Messing Up the Easy Stuff
Developing games is a long and involved process by all accounts.  So it always amazes me when I sit down to play a game that took years to develop and immediately see something that completely negates the hard work of a development team.  A case in point is Oni, the much-hyped third-person action game from Bungie, recently published by Gathering of Developers.  Here’s a game that had a ton of hype about it a few years ago E3 – the press was going ape over this game that promised to mix Japanese anime characters with action and Street Fighter-like combat.  At the height of Matrix fever, this was supposed to be a martial arts movie come to life. 

What happened?  No matter how brilliant the graphics, how compelling the gameplay, or how ingenious the concept, are you ready to hear what I think of Oni?  It’s simple: You can’t configure the game controls.  Right, read that sentence again, because I’m sure you are just as shocked as I was.  If you want to play Oni, you have to use a set group of keys (i.e. W is forward, A is left, D is right, etc.) and there’s no way to reconfigure them.   For gamers like myself who like to play action games with the arrow keys and the mouse, the inability to configure the controls is a huge problem with the game.  At the very least, I expect an action game like this to include a few control schemes to toggle between.  But not Oni – if you want to play this game, you must play it according to the developer’s control scheme.

You might think I’m making a small point into a big issue, but let me put it this way: Can you believe a developer would spend years working on a game and then not include configurable controls?  When you think about the most difficult problems a programmer has to deal with, artificial intelligence is a bit tougher to tackle than giving players the ability to change controls.  Did a programmer not have 2 hours one day in the past two years to add configurable controls?  This is just ludicrous.

I had the same problem a few weeks ago with the lack of in game saving for Project: IGI.  I don’t understand how developers can spend millions of dollars on development and team members are willing to give up years of their life for a project only to mess up the easy stuff.   It’s disappointing because there’s a lot of interesting content in Oni, much of which I will never see because I can’t configure the controls.

Next, Where Does PC Gaming Go in 2001?  >

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