I have tried, unsuccessfully mind you, to start the game five separate times on my computer and have not gotten beyond the Helen Keep section because the controls, quite frankly, are wretched. Actually, they are worse than wretched but as a good portion of the Escapist population is under the age of 18 I resolve NOT to swear, though the controls are quiet worthy of several nasty ones.
I started out with the traditional mouse and keyboard, but the Look Sensitivity was so temperamental that I was either turning my head too slow or too fast, seeing too little too late or too much too soon. Needless to say, when I had to fight off a group of attackers in the Keep I more often than not ended up attacking my own alley because by the time I was able to turn and focus on my attacker he/she was dead and my alley was telling me to move on to the next area.
I then tried a joystick, which for some unknown reason the game would not register. Searching on-line I found that, unless it is a flight simulator, PC games no longer support joysticks. You want to play a PC game but don't / can't use the mouse and keyboard? You need to plug in you XBox 360 control or buy a special PC gaming controller.
Having thus found a reason to justify NOT throwing away my old wired XBox controllers, I plugged one into my PC and started the game for a 5th time. Alas, the problems persisted. I was either looking around too fast or too slow, if I tried to reassign the buttons (example, make B the jump button and Y the character menu button) BOTH stopped working! The left thumb-stick is for movement, but I have the same problem for it as I have with the right stick to look around. I am either hardly moving or running around like a mad woman! And the lower I set the look sensitivity the more finicky the movement sensitivity (which you cannot alter) gets. Finally, when I opened the World Map, it would not let me close it. One would assume hitting B (once the defaults were reapplied) or the button that got me there in the first place would take me OUT, but that was not the case. I had to unplug the controller and hit escape on my keyboard to get out of the map.
I mentioned these problems to a friend of mine who plays the console version (which is having problems of its own, namely it does to your XBox's memory what the Federal Government does with your tax money; wastes it) and he said to bypass the issues and play his console copy. I don't WANT to play the XBox version, I want to play the PC version! Why? Two words; Modding Community. Bethesda has a long tradition of handing fans the tools to improve and advance their games after they have moved on to the next project so that the game is ever changing and still fun to play LONG after it is the latest hot new release. The things Bethesda could not fix or could not include, the modding community provides. My PC version of Oblivion has mods that add classic Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind ingredients, spells and potions into the game, as well as new creatures, new towns, new quests and a restored Kvatch once you complete the main quest line.
THAT BEING SAID!!! Just because there are people out there who know how to mod a game DOES NOT give a programming company the right to release a broken product. Because basically, that is what has happened. Other gamers who bought the PC version of the game have complained about the UI (User Interface) system since it was first released and NO up-date or patch has been released to fix it. The result? The Modding Community has had to release several Mods that fix the issue for both the keyboard / mouse and XBox control. But the FUNNY part is that if Bethesda ever does get around to fixing the UI and the patch messes up someone's hard-drive, if that person EVER had the UI-mods on their computer than Bethesda will not claim responsibility for the damaged machine. EA is the same way.
My computer is less than half a year old, it more than meets the requirements, but I will not assume that means my hardware is not causing the problems. I will be hitting Best Buy in the next few days to get some advice, but this is completely disgusting. To those who have not had these problems, congratulations. To those who are having these problems or other problems, I sympathize. To Bethesda, you should be ashamed.
. We need ALL the info!
