[zainny]

What really annoys me about Dark Souls is the shitty PC port. They're still selling tons of copies of the game for PC because of all the silly hype around it, and yet the game is virtually unplayable - even with all the mouse fixes, mods, etc. Why is it acceptable for game developers to completely abandon their customer base and continue to sell a broken product?

I picked up the game during a Steam sale, spent a good few hours trying to make it playable with a variety of mods, fixes, etc. and then just gave up completely. And for those few hours I did play it, nothing about it stood out to me as being incredible or ingenious.

[vacri]

I bought a controller especially for that game and never looked back. This being said, I completed the game right up to just before the final boss fight on kb + mouse... but with the controller, the game is really incredible.

The port is shitty without the third-party fixes, but they also specifically said "we're not PC people, this will be a shitty port". They didn't launch the PC version with a lot of fanfare - and their customer base is on the consoles, not the PCs.

One of the weird things about the port is that the mouse movement is locked - it doesn't matter how quickly you move your mouse or how far, only how long you move it for. You move a set amount given a set length of time. Took me a while to figure it out.

[jamesaguilar]

Which makes sense. They don't want you to be able to turn too fast.

[jswanson]

I love Dark Souls, and constantly recommend it to friends.

And if they say 'Yeah, I picked that up on Steam!' I get really sad.

It feels like a game that is pretty exquisitely tuned, and that tuning is towards playing on a console with a controller. I'd even go so far as to say on a PS3 and a really nice TV.

Like how some people can't stand playing an FPS on consoles, only in reverse.

[vacri]

DS plays just fine with a controller on PC, and as an added bonus, with the graphics fix you get the high res graphics - something that was already there but the consoles never got to see.

[simias]

The consensus seems to be that the game is hardly playable without a controller (by the way, steam has a big warning about that on the game's page in the store).

Some people make do with the mousefix mod (the default mouse targeting behaviour is beyond silly). It's quite a bad port indeed, but it's a good game so I guess it's better than nothing...

If you do a lot of gaming on PC buying a controller can be a pretty good investment anyway, it makes sense for a lot of games.

[frd2]

Played the whole game with just the keyboard. It is perfectly doable - just requires a little bit of time to get used to. Since then it's my favourite game of the last 5 years, a real gem... what I didn't like was the lack of proper information on the screen what buttons do what ( in the inventory and so on ).

[jamesaguilar]

I don't know why people expect to be able to play this with a keyboard. It's designed for a certain input paradigm. Play it with the same or face the impedance mismatch. Nobody complains that wii bowling is unplayable with a GameCube controller.

[vacri]

Games sold on PC usually work fine with kb/mouse, and even shitty console ports are bearable. DS's conversion was particularly bad - and it's not like it's an unusual genre with a new movement paradigm.

[cheald]

DSFix and an Xbox controller makes it perfectly playable, IMO. What problems did you run into?

[nilkn]

I'm going to say first of all that I am a major fan of Dark Souls. So I'm obviously going to be biased here.

Was the PC port rushed? Yes, there's no doubt about it. Is it a broken product, though? No, not at all, because the simple fact is that it was never intended to be played using a keyboard and mouse. The developers, probably at the behest of the publisher, didn't really make that clear for the PC version, and that's a shame, but this game was designed from the ground up for a gamepad to a similar extent that Starcraft is designed for a keyboard and mouse. I think if this was communicated more clearly people would have been less caught off guard by the atrocious keyboard and mouse support in the vanilla PC port.

You need to pick up a gamepad, preferably an Xbox 360 one, to play Dark Souls on the PC the way it was meant to be played.

> And for those few hours I did play it, nothing about it stood out to me as being incredible or ingenious.

Of course, there is no way you can expect to appreciate the game itself if you're struggling with the controls.

[zwdr]

FROM Software didnt intend to port Dark Souls originally, and when they did it after demand from the playerbase it was their first port. Lets hope they learnt something from it.

And making the port actually playable takes three libs, thats not /that/ much: DSfix for a better screen resolution and general candy DSMfix for better mouse controls DSCfix to instantly play with Windows-Live-Friends

[laureny]

> What really annoys me about Dark Souls is the shitty PC port.

With DSFix, it's actually better than the PS3 version, which I never go back to any more.