I recently got Grim Dawn and, so far, I’m loving it. One of the features that really blew me away was the Steam Controller integration, because I haven’t seen many games actually bother to set-up things like in game actions and the hot bar showing what key the abilities are mapped to is a nice touch. Unfortunately, after playing the game for a little bit and trying to put together my own config, I ran into a few points that didn’t work as well.
The biggest issue is the super hard divide between controller input and mouse input. This occurs at both the control level and the UI level and undermines one of the Steam Controller’s greatest strengths.
At the control level, it seems impossible to get analog stick movement and mouse aiming to work together. I’d like to be able to use the analog stick for movement and the right pad for aiming my abilities (particularly AoEs) and selecting targets. However, if I use the pad as a mouse it breaks analog movement and using the analog stick breaks mouse aiming. In other games, I’d just set the analog stick to wasd and use KB+M for everything, but that’s not actually an option in Grim Dawn and would likely break profile switching either way.
It would be nice if there was a way to use wasd for movement and/or make it so using the mouse doesn’t automatically switch profiles.
UI is probably the more annoying issue. When the game switches to controller mode, you lose access to the right and left click ability slots and the second ability bar. This loses you 14 slots (assuming the L&R slots also flip with the ability bar) and some organizational power (I would like to have toggle-able buffs on the second bar, since I don’t use them often and don’t want to accidentally click them). It also makes it so I’m not entirely sure what counts as a primary attack for the purpose of abilities that give you bonuses when used as primary.
I can understand needing to disable those slots for a normal controller, but the Steam Controller can very easily handle them. It would be nice if there was an option to force a specific type of UI.
Bonus Points: Steam recently introduced radial menus for the SC and they’re great for things like action bars. They’d be even better if, when you set them to an action using the predefined actions, they could grab the game could pass them the appropriate icon for the ability slot. Sort-of as a reverse of the ability slot showing the SC button prompt.
All of the bonus points: It would be utterly amazing if it could also pass the cool downs, either in a numerical form or via shading like on the hot bar.
Thank you for you trouble and the great game.