Game has no keybindings and cannot rebind manually, persists through reinstall

[UncleRichardson]

I have the Steam version of the game, with all DLCs.

Over the past year I've tried several times to reinstall and play Witcher 3 for a fresh playthrough. However, every time I try the game has no keybindings and even if I try to bind keys manually, the game will not respond to these manually bound inputs. Additionally, the Reset to Default button simply resets everything to an empty state, except Quick Save, which appears to be hard coded to F5 and is the only key that actually works ingame (including ESC to pause, if I'm in the game world, I have to alt-tab to 'pause' the game to quit without killing the process in task manager).

I have tried everything I can think of to rectify this situation. The game has been fully uninstalled several times, I have tried multiple times to verify the install even on my most recent attempt, I have turned off cloud support and deleted all instances of the config files in an attempt to force the game to create new default config files (all this accomplished was making my mouse sensitivity way higher than I had set it). Short of attempting to install the game on an entirely new system (of which would be an impossible task due to lack of social life and/or funds), I'm not sure what more to do.

 

[Powsin]

Do you have mods ? If so , remove all of them. Do not skip this step.
Have you used mods in the past?

"Your Steam Folder\steamapps\common\The Witcher 3\bin\config\r4game\legacy\base\"

input_azerty.ini
input_qwerty.ini
input_qwertz.ini

I attached "super clean" files for you to work with. These are generated from steam v1.32.
Do not paste everyhing , only the mentioned files above. I included other files in case you need it
or for comparison analysis , as those are default.

Do this while being Steam > Go Offiine (turning off cloud sync will never be enough)
Do not skip this step , and yank the network cable if you could.

If it was fixed , do not go online yet. Download notepad++ , and open the mentioned files.
Once you go online , go back to notepad++ and check for a prompt if you want to reload.
If yes , it means that steam downloaded from cloud and replaced your file again.


If you are familiar with KDiff , compare your file against the attached file here

I hope your issue gets fixed.

 

[UncleRichardson]

I do not have mods installed at this time. They were removed long ago when I first uninstalled the game. Additionally, after this whole shenanigan train started, I double checked to make sure the mods were completely removed from the folder even after uninstallation (as the mods are not part of the base program, some uninstalls ignore them). And to be double sure, I even deleted the mods from the mod manager I use and deleted Witcher 3's profile from the mod manager. The only mods I remember having were a console command access and one that changed trophies to have higher bonuses.

The files you provided are binary equivalent to ones in my install; there is no functional difference between them. Nonetheless, to entertain my 'but what if' I removed my versions and replaced them with yours, on the off-chance there was some meta-data that was different that KDiff doesn't compare. This did not work, as you might imagine. It was a long shot that was just simple to try anyways.

Turning off Steam Sync was one of my first attempts to fix this, but I took your suggestion and went offline and turned off my computer's networking while I delete the config files and let the game generate new defaults. Sadly, this failed to make a difference.

 

[Powsin]

Use another steam account which doesnt have witcher 3 , then family share your games into that account

Then on a virtual machine or another pc, do not login your main account (or more specifically dont install witcher using your main account)

Use the family shared account to download and play witcher 3 , if the keybinds work well, use the files from that folder to entitely replace the copy onto your main machine (or just the bin 1st)

Or try a pirated gog copy on your main machine (for debugging delete it afterwards or buy it) beware of trojans

---

Im on mobile, does witcher 3 cache any data on %user% appdata?

Forgive the broken engrish , sleepy asian will edit tomm. XD

 

[SigilFey]

When this happens, it's normally down to one of two things:

1.) The Permissions for the ...\Documents\The Witcher 3\... folder are not set to "Everyone". Depending on your Windows Security settings, it can prevent the game from accessing and editing the config files to save your changes. Windows 10 haas been exceptionally problematic for some players in this regard. Changing that setting for the TW3 folder should do it (...if this is the issue).

2.) There is another program installed on your computer that is hooking your inputs. Most commonly, this is an aggressive anti-virus software (McAfee, Norton, Comodo, etc. Comodo has been the confirmed cause for a few users, but not everyone.) Other times, gaming peripherals come with driver suites that allow for things like programmable macros and such. Uninstalling these and using the hardware UPnP can solve it. Lastly, it could be something like Steam's "Universal Controls" overlay that are creating static. Disabling all overlay features will check this.

Just test this all systematically. It is a system specific issue, so it may take some doing to track down the cause. But I can assure you, after nearly 6 playthroughs on 2 different systems, the game's controls will work just fine once you've found the snag.