During the Steam Christmas Sale I ended up buying Need for Speed: Most Wanted 2012 because it was like $6 or $7 and I'm in the mood for a new racing game to chew up. EA already gave the game away for free in like 2015, but that meant installing "The EA App". I figured having it on Steam would be more convenient.
You'd think so.
It's not! As part of the first time launch, it installs "The EA App" anyway, which also means it found and uninstalled whatever version of Origin I still had (I wasn't aware I'd ever reinstalled Origin since my HDD crash). As part of this process, it also asked me for my EA password, I misread Firefox's stored password incorrectly, and went through the trouble of resetting my EA account with a new password before linking it to Steam. To my surprise, EA's been sitting on my seven year old cloud save from the few minutes I played of this on Origin in 2017, and asks if I want to import it. Sure, I guess.
So that's ten minutes down the drain before I can even boot up the game. Okay, fine, the game finally launches. Gotta wait while it boots up The EA App each time before it boots into the game, gotta wait for the title screen logo animation, gotta wait for a 10-15 second load screen because even though this game came out in 2012 it's gotta ping some always-online "Autolog" leaderboard whatever. Once it connects, it has to do a slow cinematic pan across your car, telling you what your online rivals have done since the last time you connected, and what kind of equipment you have on your car.
All told, every time you boot up Most Wanted 2012, you're looking at a 30-45 second wait before the game actually hands over control and lets you start driving.
Pull the accelerator and instantly Most Wanted SCREAMS at me:
Fair enough. I'm using a Dualshock 4, and the Playstation 4 did not release until over a full year after this game. Click to the menu it's asking of me and see that the control binding menu is awful -- it's one of those super oldschool ones, like binding keys one by one in Doom 2. I have no idea what these buttons are supposed to be in terms of Xbox equivalents, and I realize that Steam has this thing called "Steam Input" that's supposed to be handling all of this anyway. Steam Input generally makes my Dualshock 4 look like an Xbox controller to most games.
I exit out of Most Wanted, force Steam Input to "on" (I was messing with its settings recently, so I thought maybe it was disabled), and relaunch the game again. Wait for the EA App to boot up, gotta wait through the title screen logos, gotta wait 10-15 seconds on a loading screen, gotta wait another 5-10 on the cinematic pan across my car. I have now spent a minute and a half total waiting for this game to boot while I troubleshoot this.
Pull the accelerator. Instead of it complaining about my controller, straight up nothing happens. That's weird. The Start button works, the analog stick seems to work in the pause menu, but the triggers do not. The face buttons also do nothing. Upon checking the settings, that's because Most Wanted has settled on keyboard mode, even though it's clearly accepting some controller input. After poking at it, it does not seem like there's any way to get it to see my controller.
This makes Most Wanted a special game, because a lot of games I play will happily accept that Steam Input is telling it I have an Xbox controller connected even when I absolutely do not. But this is the rare 1% that seems to be incompatible. It's time to bring in the big guns.
Mayflash makes a terrific little passthrough device called the Magic NS, and the general purpose of this device is that it lets you use any controller on any other platform. An Xbox controller on a Playstation? No sweat. A Playstation controller on the Switch? It'll handle it. If you upgrade to the Magic NS2, you even get full gyro support. Every NS device also doubles as a Bluetooth dongle, so you can stay wireless if that's your thing. I love it so much I bought two, because generally they're only about $20.
A Magic NS2 for my Switch... and Magic NS1 for my PC. Strictly for scenarios like this, where a game expects an Xbox controller and Steam Input fails its camouflage.
Plug the NS1 in, connect my Dualshock 4, and once again boot up Most Wanted and wait the 45 seconds to get through the EA app, logos, loading, and the cinematic pan across my car. More than two full minutes now looking at this junk, and that's not counting the time spent outside of the game troubleshooting this in menus or digging out dongles or whatever.
Pull the accelerator... and my car starts to drive! I can steer! It works! Of course it works. The Magic NS never lets me down. I pull up to the first race event...
Press J and K to start the event.
Those are, uh. Those are keyboard keys. I'm using a controller. The controller is fully functional. You don't need to tell me this in keyboard controls. This isn't going to be one of those games, is it? The kind that still tells you everything in the keyboard shortcuts no matter what?
I drop into the menus again and see Most Wanted is still stuck on Keyboard mode and won't let me switch to anything else, even though I'm clearly using a fully functional controller now. This can't be right. But then I remember: Steam Input is still turned on, and when I forced Steam Input to be on, Most Wanted got stuck in this keyboard mode.
Exit out of the game, tell Steam to turn off Steam Input for this specific game only, and relaunch. Wait through all that crap again. We're up to three minutes just waiting for the game to start, and probably closing in on 20 minutes since I first decided I wanted to try Most Wanted.
Pull the accelerator, it works, drive up to the first event, and...
Pull LT and RT to start the event.
FINALLY. HOLY SHIT.
On the plus side: this game controls a lot better than I remember. It's a decent middleground between Criterion's heavier-feeling Hot Pursuit (2011) and the snappier Burnout Paradise. Though I could do with a lot less full screen flashing or the fact that Autolog alerts hide the minimap for some reason.
Not pictured, but the "always online" nature can also be frustrating if you pause, unpause, and find you have to quickly re-pause again a second time. That second pause will actually incur a loading spinner because it hasn't finished syncing with the server from the first pause, apparently. This game is going on 12 years old.
Anyway. This was a nightmare.
HOT BONUS
"The EA App" now starts up with Windows and is nagging me to enter the login credentials I already entered last night. I have to go through extra steps to get it to leave me alone and not do this
In the time Ive been gone, Ive started posting cursed gaming stuff over on the bird app and will post more on youtube, so as a result of my return to Tumblr, I present to you...
What programs or drivers can you suggest to use a DualShock4 with on PC?
I used to use DS4Windows, but that started giving me trouble. Basically, what DS4Windows does is make Windows think you have an Xbox 360 controller connected and it will route DS4 button presses through that. And it works!
But Windows will see two controllers plugged in, and both of them will be mirroring their inputs. It’s fine for games where you have the option to pick one specific controller for all input, but for games with co-op that just automatically assume two controllers means two players, it becomes a bit of a hassle to deal with.
DS4Windows has a specific checkbox to fix this, called “Hide DS4.” This will, as the name implies, make the Dualshock 4 disappear from the Device Manager so that games only see the phantom 360 controller. But using “Hide DS4″ requires a special “Exclusive Mode” that is kind of a pain in the butt to set up. If any other software hooks in to controller input, it can cause DS4Windows to error out of “Exclusive Mode.”
The problem is, a lot of software does this! Depending on your settings, Steam can cause errors in the DS4Windows “Exclusive Mode.” But, most importantly, the GeForce Experience overlay messes up “Exclusive Mode.” This means if you use Shadowplay (or whatever Nvidia calls it now) to capture video, you can’t use DS4Windows. You’d have to turn off the overlay, which means no more video capture, no more extra features.
There are workarounds, I guess. You could use something like OBS for all video capture. But Shadowplay is incredibly convenient because it’s always on, essentially. If I decide, in the middle of playing a game, that I want to capture video, I don’t have to exit out of the game, then open OBS, then reopen the game and start capturing. I just hit ALT+R and it starts recording.
Instead, what I end up doing is just letting Steam handle everything. Steam will detect the Dualshock 4, and map it to Xbox 360 buttons for the most part. There can be some weirdness with that sometimes, but 65% of the time it works the way it should. In the cases where it doesn’t work the way it should, you can tinker with Steam’s settings and usually get it where you want things to be. It’s never unusable, just occasionally very annoying.
Unfortunately “it works 65% of the time” is the best, most consistent solution I’ve found to using a Dualshock 4 on PC.
8BitDo Ultimate 2 получит полную поддержку Steam Input
Одна из проблем с оригинальным контроллером 8BitDo Ultimate 2.4G заключается в том, что Steam Input не видит дополнительные кнопки на задней панели, но, похоже, что с последними обновлениями прошивки 8BitDo Ultimate 2 компания 8BitDo решила эту проблему.
Компания HORI, производитель популярных игровых аксессуаров, представила беспроводной геймпад для Steam. Устройство разрабатывалось совместно с Valve. На странице обновления Steam Input компания Valve подтвердила, что добавила поддержку нового HORIPAD для Steam и "работала с командой HORI, чтобы их контроллер хорошо работал со Steam Input".
