Review of OpenMW Experience by My Girlfriend

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Greendogo
Posts: 1467
Joined: 26 Aug 2011, 02:04

Review of OpenMW Experience by My Girlfriend

Post by Greendogo »

My girlfriend graciously agreed to check out OpenMW the other day since it ostensibly has controller support and she's taken to playing games on her 4K television from bed with an Xbox One controller. I took the opportunity to write down her impressions of the usability of the engine using a game-pad.

First of all, she was super impressed by the engine from a technical point of view. She has been wanting to replay Morrowind for a long time but since it doesn't support game-pads natively she was resigned to never play Morrowind again before I told her about OpenMW. I think she said she originally played it on the Xbox original.

She liked how OpenMW ran on her wimpy computer and the fact that so many long-standing bugs were fixed inside the engine (like the month fix). She looks forward to playing OpenMW in the future when the AI has been beefed up and when several usability changes are made so that game-pads are better supported. Below are her observations:
  1. Using the joysticks to control the mouse is the absolute worst. She noted that using the joysticks to control the mouse made inventory and window management such a time-sink that it basically made her quit eventually.
  2. She showed me several instances of game-pad double-clicking where she'd select a dialogue topic and it would select the dialogue once when she pushed A with the mouse on it and once when she released the button if she kept the mouse over the topic (this is not what we want). This is probably the same situation as what was happening with Bug #3978, but will be filed as a separate issue since this behavior has already been fixed with containers.
  3. I believe this is different than #2 above, but when she did character creation on the boat, any press of the A button (such as selecting a different hair style or race) would progress the char gen menu like she had pressed the "done" button.
  4. She made we watch her change her outfits and select spells and weapons to prove to me how unusable the game-pad mouse solution is. She noted that it's a vast improvement over Vanilla Morrowind which can't even use a gamepad, so she was thankful for that, but noted she still couldn't enjoy playing OpenMW with a controller until she could select items without resorting to moving a mouse cursor over them.
  5. She said she didn't observe a change in the speed of running or the height of jumping when she ran out of Fatigue. I don't know if this observation is accurate because I don't remember how it should be.
  6. Assassin spawned every time she would sleep. First assassin spawns, hurts her character, she runs away to a safe spot and then sleeps, second assassin spawns and kills her. I think this might be normal Vanilla behavior, but she wanted me to include it here.
  7. As mentioned in the other post I made specifically regarding Assassins - guards wouldn't help her fight off assassins, and again, we don't remember if this is Vanilla behavior.
  8. Annoyingly we couldn't get the game's audio to output over her HDMI to the television, even when the rest of the applications and the operating system put it out on the surround sound she has connected to her television. This is an active bug here: #2357
Conclusion:
There's a lot of work before OpenMW allows comfortable playthroughs with a gamepad/controller. To this end I've compiled a few GUI-Gamepad related Feature reports I'll post on the forums soon for feedback before I submit them to the Bug Tracker.
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drummyfish
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Joined: 22 Oct 2017, 10:13
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Re: Review of OpenMW Experience by My Girlfriend

Post by drummyfish »

Today I was testing a new char and got the assassins at first sleep too, I ran towards guards to protect me but they did nothing, just as you say. I gotta check this out in vanilla.

EDIT: Vanilla observation - I had to sleep like 5 times (for 24 hours) before I got the assassins on me, guards didn't help.
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akortunov
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Joined: 13 Mar 2017, 13:49
Location: Samara, Russian Federation

Re: Review of OpenMW Experience by My Girlfriend

Post by akortunov »

Greendogo wrote: 19 Nov 2017, 23:19 She said she didn't observe a change in the speed of running or the height of jumping when she ran out of Fatigue.
IIRC, run speed does npt depend on player's fatigue level.
Fatigue level affects the jump speed, according to Npc::getJump(), but not as a direct multiplier, so a difference may be very small.
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