Controller Support Needs Work

[thelefthorse]

I love this game, but a hand injury has relegated me to gaming with a controller for the forseeable future and, unfortunately, that appears to mean no playing Immortal Life for the forseeable future.

I pride myself on being a fairly flexible person, and I'm always game to learn a new control scheme, play games without mouse support, etc., but I cannot play this game with a controller using the current layout. Inventory management is when it all breaks down. Holy mother of god, trying to figure out which button to use to, say, 'pick up' a stack of an item and place it on a particular page of the warehouse turned this from a fun way to spend half an hour to a phenomenally frustrating experience.

Simply navigating multiple inventories -- the warehouse or chest -- is absurdly poorly implemented. It's as if someone who has never used a controller to play a game was put in charge of implementing controller support. It boggles the mind.

Despite never seeing the devs in these forums, I don't know of another way to communicate with them, so I'm posting this in the hopes that more support for controllers is in the pipeline, including, of course, the ability to remap buttons, as anyone who's used a controller with the game knows the button-mapping follows the old Nintendo model, which is pretty much the opposite of what the overwhelming majority of games (at least that I have played) use, which makes it extremely unintuitive. In the fifteen minutes I played this morning, I accidentally closed windows/letters/inventory/etc. a minimum of twenty times. That's probably an undercount. Nonetheless, I am confident I would eventually get the hang of that little switcheroo; managing multiple inventories, however -- no.

(And yes, I tried using the Steam functionality to remap, but when I did so absolutely nothing worked and besides, as I said, I can deal with the odd button choices, it's the inventory management system that is untenable.)


I'll throw in a little PSA here: if you can't get any of the primary controller buttons (X, Y, etc.) to work at all, make sure you've reset the controls in the in-game menu (this cannot be done from the home screen). I had previously remapped a couple of keys to mouse 4 and 5, and the game seemed unable/unwilling to override that customization with controller controls. Luckily, simply resetting the control scheme solves that particular issue.

[NekoShogun]

You need to turn on steam controller input on the game to remap using Steam. I 100% agree with needing to be able to remap in game though. I've had a very similar experience with cancel/accept buttons being swapped.

[thelefthorse]

Originally posted by NekoShogun:

You need to turn on steam controller input on the game to remap using Steam. I 100% agree with needing to be able to remap in game though. I've had a very similar experience with cancel/accept buttons being swapped.

You'll notice that I mention doing just that in my post; unfortunately it did not improve the situation. But thanks for the suggestion.

[アシュトン]

- Cancel/Accept are biggest annoyance, just option to reverse that would go a long way.

Not because i can't get used to it. but because after that whenever i open steam overlay i get confused ;D

- menu: it's a bit annoying to have both analogue and dpad. I think menu should work on either, and simply focus when you select menu section and confirm

- quick bar, best option for gamepad would be radial, but even without that. quick bar left right to change which menu you're using would do better.

- entering menu would work best under y/triangle button, use dpad for quick accessing inventory/skills when in game.



Welp i doubt it'll get fixed, but maybe it'll get better in the next game. So far it's quite tragic, not unplayable, but it's one of the worse controller schemes i've dealt with.