Dungeon Siege was starting to frustrate me.

Not for the normal reason that games frustrate me, which is that they’re hard and I’m a wimp.

Honest!

It was more interface issues than anything else, really.

A couple of the frustrations were caused by running it at 1920×1200 resolution.  The game DOES run at that resolution, and I have to give the developers credit for it, but there are a couple of problems with it.

The first problem is that the game doesn’t adjust its aspect ratio to show you more on the left and right when you go widescreen.  Instead, it crops the screen at the top and bottom, which has the effect of a) always feeling uncomfortably zoomed in and b) having to fight the camera to show you things that you know SHOULD be visible, just slightly off the top of the screen.

The other problem is that stuff like your inventory screen and all the text in the game are rendered at a constant pixel size.  This means that fonts designed to be quite readable on a 1024×768 screen are, well, bloody tiny and hard to read on a modern display, and buttons and item icons are kind of hard to select because they’re also bloody tiny.

So, the first thing I did to relieve frustration was to knock the graphics back down all the way to 1024×768, and suddenly the game got, well, it’s fuzzier, because the scaling isn’t quite perfect when you’re talking an LCD display, but it’s also considerably more readable and I can see things I was missing before.

So that solved the display annoyances, but I was left with the control scheme.

Dungeon Siege has a painfully indirect control scheme.  If you want your party to move somewhere, you point at a place on the map and click the button to tell them to go there.  If you want to fight something, you point at the thing you want to fight and click it.  If you want them to open a box, you click the box, and so on.

Camera controls are also, by default, tied to the mouse, which makes for a lot of accidental view spinning and view correction.

The end result is a surprising amount of wrist cramping and mouse finger fatigue, because you’re constantly moving the mouse and clicking.  It’s worse than playing an FPS, because there’s no breaks in the clicking and you’re never just holding the mouse button down.

If the game had implemented keyboard controls for something as basic as movement, this wouldn’t be an issue, but it’s not flexible in that regard.  It’s really the epitome of “Look!  We’re not a console game! We’re a PC game, for real PC gamers!”

I managed to work around the camera issues by turning off the default camera movement and mapping camera controls to the d-pad on my Nostromo n50, then mapping most of the keyboard controls to buttons on the n50, and this worked out really quite well.  Didn’t fix the mouse finger fatigue problem though.

You in the back laughing, yes, I know “mouse finger fatigue” sounds like a silly thing to whine about.

Then I had, in quick succession, two flashes of inspiration.

The first: “Hey, I wonder if there are any programs out there that would let me use a gamepad as a mouse?”

The second: “Hey, I already have the software that came with my Logitech gamepad installed, I wonder if it does that?”

It was rather surprising, but gratifying, to launch said software and have it not only support emulating a mouse, but automatically detect Dungeon Siege and give me a set of predefined actions for the game.

Those guys at Logitech, they’re awfully sharp.

Anyway, using the gamepad is no substitute for the mouse when it comes to stuff like inventory management, because it really isn’t very precise, but for the purposes of moving my party around the game world, killing things, and looting them… it’s working just fine and my frustration level is WAY down.

Oh, and I ditched a dead-weight character and replaced her with a third packmule, and that’s helping too.

The dungeon I’m currently working through has, again, entirely too many spiders, but at least they’re frost spiders and for some reason I don’t mind white, snow-covered spiders nearly as much as green-and-black, ichor-covered spiders.