Modern keyboards, mice and other
peripherals are often times loaded with a great
abundance of extra
macro keys.
Between my keyboard, mouse and headset I can count 29 available macro keys (and that's not counting using one of the keys to switch to another macro layout, adding more possible macros than I could ever need).
Some
games really
benefit from this possibility of
binding strings of
sequences to a single key and provide a nice quality of life improvement to whole experience.
Unfortunately,
Divinity: Original Sin is not one of these games, at least not in the extent I feel it could be.
The
primary problem I see can be summarized in one short bullet point:
- - state dependent key bindings
Most of
D:OS key bindings rely on the
current state of something to determine what is to be done. (see "toggle X", "next Y" or "previous Z" bindings)
Let's give a small example: Imagine I have a healer companion who has a healing spell on slot 8 of quickbar 3. What if I want to build a macro key that selects that companion, goes to quickbar 3 and uses spell 8?
I could build a macro that blindly presses the keys for "next character, next quickbar, next quickbar, spell 8" and hope that my currently selected character is not my healer, that my currently selected quickbar is not higher than 1 or at least hope that the combination doesn't trigger instant self-cast that wastes AP points in combat.
I think this issue could easily be
solved by adding state-independet key bindings to the game (along the lines of "Select primary character" or "Select quickbar 1") that enable
elimination of the uncertainty factor.
The above mentioned example would then be "Select character 1, next character, select quickbar 1, next quickbar, next quickbar, spell 8". As long as I verify the order of my characters and the postion of my spells on the quickbar once at the start, I'm good to go for the rest of the game session. And doing that trivial 5 second check once is something I'm willing to do in order to save many more seconds later down the line.
I realize that this suggestion comes too late in order to add this functionality to the original Original Sin. But it's something I really really would
love to see in the Enhanced Edition and DOS2.
TL;DR: Adding state-independet key binding allows reliable macro scripting and makes crafty gamers happy.
