You know that moment when you’re playing a game and you attempt to climb onto your horse only to end up punching it in the head instead? Sometimes that’s because you’re remembering the controls for another game, but sometimes, it’s because you pressed the right button, you just did so in the wrong context.
If you’ve ever jumped when you wanted to read a sign or skipped a cutscene when you wanted to pause, you know how difficult it can be to navigate modern video games, where the meaning of a button press changes based on the context in which you’re pressing it.
Sometimes X Does Not Equal X
In fact, while playingAstro Botthis year, I found it refreshing that buttons basically only ever did one thing. X was jump, square was hit, and L2 and R2 let you use a given level’s specific ability. Sure you need to hold square to do a spin attack or yank a wire, and the layout gets tweaked a bit if you’re in your spaceship or at the Crash Site, but Team Asobi did a great job keeping the controls simple enough that the many children in its audience could pick it up as one of their first games.
But forget the kids! I’m worried about me! I recently played throughCall of Duty: Black Ops 6’s campaign and, though it’s great, I did get annoyed when I got a hold of the grapple gun in the ‘Emergence’ level and found that it wasn’t nearly as satisfying to use as the game’s weapons usually are. And for a series as good with guns as COD and a tool as satisfying to use in games as a grapple gun, you would expect Call of Duty to make it feel incredible.
Unfortunately, the way it actually works is that you’re able to only grapple to specific points in the environment and the weapon doesn’t really snap to those points. So, you have to manually position it over the ledge you want to grapple to, and that can make for some annoyingly fiddly maneuvering. Pressing the button doesn’t do anything if you aren’t positioned correctly.
This was the same problem I had with the magical grappling inImmortals of Aveumlast year.
Contextual Button Presses Break Immersion
That moment of needing to judge if your reticle is perfectly lined up with a barely perceptible ledge 100 feet away just isnotfun. I would enjoy aSpider-Mangame that demanded greater accuracy than Insomniac’s have, but in that case, you would be swinging on buildings. A building is a big target, and anywhere you attached your web would be usable.
The Spider-Man 2 movie tie-in game that released in the PS2 era handled swinging this way and it was a ton of fun. But if Spidey had needed to specifically hit a bullseye on each building, and the button you pressed to fire his web shooters only worked when the reticle overlapped the bullseye, it would get old fast.
That’s one of the problems with contextual button prompts. Instead of being able to get immersed in the game and play by instinct, you’re instead waiting to see a small visual cue to act on. Only then will pressing the button yield any kind of result, and that’s annoying.
Dragon Age: The Veilguardhas the opposite problem. While playing recently, I found an altar area where supplicants had left gifts to their god. I took all their offerings, but each time I pressed X to pick something up, the game also registered it as a jump. So, I briefly looked like an MMO player killing time by jumping. This wasn’t actually a problem, per se. It was mostly just funny. But it still highlighted how difficult it must be for developers to design increasingly complex games for controllers that have been locked to static layouts for two decades.
I don’t think games should be less complex, although I have a tremendous amount of respect for games, likeDownwell, that get a lot of mileage out of limited controls. Not every game needs to do that. Games can, and should, be many different things, and that includes complex action games with ridiculously complicated controls. But, if that’s what they’re going to be, I just want to stop punching my horse.
