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one-armed band… er Jedi

Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2012 11:21 pm
by Galahad
I'm sure some of you guys have played Star Wars the Old Republic and Skyrim. Are those games that could be played with one hand or adapted to a joystick, or do they require a lot of simultaneous input?

Posted: Fri Feb 03, 2012 12:18 am
by Rusty
Skyrim (and most other PC games) could have enough commands mapped to a multi-key mouse that one handed use would be practical. The default mapping is the movement keys to WASD and the "look around and steer" is done with the mouse.

My mother has had some success with mapping the "go forward" key to a third mouse button, and some high end gaming mice have a rather large number of keys. I play Skyrim on the XBox360 controller, which uses a total of 14 "keys" distributed over it's surface, as well as two depressable analog sticks, technically counting as 16 command entering features beyond movement.

The Razer Naga Epic mouse has 17 programmable keys on it, which through the PC game UI should be configurable to essentially cover everything you "need", some gaming mice like this also have multiple profiles you can toggle, allowing you to hot swap out the commands each key gives.

In general, most games will not require you to interact with them with more commands than that. Particularly modern games made for both PC and XBox, such as skyrim, the general upper limit is 16 commands beyond looking around and moving, after which players can no longer use a controller in any sane way. For skyrim, this involved combining a system menu usually accessed by pausing, from which one can save or load games, change settings, and exit the game, with the quest journal and other in game features.

If you can occasionally use the keyboard, than you should, with a gaming mouse of adequately ridiculous volume of keys, consider yourself armed to play any game on the market, regardless of how many arms you really have.

Link for razer naga epic:

http://www.google.com/products/catalog? ... KACEPMCMAw

Posted: Fri Feb 03, 2012 12:41 pm
by Avilister
If you're investing in a new gaming mouse, the Naga Epic is overboard (for pretty much anyone). I'd recommend the Naga which is frequently $30-$50 cheaper and comes with universally rave reviews. I've considered buying one myself, but I'm super cheap: http://store.razerzone.com/store/razeru ... .169418900 The functionality difference between the two is going to be effectively nil, so why pay more? It is worth noting that products like the Naga will also allow you to map their buttons to modifier keys like ctrl, shift, and alt which will potentially double or triple the number of remaining buttons if pressed in combination.

Also of note, at least for MMOs, you can play pretty much everything with a normal 3-5 button mouse if you're not needing to move and use abilities at the same time. You can hold the left and right click buttons to move forward by default (there's also autorun mapped to one of them by default, I think mouse4 on a typical 5 button mouse), and you can simply click on the abilities in the action bars to activate them.

That said, while something like SWTOR could be played with one hand, I wouldn't recommend much PVP. Even people who spring for the Naga or products like it will typically still use one hand for movement and maybe a small number of other abilities while using the Naga's impressive array of mouse keys for everything else. I'd say you could pretty easily do most of the rest of the content, though. The classes are fairly varied - there's almost certainly one that would mesh well with a one-handed play-style.

Posted: Sun Feb 12, 2012 12:23 am
by Avilister
Foot pedal for your consideration:
http://www.gamingmouse.com/gaming/fragpedal/quad/

WoW SteelSeries mouse = meh

Posted: Wed Mar 07, 2012 5:54 pm
by durden
Wish I bought a Naga when I was in the market. SteelSeries makes a flashy, shiny thing, but after heavy wear from a person with no life it loses that shiny coating and looks all yuck.

Found that I could play Starcraft II just fine, but did not map the keys to anything. Probably why I was in Platinum league and not Diamond. That and me not being Asian.

Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2012 3:54 pm
by Galahad
I bought SWTOR and have been playing it fine on my 5-button mouse. However, my next mouse will probably be a Naga. Thanks for all your input.

No one has said anything yet about Skyrim, are the controls similar or is that it's own world of complexity? I occasionally see people here in the house playing it on the X-Box and I'm really interested in trying it. But I'd rather know whether I can even play it before I plunk down the money...

Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2012 9:08 pm
by rydi
that's a steven or adam question probably. seems like you could, at least from watching others, but not sure.