Trying to play Fable

I have a teenage nephew, who owns a XBox. Feeling particularly generous on my last visit, he let me play Fable on his XBox for half an hour or so. I liked it, and so I bought the PC version, Fable : The Lost Chapters. I connect my USB dual-stick gamepad to my PC, check that it's recognized okay by Windows, install Fable, and start the game. Doh! In spite of being definitively designed to be played with a gamepad on the XBox, using a gamepad on the PC is not an option. How stupid!

Instead you move your character with WASD keys (or you can chose arrow keys if you are left-handed), and the camera with the mouse. Now I wouldn't mind that, if the camera followed my character, but no: If you turn, the camera doesn't turn with you, and you need to move the mouse at the same time to keep it behind your character. Even worse, that sort of camera control makes the camera move all over the place, and after a short while I get the famous video game nausea. I fiddled with the options and turned down the camera sensitivity, but I'm not sure I will be able to play this at all.

Meanwhile X3 Reunion gains some sympathy points by automatically recognizing my gamepad, and allowing me to control my space ship with the pad. I might need to reconfigure the buttons, the fire button is not where I would want it to be, but otherwise the controls of X3 are just fine. I just need to take the time to learn them, there are about a million different buttons to press.

In the MMORPG department, both FFXI and City of Heroes/Villains can be controlled with a gamepad. Actually FFXI is so gamepad-centric that playing it with a keyboard will drive you crazy. Unfortunately not many other games can be controlled with a gamepad, even if it would make sense. I do like moving with the left stick and controlling the camera with the right stick. In addition to the two sticks, my gamepad has a D-pad for menu navigation, and 12 buttons. Would be perfect to control a game like World of Warcraft, but WoW can't be controlled with a joystick or gamepad.

Okay, there are lots of people that don't like gamepads and who prefer keyboard / mouse control. No problem, I don't demand that keyboard / mouse control should be abandoned. I just would like more games to offer the *option* to use a gamepad. Because often it would make sense, gamepads are designed to control games, keyboards and mouses are designed to do serious office work. And especially games which have been designed to run with a gamepad on a console should offer the same option on the PC, it would be a lot easier.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:41 AM Permanent Link