Kritika:REBOOT – XboxOne Controller Setup

Hello. Some people, like me, like to play all games sitting on a couch far from the monitor/tv while using a controller pad. As an old gamer from the 80’s, I have done all of my gaming using gamepads, so I never really clicked with the KB+M setup when I switched to PC gaming. Now, while most single player and some first person games do well with a gamepad, MMOs are usually void territory for them due to button limitation. Most MMOs have 8 or more skills up front, plus all the other commands for movement, special actions, or to call up other menus. Some MMOs bring native controller support with varying success. But for those who don’t even give basic support, we have tools like external keyboard emulators, or the rather robust Steam controller support. In this guide I’ll attempt to teach how to get Kritika’s 16 main skill slots, regular and side attacks, jump and some free buttons to toss utilities of your choice there, using an XBoxOne controller on a Windows 10 PC, all through the magic of Steam Chorded Press activators. This guide may work for other controllers and other Operating Systems, but I cannot guarantee what I cannot test.

First things first. To even have use of a controller here, you must always start Steam as administrator. So if you have Steam running, exit it (not just close it through the x, but to actually select “exit” from the menu), then right click on your Steam shortcut and select “Run as Administrator”. Now I don’t recommend editing your shortcut to always start as admin because some games react badly to it. However, you can create a secondary shortcut and set that to start as admin.

Start the game and go to the training ground in game so you can test your controls “on site”. You can access the first training ground after the intro fights when you are tasked with your actual first mission. In the stage select screen, check the lower right for the training ground. Unlike the old Kritika, training ground is open from the start, so make use of it. Also, note that your skill bars have two keys missing. One on upper row and one on lower row. I used keys 8 and 9, which were not being used, and mapped them to those skill shortcuts using the in game “Controls” menu.

With the game open, alt+tab out of it and go back to the Steam client. Go to your Kritika shortcut, right click on it and select ‘Manage > Controller Configuration’ to access the gamepad screen. Usually, you will see either a default “Gamepad” config with the usual actions for the standard XB1 gamepad, or the game will pull a config at random from one of the already released player configs out there. Before continuing here, I’ll advise you to check other people’s configs. Maybe you will like someone else’s work, and you will save yourself some time. If not, or if you just want to learn how to do it yourself anyway, read on.

We are now going to edit the controller buttons and sticks. For the left analog stick, set ‘Style of Input’ to Directional Pad, Layout to ‘8 way Overlap’ and on the keys themselves, set W for up, A for left, S for down, and D for right. You can set click action to any key of your choice. Click on the ‘Back’ button on screen or press B on your gamepad to go back to the main menu.

Now select the right stick. This will be our mouse movement stick for both the cursor in game and to move the camera. You will set this one to ‘Joystick Mouse’. Go to Additional Settings and set your stick response curve to either linear, or any of the other smoother curves. This is a preference if you want a more responsive cursor/camera, or a more relaxed one. Deadzone shape can be left as cross, but I personally switched it to circle. If you want, you can increase inner deadzone if you are using an XBox 360 pad and want to eliminate the jitter that controller comes with.

The sensitivity sliders are here as well, and you will use them alongside any in game camera speed settings to dictate how fast or slow your camera and cursor move. Slower movement is best for ranged characters that rely more on manual targeting. Faster moves are best for melee characters that need to look around quickly. Lastly, as my personal preference, I set Jump to right stick click action. That way I don’t need to let go of the stick for such action.

Start and Select buttons can be used for Esc and Ctrl keys to open the menu or to just bring up the cursor. The D-pad can be used for other actions like repair, consumable item shortcuts or opening the inventory. Your preference.

Now for the face buttons. First, make sure you leave both triggers and both bumpers empty. Do not add anything to those, as we will be needing them for the chorded press feature. Technically you can add stuff to them, but make sure what you add there doesn’t conflict with what we will be doing next. Anyway, select the buttons pad (the A,B,X,Y section from the main menu). Here we will be setting up our skill shortcut bars.

To start, select a button. You will see one of two screens. If you see a screen with a drawing of a keyboard, a mouse and a controller, switch to the activators screen by either pressing ‘Select’ on your gamepad or clicking on the Activators button near the lower right of the screen. In case you can’t access the activators screen, exit the config and open it again. This is a mild bug with the Steam client. Once you can access the activators screen, you should see a single action named “Regular Press”. Set the binding there to a key of your preference. Maybe something you will use a lot and want to have easily available.

Leave the rest of the settings as they are and press the “Add Activator” button for a new activator to be created. On the new activator, click where it reads “Regular Press” and change it to “Chorded press” (you will have to scroll down on the drop down menu to see it). What this will do is that for the action to happen, one button must be held while pressing on the assigned button. For the held button, we will use our triggers and bumpers, pretty much copying behaviors of games like Closers Online and Tera. Here, set Binding to a skill key, and set the chorded button to one bumper or trigger of your choice. Set ‘Interruptable’ to Off to prevent the regular press action to overlap it. Now add another activator and repeat the process, setting up the next key while using another bumper or trigger as chord button. Do this until you have used up all bumpers and triggers. In the end you should have 5 actions on a single face button. You will do this for the next three buttons for a total of 20 actions on 4 buttons.

As an example, in my case I set the regular action face buttons to Interact on A, Left mouse regular attack on X, Evade on B and extra attack right mouse on Y. Then I set skills 1,2,3,4 to buttons A,X,B,Y respectively while holding left bumper. The next batch of skills were set to A,X,B,Y while holding the right bumper. And the last two batches were the same thing but using the triggers as chord buttons.

>>>It’s important to note that for the triggers to function as chords, only the Full Press option seems to work. So select Full Press and leave Soft press untouched.<<<

While it’s possible to add controller support for this game, know that it’s not all completely smooth. First, as I said before, Steam must be always run as admin for it to register. Second, you will get no button prompts on screen so you will have to memorize which button combination does what. Third, I found a small bug. If while editing your controls you close the controller config window, you will have to close the game as well because all controls will cease to function for the session. Restarting the game will fix it. Also, while you can use the joystick to move your mouse cursor and your designated button for left click to navigate, you shouldn’t fully ditch your KB+M, as you may need it for any other actions you couldn’t stick on the controller, like chat or all the other window pop ups. And lastly, mouse cursor and camera work best with a mouse, and it’s impossible to get anything more precise than that. Remembering these limitations and working with them will still give you a very entertaining experience.