Gamepadding Through The Secret World

     I've been playing The Secret World off and on for the past month, or so. Everything was going well until I reached the first combat sequence after watching my character fall unconscious outside London's Ealdwic Park. This was when things got rather difficult, and painful, fast. The shooter style combined with the hotbar commands and tab targeting put a bit of a strain on my wrist. The result is that I stopped playing, did a little research, and found the following link on the TSW forums:

http://forums.thesecretworld.com/showthread.php?t=34982

      From there, I downloaded the Xpadder program for about $10:

http://xpadder.com/

     Now I'm sure more than a few of you reading this know of other, better (free) programs and techniques for getting a gamepad to work with The Secret World. I'm also fairly positive the layout pictured isn't the most efficient. However this is my first time trying to set up a gamepad to work with a PC game, so this layout is very much a work in progress.

     What we see here is Set 1 of 3, where I try to put the most useful buttons such as main attacks, movement, tab targeting, and camera. When you first create a new layout, you can select from a list on the Xpadder website to load the image of the controller you are mapping, in this case a Logitech Gamepad F310. I made sure to register the movements of all the analog sticks and buttons with the program. I then went through and assigned key(s) from the keyboard to each button and each direction of the analog stick. The sticks can be assigned as few a 4 direction functions and up to 8, as well as defaults for W,A,S,D and the arrow keys. Clicking the little wrench will show you more options. In order to keep everything organized, I named the buttons after their function by clicking on the green “Abc” area in the Xpadder UI.

     I was able to also bind multiple keyboard functions to one button/analog direction as well. You can do this by clicking on the initial key you want to bind in the Xpadder keyboard interface, then going into the “Advanced” menu to add a second key bind. This helped in setting up the camera movement, since I could map the right click mouse button along with a direction:

     Now here comes the tricky part. Since there are a lot more keys for TSW than just the primary ones featured in Set 1, I needed to make a second Set. Once I created Set 2, I had to link it to Set 1 to be able to switch between the two. The forum post recommended using the “When Held” assignment to one of the triggers/bumpers. Instead, I played around with the “One Way Click” and “Two Way Click” options before realizing that all of these functions needed an anchor point between the sets involved. I decided to stick with the “When Held” function as it was the easiest to work with. I then went through and, still using the TSW forum post as a guide, assigned the next round of commands to Set 2:

     Finally, Set 3 focused on the basic functions of the mouse in interacting with the GUI:

 

     I plan on using this program to assign keys for Age of Conan, as well. Considering that game relies on tab targeting and directional assault on the enemy's flanks, it should come in handy. I hope this this post has been of interest.