Controller Not Working Fixes For Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

Since Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice launched last week, it’s received heaps of praise. But it’s not all sunshine and roses. Many players are reporting controller problems with Sekiro on Steam, extending to PC, PS4, and XB1 controllers.

In an ideal world, there’d be one easy fix for the problem. However, there are multiple potential ways to fix the issues, and they don’t all seem to work for everyone. We’ll list the main fixes for you here, along with the methods for some of the more involved solutions.

Try These First

There are two potential solutions you should try before doing anything else, these are:

1. Try playing the game in windowed mode rather than fullscreen, which may or may not work.
2. Uninstall your controller’s drivers and reinstall them, which also may or may not work

These should be your first steps towards trying to solve the issue. After that, there are some more intensive methods you can try.

Steam Settings and Overlays

Another method more successful with more people is to adjust Input Per-Game Setting for the game directly. You can do this by:

1. Right click the game in your Steam Library
2. Click Properties
3. At the bottom of the General tab, you’ll see ‘Steam Input Per Game Setting (Requires restart of game)’
4. Choose “Forced On” from the drop down menu
   

Changing Big Picture Mode’s supported configurations is another option you can try:

1. Open up Big Picture Mode
2. Click the Settings icon
3. Click Controller Settings
4. Uncheck the boxes that don’t pertain to your controller (If you’re using an Xbox controller, uncheck PlayStation; and vice versa)

An alternative method involves going to the Big Picture Mode page for the game and altering the input setting there:

1. Open up Big Picture Mode
2. Click Sekiro in your Big Picture Library
3. Click ‘Manage Game’ to the left
4. Click ‘Controller Options’
5. Find the ‘Steam Input Per-Game Setting (requires game re-launch) and choose ‘Global Setting’

The next question is whether you have a non-Steam overlay running.

There is a known issue with alternative overlays interfering with Steam’s overlay and preventing the controller emulation from working, specifically that the game is trying to read a virtual controller rather than the real thing. You can read more about that issue if you’re running an Nividia overlay or other program hosting virtual controllers in this thread with responses from a Valve representative.

Controller Order

What’s being recognized as the primary issue is the way Sekiro recognizes controller order. Regardless of how you download or plug in your controllers, the game automatically recognizes the first one.

For many, that ends up being the virtual controller connected to the Unified Virtual HID, the 10-in-1 virtual control software used for many PC games. The simplest way to handle that is just to uninstall it.

Some have encountered problems uninstalling Unified Virtual, but if the driver is still hanging around after you’ve tried uninstalling it the normal way, follow these steps:

1. Open the Start menu, search for ‘Device Manager,’ and select ‘View’, then ‘Device by Connection’ to see if the driver is still there (Unified Virtual HID)
2. Restart the computer
3. Go to uninstall Unified Remote Server again, making sure ‘Enable driver input simulation (recommended)’ is checked
4. Restart again
5. Go to your Control Panel, then to ‘Programs and Features’
6. Find ‘Unified Remote’ and uninstall it
7. Check the Device Manager again to make sure the driver is gone this time

If you want to use the software without the driver in the future, Unified has a tutorial for how you can do that.

Going the Long(er) Route

There is a more detailed method that’s worked for many, but involves some more work. Download the Devreorder executable from GitHub, and install it near your Sekiro folder or your system folder.

Check the related link to install this thing for direct instructions on how to get it to work. It sounds like a lot, but plenty have reported this solves the problem.

Do note your virus protection software may flag Devreorder as a malicious program. That appears to not actually be the case, however.

—

As of now, the controller not working problem in Sekiro is an ongoing issue. If there are more strategies that develop for permanently solving the problem, we’ll let you know. Be sure to check out our other Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice guides for more tips to help you survive.