So let’s move away from the performance and onto something I can more safely discuss: the controls.
This is a bit more of a “hmm” area. I’m not sure I can fault CD Projekt RED for this too much, because combat requires quite a few buttons and there are only so many that make immediate sense on mouse and keyboard, but… hmm.
As an example, let’s say you’re in a fight. Other than drawing your sword (the number 1) you’ve got sheathing your sword (C), fast attack (left mouse button), heavy attack (Shift and left mouse button), parry (right mouse button), throwing a bomb (middle mouse button), lock target (Z), dodge (Alt), roll (Space), selecting a sign (number keys, or a selection wheel), casting a Sign (Q), quick-using an item… etc. And then you get out of combat and several of those keys change, and you’ve got a few more to remember.
I mean, that’s a lot of buttons. I get it. Attacks and dodges and Signs and items and selections and so on. But… it still feels a bit messy on keyboard, and I can’t help but feel it’s been designed around a gamepad first and foremost. Previous Witcher games never had perfect mouse and keyboard controls either, but for whatever reason, this feels considerably clunkier than before.
This sense was heightened when I plugged in a gamepad and played it, and suddenly everything felt natural and comfortable. I mean, I got my arse kicked in the very first fight I tried because I had no idea what the controls were, but having my attacks bound to X and Y rather than modified by the shift key made a lot more sense for something I’m doing regularly.
Fortunately, my mouse has a lot more buttons than three, so I suspect I can improve matters greatly by spending a little time playing with the keybindings. Most buttons can indeed be changed within the options (although a few, like the map hotkey being M, are locked) so I can set the thumb button on my mouse to parry, if I really want to. And I probably do. Or maybe I should swap parry to Shift, and strong attack to the right mouse button? Or maybe that should be the default, rather than having a modifier? Again: hmm. Then again, The Witcher 2‘s controls felt incredibly awkward for the first few hours, so maybe I just need a bit of time to get used to it.
With all that space, I see no reason why the PC version couldn’t have the tabs expanded at the top rather than buttons cycling through them.
I should probably also note that the menu interface is also a bit… interesting. The inventory seems fine, in the few chances I’ve had to experience it, but there are a few niggles with the rest of it – the tabs at the top are fairly useless for cycling through the menus quickly on mouse and keyboard, and the map doesn’t properly detect you releasing your mouse cursor if you’re outside the actual bounds of the map. Like, say, if you’re dragging across it a fair distance, and your cursor leaves the map, and you let go… welp, the game thinks you still have the button held down when you next move the cursor onto the map. Irritating.
Inconclusive results then, I’m afraid. Mouse and keyboard controls are okay-ish, but right now, the game still feels at its best with a gamepad; this may, however, change as I get used to the keyboard. The graphics can be tweaked an awful lot, but this won’t necessarily result in the performance gain you’d expect. The main menu and cutscenes run at a bizarrely low framerate.
Initial impressions are that this is a perfectly fair port (or version, perhaps), and I’ve probably been spoiled a bit by the likes of Ground Zeroes and Grand Theft Auto 5, so maybe I’m being a bit too mean. Or maybe I should be frowning at the menu framerate and the fact that the scalability doesn’t impact the framerate nearly as much as I’d expect. But then, CD Projekt RED have a really good history of patching these things up and making everything right. So… look, I don’t know.
