I was playing Grounded 2 recently and, in typical Mollie fashion, hurtling through the tutorial like the game was billing me by the minute. I mean, what the hell do I even need to learn? I played the first game, and it’s all your basic hand-holding stuff to start out with.
Ah, here it comes. More conveniently placed debris, this time forcing me to crouch down and crawl my way through it. The tutorial text vanishes as quickly as it flashes up causing me to miss it, but I don’t need it! I’m a pro! Let me just hit Left Ctrl and… oh. I’m not crouching.
Well that’s okay, if it’s not Left Ctrl then it’s usually ‘C’, right? Except, er, nope. Not crouching either. I sigh. I hit Left Alt. I watch in horror as the first-person view lowers to the ground. I’ve finally crouched, but at what cost?
I’ll be blunt. This is a crime against keybinds everywhere.
Like, come on Obsidian, every PC gamer knows the following:
- WASD is to move
- Space is to jump
- Left Shift is to sprint
- Right click is to scope in
- Left click is to shoot
- ‘E’ is to interact with objects
- Although, wait, sometimes it’s ‘F’
- Maybe my entire argument is falling apart
- But crouch should absolutely be Left Ctrl
To suggest that crouch shouldn’t even be on the ‘C’ key—a vastly inferior keybind as it is—but Left Alt? Are you trying to take years off my life?
It’s not the first time the PC Gamer team has taken umbrage with the ways of the keyboard. Tyler was shocked back in 2021 to discover that some people were hitting Ctrl with the tip of their pinky—hi, hello, guilty—and Wes Fenlon changed the work Slack channel forever when he dared to reveal that he was… using his pinky finger to hit ‘A’. I still feel sick thinking about it.
I can barely even remember a time pre-WASD, when I was running around on Toontown Online using—gulp—the arrow keys. I know, I know. That’s before we even get into what videogames looked like before we’d universally decided the way of the WASD: As Tyler wrote back in 2016, early Quake days saw some folk using combinations like WADX, ASDX, or even ZXCV. Something we would consider to be standard now was ripe for experimentation back then, and I guess things haven’t changed that much if we still can’t agree on actions like the humble crouch ‘n’ crawl.
Now listen, I’ll admit we don’t have it as bad as our controller brethren. I lost count of how many times I would adjust to hitting Triangle on a PlayStation pad to jump in one game, only to hop to another and realise that it was X now. What about guessing whether sprinting is on L3 or R2? Don’t make me go back, I won’t do it.
Could I simply go into a menu and fix all of this with a simple scroll through the keybinds menu? Sure I could, but we’re still living in a time where not every game offers that option. What if I boot up a game with the most whack-ass control scheme imaginable, only to realise that I’m locked into it for the duration? It’s the principle of it all.
I dunno, I just find it a lot more comfortable to easily switch between sprinting and crouching with my pinky finger hovering over both Left Shift and Left Ctrl than I do sliding my thumb from Space to Left Alt. I also know I’m correct because, when I was complaining about this, Associate Editor Ted Litchfield helpfully chimed in to proclaim: “IT IS LEFT CTRL”.
I do find it interesting, though, how universal the language of keybinds has become and how accustomed I am to things being in certain places. It trips me up when I hit ‘M’ in a game and I’m not immediately greeted with a map, or when I hit Tab and an inventory menu or FPS scoreboard screen fails to materialise.
One of the best things about booting up a brand-new game is setting the foundations of familiarity with its control scheme, and when things even slightly deviate from what I’m accustomed to, it trips me up for far longer than I’d care to admit. So I’ll take your Left Alt for now, Grounded 2, but you’d best know I am not pleased about it.
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