I bought the Witcher 2 quite a while back, since I liked the first part a lot. Never got around to playing it, so with all the rage around TW3, I thought, let's finally play TW2 first.

I stopped at the configuration tool.
When I saw that certain essential keys were blocked from re-assigning.
WTF?

Is there any way this can be properly circumvented?
I have found the Input_******.ini files. But there are not all keys of the keyboard mentioned by name, I have no idea what they might call them.
There are, for example, no NumPad keys mentioned...
(I did not try yet whether fiddling this this even works...)

Thanks for any helpful pointers.

----
I feel like blowing off some steam here, although we're on GOG ;-)
[rant]
I refuse to play the game this way. Unacceptable.
It may be a good game, but not that great that I will learn arbitrary new controls for it.

To the one who is responsible for this decision:
You ought to be punished. HARD.
Is this a f*****g 1990's game? (Well IIRC even Daggerfall had better custom key bindability)

My guess is that, again, some self-absorbed game designer thought everybody must get it his (or her) way, period.
I don't think it's a case of "let's have the summer intern do the input system, for it's so easy" this time, as there is partial customizability.
If it's a "full customizability didn't work completely and it's low priority", even worse.
Playability should be pretty frikkin high priority, or all the rest is a case for the dumpster.
In fact I have ditched (as in, returned for money back) games which incorporate such a stupid blunder.

WHY the heck make it "sorta customizable" at all? It's pointless.
A game that prevents me from using my standard controls for those actions which are shared between most games (including similar if not exactly the same kind of actions), is a useless piece of you know what.
[/rant]

'I refuse to play the game this way. Unacceptable.
It may be a good game, but not that great that I will learn arbitrary new controls for it.

To the one who is responsible for this decision:
You ought to be punished. HARD.

'Is this a f*****g 1990's game? (Well IIRC even Daggerfall had better custom key bindability)'

That's because those games were made when keyboard and mouse and a joystick were what most games were designed to be played with.

Nowadays most games are designed to be played with a controller.

I think it's something that will become more common in PC gaming too. Although kb+m are still a preferred method of control in some games I feel it is becoming outdated in favor of the more simple console controller.

You mean, gamepad?
It's b/c of the laziness of the developers to also implement proper controls.
It is easy enough to do if you are a team who is always doing PC ports also...

The gamepad is a vastly inferior means to control games where quickly & accurately turning around and performing actions while doing so is of advantage.
Games where this is not of advantage are probably boring.

So many things are ruined because the average consolero must be served.
What a shame.

Or shorter: I am not obliged to welcome this trend, and quite frankly, I don't.
It simply means I will be buying fewer and fewer games.
Too bad. More time for other hobbies then I guess.

Outcast's controls were fine, I could at least set every key I wanted, no arbitrary fixed shit.
The only thing that needed getting used to was that, if memory serves me correctly, you need to control two turning movements at the same time - aiming and the walking / riding direction, which IMO is quite nice as more realistic.
I.e. not limited - the opposite.
EDIT:
In fact, now remembering combats - I found the controls to be so efficient that even combats with a lot going on was only a slight challenge at times even when using the lower weapons to save "precious ammo", lol. Just given enough time to dance around and in between the enemies avoiding fire while shooting one of them...
Especially fun riding a twon-ha and firing from its back with one of the more rough weapons.

The voice acting was different in different languages.
In German, it was fine.
I disagree about things like poor script, story etc. It was a lot better than anything I had played before, and that was in 2001 or so. I played a lot of the cames coming out back then.
This game was made in 1999 ! (development started 4 years before that)
Show one that even gets close from that era.
None that I'm aware of had this kind of complex modeled social system connected to the story to interact with.
If you apply Witcher III standard to 1999, you can't be helped.

I am curious - if you haven't played it through, how do you know the story is terrible?
(I assume you didn't, given your description, unless you're masochistic)
What's that light flashing... oh, the BS detector

Short answer is I didn't play it through. I don't need to play a whole game through to realize its story is basically an adaptation of Tintin set in a Planet of The Apes/Stargate setting. Plus, the voice acting may be good in German and French, but it's downright appalling in English.

I love old action-adventure games, in fact, I grew up playing those games, along with point & click adventure titles, and Outcast has a lot of issues when compared to good action-adventures; I understand what it did good and why it was groundbreaking, but to me it's more like an artifact, a piece of video game history showing the foundations of what was to become the modern open-world sandbox action-adventure (a genre I'm not particularly fond of). Outcast tries to be a lot of things at the same time, and it ends up not doing any of them particularly well.

If you want to try an action-adventure game that's *actually* really good in pretty much every department, I'd recommend Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver (which also came out in 1999 and doesn't have any of the problems Outcast has) or Beyond Good & Evil, arguably the last "pure" action-adventure to be made. Both those titles have awesome voice acting (the Legacy of Kain series is particularly well-known for its stellar, engaging acting), both of them have enthralling stories that manage to grip you right from the get-go, instead of Outcast's "here, we'll dump you in this not very interesting setting with not very interesting characters that look exactly the same, with awful people voicing them, give you a lot of exposition in the tutorial village and then release you in the world without an actual clue of what to do besides roaming around and trying to get items and save this world from... some... evil guys?" and both play nicely and have fluid gameplay all around (well, for the time of their release, that is).

I don't know a lot about Outcast's director, but I didn't get the best of impressions of the guy when they were pitching an Outcast remake on Kickstarter. He came across as arrogant and cocky and I don't like it when game directors outright think of their games as some sort of holy grail in the video gaming industry, which is what he sounded like when talking about Outcast.

Sounds ridiculous. What makes stories good are things like plot twists, and I enjoyed some of the references to other media or historical events.
Yes you do need to play it sufficiently through to evaluate the story, the similarities to general settings with other media are superficial.
If you don't generally enjoy the perceived setting, sucks for you, but to turn "I don't like such settings" into "the story is bad although I don't know jack" is a bit of a stretch.

Btw, I played Outcast several times and didn't encounter any problems, besides a technical one of the "computer too fast" which was fixed.
Gameplay wise, the most frequent complaints I heard were that basically OC wasn't a rail-shooter "tell me what to do every step, for I'm too stupid and unimaginative". Oh boy.
Yeah, Outcast tried to do a lot of things, and IMO succeeded.
Even though the average shooter fan who tried it might have been a bit too challenged (and if it's to find out what to do). Now that really is ridiculous.
I have played soul reaver. And that's your recommendation as "better than outcast" or "play that if you wanted to like outcast" ?
It's been a while, but from what I remember, it is an okay game, but rather straightforward & bland,
to put that anywhere near Outcast is just silly.

Also I'm not sure what's interesting about the story of Soul Reaver. Typical fantasy magic blah chewed for the 62341249th time. That I might try out, what I have read about that actually sounded like it had some substance to it (the game).
You just tempted me, GOG has it on sale right now... Well, as I said, you are dead wrong about the story & gameplay, and that you've "got it" from playing a little while, if that's what you got from it.
Here you do sound somewhat like one of those short attention span "rail shooter guys".
Yeah, it's really hard to know what to do if killing everything on sight or some obvious pulling of levers & switches isn't going to cut it. And you have to actually *talk to people*, understand their problems & how they're connected to the rest of the modelled society to know what to do.

But yeah, not all of the NPCs you "have to" interact with are special nor are they pieces to a grand fairytale.
You have to find out who is how important, and how they tick. Many play only a small role.
And that's good.

But if the English voice acting really was that bad - I can understand that this may be destroying things quite a bit, it ruins the overall athmosphere and how things fit together, and may make it not very tempting to even try play further when you have to cringe whenever anybody says something.
It's quite inaccurate to say "the game has bad voice acting", one of the localizations has.
Apparently there are a lot of English speaking people who aren't bothered too much, though.


Average NPC skin / model recycling, well Outcast is not by a long shot the only game esp. of that time that does this.
Plus, it already needed a lot of RAM for all the graphics goodies.
Don't forget that the game looked incredibly better than any of the typical 3DFX VooDoo based games back then, the gfx cards of the time could not render beautifully like what Outcast all did in software. It's a compromise that probably had to be made. Irrelevant.