I played this game ( almost ) start to finish with a wheel! Here's how it went.

[Vectorv12]

This post is more or less exactly what it says on the tin. I played this game almost from start to finish with a racing wheel ( I say almost because I feel like someone will call me out on a technicality that i'm going to get into later on ), and in true ARDA fashion, I wanted to share my experience with the community for science! since native wheel support is something I've been seeing pop up here and there! Minor spoilers for the game's ending are hidden behind a spoiler bar below.

So, without further ado:

How I did it

The million dollar question. This was accomplished by using a piece of software called x360ce; for lack of a better, more technical way to put it, this program effectively "tricks" your computer into detecting one or more input devices as an Xbox 360 controller. Using this, I bound the wheel's rotation to the horizontal axis of the left stick, and the gas and brake pedals to the right and left triggers, respectively. Some sensitivity tuning was necessary to get the feeling of driving around right, but for the most part it was perfectly serviceable and I was able to drive my station wagon around using my wheel! I was also able to use the keyboard without disrupting the use of the controller, meaning that I could leave the headlight and windshield wiper switches bound to their default bindings while still using the wheel to drive around.

The specific wheel that I used is an old Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback Wheel from 2001, though I imagine this method will work with any old wheel, provided that you take the time to fine-tune everything and get the feel right. A feature that I imagine would be especially helpful that my wheel lacks is the ability to limit the range of motion that the wheel has via configuration software; I imagine that something around 180 degrees would be much more responsive than the 240 degrees of rotation that my wheel has.

How It Went

The BILLION dollar question... For the most part, it went alright, although there were a few caveats that some might consider dealbreakers.

The biggest one by far - and this is where that technicality that I was talking about earlier comes in - is that the car was very difficult to control offroad during the early game. When I was on the road, the control scheme I was using worked fine enough, but when going offroad, the steering would go every which way, making it essentially impossible to keep the car going in a straight line; this, in turn, led to a handful of embarrassing collisions with trees and other such objects before I figured this out. I was forced to use the A and D keys in order to keep the car going in a straight line offroad, though I was stil able to use the pedals to control the gas and brake ( this is why the post title says "almost" the whole game, as I figured someone would say that this use of the keyboard to steer disqualifies me from saying that I used a wheel to play the game from start to finish ).

Thankfully, once I acquired Offroad Tires, this problem went away, and I was able to drive around with the wheel to my heart's content! I suspect anything that doesn't have a good offroad rating ( such as the Summer Tires and Spare Tires that the car starts with ) will control poorly with the wheel while going offroad. AT the time of writing, I haven't tested how power grip tires affect the car's handling while using a wheel, though I suspect that they'll handle poorly while not activated given their substandard offroad rating.

The other problem that I encountered ( which I sadly don't have the means to correct ) was that the car suffered from a bit of understeer ( meaning that the car turns less than expected when you turn the wheel ). I couldn't quite correct this, as turning up the sensitivity of the virtual Xbox controller provided by x360ce too high would cause strange inversions of the steering direction, so I decided to just live with it; it was only really a problem during the prologue anyway, and I didn't notice it too much while playing the game proper.

I also accidentally rolled the car over during the final escape scene, though whether that's because of the wheel, driver incompetence, or handling model design is a bit up in the air.

What This Means

You're probably wondering, what's the takeaway from all of this? Well, whatever you want it to be!~ Personally, I feel like this proves that using a wheel and pedals on Pacific Drive in its current state ( update 1.4.0 at time of writing ) is viable and functional, especially if you have offroad tires - though you'll want to keep your keyboard handy if you don't. It'll be interesting to see if Ironwood Studios implements force feedback ( for those not aware, force feedback refers to a feature where the wheel will automatically move and react as if it would in a real car, such as, say, jolting in your hands while driving over rough terrain or jerking as you move over a bump ) if they ever decide to pursue native wheel support, but even if nothing comes to fruition, I still feel like this game works well enough with a wheel in its current state.

Well, that's all I've got for now! Feel free to ask me any questions in the comments, I'll do my best to get to everyone I can. Thank you to Ironwood Studios and the development team for making such an awesome game!

Have fun, and drive safely!

[aim]

downside is there is no feedback

[Vectorv12]

Originally posted by aim:

downside is there is no feedback

That is unfortunately true, yes.

[WhiskeyNinja]

Kudos! This reminds me of when I tried playing Mechwarrior 3 with a Steel Battalion Controller back in college. When it worked, it felt amazing, but it struggled to work consistently.

[WhispersOfTheWind]

It's always so fascinating to me that in the realm of gaming people that desire for features sometimes work hard to implement features that they wish for through various means be that using external programs like joystick or controller emulators and like things like vjoy and glovepie for instance to use mouse controls to play racing games without a steering wheel or that modders and the modding community come up with ideas and mods for a game from like simple flashlight-mod for a game that doesn't have it for instance to total conversions or just sometimes some features that are missing in an original game for whatever reason and it's often that we take such measures to create something that might have been missing that tend to add like a lot of value to a game and create for very rich experiences we could have only wished for in the first place.

Like I'm glad you managed to implement a workaround to get what you want and it sounds appealing honestly so who knows, maybe one day I'll try that myself although I would much more like to have like official support for this because sometimes tinkering with external programs is like confusing and at times complicated but I'm glad you managed to make it work. I hope it was a good experience ;)

[Vectorv12]

Originally posted by WhispersOfTheWind:

It's always so fascinating to me that in the realm of gaming people that desire for features sometimes work hard to implement features that they wish for through various means be that using external programs like joystick or controller emulators and like things like vjoy and glovepie for instance to use mouse controls to play racing games without a steering wheel or that modders and the modding community come up with ideas and mods for a game from like simple flashlight-mod for a game that doesn't have it for instance to total conversions or just sometimes some features that are missing in an original game for whatever reason and it's often that we take such measures to create something that might have been missing that tend to add like a lot of value to a game and create for very rich experiences we could have only wished for in the first place.

Like I'm glad you managed to implement a workaround to get what you want and it sounds appealing honestly so who knows, maybe one day I'll try that myself although I would much more like to have like official support for this because sometimes tinkering with external programs is like confusing and at times complicated but I'm glad you managed to make it work. I hope it was a good experience ;)

Thank you for your comments! It was a good experience, yes - I'm looking into combining it with UEVR next~