Mapping keys - what's your preference?

[mattderes]

I've been playing Skyrim since the midnight release, but all my hours (until a few days ago) were spent on the 360. Now I'm on the PC (so I can get me some mods!) and I've noticed that the default keys used seem very unintuitive to me. Obviously I could fiddle around with them myself until settling on something I like, but I would like to hear from people who've already been through the trials.

 

On a related note, has anyone else swapped the left and right mouse buttons? It just seems weird to me to map the right arm onto the left mouse button.

[cdcooley]

I find that most of the awkwardness of the key bindings are that many (but not all) of the are linked together and do different things in different menu modes. If you remap something to be "intuitive" in one mode it might be really strange in another. It's also possible to rebind things in a way that lead to conflicts and sometimes the on-screen hints about what keys do don't change when you remap keys. If something really bothers you then change it, but unless you have a specific layout you use with other games that gives you habits that are hard to break (like space being activate and E being jump) then you're probably better off just playing with the defaults for a while until you get used to them.

 

One exception is the mouse button mapping. There's a tradition in many games that left mouse button is attack and right is block which is probably the reason they are mapped the way they are. If it bothers you swap them, I know plenty of people do. (But also be prepared to need to use the right button in other cases where you might expect to have to use the left one.)

[mattderes]

Good point about the remapping not working the same in all modes. I'll have to play around a bit. I guess what I find counter-intuitive is that, if your left hand is over the WASD keys, your thumb is right on the space bar, making it an easy key press. But in the default map, the space bar is "jump", which I honestly don't do that often. For example, in combat, you might want to drop a shout on an enemy, but to do so, you have to move one or more of your fingers off the WASD.

 

It also seems odd to me that the two <enter> keys don't map the same. The standard <enter> key is way out in the middle of nowhere while the number pad <enter> is right there by your mouse hand and, as far as I can tell, isn't used at all.

[ironbender800]

I swap the mouse buttons. Very weird and annoying otherwise. I leave the rest of the keys as is tho.

[Signette]

Swapped mouse buttons too and most functions along with them + SkyUI. To be honest I have yet to seen a game, where I didn't almost completely change key mapping, maybe that's not the case with ppl accustomed to pads and joysticks, but with kb/m default mappings are almost always wrong.

Edited April 5, 2016 by Signette

[mattderes]

Swapped mouse buttons too and most functions along with them + SkyUI. To be honest I have yet to seen a game, where I didn't almost completely change key mapping, maybe that's not the case with ppl accustomed to pads and joysticks, but with kb/m default mappings are almost always wrong.

 

I don't have SkyUI (yet), but would you care to mention what you're remapped? I swapped the action <e> with the jump <space>, but have noticed that it does sometimes not work quite right.

[NukaColaPrime]

My biggest change to most games with key mapping is making crouch Left Control and not Left shift, not sure why the standard went from Control to Shift considering sticky keys.