Elden Ring Controls Pc
Christopher Caldera
Good news, star admirals with decent CPM! Gearbox and Blackbird Interactive's strategy escapade Homeworld 3 has a demo on Steam. It's been live for a few days, actually, but whether due to the bombardment of other Steam Fest goodies or my being led astray by the similar-but-nerdier Nebulous: Fleet Command, I didn't try it till last night. The demo includes a tutorial mission, four maps and the War Games mode, a one-to-three player affair which essentially turns Homeworld into a roguelike - pitching you up against unpredictable opposition while unlocking new fleets and doling out Artifacts that augment your vessels.
If you already have your heart set on the game, you might feel like waiting till the space sim's full release on March 8th (Feb 8th update: it's been delayed till May 13th). But here's the kicker, O would-be Commander Adama: any War Games progress you make in the demo - Steam link here - will transfer to the final release. Besides, I have a feeling you'll want to give the controls a try before buying.
Homeworld 3 gives you a choice of two, somewhat deceptively-named camera control schemes, "modern" and "classic", which determine whether you'll need to say, right-click to engage WASD camera movement, or whether you can mouse-wheel-zoom right through the ship you're locked onto. Neither system feels intuitive, with much of the tutorial given over to belabouring their differences, and there's been a certain amount of player pushback on the Steam forums and Reddit.
Part of the problem is that Homeworld 3's encounter design emphasises precise control more than its predecessors. One of the threequel's headline selling points is the ability to have units take cover behind larger celestial objects, including your own capital ships. There's also more in the way of micromanaging formations than I remember from Homeworld Cataclysm, the last Homeworld outing I played properly, with different groupings suiting specific combinations of little and large starcraft. Interceptors gain a defensive advantage when they fly in a V, for example.
There's a slow-mo option to alleviate the stress of managing fleets. You can spin it up from almost-stasis to 25%, 50% and 75% of real-time. Slowing time also gives you a chance to admire each ship's workings, of course - turrets swivelling, hulls blackening under fire, smaller ships emerging from hangar bays, all manner of greebly wonderment. The maps are as gorgeous as the ships. It's been decades since the last brand new Homeworld game, but somehow no other space series has ever managed quite the same majestic underwater ambience, with cubic lightyears wrought in hazy shades of blue and purple.
I'm surprised by how finicky Homeworld 3 feels in the hands, but I feel like I'll acclimatise with practice - and I'm prepared to put up with a fair amount of unwieldy camera behaviour for the sake of a new Homeworld single player campaign. What's the story this time? "Since the end of Homeworld 2, the galaxy enjoyed an age of abundance thanks to the Hyperspace Gate Network," the Steam page details. "Cycles of plenty and war have come and gone. Now the gates themselves are catastrophically failing and Karan, who has passed into myth and religious idolatry, is the key to the mystery threatening a galaxy's future."
The Karan here is Karan S'jet, visionary neuroscientist and Cortana-style cyborg soul of the original game's Mothership. In Homeworld 3 she's been replaced as Mothership-minder by her apparent descendant, Imogen S'jet. Amongst other things, this means that Homeworld 3 will avoid any undesired Twitter popularity resulting from somebody misspelling the Karen meme.
After years languishing in apparent legal limbo, the fan-favorite N64 game GoldenEye 007 has finally returned to modern consoles. The developer of the original game, Rare, has since been acquired by Microsoft, so both the Nintendo Switch and Xbox consoles received the game simultaneously as part of some kind of 007 custody agreement. Unfortunately, like many divorces, one parent has their shit together and the other one clearly doesn't. The Switch default controls are, in a word, terrible.
I wasn't sure if I would replay the entire game from my youth, but I liked the idea of at least revisiting it on a handheld, so I fired up the Switch version first. I started the Dam level and figured I'd find my bearings as I explored. Immediately I moved right in front of a guard, and mashed buttons wildly until I found the one that shot him. I crossed the bridge, awkwardly dispatched a few more guards, and then found myself staring up at the sky, somehow? I made it through the stage mostly by just hip-shotting my way through legions of Russian guards thanks to the generous aim-assist of Agent (aka Easy) mode.
You see, on Switch, the default controls are virtually the exact opposite of every single thing you'd expect. The left stick looks and moves forward and backward, and the right stick strafes and looks. The D-pad also strafes. Either shoulder button aims down sights, but only the ZL button fires your weapon. The ZR button, the one you'd traditionally imagine firing a gun, does absolutely nothing. The B button reloads and opens doors and the A button changes weapons. X looks up and Y strafes left, for some reason? What is this? What even is this?
I briefly cycled through the other control options, but they were all different flavors of bad. The core problem seems to come down to the ZR button simply being off-limits for button mapping. The game is running in an N64 emulator, so it's assuming you're using an actual N64 controller and mapping the Switch buttons to specific N64 inputs. As a result, every control configuration has to place the fire button on ZL or a face button and then organize the rest of the controls around that.
Maybe these controls, the ones that feel like they were designed as part of some cruel social experiment on gamers, are actually reminiscent of the ones found on the original N64; I don't know. Frankly, I don't want to know. The Nintendo 64 controller was a bizarre three-uddered monstrosity by itself so of course a modern controller doesn't map cleanly onto its interface. The real question is why you would even try.
For the sake of curiosity I went ahead and downloaded it onto my Xbox as well and to my shock, it works just fine. The buttons are mapped to the places you would imagine they would be mapped to. I changed my weapon by tapping the Y button. I aimed down sights and shot using the correct shoulder buttons. It's a little clunky, as you'd probably expect from any modern port of a very old game, but it functions. Compared to the Switch port, it's Call of Duty.
There is a weird, backwards hacky way to get modern(-ish) controls into GoldenEye 007 on Switch. That option wasn't available to me, as the button remapping wasn't available on my Split Pad Pro controller. I wouldn't fault anyone for trying it out--especially if the Switch is your only option, and you're aching for that sweet nostalgia. Switch is also the only one with online multiplayer, so you'll need to find some kind of acceptable solution if you want to frustrate your faraway friends by picking Oddjob in every match.
But if you have a choice, and don't mind the lack of online play, just do yourself a favor and play the Xbox version. It may not be as accurate to the original, but it feels correct. No extra work or hoops required.
Perri Karyal, a video-game and variety streaming-video broadcaster, has created a way to play games with her brain waves. Karyal, who hosts a regular show on twitch.tv, has been using a custom controller that reads electroencephalogram signals (EEG) to play the popular video game Elden Ring since earlier this year. This month, Karyal demonstrated a fully hands-free version of the controller live on her stream.
Karyal has completed the game using early versions of the system, which could produce only a small number of inputs. But she has since extended her homemade tech to recognize enough distinct EEG patterns to replace every input she needs to play the game. When combined with a pair of headset-mounted accelerometers that replace character movement and camera controls, the headset becomes a complete, hands-free game controller.
Michael Nolan is a writer and reporter covering developments in neuroscience, neurotechnology, biometric systems and data privacy. Before that, he spent nearly a decade wrangling biomedical data for a number of labs in academia and industry. Before that he received a masters degree in electrical engineering from the University of Rochester.
Elden Ring received its first update on Thursday, with full patch notes since issued by publisher Bandai Namco Entertainment, as the title rolls out across the globe. The update sets out to tackle various looming issues in preparation for the game's slated Feb. 25 release, promising "improve the stability of the gameplay" on console and PC.
Elden Ring marks the latest action role-playing game (RPG) developed by FromSoftware, with early reviews now live, positioning it as one of the best-rated video games of all time. It delivers the challenge of the studio's previous projects like, Dark Souls and Bloodborne, and with input from George R. R. Martin of Game of Thrones fame, also hosts a deep universe to explore.
The latest Elden Ring patch delivers refinements upon some initial complaints, aiming to improve console and PC performance, addressing frame rate drops "under certain conditions." The update also brings changes to balancing and controls, plus miscellaneous bugs ahead of launch.
Bandai Namco has also reiterated that ray tracing support remains in the pipeline, as previously announced for a later post-launch update. The publisher has previously announced a planned release on Xbox Series X, PS5, and PC, via a free update for all players.
Our Elden Ring review describes the title as a "masterclass in open-world game design," delivering FromSoftware's best project to date. "For players willing to embrace the challenge and defeat seemingly insurmountable foes, Elden Ring is, without question, one of the greatest RPGs ever made," stated Windows Central's Miles Dompier.
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