Hi, everybody. This thread is intended as both a suggestion and a discussion, so while I'm certainly looking for support for the idea, you can do whatever you want, and I'd love to have a chat about it with anybody else. That's sorta the point of forums, after all. I included a poll to gauge interest. If you vote "no," while far from mandatory, I'd love to hear your reasoning behind the choice.
TL;DR at the bottom.
Anyway, so what is variable movement and why do I think it's important?
In short, variable movement is just what it sounds like: the ability to move at different paces smoothly, dynamically, and at will, much like you would in the real world, or console video games.
As you can imagine, in games where there is stealth, this has a direct negative impact on a PC players' experience. Since it was confirmed in a recent interview (I will look for the link, but it's common sense) that the speed you move at in stealth will impact detection, you can see why this might be frustrating for us. We either move at a snail's pace and risk not being able to catch up to enemies, or we move too fast and risk getting detected.
This was a problem in Skyrim, as well, and I never considered how much better it could be with controller-like movement till I tried it one day.
Ok, so what's the solution? There are several. You could buy a controller, as stated above, but that has drawbacks. You could also buy an analog keyboard like the Wooting one or two, but they are expensive and little-known (thus not always well-supported).
There is a third option, though: a combo key. I've suggested this randomly in other threads, but I thought, given that the game has about 9 months of development left, now is a good time to ask for this very simple quality of life feature.
First, two good examples: Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Escape from Tarkov. While I can't find any videos to demonstrate the former, I've included a timestamped video of the latter below. (about 2:26 if the timestamp doesn't work for you)
As you can see, in both of these games, scrolling up or down on the mousehweel adjusts your movement speed. On PC! What an outlandish thought, that almost no developers have ever considered!
"But Snow, what if I want to use the mousewheel for other things?"
Yeah, I know. People like to use the mousehweel for swapping weapons, items, powers, etc. I get it. The alternative is to have this variable movement option disabled by default (but communicated in the form of loading screen or tutorial hints) and require a modifier key to be pressed before it functions. This key can be changed at will. For example, I might choose to use Alt (a key I never have bound to anything else) as my modifier key -- while that's held down, and while I scroll my mousewheel up or down, my movement speed shifts up or down.
Not only would this be great for stealth, it'd be nice for immersion. CDPR had the brilliant idea of having story NPCs match your speed when they follow you around in TW3, but what if you want to match someone else's speed? What if you want to adjust how fast your car or bike is going without constant taps on the W and S keys? What if you simply don't want to run around like a chicken with your head cut off in the middle of a diner, but you also don't want to walk like a geriatric?
TL;DR:
I would like CD Projekt Red to consider adding console-like movement to PC, by allowing players to use an optionally-bound "modifier key" in addition to the scroll wheel to adjust their speed. Hitting Caps Lock (or whatever the walk/run key is) would automatically switch you back to the standard walk/run speed.
This feature would be disabled by default, and you'd need to manually bind it in the options before it would ever work. That way, you can't accidentally adjust speed while trying to swap weapons or use the scroll wheel for other purposes. Further, I imagine this would require minimal development effort (though a CDPR employee is free to prove me wrong) to implement, so I can't think of any major drawbacks.
Small update:
Thanks for reading.
TL;DR at the bottom.
Anyway, so what is variable movement and why do I think it's important?
In short, variable movement is just what it sounds like: the ability to move at different paces smoothly, dynamically, and at will, much like you would in the real world, or console video games.
Console joystick input is called "analog" input, which in practice means it is not "binary" -- the issue with PCs is that, short of buying a controller (which ditches all the benefits of using a keyboard to remove a single drawback), our input is always binary.
We move at one of two speeds: Walk or run. There's also sometimes a sprint key, but that's the same as pressing down the joystick on console, so I don't include that here.
We move at one of two speeds: Walk or run. There's also sometimes a sprint key, but that's the same as pressing down the joystick on console, so I don't include that here.
As you can imagine, in games where there is stealth, this has a direct negative impact on a PC players' experience. Since it was confirmed in a recent interview (I will look for the link, but it's common sense) that the speed you move at in stealth will impact detection, you can see why this might be frustrating for us. We either move at a snail's pace and risk not being able to catch up to enemies, or we move too fast and risk getting detected.
This was a problem in Skyrim, as well, and I never considered how much better it could be with controller-like movement till I tried it one day.
Ok, so what's the solution? There are several. You could buy a controller, as stated above, but that has drawbacks. You could also buy an analog keyboard like the Wooting one or two, but they are expensive and little-known (thus not always well-supported).
There is a third option, though: a combo key. I've suggested this randomly in other threads, but I thought, given that the game has about 9 months of development left, now is a good time to ask for this very simple quality of life feature.
First, two good examples: Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Escape from Tarkov. While I can't find any videos to demonstrate the former, I've included a timestamped video of the latter below. (about 2:26 if the timestamp doesn't work for you)
As you can see, in both of these games, scrolling up or down on the mousehweel adjusts your movement speed. On PC! What an outlandish thought, that almost no developers have ever considered!
"But Snow, what if I want to use the mousewheel for other things?"
Yeah, I know. People like to use the mousehweel for swapping weapons, items, powers, etc. I get it. The alternative is to have this variable movement option disabled by default (but communicated in the form of loading screen or tutorial hints) and require a modifier key to be pressed before it functions. This key can be changed at will. For example, I might choose to use Alt (a key I never have bound to anything else) as my modifier key -- while that's held down, and while I scroll my mousewheel up or down, my movement speed shifts up or down.
Not only would this be great for stealth, it'd be nice for immersion. CDPR had the brilliant idea of having story NPCs match your speed when they follow you around in TW3, but what if you want to match someone else's speed? What if you want to adjust how fast your car or bike is going without constant taps on the W and S keys? What if you simply don't want to run around like a chicken with your head cut off in the middle of a diner, but you also don't want to walk like a geriatric?
TL;DR:
I would like CD Projekt Red to consider adding console-like movement to PC, by allowing players to use an optionally-bound "modifier key" in addition to the scroll wheel to adjust their speed. Hitting Caps Lock (or whatever the walk/run key is) would automatically switch you back to the standard walk/run speed.
This feature would be disabled by default, and you'd need to manually bind it in the options before it would ever work. That way, you can't accidentally adjust speed while trying to swap weapons or use the scroll wheel for other purposes. Further, I imagine this would require minimal development effort (though a CDPR employee is free to prove me wrong) to implement, so I can't think of any major drawbacks.
Small update:
Also, I should have clarified in the OP, but once you've adjusted to the speed you want, you only need to hold W (or whatever other movement direction) to maintain it. Releasing and re-pressing a movement key would still maintain that speed. You don't need to hold all keys at once (including scroll wheel).
Thanks for reading.
Last edited: