» Fri Nov 27, 2015 4:29 pm First off, I love this game within the first hour of playing and know I will be logging hundreds if not thousands of hours.
Unfortunately I am one of the 10% who are left handed. I accept games will be made for the majority righties but I can always get them keybound to work for me. This goes for FO4 too, but it is a bit more painful than most.
Fallout 4 has very poor keybinding flexibility and this is compounded by an inconsistent UI that multiplies the pain. I thought I would list the issues in the chance Beth might be listening. And maybe folks have some suggestions, I know there are some other threads on it that I'll go through.
The three confounding problems are:
- Inability to map keys because they are "reserved". Why is the numpad reserved? Reserved for what? This seems like an easy fix, they just need to take these off reserve status.
- Hard coded bindings. Some of the mappings, such as E and R for getting stuff out of containers, don't appear to have an option to re-bind them. What's the point of offering re-bindings if some of the most commonly pressed keys are hard-coded? These should be able to be re-bound.
- Inconsistent UI. This is a force multiplier of the keybinding pain and keeps both my hands moving all over the keyboard. Examples of completely unnecessary and un-ergonomic UI inconsistencies include:
- At least three different buttons to close UIs, pipboy, dialogs, etc... might be to hit tab button, the esc button, or the pipboy button. We should have one button that can close everything
- At least two different buttons to pick up objects -- say you are panning across a dresser picking stuff up off the top, you use a different key to pick up surface items than the container items, which requires the E key. I like how Beth changed container inventory to just pop up, but they should make it so we can use the same button to pickup container items as we do picking up surface items.
- At least two different directional sets! Being a lefty I use arrows as my directionals, which works fine in FO4. However I went to pick a lock and noticed my arrows don't work on that, I have to use WASD, which must be hard-coded for lockpicking. This seems like a bug and I urge Beth to take a look at that one.
The ideal for PC game ergonomics is that a user should be able to play without taking their mouse hand off the mouse, except for infrequent things like pausing the game and saving. Fallout 4 falls quite short of that for anyone who isn't perfect use case righty.
This is going to be a fun game, it's hard to complain, but please Bethesda, try to bring some relief to these issues!
