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Feanbor's avatar
Feanbor
1 year ago

Battlefield 2042 & JoySticks

To EA, DICE and to those who have joysticks or looking to purchase.

This is to serve more a warning to those who are looking to acquire joysticks to use with Battlefield 2042. 

I saw that within the Battlefield 2042 controller settings a joystick option and remembered enjoying the battlefield 2/3 immensely with one when it came to jets and helicopters.

So I ordered myself a VKB Gladiator EVO R based on other recommendations for flight sticks as I plan on using it in Star Citizen as well.

Oh boy did I assume and make an * out of myself. As you can guess this fancy and yet complicated stick isn't even detected within BF 2042.

Long story short, Battlefield 2042 didn't ship with joystick support and it was only added as an after thought in 2023 from what I can find out via forums and the plethora of complaints on this subject.

Many people made a suggestion to use a utility called joy2key, but this will not work, the game will not start (basically this utility violates the games t&c) and rightly so, basically the way you have to solve the joystick issue is the way aimbots and hackers would take advantage of a game by pretending to by emulate a Human Input Device.

It is appalling from EA and DICE to introduce a joystick option but have no mention of it in any update changelog(release notes) and to make NO mention of any supported model/vendors.

The stick does appear as xbox controller but my gosh is it clunky and re-mapping is a horror show.

I really do hope there is better consideration for joysticks in the next game and hopefully something in the works for Battlefield 2042.

I have been an avid fan since Battlefield 2 but they lost me with hardline, 1 and V

technical issues

1 Reply

  • Silversquirrel89's avatar
    Silversquirrel89
    New Novice
    5 months ago

    So I tested my VKB Gladiator NXT/EVO first in Battlefield 6, then in 2042 after seeing they claimed to have “joystick support.” Two things popped up...

    Problem #1- The games wouldn’t see any button numbers higher than 17, so I remapped what I needed into 1–17 and turned the rest into keyboard keys.

    Problem #2- The real issue was the thumb mini-stick. When I first tested this out, I was still running my Star Citizen profile that I have used for a few years, which disabled the mini joystick and replaced it with a virtual mouse input. During this time the stick was recognized and worked just fine. The other night I reset everything back to factory, not realizing that the only reason the stick was actually working with Battlefield was due to how I had that mini joystick set up. Once the default axes were reassigned to the mini joystick (X Rotation / Y Rotation), the game started treating my VKB like an Xbox controller instead of a joystick. When I switched that mini-stick back to a virtual mouse inside VKB’s software (which removes X/Y Rotation), BF6 and 2042 immediately recognized the device as a normal joystick again. Took me a while to narrow it down, but this is the root cause for everyone who's had issues running higher end sticks on Battlefield these past few years. 

    Basically for some reason the sticks of an Xbox controller and those two axes for joysticks share the same hardware ID profile. Doesn't matter if it's VKB, Virgil, JoyToKey, or VJoy- if either X Rotation and/or Y Rotation are enabled, it'll come up as an Xbox controller. 

    So, how to fix:

    In VKB software, disable X Rotation and Y Rotation on the mini-stick and set it to act as a virtual mouse. Alternatively, z rotation causes no issues and can still be used, so if you wanted to instead remap the y-axis of that mini stick to Z Rot, you could. 

    No third-party remappers needed; there are several YouTube videos and guides out there that show exactly how to remap buttons and set up VKB’s virtual mouse if you haven’t done it before.

    Or if you wanted to get a little more advanced,  you could use v joy to create a virtual joystick and joystick gremlin to remap any and all of your BKB buttons to be what you want on that virtual stick. Just make sure when setting it up that you uncheck X Rotation and Y Rotation. I've confirmed that a virtual joystick created this way will not come up as an Xbox controller. Using this method, if you have HOSAS or HOTAS, you can also combine the inputs on both into one virtual joystick, if that's how you wanted to fly.

    If anyone ends up ever actually reading this and wants help setting any of this up, feel free to message me here or on Discord (Silversquirrel) and I'll happily jump on a call to walk you through it. I can confirm that using the VKBs to fly in both Battlefield titles is pretty epic.

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