Crucial keyboard and mouse improvements

[Monty]

This demo was excellent, and played better than expected with keyboard and mouse. There were however some issues :

1. Camera autocentring: the camera will automatically rotate to face the direction the player is moving, and seems to change pitch when moving on stairs.
I think (?) it also moves on its own to avoid walls and obstacles. These should all be options that can be turned off. Automatic camera movement causes headaches or motion sickness for many players, including myself.

2. Mouse input smoothing: this should also be an option. Dulling the mouse's movement simply makes the camera feel unresponsive and laggy (this also applies to controllers).

3. Mouse sensitivity is far too low. The upper limit should be much faster.

4. The mouse cursor is not always locked to the game window, even in fullscreen. For players with multiple monitors, this can be a serious problem as the game will not pause if the window loses focus.

5. Unmappable keys:

• Alt
  
• Tilde (below the Esc key on a US keyboard)
  
• Thumb buttons on the mouse
  
• WASD; locked. Why ?
  
• C: also locked.

No game should have any fixed bindings, especially considering the variety in keyboard layouts.

If these problems can be addressed, there should really be no serious barriers for keyboard and mouse players.

Thank you.

[Hatch]

I play on a controller and I'm fine with all the default bindings.
Though I agree that players should have complete freedom when it comes to input bindings.
The devs seem to pay attention to the community so I have hope that it will be there on release or get added eventually.

[Monty]

Here's hoping; developers often have huge blind spots when it comes to these sorts of small but fundamental design choices.

[tintingaroo]

Changing pitch on stairs had a setting in the Camera menu ("Adjust Inclined Surface Camera").

[Monty]

Did it? I'm amazed I missed that. Maybe I read it and just didn't know what it meant.

The developers do seem to be trying to get the basics right, which makes me somewhat hopeful.

[Rodi]

Originally posted by Monty:

5. Unmappable keys:

• Alt
  
• Tilde (below the Esc key on a US keyboard)
  
• Thumb buttons on the mouse
  
• WASD; locked. Why ?
  
• C: also locked.

No game should have any fixed bindings, especially considering the variety in keyboard layouts.

I pre-purchased the game, but if WASD keys are locked on release I will have to refund...
I play most games with mouse and keyboard, including souls games, but I am left handed and WASD movement don't work for me.

[Amene]

wasd locked

Lmao ...

This always makes one wonder how incompetent (or ignorant ? lazy ? idk anymore after 2 decades of similar ♥♥♥♥) devs these days can be; ... and how important keyboards with hardware/driver level key rebinding (so you can workaround basically anything) sadly are these days.

It's not even about other keyboard layouts or left handed players, where in both cases you are naturally forced away from wasd. The wasd itself is pretty crappy layout and there are better ways if one cares about controls being more efficient/optimal. YMMV of course.

While I missed the demo, I can already guess other issues are present (such as hardcoded menu/inventory-level keys, so wasd+qe+zxcf if applicable).

I do consider the game depending on players' reviews and if they fix glaring bugs like that. At the same time it won't help being spoiled by very good kb/m implementations in games like Wo Long.

Oh well ....

[Monty]

Well, this was a pre-release build from some time ago.

There's no guarantee any of these problems will be fixed at launch, which is one reason pre-orders are always a bad idea. But I did get the sense that the dev team was making an honest effort to accommodate keyboard and mouse users.

I've certainly seen worse, from bigger studios.

[Phantom Limb]

Let me ask you a simple question: why of earth would you play such game with kbm?

[Virake]

Originally posted by Phantom Limb:

Let me ask you a simple question: why of earth would you play such game with kbm?

and why would you use a controller? I can only think of a few legitimate use cases;
- driving games
- some 2D platformers
- gaming on a couch instead of at a desk
for literally everything else, keyboard and mouse is just as good or better. not to mention you'd be spending money on a controller on top of the keyboard and mouse, not instead of them, and decent controllers aren't cheap.

it's so bizarre to see how this console periferal has conquered the PC space. some people even play first-person shooters with controllers, it's crazy.

[Phantom Limb]

Originally posted by Virake:

Originally posted by Phantom Limb:

Let me ask you a simple question: why of earth would you play such game with kbm?

and why would you use a controller? I can only think of a few legitimate use cases;
- driving games
- some 2D platformers
- gaming on a couch instead of at a desk
for literally everything else, keyboard and mouse is just as good or better. not to mention you'd be spending money on a controller on top of the keyboard and mouse, not instead of them, and decent controllers aren't cheap.

it's so bizarre to see how this console periferal has conquered the PC space. some people even play first-person shooters with controllers, it's crazy.

Why? Because action RPGs like this one are meant to be played with controller. Have to deal with that one.

[Virake]

Originally posted by Phantom Limb:

Originally posted by Virake:

and why would you use a controller? I can only think of a few legitimate use cases;
- driving games
- some 2D platformers
- gaming on a couch instead of at a desk
for literally everything else, keyboard and mouse is just as good or better. not to mention you'd be spending money on a controller on top of the keyboard and mouse, not instead of them, and decent controllers aren't cheap.

it's so bizarre to see how this console periferal has conquered the PC space. some people even play first-person shooters with controllers, it's crazy.

Why? Because action RPGs like this one are meant to be played with controller. Have to deal with that one.

I beg to differ. Lies of P demo played just fine with keyboard and mouse, just like every other Souls and Souls-like I've ever played, including Demon's Souls on an emulator.

[Rodi]

Originally posted by Phantom Limb:

Because action RPGs like this one are meant to be played with controller. Have to deal with that one.

Not really. If you are not good enough with mouse and keyboard, you will do better with a controller indeed. Players who can properly use their peripherals will have faster and more precise camera controls and executions with mouse and keyboard, as always.

[Amene]

Originally posted by Virake:

for literally everything else, keyboard and mouse is just as good or better. not to mention you'd be spending money on a controller on top of the keyboard and mouse, not instead of them, and decent controllers aren't cheap.

It's far, far better than anything a controller could possibly bring - as long as the game has kb/m at least semi-decently implemented with a shred of thinking. And as long as the person actually playing the game bothers to spend some time adjusting keys and options to their liking and preferences whatever they might be.

Sadly, half-assed ports (along with "what are options ?", "why change defaults ?" braindead players) are still frequently the crux of the issue. With a literal barrel of gamepad workarounds - to make that joke of a device usable at all - rammed down kb/m throat 1:1, including but not limited to:

- aggressive camera auto adjustment / spoon feeding
- deadzones ported to mouse
- negative acceleration and caps ported to mouse
- ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ target lock
- character-relative action/attack direction
- hardcoded menu/inventory keys
- the new plague of recent years: hardcoded random keys (e.g. Elden Ring and its in-the-middle-of-keyboard G key), non-rebindable random keys, non working rebindable keys (I'm looking at you, Atomic Heart)
- everything in sets of 4 with cumbersome cycling/swapping
- target lock doubling as camera orientation reset
- and/or block or anything else doubling as camera orientation reset
- ludicrous ideas like putting e.g. parry on double click without a way to change it (DS2, thankfully it got patched out)

The iconic example of a game having all that ♥♥♥♥ and more (due to 2d sequences) - Nier: Automata - probably the worst game to play in unmodded form on kb/m - became one of the best kb/m games after NAIOM mod (which actually made almost all 2d sections fantastic with literal target reticle on the screen to target stuff with mouse). To the point that the producer of the original game linked the mod on his twatter.

There are some games with /really/ good kb/m implementation - like Nioh 1, Nioh 2 or Wo Long - which for example allow you to retain full camera control with target lock active, allow you to rebind menu-level keys, have extra sensitivity sliders for mouse users, have good automatic target swap options and so on. Just a bunch of screenshot examples:

https://i.vgy.me/r7w3Fe.png
https://i.vgy.me/kEGjeL.png
https://i.vgy.me/55wzC6.png
https://i.vgy.me/U6rhTk.png
https://i.vgy.me/sIsLeW.png

From TPP games, the only ones I remember with camera-relative melee behavior from recent times are Remnant I / II and now-dead Tera mmo. Other titles that do this that I haven't played could prooly be counted on one hand.

[Monty]

Things have been busy while I was gone, it seems. And I can see I'm not the only one who gets rather defensive about their chosen input setup! It's an understandable reaction when someone is frequently asked to explain why they prefer a keyboard and mouse to controllers.

I hope the development team has read my initial post. With that goal hopefully met, I don't mind going back to the question of why KBM is my preference, whose main answer has surfaced a few times now: camera control. A mouse is a far faster and more precise tool for moving a free camera, like those of Souls games and 3D Soulslikes.

Additionally, moving the mouse doesn't require displacing the thumb or any fingers, making it much easier to use buttons or other keys at the same time; with a controller, using the right-hand face buttons while rotating the view requires a very awkward grip.

There are secondary reasons, like the cost of first-party controllers (and unreliability of third-party ones), the convenience of launching a game without having to go fetch and plug in a new device, remappable bindings (which are sometimes implemented for controllers, but often aren't)...

Personally I tend to use a controller for racing games, or games without a free camera, but even then I'm not too bothered to stick to KBM. In nearly all cases the game is still perfectly playable (even without an analog keyboard). Most racing games however could still be significantly improved, as illustrated by Sanicball which uses KBM beautifully.

The most common response I've seen to KBM users, as seen above, has always been: "it was made for a controller". The problem with this statement is that it has no concrete implications. It's a very vague comment that glibly combines everything from hardware limitations to developer negligence into one opaque mass, discouraging anyone from questioning whether things could be better.

I hope KBM support has been improved since the demo, but as I mentioned earlier, the game remains playable.

As it happens, I've now just seen the Skill Up review for Lies of P. Disappointingly, the reviewer didn't mention the controls, but all the displayed buttons were keyboard inputs.

[Amene]

As it happens, I've now just seen the Skill Up review for Lies of P. Disappointingly, the reviewer didn't mention the controls, but all the displayed buttons were keyboard inputs.

On a side note, most (and all of them that I've seen) so called reviewers are as reliable with actually checking kb/m implementation as your random "it was made for a controller" guy on forums.