to even access the feature, because if you forget you may simply get the wrong result from your inputs not working correctly, and like in the above example of climbing, die instantly because the game either lied to you or did something explicitly NOT what you pressed an input for.
Oh and as a free bonus irritation, if you do a rune attack or utility rune that uses circle, it will overlap the input and toggle you at the same time, so even if you DO take on the burden of managing a mental checklist for all of this jank, you will also unintentionally toggle yourself on or off just playing the game normally - further compounding the issue.
Which sucks, because run/walk toggle is actually fantastic, because you can do it while locked on and freely move at top speed, which can be relevant if the enemy is 1) large, and/or 2) doing a length combo - because you can navigate and space those attacks to creative a whiff punish. It’s also kinder on your controller and fingers when traversing big distances too. Also, just because I know it certainly disables plunge attacks until you toggle it to walk from sprint, that doesn’t mean plunge attack is the only input the game will fail to recognize or do, it’s just a major clue.
Why is this happening? My best guess would be some really spectacular spaghetti code is used for the controls, which feels like the last place you’d want that. Or some variables are not getting recognized by functions but the variables are used to determine control input swaps, and/or the functions for controls are not modular enough. Hopefully they are isolated enough in the code to discover where things are going wrong, because ideally this would take less than 30 minutes to fix? This seems like toddler work compared to some of the code being used in the game elsewhere.
In conclusion, this is a gameplay experience and perception warping issue, that undermines both the developer’s work to make good controls (when they work, they work well) and the player/users sense of confidence that they are doing what the game told them to do for X result correctly. It specifically does the opposite of letting people who want to use different control schemes play the game the way they want, and the earlier a player does it, the less likely they are to know what the problem is because their framework for playing the game was faulty but not visible to the naked eye. It is most prevalent for console release since controller is the default there, and that is coming up in a few months. Please do not ship 1.0 and console release without getting to the bottom of this and fixing it.
TL;DR - (using playstation terminology, unlike the UI in the “change controls” menu)
Triangle, when bound as attack, exclusively will not execute plunge attacks, despite every other face button doing so.
Circle has a permanent input for either “drop down” or something for letting go, meaning if you bind sprint/dodge to it and use this button for traversal, the game will force you to kill yourself constantly whenever you try to do speedy traversal, because taps will be recognized as let go and fall to your death instead, even if you hold the input to “rush” climbing. You can have nothing bound to circle at all, and tapping it will just drop you off vines anyways, just to test, but putting new inputs on the button will not remove this, simply cause them to fight for priority or happen at the same time whenever possible.
On the topic of “same time” inputs, if you assign toggle walk/run to a face button, using a rune attack or utility rune that coincides with that face button will unintentionally also toggle your walk or run despite those runes coming from a [button] + [button] combined input.
While you are toggled to sprint, you are incapable of doing a plunge attack for no reason, even when doing exactly the same interactions as holding sprint would do into the situation - you can even “toggle” back to “walk” midair and suddenly be able to plunge attack again midair, but this becomes a permanent mental burden to juggle, and the previous issue also makes THIS issue worse because it affects it, doing any rune attack with an overlapping input to toggle, will also toggle despite being a different, combined input.
For people who aren’t lucky enough or care enough to discover why the game is doing the opposite of letting them play the way they want through changing the controls, BECAUSE they changed the controls (the control changes aren’t working properly) the earlier they change controls the more likely they are to experience a degraded perception of the game and their own performance due to code problems giving them unintended results. If I can attack in the air, and I can change triangle to the attack button, I expect to be able to attack in the air with triangle when I do that.
Since you are releasing this game on console, which will be using controllers, do not ship 1.0 along with the game console release without fixing this first, it will save you and players a lot of grief and unneeded controversy. People will not be happy if they can’t get past step 1 - “this is how you operate the game” when it is NOT their fault. If they assume it is however, that creates an unjustified quit moment because YOU guys messed up. Bad code is the worst kind of artificial difficulty, controls should work as advertised, you are about to tap into a large quantity of controller users with console release who will be buying your product, please fix it before EA ends.
