You're going about controller support all wrong

Short version: making all controls mappable to arbitrary combinations of keyboard keys would amount to offering good controller support. In particular, that includes WASD-like movement. What you've done so far in your "controller support" is a disaster, and the entire thrust of it is all wrong to the extent that it's unfixable.

Long version:

Because I use a mouse and keyboard extensively for other things, I can't play games that require heavy mouse usage. I've played a lot of PC games using a controller, and can't play PoE with heavy mouse usage. I briefly tried the game years ago to see if it was playable with a controller, and the answer was a pretty hard "no". So I was interested to see that you're now claiming to add controller support.

Unfortunately, it appears that whoever was tasked with implementing the controller support hasn't a clue what to do. One could start by nitpicking the obvious mistakes:

1) When you enable controller support, it just turns itself back off. The way to make it stop doing this is to switch the controller to xinput mode. This is completely undocumented, however, so unless someone is really determined to figure out how to make it work, it's going to look like the controller support does not work at all.

2) The controls are almost entirely undocumented. This is much worse for a controller than for a keyboard, even, as controllers will commonly run out of buttons and need some things to be combinations of buttons. Expecting players to reverse-engineer that is completely unreasonable.

3) The controls can't be changed. This is egregiously bad because not all controllers are identical. This isn't just a matter of personal preference. Imagine trying to play a game where it's hard-coded in that some controls need to use the 10-key section, and trying to play that on a keyboard that doesn't have a 10-key section. You're inevitably going to do that to people if controls aren't configurable.

Ultimately, the above things are irrelevant, however, because the entire philosophy of your controller support is all wrong. If you focus on fixing things like that, you'll end up with controller support that kind of works on some particular developer's box, albeit likely not well enough to play the game for real, and is completely useless to nearly everyone else.

The glaring, showstopper flaw is that controller and keyboard input options can't be mixed. If you don't fix that, then nothing else about your controller support matters.

The goal of controller support is not, or at least should not be, to make a game 100% playable by a controller. Navigating complex menus on a controller tends to be painful. Developers who are willing to put in a lot of work on the UI can make it tolerable. Considering that it has taken more than eight years past launch to pretend to offer controller support, that's not you. Besides, even if you try to make a game 100% playable by controller, all it takes is one little mistake to disable considerable swathes of the game.

Rather, the goal of controller support is to let players use a controller for the parts that make sense and a keyboard or mouse for the parts that make sense. If that means a controller for combat, a keyboard to chat and bring up menus, and a mouse to sift through inventory, then that should be allowed. Making the keyboard and controller options mutually exclusive as they are now is as dumb as making a game's controls require either keyboard only or mouse only with no option to use some of each.

The other fundamental problem is that different controllers are different. If you only try to make everything work on one particular controller, then maybe you can get it to work on that particular controller, but completely fail on all others. If you're going to offer controller support, you want for players to be able to use whatever controller they have for whatever the controller would be able to do if given good support. That doesn't mean trying every single controller in existence. That would be stupid and a waste of time. How to solve this is a solved problem and has been for many years, however.

Keyboards have the same problem, after all. Different keyboards are different. It's not just that some keyboards are missing the 10-key section or even the F-keys. Even full-size keyboards for different languages or regions. Some parts of the world have different alphabets entirely. You would not and should not import every single keyboard in existence and customize controls for them one by one. You shouldn't pretend that you can do that for controllers for the same reason.

Rather, with keyboards, a lot of signals are standardized. You don't have to care if a French keyboard swaps the Q and A as compared to an English keyboard. So long as you can recognize that the keyboard is sending some signal when a key is pressed, and map a control to whatever signal is sent when a player presses the desired key at a keybinds menu, it just works.

You can and should do something like that with controllers, too. Except that controller signals aren't nearly as standardized as keyboard signals. But there is a way to fix this: controllers commonly have software that can map controller buttons to keyboard keys. So long as your game can detect keyboard keys, that allows the controller buttons to be used in their place.

But that's only if arbitrary controls can be suitably remapped. Offering high quality controller support is mostly about making it possible to map as much of a game's functionality as possible to arbitrary combinations of keyboard keys. Maybe you can't make it truly arbitrary combinations, but at least make it combinations of at least two keys. Don't hard code in that anything at all must be exactly this or that keyboard key or mouse button. Make everything remappable.

If everything can be mapped to arbitrary combinations of keyboard keys, then it can also be mapped to arbitrary combinations of controller buttons (and D-pad and thumbstick directions), since those are easily remapped to keyboard keys. People who play PC games using a controller know how to do this. Most PC games are basically unplayable with a controller without doing this. Don't bet on your game accidentally being one of the rare exceptions. It won't be.

Controller support is not primarily about putting an official controller sheen on top of the underlying substance of making all of the game's controls properly remappable. Maybe that's a nice bonus, but it's useless if you don't have the underlying substance of remappable controls. And right now, you don't. Prettier menus on top of not having the substance that the menus exist to give players access to won't make any difference.

The glaring thing missing right now is a lack of keyboard movement. As it stands, in order to use a controller, you basically have to map a thumbstick to control a mouse, which is slow and awkward. And you have to use the same thumbstick both for movement and aiming simultaneously, which is just awful.

Yes, yes, the official controller support nominally gives you a way around that. But the official controller support as you're doing it is completely broken and probably unfixable. Getting it to the point that it more or less works on the personal workstation of one developer somewhere in the world when that one developer doesn't even use controllers to play games isn't at all similar to having a control scheme that is practical to use by arbitrary players.

It is beta......and probably just aim for Steam deck

Thank you Quasirandom for your great explanation and layout. I really hope that GGG sees this and implements a better controller system.

So, I personally don't use a controller, but I have a friend who uses a controller. She is VERY frustrated with how ill-thought-out many of the controls are. There are so many glitches and bugs that it makes the game very frustrating and nearly unplayable to play solo. While we have played together, I have noticed the following terrible issues:

*When it comes to skill aiming, there is none. It's spray and pray. For the most part this isn't bad, as you can use lots of AOE spells or attacks. But in places where you need to aim a direction to use a travel skill, nothing happens. She constantly tells me that she presses the buttons, but the skills don't activate. Worse, she cannot aim the skills unless her character is already moving in the same direction. That's insanity. So many places in this game (like the ascendancy trials and Piety mk2) require very specific movement and placement just to survive. The controller makes these things unplayable. In fact she has often told me that she has never been able to progress past certain points without another player's help due to this issue.

*Picking up items. This is a big one. Items are half the game. Without them, you cannot progress. When too many items drop, the controller stops functioning properly and prevents the character from picking up any items. Let me reword that. She highlights the item on the ground, presses the button and NOTHING happens. The item does not get picked up. This is game breaking. It's no wonder that she never progressed past a certain level. The gear she could pick up was reduced to when 4 or less items were around. I have been picking the items up for her and trading with her directly just so that she can have the items that dropped for her. I am glad to be able to help her with this, but I shouldn't need to in the first place.

*Button mapping. She mentioned that she needs to press certain buttons in a certain combination to cast certain skills because she can't remap the buttons at all. As a keyboard and mouse user, my ability to remap keys in games is the only reason I can play well. My muscle memory is particular that way. If I was unable to remap keys, then that would mean I simply couldn't play those games. For her, she is trying to use combo-keys in boss fights and often presses the wrong combinations because it's very awkward to use the buttons as they are currently mapped. Thankfully, she isn't salty about dying a lot, but she is very frustrated that she can't do what she wants because the buttons don't work.

TLRD: With the current controller system in place, my friend cannot aim skills, cannot pick up items that group together (and other items that randomly decide to be ungrabbable), and cannot change the button mapping to suit her hands.

Please update the controller support, GGG.

Thank you for reading.

they should remove controller support from the pc version and leave it only for console users.

it's a very limited input method which drags down kb/mouse input on it's lower level if both are enabled in the same realm.

haven't tested it recently, but the fact that keybord is disabled completely, for example stash management is stupid.

The biggest issue that I personally have is they forgot about one skill-action button.

On the keyboard UI, we have a total of thirteen. The three mouse buttons and the 5 keyboard action slots that can be CTRLed into another 5. That's a total of 13 skill-buttons.

On the controller, we get four skill buttons with two modifiers for a total of twelve.

There is the Leftpaddle+Rightpaddle shift that SHOWS eight more slots... but they're not accessible unless you are doing a thing (like planting explosives) that requires a special button all of its own (usually V on the keyboard.)

So unless I am blind or my ADHD caused me to miss it... I am seeing that they owe us another skill-button on the controller. This is enough of an issue that I'd have to create builds that can only utilize twelve buttons.