Playing Grim Dawn with a Controller is relaxing

Grim Dawn General Discussion
1

I just wanted to add that I played GD with xbox360 Controller through all the Campaign, including the secret boss quests.

And it was glorious!

Why use a controller? Well, unlike the mouse/keyboard, you can sit back on the couch and even socialize while playing. Even though the xbox controller has few buttons, the alternate feature makes it easy to double the number of “hotkeys”, so that’s not an issue. I ran with 12 “hotkeys”, a swap trigger and the autofire trigger. Further, the control of the view angle is fluid and superb.

My original concern was that a controller would be very limited with hotkeys and targeting, but that was not an issue once I figured out the controller mapping available from the GD menu.

The auto-aim works surprisingly well and the zoom/angle is awesome. I often stopped to pan around at various locations just to admire the effort put into the view/terrain/atmosphere.

There are a couple of things that you have to get used to:

  1. Pinpoint locations for grenades, placeables, etc. You get used to judging range and angle for placement. Unlike the pinpoint no-brainer with the mouse, this takes practice. Picking the desiried target mob is similar, but much easier.

  2. Loot: pro and con - pro is that autoaim/move with controller means all that loot doesn’t impact gameplay, so you can leave the filter at any level. Con is that if you really want to just move through and pick up an item = you need the mouse to get that if mobs are still in Los.

However, for these non-combat things, I could not live without the mouse which was usually in arm’s reach:
-inventory fast transfer
-merchant buy/sell
-equipped and inventory item mouse-overs
-skills/devotion menu mouse-overs and changes.
-component applications

99.9% of the combat was just fine with a controller. There are a few areas that are tricky to navigate and one can get pinned if not careful…because unlike using the mouse, you must micromanage the pathing 100% of the time. This is never an issue with trash mobs, though - just kiting the nasty bosses; with a little time taken for area reconnaissance, this is much less of an issue.

Thus with the resoluton of to a few QoL inventory details, the console version should be nice.

2

Good to know , thanks , at the moment thinking of getting a gaming pc for the front room just for the purposes of grim dawn , know for a fact il sink the time into it , thousands of hours on Diablo , hundreds on path of exile , decent trading hasn’t really happened yet on Poe on xbox which I feel holds it back , game is reliant on a good trading economy , roll on grim dawn

3

GD is coming to Xbox at some point in time. Team have been working on it for a while.

4

Nice one , yea I’m aware of this , I’m impatient lol , I’ve been lurking here for a while now , it’s hard to join in sometimes when I’m coming from a platform that currently doesn’t have the game , that and the pc nerds scare me

5

No need to be scared of us. I think several people use controllers to play the game.

6

Thanks , lore reading is where I’m at currently

7

Well, there’s plenty of that to keep you going. :smiley:

8

The scary PC gamers are all on the Total War and Europa Universalis boards…:smiley:

9

Well I caved and bought the game on steam , playing on my daughters gaming pc , she will love that we she gets in , she will love it even more when she gets in from work on my next day off and I’ve unplugged her pc and relocated it to the front room lol, anyway love the game with controller , what really has struck me though is sound design , absolutely awesome , love the ambient sounds , have gone with shaman occultist for first toon , fairly uncomplicated build to play so far, don’t know if there’s any way of tracking quest on actual map though , any that I’ve completed so far I’ve just stumbled on through exploration , hurry up the Xbox version please

10

Depends on what you mean by tracking. If you mean something to point the way, nope. GD doesn’t hold your hand for that sort of thing, you need to explore everywhere to find out of the way quests. As you get near to a quest objective though you will see a star on the mini map.

If you mean quests you’ve found, but haven’t completed yet well, there’s a little thing on the right of the screen called Active Quests. If you click that it’ll list the ones you have, but haven’t completed yet.

11

The star is good , that’s what I was looking for , thank you

12

Im about to do the same thing,hope its easy enough