User Experience Challenges

I continue to slowly prod my way through the Witcher 2. This was probably an excellent game when it came out in 2011, but it has not aged terribly well. In a lot of ways it reminds me of the ways that the original Mass Effect just felt outdated and a little cludgy. The prime example of this is that too many things are tied to left clicking on objects, and often times your intent gets lost in the shuffle. Left and right click are both attacks in this game, and when you are in combat that takes precedence over anything else as it probably should. However lighting torches, opening doors, and looting bodies are all also tied to the left click action meaning that you can’t do ANY of these things while in combat. In practice this also means that more or less items don’t show up as lootable until you have been out of combat for a bit, meaning you have to keep retracing your steps to make sure you didn’t miss something interesting.

A lot of these problems can be summed up as this game being built before we had somewhat agreed upon what the ideal user interface was for this sort of game. We had some of these same problems upon playing Tron 2.0 for the AggroChat game club because it had a bunch of non-standard controls from an era before “FPS Game Controls” had effectively been codified and universalized between all games. The thing that kills me the most is the absense of a standard “confirm” button or options for selecting dialog choices with number keys. This means I am constantly moving between keyboard and mouse in a deeply uncomfortable way. While you can hit Spacebar to loot all items, you can’t hit the space bar to accept a crafting prompt for example and have to instead hit the enter key, but not the one on the numpad.

Another oddity is that you can see all of your patterns that you can craft in the inventory system, but can’t actually do anything with them there. Instead there is a completely different UI that is accessed by holding down the control key and shown two screenshots above… then you have to click the center symbol to go into another menu with no hotkey available. From there you have to go into yet another menu for Alchemy which finally allows you to brew a potion or make a bomb. There is no reason why this functionality could not have been accessed off of the inventory screen since that is already loaded with a bunch of other information.

All of this just drives home how important user interface and user experience design is in a video game. We have evolved to the point of having a pretty standard template, and when a game doesn’t follow that logic it feels bad to play it. This is ultimately the biggest challenge about dipping too deeply into the back catalog of games that came out in the 2000-2012 era of games, because we were still sorta figuring out how these games should work on the PC without a controller. For all I know this might all go away and end up as a very smooth experience with a controller equipped, but that is not my default method of play and not something I naturally gravitate towards.

I am super thankful that by the time Witcher 3 rolled around all of these user experience problems had been ironed out. Yet again it is a scenario where I am hoping that eventually, much like they have started to do for Elder Scrolls Games… that someone will come through and do a mod that effectively recreates the first two games in the Witcher 3 engine. Erxv1 recreated the entire Witcher 1 Prologue for the Witcher 3 engine and it is available over on Nexus Mods. Unfortunately I am certain this took a massive amount of work, and came together largely because all of the needed assets were readily available in Witcher 3. It would take a lot more effort to recreate entire games, but god I would love to see it.