Funny enough the "likely" part was the word that made me thought you may have facts on which your assumption is based. I read it in a way "It's highly likely because ....". So if it's just an assumption not based on any facts I will ignore it for now and be angry at a later time if your assumption should turn out to be correct.

Please don't get me wrong. I never wanted to say that you are lying. So yes, I'll take your word for it (or maybe searching myself a bit ... don't know yet) but like I said - I still don't care what the origiinal dev said since DS2 is a poor written ending if the franchise should end this way and so I would be thrilled to get DS3.

I agreed before. A game without proper possibility to rebind key on a PC has at least a big design flaw. I still would not call it "bad port" in general - Saints Row 2 is a "bad port". The game is running fine here BUT the controls are not at all optimized for PC. Suggestion: Do not just trow your game on the market, let people talk about it (and let them ask questions) and leave before the discussion is even starting. SOMETIMES talking to POTENTIAL customers, maybe even ANSWERING their questions (which so far you have not done at all) might raise sales. You could i.e. have answered if there is key rebinding planned and may get some customers who don't buy the game because of it missing for now. I bought your game but seeing the non existing feedback from you here in the thread I already regret supporting you. It cannot be too hard to get some feedback - oh mighty publisher.

Yes, you are right. I meanwhile tested it a bit myself and it does not seem to be as simple as changing some letters in it, you have to know the values. It was just a possibility and of course nothing more than a workaround since I completely agree that it's mandatory for a PC game to have rebindable keys from within the game.

Still my friendly advice to try GlovePie stands - if you should have questions regarding this simple little tool feel free to contact me.

Let's just hope that THQNordic in fact is doing more than just throwing games on the market and leave. Let's just hope that they read about your valid complaint of missing key binding for a PC game they just took money from you and let's just hope that they are already trying to patch this.

Betcha NitroRad is tickled pink about this.

I may have spoken too soon. After venturing into the bigger areas, I've started encountering the audio bug quite frequently. I've endured it for some two hours, but I think I may have to suspend my current run until this is fixed because it's gotten to the point that it's annoying the crap out of me.

Thank you for posting, ThomNG. It always means a lot when a developer takes the time to post here.

However, my purchase (along with many others, if the posts here are any indication) is awaiting your confirmation that the key binding issue will be addressed.

And hey, I'm no developer, and thus have no understanding of how difficult these things may be, but I'd still appreciate you at least answering the question, even if that answer is, "I'm sorry, but creating that option would require too much programming time". Maybe such an option is more complex than I am thinking. But I'll never know that if you don't tell us.

Communication with your potential customers is vital.
Communication with people who have actually purchased your game is even more vital.
Even if what you report may not be what we want to hear, doing so at least shows goodwill, which will always far outweigh anything negative which you may report in such communication.

You don't need to answer every single question, but popping in every now and then to address a few common questions would help immensely.

If you haven't followed the conversation: MarkoH01 pointed out there is this Sphinx.ini in a reply to groze.
It's not unreasonable and I thought it's a good idea to try this since I had the impression this is the only (big) thing which groze deemed problematic about this port.

Why should I do this? I'm not getting paid to fix your stuff, you can try it yourself of course but why should I care? (note: groze tried it already, you have to fill in the appropriate scan codes so it's not really user friendly)
Also to begin with I don't have problems with using game controllers on PC. Nowadays if you call yourself a PC gamer I'd be actually surprised if you don't own at least one (modern) controller.

No, I don't want this to be a new standard for PC games. But I also understand that this is a console port which was designed for controller support from the very beginning. I appreciate they have tried to add support for other input devices and also agree there is still a lot of room for improvement in these regards.

But I've always used different kind of peripherals on PC, in the past mainly joysticks and wheels and now I often use controllers like X-Box (360/One). For some games those are an absolute must (platformers mainly).
As it turns out for such console ports they are handy too. (Btw. I also use them to play old platformers by binding controller buttons to keyboard keys)

They probably didn't want to go so far changing actual game content especially when it's need to be dynamic and locale dependent (to show the correct key on screen you have to map scan codes to some keyboard layout), i.e. quite some development and testing efforts.
What they definitely should have done is having all those keys documented! (at least for a standard US layout so people can infer from that)

THQ listed various improvements. They have put at least some work into the port and using an emulator wouldn't really match this.
But yes, you would get bindable keys though :-)

I see. Well there are still hopes they may make them rebindable with an update, but you shouldn't really count on it (it would mean to add some additional and quite complex UI).

Btw. if you want to bind mouse buttons yourself in the meantime this is a neat utility I'd use for such purposes: X-Mouse Button Control

That's exactly my thinking as well. +1

It's even worse because those codes are not the usual ASCII codes but codes used in a special Engine I don't know anything about. Long story short - so far I did not find another solution of rebinding keys except from using third party tools.

And I would have though this criteria would describe a console gamer because ... you know PCs usually never had controllers. This is a recent development. If you buy a PC you will get keyboard and mouse and if you are a bit older you probably are used to these periphals only. It was about two months ago when I first used a controller at all and I still prefer to play several games on keyboard and mouse.

You did - many people did not. This game is aimed to be sold to all people and there is nothing in the description or the requirements that states you need a controller to be able to play this game at all without problems. If the default keybindings would be reasonable I might just give them a slap on the hand for the missing rebinding option but the default (unchangable) bindings are ridiculous like it was already pointed out. So basically you are forced to use a controller and you are forced to like using a controller ... If I want to sell a PC game I make sure that it's playable with normal PC periphals as well - easy as this. The fact that they even have an ini file with the assigned keys also shows that such a rebinding function would not have been that difficult to implement. I also still think that they want to add something in future. In the ini you will find the following comment:

"#= You can override the default keyboard map of our SDL Gamepad back-end here by
#= adding an EngineX keyboard code to a Xbox-style gamepad button entry.
#=
#= The EXKey numeric values are in EXKeyboard.h. Put them in decimal.
#= This is probably a temporary thing."

For me this is an indication that the game has not reached its final state yet.

No, they would only need to build a launcher for the game with rebining options like the ones Unity is using. This launcher only needs to edit the ini file and they are done. It's far from being difficult at all. If these would/could affect the shown keyprompts in game of course I don't know - but with such a launcher people would know which key corresponds to which button AND they could rebind those settings.Sorry to say this - but that is pure lazyness from the devs.

It is never that easy. For this use case you don't want to have keys mapped to ASCII letters because it's everywhere different.
e.g. if you press 'Y' then in a lot of other parts of this world it would be a key located completely somewhere else.

I may be old enough to always have used additional controllers but having modern game controllers on PC is IMHO not a new thing by far.
A lot of platformers on PC have been developed with controllers in the first place. Some games even require a modern controller (I remember Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (2013), a game I like so I'm glad they got away with it).

In case someone doesn't play platformers at all I do understand they may not have such a controller (yet :-).

Although they did add mouse & keyboard support when making this port (which is definitely a good thing for a PC port) I agree they did a subpar job.
I'd also prefer having it fixed in a proper way, i.e. not by updating the requirements :-)

Yes, a launcher or a separate configuration utility is a possibility. But also it is never that easy, especially if you want to be able to bind all kind of input devices like keyboards, game controllers (several buttons and axes) and mouse buttons. Are multiple devices connected? What if I configure with XBox controller 1 and later play with XBox controller 2? And even later have both connected? There is a lot to be considered and tested, with a lot of different hardware and OS configurations. It's never "easy", and I wouldn't assume developers made something that way because of laziness.

Also note you have to compile this utility on every platform you want to support and update every language you claim to support.

Putting it into the game directly would be preferable. Maybe it wouldn't even make much of a difference unless it would require additional art.
(btw. according to your file snippet the game is using SDL, so 3rd party launchers are a possibility as well)

I agree.

I don't think this matters. This port of this game was released now. And if now many PC gamers have controllers then this would be enough.
But maybe my assumption of a lot of PC gamers also owning a controller is just wrong (I was actually hoping that the Steam hardware survey collects such information; it seems like they have removed this [maybe since controllers on PC are often only connected on demand anyway]).

Most games released on PC should work good enough with keyboard controls but they often work better with controllers because (/when) they were developed with an analogue stick in mind (vs. digital input [pressed/depressed] of a keyboard key).
The advantages are a little bit like keyboard vs. wheel in a racing (simulation) game (but not at such extreme of course).

As for an example: A lot of other people didn't like keyboard controls of 'Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons' and I thought it would be a good example. In fact GOG goes so far to say 'Dual-stick Controller required'.
Maybe you can just play everything with keyboard. You haven't mastered the race in Mafia in hard difficulty with keyboard by any chance? :-)

Btw. when I play platformers it's normally 2D gameplay and I'd always prefer controllers.
When talking about a 3D game with 1st or 3rd person free look I'd also prefer to use mouse look in general.

Because I'm a PC gamer and I want to be able to customise controls. And for me this includes controller buttons too.
Not being able to do this would be frustrating indeed, which is also the reason I play on PC platforms because there are tools and possibilities to do whatever I want.

I agree, it would be nice to hear about them about the keybinding issue and also that they are looking into this sound loop bug which doesn't seem to be an isolated case.

Even if the Steam hardware survey would list those it does not say anything because then you would only look at the digital steam marklet but there is a retail market too as there is one without steam as proven here on GOG (most people here don't use steam at all). Anyway: the question remains if one could say "PC optimized" does not need to mean that it does support keyboard and mouse probably and since the PC first and foremost was developed as a business machine and not a gaming console I still think kb+m should at least be usuable without any problems.

I do agree but still there are several people out there who don't use controllers at all because they just are not used to it. Like I already said PC people have grown with using kb+m so you cannot blame them if they want to use their prefered control method which also was the control method that was in mind when the PCs actually were developed. I don't know why exactly the gaming industry started to assume PC gamers should also own a controller and be able to use this. I guess it's mostly because this way it was more easy to port console games to PC and I guess that this is the same that happened here. No need to applaud for being lazy or making it easy imo.

I would agree to say that using two keysets for Brothers is really something special but it's managable after some time. The wheels (I guess there were two in the game) however do not work correctly with kb - it takes minutes to turn them - that was my only real downside playing it with kb then (I did not even own a controller when it was released so I did not have much choice). But yes, I even play Hollow Knight on keyboard and no, I haven't mastered the Mafia race but not because of a missing controller but becasue of the fact that I stopped playing the game even before that mission without a specific reason.

And that is what most people would say - even most critics. But even though somebody is recommending using a controller it's imo not a thing a developer should just assume. It's not that people are asking to get keyboard support for Sphinx that works the same way as the controller - it probably won't. because it was a console game before. All people are asking is a possibility to rebind the keys and imo that is not too much to be asked for.

So you are saying that you prefer to customize your controller but you are also saying that kb/mouse users should not get the same possibility and instead use a controller? Think again - all they want is the same you want: customizable controls.

Nice that we do agree again. I guess if we are continuing this discussion for another few hours we would find compromises for all our little disagreements :)

...which is the largest PC gaming market and if you don't look at what gamers are doing there and what hardware specs they use you probably don't care about gaming at all as a developer.
Sure there may be differences with GOG(-only!?) gamers, but do you really expect THQ Nordic to align there marketing and development on hardcore GOG users?

Also I'm sure a lot of people using another distribution platform besides Steam are actually using multiple ones, often including Steam (e.g. I also use Humble and itch.io).
I personally don't use Steam a lot and I'm generally a DRM-hater, but I do have some games there too.
Then there is GOG Connect which I don't have a use for but apparently there are people happy about this too.

Yes, there is a retail market (especially in Germany) but more PC games are sold digitally and I think I read something about it also outperforming on revenue (may have been US market only though).

The default bindings may be stupid, and not allowing rebinding is inconvenient.
But from a developer perspective I'd say it is usable without problems. At least I don't think it's a reason to say it's such a bad, bad port (which was the original reason I entered discussion).

I'm not sure about what time period we are talking about. PCs were developed a long time ago (when there was no mice in sight). But we are talking about today.
That's why it would be interesting to have some current survey about controller usage + PC gamers.

IMHO playing platformers with game controllers is much superior to using a keyboard. This has nothing to do with console ports or laziness.
(I even prefer to play old keyboard platformers with controllers)

And I'm fine with that, I'd prefer it this way too.


I never said that. In fact I always want to customise controls in nearly every game, and I do be it in-game or with additional tools.

The difference is that since I know this was a console game and know it was always made with a controller in mind my expectations would always be that controller controls are superior, i.e. not a reason to dis this port. But of course still a reason to complain.

Maybe :-)

No, I don't. But again - I was never complaining about the fact that they support controllers I was complaining about the fact that they are calling this a PC game yet they don't correctly support kb+m.

Using inconvenient keys for controlling a game is not something you do "without problems". groze was posting some of those problems.

Not really. We are talking about the definition of "PC gamer" and imo several older PC gamers don't use controllers.

So because YOU are THINKING that platformers are better played with keyboard they ARE superior? I don't have any doubts that YOU are feeling this way but I also know that there are several people who feel differently and their opinion imo is as valid as yours. But why should developers even support keyboard or mouse at all then? I mean - it'S a plattformer and people should by a controller ... so that's it? Basically it's what you are saying here.

Then this is another thing we can agree on.

Like I said I don't mind if controller controls are superior in this game but the kb/m controls are nearly unusuable without any possibility to change it. THAT is my complaint. Even with rebinding controller probably will be superior but it least the game is playable even without using a controller. I also said that I would not say that the port is bad but I would say that it has a big design flaw.

This definition looks easy: it's someone playing games on PC platforms.

What we were actually talking about at this point is how likely it is PC gamers having at least one modern controller and/or if it's OK to demand such thing.

Their age is also irrelevant. If those are "old" gamers still playing games on original DOS machines that's nice for them.
But also old gamers can use modern hardware, including controllers.
(btw. for this game you need to have at least Windows 7 (released 2009) or MacOX 10.9 (relesed 2013), so even if you are an "old gamer" your hardware is likely not older than 10 years)

We are talking about a game released in 2017 and the question how many PC gamers use game controllers in 2017.
Sure, I cannot answer this question but at least every PC gamer I know personally which plays games other than Microsoft Solitaire and web-based games do have one.

(I'm sure you meant controller)
You are presuming developers being lazy but I presume they actually know what they are doing and assume they develop their games with a controller because they like it better this way, and also add keyboard controls.
But not the other way around.

Sure there may be people preferring keyboard controls over controller when playing platformers. I would have assumed that the other way around is the majority but I can't say for sure of course.

Because as you guys said, a lot of PCs have a keyboard and a mouse. But my opinion is still that developers (when talking about platformers) nowadays develop for a controller first but not because of portability with consoles.