Stick drift is such a nightmare with modern controllers
@whoisjohn
Posted 4d ago · 5 min read
This is a story about me attempting to play Resident Evil Village with a controller that started to go a big wonky about 6 months ago.
RE games aren't particularly difficult, and now that we can select the difficulty they are even less so. However, in modern-day games these things are geared towards extreme accuracy as far as controller input is concerned and when your controller decides it is going to be pushing in a certain direction then that is just what it is going to do.
There are loads of howto's out there that show you how to fix this on your own and I got about halfway through one of them and their instruction on opening the controller and cleaning things with air and alcohol and decided "screw that". You also have to go through a rather lengthy process of resetting all the settings of the actual controller and well, I guess I am lazy because I don't want to do that.
The stick drift I am experiencing is slight and I notice it in other games a lot more than I did this one because the aim assist is on for me because I am not in the mood for some hard-as-nails game at the moment.
But when you are in the map on RE Village the game because extremely annoying because the little icons on the map are actually quite important for you to know where you are meant to be going next. since I have a slight stick drift I cannot get my cursor to stay on one of the icons and it just becomes this frustrating game of tiny circles with the left stick to find out what the hell this icon even means. Combine this with my less-than-stellar eyesight and we have a problem Houston.
Anyone that has ever played Biohazard or Village knows about how simply touching a locked door tells you that the door is locked and then the system presses you back a step or so and the dialogue goes away... but not when you have stick drift. I would hear the sound me jiggling a lock or a chain over and over again and I can only thank my lucky stars that this wasn't an audio thing that would be screaming "it's locked!" when I ram into the door for the 17th time in a row.
Stick drift apparently is very common and most of the time in the past it was likely caused by a small tiny bit of dust or whatever inside the controller and I was able to dislodge it by just going bananas swirling the controllers in all directions like a madman. However, I think I've reached the point where I can't deal with this frustration anymore and I have Resident Evil to thank for this.
If you have played Village you are probably aware of the fact that you are frequently pursued slowly, but relentlessly by something that if it gets a hold of you, it is going to do a lot of damage to you. This stress that the game creates is exactly what a survival horror game is supposed to do to you. It does not however, allow for a controller that isn't doing what you tell it to do.
In the end, this game convinced me that it is time for me to loosen my purse-strings and shell out the $60 or so that it costs to get a new controller. I'm just thankful that these things come with a 1-year warranty. I don't even know if my current one is more than a year old, but the warranty card is something I got rid of accidentally a long time ago.
If you are more adventurous than I am here is a wikiHow on how to fix it on your own. Once I have my new controller, which is being sent here as I write this, I may get up the balls to actually do what this thing says, just to see if it actually works.
I think compressed air is banned here though because kids were using it to get high or something.
Dating all the way back to the Atari 2600 I have been willing to take these things apart and clean them when an issue like this occurred, but seeing as how they cost as much or more than a game these days, I am far more reluctant to so much as attempt something like that these days.
I will likely start to enjoy gaming a lot more once I get my new controller plugged in and the damn map stays where I want it to for the first time in many moons. Now I just wonder how the problem ever started in the first place.
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