Post by Cyborg Rising in Bad Controls at the El VotV OR: How I Learned to Start Worrying and Hate the Game

Viewing post in Bad Controls at the El VotV OR: How I Learned to Start Worrying and Hate the Game

I've been playing a fair bit now and the only way I've found to eat food or use batteries is to set them down and long press LMB while looking at them. If I can hold LMB while holding an item to perform the same action that I perform by holding LMB while looking at it, that would be news to me. But I'm on day nine and still can't even figure out how to get credit for finding a signal and processing it to level three, so I guess that would track.

The issue is that there are the following different inputs to interact with an object:

LMB quick press
LMB long press
Grab quick press
Grab long press
Hold quick press
Hold long press
RMB quick press

Which are all repeated over again for the following states:

Looking at
Grabbing
Holding

Which is further multiplied by the following modifiers:

Scroll wheel
Sprint (I mapped sprint to 'press left stick' when binding a controller and somehow now I need to use it to put things in the drone bag, hell if I know what key it usually is)

This is over FORTY possible ways to interact with an object, and EVERY interaction becomes its own minigame of figuring out which of the over FORTY possible inputs that you can perform on an object does an OBVIOUS action that a real life human would have NO difficulty immediately and unhesitantly executing, that every player is going to look to do with the object in a given situation. This effectively transforms Voices of the Void into the QWOP of user interaction.

Sure, some combinations you can start to rule out because they are universal. Short press hold puts something in inventory. But that only removes one combination of the forty, and there are many examples of objects that break many of the conventions you could try to set forth. Broom which sweeps with RMB (holy goddamn SHIT that was agonizing to figure out as somebody trying using an controller). Tape reels that you can only remove from the recording machine with GRAB rather than long-presing HOLD, yet the tape reels are put into a HELD state. The fact that you put tape reels into the machine tape recorder with LMB, but you put drives into the signal playback/processing machines by long-pressing HOLD (or wait, maybe it's LMB too and it's removing them that's different between drives and reels?). Broombas whose inventory you access by using the SCROLLWHEEL and LMB, but I don't think I interact with the drone bag in the same way? The whole ridiculous situation where you can grab drive out of a signal machine and put it at slot of another machine, but even though you moved the object correctly through time and space, you didn't use the right magic word while making the motion, you need to use the other magic word for performing the very same physical motion.

And to top it all off - there is NO radical, special sophistication that Voices of the Void has somehow introduced with having FORTY possible user inputs relating to objects. The things that your character is doing is NOT an order of magnitude more complex than any other video game. It might not be universal across all other games, but I have absolutely been able to pick up world objects and set them down while also holding a firearm that I can shoot or a sword I can swing. I've also been able to pick up and hold an object and then have it interact with the world other than just firearms that put holes in things. I've been able to enter things into keypads, eat food, reload objects that take consumables (be they bullets or batteries or whatever). All without even really thinking about it because of an effective user interface design that apparently deserved far more respect than I've ever paid before in those other games. I really wonder how much somebody actually likes "the complexity", or more honestly they just like playing interaction QWOP (QWOP is a game after all) where it becomes possible to make mistakes, be wrong, and you need to get interactions right across a myriad of inputs. That it just feels complex and sophisticated because of all of the different possible inputs you have to think through, even though the actual interactions character is performing with the world are exactly the same as the games that achieve this with vastly less confusion and a vastly simpler set of commands.

I think the real, true test here is just how much effort goes into actually performing these actions IRL. If much of a game's interaction is managed by a single interact key that has a context aware-input that simply knows that the desired interaction with food is to eat it, the interaction with a mounted tape reel is to take it off the machine and start holding it - and then a context aware single activation key for equipped item, where brooms sweep and tape drives are installed into a slot - it would indeed make doing these sort of things thoughtless and effortless when compared with the current controls where every one of these interactions currently involves a separate keybinding - but aren't all of these actions also effortless and thoughtless in real life too? I never find myself unable to take off a tape reel because I tried to hold it my hands rather than grab it in my hands, I never hold a broom and can't figure out how to sweep it, I never get stuck not being sure how to eat food, I never have a drive in my hand that I can't insert because I'd 'grabbed' it instead of 'held' it.

I don't think there is a single way your character actually interacts with the world that couldn't be managed by just four buttons, including a trigger:

Put in inventory (long press to access its inventory)
Interact (long press to move it around in the air, releases object when press is released) (interact is context-intelligent, does the obvious thing you wish to do with something) (never activates a held object, is only an interaction with the world object)
Activation button (e.g. trigger, no long press function other than continuous activation) (is never used as an interact button - only ever activates held item)
Switch held item, ideally a radial menu (long press to access your inventory)

This is only 5 different ways of interacting with the world, and then two of interacting with yourself. Maybe add one or two functions to more easily place equipped item, while easily keeping it under 20 possible ways of interacting.

nippleman2 hours ago (1 edit) (-1)

what in the actual fuck are you talking about????? long press LMB does nothing? did you rebind all your controls or something? what is going on??? none of what you say in your post is accurate, there are four ways to interact with an object in the world. left mouse button only does one thing, and that's activating the subfunction of whatever is held in your hand, and holding left mouse button does nothing as far as i know. you eat food in two ways, holding e on it when its in the world, and pressing left mouse button when its in your hand. like, your post makes so little sense I'm beginning to think you haven't even played the game.

when you're looking at an object, you have FOUR ways of interacting with it:

grabbing it: this moves it to the center of your vision and uprights the object and keeps it that way. grabbed items can be rotated with right click

using it: using it uses the item, for food, using would be eating,,,,,

pick up: puts it in your offhand. this is just an inventory action nothing more

put in inventory: puts it in your inventory

it gives you a description of what each action does when you look at an object, i dont see why you cant just read it every time.

Cyborg Rising55 minutes ago (13 edits)

At this point you're not even reading what's written, though I may not have done a perfect job of reading your post myself.

I'm not saying that long mouse press while holding food does nothing. I'm saying that I didn't find out that was a way to eat food. Which was exactly what I wrote, and follows my ponint of there being too many combinations of inputs and it being a challenge to keep them all straight. EDIT: If what you're saying is that long-press LMB actually does nothing, that's kind of my point. Long pressing other buttons does things, so if you're searching for an input to do something, a long press on the mouse is going to be one of the things you try. I may have mixed up long-press LMB and long-press grab for food eating - I've remapped LMB and the grab key to controller buttons and I'm trying to translate everything back to M&K for your benefit, so between the input soup and trying to keep track of controller map I might have mixed that up with grab - which still goes to my point.

You're also not even engaging with the full facts and overall discussion here. Four inputs for an object you're looking at is more than what I suggested is actually required for an object in front of you, and the user has to deal with more than just looking at objects. More than that, they have the experience of having to determine which of different possible input combinations performs the requested real-world action, and isn't operating from a place of already knowing what every possible input is . I think you're withdrawing into a simplified mental concept of the controls you have that isn't what's being discussed. Whats being discussed is the total number of input combinations, across every different input a player has to enter at different times and multiplied against the various conditional states that in change some of the user interface input meanings, as well as user interface modifiers that also change what some of the inputs mean.

One possible thing that could be tripping you up is that not every conditional state (holding, looking at, grabbing) and every user interface modifier (such long-pressing the input or scrolling or whatever sprint is) always has a valid button combination with each other user interface, but this is not inherently perceivable by a new player who is learning how to play the game. To know what combinations aren't valid inputs, one must know all of the valid inputs. If you have an action you want to perform in mind but you are trying to figure out how to perform it because you haven't Matrix-style uploaded all of the valid input combinations into your brain, but you DO know that looking at an object and holding an object and grabbing an object can each influence the action that LMB performs, that's three different inputs the action you have in mind could be. If you know that long-pressing an input and quick-pressing an input have performed different actions, now you have six different ways of interacting with an object with LMB that could be your action. But if LMB is one of lets say 4 different keys, now there are 18 possible combinations. There's also mental logic to filter these down, but the point is that the sheer number of combinations you are facing prior to having the inputs completely memorized, or god forbid you forget any of them, is significantly problemactic for exactly everybody who isn't someone who has long since figured them out and put learning them into the forgotten past.

If you can extend a modicum of empathy for what it's like to not know how to play the game and how the true level of required knowledge a person has to learn is not actually sufficiently captured by your control summary, that's what will get you to understand what I'm talking about.

The tooltips while looking at an object, in some instances, have been EXTREMELY helpful - I did not have to struggle to figure out how to put things into the drone bag, or how to start the broomba. But they do not include words like "eat", and only inform the meaning of user inputs when an object is being looked at. They also get MUCH more clumsy and overly wordy with a controller map. They don't cover the different sets of inputs and input meanings in the grabbed and held state.

And again, if I'm getting some of the input combinations wrong.... that's kind of my point!!!

itch.io

Viewing post in Bad Controls at the El VotV OR: How I Learned to Start Worrying and Hate the Game