Controller/Steam Deck support needs work

[Xerxes Qados]

About 8 hours into the game on Steam Deck, and I'm enjoying it enough to keep going even though the controller support is really rough.

Firstly, ran into a couple bugs:

1. The default mapping of D-pad Up to both Weapon Select, and Next Page when interacting with things like calendars or stacks of documents, doesn't work. Weapon Select doesn't get overridden when you're aiming at an object with pages.

The least bad workaround on Steam Deck is to turn on Autodetect Keyboard/Controller, map a back grip button like L4 to Keyboard X, and map the controller input for Weapon Select to Back. Since Back defaults to bringing up the Map, now pressing Back will SOMETIMES just bring up the Map, except when Weapon Select somehow takes precedence again for unclear reasons. Pressing L4 to open Weapon Select works, but shifts the input mode to Keyboard, and I have to mash random controller buttons before the analog sticks work again.

2. Using the right analog stick on the Case Board started my game successfully scrolling around it, and then about 4 hours in just stopped working, even when I quit and reload a save.

Aside from those bugs, general gameplay works pretty well on the controller. The Case Board, however, is a nightmare at this stage of Early Access.

- Using the D-pad to switch between pinned notes feels completely random. When I press a direction I will usually have no idea which note the game is going to navigate me to. Often I'll get caught in a loop where pressing the same direction will just swap back and forth between two notes over and over again.
- Pressing B to switch between UI panels is not workable. It's an incredibly frustrating way to interact with the case board.
- Using Search often takes some of the headache out, but the game has no built-in onscreen keyboard, so I have to bring up Steam OS's and hope the search bar doesn't end up obscured by it.

Because of this, half the time I end up switching between fumbling with the controller and using the touch screen, which isn't great because a lot of the touch targets are really small, and anytime I touch the screen it switches back to keyboard and mouse input. If I were playing on an external monitor I wouldn't have this escape hatch.

I'd much rather use a cursor controlled by the left analog stick. Golden Idol and Prey are a couple games I've seen implement this really well. The UI could also work really great with the touchscreen if the targets for stuff like Close buttons were made bigger, so if the Steam Deck APIs allow for combined controller/touch input without the weird issues of autodetect mode switching, I'd love to see that.

I am continuing to play the game despite all of these frustrations because it's really, really good, but I'd love to see the controller UI overhauled before release.

[MichaelPatriot21]

I had all the same issues. I just switched to keyboard/mouse controls. Mapped crouch to L4, inventory to R4, and quicksave to R5.

[Fdruid]

It needs a LOT of love, that's for sure.