Not that I think the petition will get much done, even all these things combined will likely not motivate the Japanese studio - specially since Japanese Studios have tended to ignore the PC in the past with maybe 1 or two exceptions - to port the game.
But I signed it anyway, I put my 2 cents on the forums, etc. If you are at all interested in seeing the game on PC, hey, why not sign it?
Palooka: You can always plug in a gamepad. That certainly doesn’t solve the problem from the developer’s point of view, mind… but it solves it for me at least so I still want them to port it.
I’m sure mouse and keyboard interface will require a bit of work.
But I’ve never encountered a third person game where you could control the camera where mouse and keyboard was either fine, or superior to the controller anyway.
As long as the mouse controls the camera you get a rich control over movement, and of course a very accurate control over the view and “aiming” both for ranged attacks and for platforming.
For example the Batman games are excellent on mouse and keyboard as are the Mass Effect games. Batman specially is just way better with mouse and keyboard because of the mouse’s extremely accurate positioning of the camera. Combat with mouse and keyboard is a joy of precision and timing, where as with the gamepad it’s a struggle against the stick.
The problem with third person games and mouse and keyboard arises when you cannot control the camera with the mouse. When that control gets taken away from you, the limitations of WASD become readily apparent. You lose the nuance that the mouse gives you in movement and it’s a pain to do any sort of complex movement.
I think the problem with Dark Souls is more that I can’t see the combat working without a gamepad. Dark Souls binds the two shoulder buttons to Light Attack and Heavy Attack for the right and left hand. On top of that, the roll/run/jump button is very important for quick access (the item button less so). The buttons to change weapons and spells (D-pad on the console) are very important at times too.
As many keys as mouse and keyboard have, I think any control scheme that also allows you to move would be necessarily awkward (ctrl+q and that don’t work too well when you need to do them within under a second).
Four major action buttons is a trivial. Any mouse sold today has four functions right there, though usually only three are used. awsd would be used for movement, space for action-movement, and the mouse for the other actions.
The other problem is that, if they do come up with a competent control scheme, is what happened to Dead Space. The game isn’t nearly as terrifying or effective when you can insta-spin and double-tap everything with tight mouse control.
Yeah, that happens a decent bit - you have to really crank up the difficulty level because they don’t rebalance the game for mouse/keyboard. So you get a normal or hard more designed for difficulty appropriate to struggling to waddle around with your thumbs, and then you blast right through it easily with a mouse.
But just cranking up the difficulty is an imperfect solution - the guys may hit harder or have more health, but you’re still limited to difficulty decisions based around console limitations, like having all your enemies come from in front of you, not enough enemies to be challenging, not having the vertical be a real part of the combat, etc. Oh well.
I don’t think that’s really liable to be a problem with Dark Souls, most of that game is being patient, not twitch reflexes. You’re capped by your character speed, not your ability to turn around, there’s only so fast your character can roll and move, making it about the same to get behind an enemy regardless of what controls you use. Further, enemies block and retaliate, no matter if you have a mouse or a controller it won’t affect your ability to get past a shield. There’s ONE fight I have in mind where a mouse may make it easier (the Hydra at Ash Lake), but for 99% of the game, I don’t think trivialities like “turning around faster” will really affect the game, the game is mostly about knowing where enemies are and how they act rather than reflexes.
Edit: There are a couple cheese tactics that may be easier with the mouse, but these tactics are VERY encounter specific, and they’d only really affect two or three fights in the game, which are optional.
Wow, I could not disagree more (well, with Batman, never played Mass Effect.)
I downloaded the Arkham Asylum demo on Steam when it came out (this was before ever playing it on PS3,) and I could not stand using M&K. I hated that there mere act of hitting attack or counter (left and right mouse buttons, IIRC) would cause the mouse to wiggle just enough to constantly move the camera to where I didn’t want it. I’m sure I could have turned down the sensitivity, but I feel it plays so much smoother on a gamepad…it was clearly designed for a gamepad, and it shows. Unlike a FPS, it doesn’t need the extra sensitivity and precision of a mouse, and in fact, suffers from it.
The remote controlled batarangs were a pain enough to fly on the PS3, with all the over-steer they had, I can only imagine it was ten times worse with a mouse.
All that being said, I don’t even see the point of Dark Souls on the PC…it seems everyone who wants it on the PC already owns it for 360 or PS3, so would they ALL be willing to buy it again? I just don’t see the sales being that high…which means an even smaller player-base for multiplayer than the 360, and seeing as multiplayer already has problems with trying to connect, this would just compound it.
And seeing as there are people who cheat on the 360, porting it to PC would make it even easier to cheat…anyone who played enough Diablo II multiplayer knows the pain of character editors.
Yeah, I’m not seeing how being more accurate is any sort of detriment to Batman. Being able to pinpoint opponents all around you is what the combat is all about.
I also don’t know what you mean with the wiggling when clicking the mouse button. That would be an even bigger issue in FPS’s and I’ve never heard anyone complain about it there.
Aiming with the batarangs, specially when hitting objects in Arkham City is also 10 times less frustrating.
Finally, a decent port to the PC would assume some sort of anti-cheating in place, and your assertion that everyone already bought it on consoles is silly. There are plenty of PC gamers who want to play it and don’t own a console, want to play it and never bought it on their console, or played in on their console and would like to play it to the artist’s full vision. As in great fluid frame rate, AA, AF, higher quality graphics, higher rez, etc, etc.
Hell, make it a download only release, price it right and I guarantee you it’ll sell at least 250,000 copies on PC. At LEAST.
With the larger margins from digitla sales, that is not an insignificant amount of money for the developer.
