binary domain control issues
i finished yakuza 5 the other day, and after 85 hours of that game i need a break before moving onto 0. so, i decided to play the game the yakuza developers made to give themselves a break between 4/dead souls and 5: binary domain. there isn't a modern port of the game, but it did receive a pc port at the time (perhaps an indication of their genuine attempt to appeal to the west). being that it was a japanese pc port from 2012, i expected some issues. i was right to!
immediately i know that keyboard/mouse is out the window, given that this was a console shooter from a japanese developer. there's zero way the game doesn't have some sort of weird keybindings or mouse acceleration issues (pcgw tells me that that is indeed the case). so that leaves gamepad, which i'm fine with. because as they say,
however, the problem is that since 2012 controllers have evolved, and so if you plug basically any controller in that isn't an xbox 360 pad in you're gonna get nonfuctional controls. like, "y-axis aiming is tied to the triggers" nonfunctional. there's a few different solutions to this, most of them annoying. the simplest though is so funny to me. y'see in a lot of pc games, if your controller is not turned on/plugged in before the game starts, the game will refuse to recognize it until you restart the game. binary domain decided to innovate in this area. if you want normal controls, you need to make sure you turn on/plug in your controller after the game is started. i have literally never seen that before and probably never will again.
in another input issue, we have the voice input system, which has you using voice commands to issues squad commands and respond to dialogue.
the problem is that no matter what i tried, i literally could not get it to work. i swapped microphones, i changes settings in windows, i even loaded audacity to make sure i wasn't going insane. eventually i just gave up and disabled the feature altogether. this isn't necessarily a problem, but doing so also creates a sort of vacuum in the battle chatter. because the game was designed with you physically saying "charge!", the player character doesn't actually say that much in gameplay. your squadmate will chew you out for going down in an encounter, and you can tell him to piss off, but dan marshall doesn't actually say it when you just hit x. after an awkward silence big bo responds and calls you an asshole. it's very awkward.
anyway that's all. game seems cool besides that stuff.
edit August 17th 2022:
just as a follow up, i have since experienced two different unique control quirks different from those described here. the first is that for whatever reason analog stick movements are not recognized when it comes to qtes that require use of the stick. there only seems to be one so it's not that big of a deal, but you have to be mindful and use the keyboard to do that qte.
the other was a random moment where I just wasn't able to look to the left or right. this didn't even seem like a gamepad issue since the mouse had the same issue. reloading the checkpoint fixed it so it was a moot point. regardless, this is a game that is constantly adding on new ways to surprise you in funny dumb ways.