The Computer Was a Mistake

I finally booted up 007 First Light last week, and so far, it’s been a solid experience. My PC sits somewhere in the gray zone of the game’s recommended specs, but it runs fine with most settings cranked to high. I started playing with a keyboard and mouse, my usual go-to, but the layout felt awkward. The hand-to-hand combat requires a lot of key presses, and holding down the Alt key to activate Bond’s watch is just uncomfortable. So I switched to a controller. Now the game barely runs at all.

On Sunday morning, I restarted First Light to replay the tutorials with controller prompts. I have this embarrassing quirk where I need the controls shown to me directly instead of just figuring out the layout on my own. The Iceland mission ran just as smoothly as before on my Xbox One controller, and the controls felt more intuitive. But while following Moneypenny through the MI6 office, I noticed Bond was subtly rubberbanding, lagging behind her and then jerking forward. By the time I reached Malta, the entire game was dragging.

Nothing had changed since I’d played with keyboard and mouse a week earlier. No updates had installed. I spent half an hour tweaking every graphics setting I could find, lowering things to medium, reducing lighting and shadow effects, fiddling with DLSS. Nothing worked.

Worried my hardware was failing, I grabbed my mouse to check my system. As soon as I moved the mouse, the game stopped lagging. Shocked, I tried using the keyboard to steer Bond. He moved smoothly, and the game ran perfectly around him. I picked up the controller again and moved Bond up and down the Malta street. He jerked along. The game stuttered and flailed. Back to keyboard and mouse? Normal video game again.

I have a habit, when faced with PC problems, of inventing narratives that defy the machine’s cold logic. My first thought was, “My controller is breaking this specific game.” Even I knew that was absurd. I closed First Light, updated my graphics driver, and tried again with the controller. Same problem. Keyboard and mouse? Flawless.

That gave some weight to the “controller is breaking the game” theory, but it still made no sense. I’ve used this wireless Multiversus-themed Xbox One controller for months without issue. It connects via Bluetooth because Xbox no longer sells a wireless adapter. Sometimes I have to reseat the Bluetooth dongle to get it to pair after leaving a game paused too long, but it’s never fully broken a game just by existing.

Incredulous, I Googled “xbox controller causing lag pc.” I couldn’t believe it when results actually appeared: a thread on the Microsoft forums from 2025, Reddit posts, complaints on EA and Steam sites going back years. Some people blamed dual instances of Microsoft’s GameInput program. I had one installed but found multiple instances running in Task Manager. Closing them did nothing. Others pointed to dying controller batteries. Swapping in fresh ones did nothing either. Some suggested a Bluetooth issue solvable by wiring the controller, my preferred method, but that would require a trip to Microcenter for a USB data cable. I couldn’t let the mystery sit half-solved while I left the house.

I posted on Bluesky about my discovery, and multiple people said they’d had the same problem. Frank Cifaldi from the Video Game History Foundation helped narrow it down. He’d experienced this when using a controller with games through the Epic store. This was my first time using a controller with an Epic store game.

Here’s how I’m dealing with it now: I play for about 20 minutes until the game stops working. Then I disconnect and reconnect my Bluetooth dongle, resetting the whole situation. I play until the game breaks again, then repeat.

Besides being a deeply unpleasant way to experience First Light, this entire situation is ridiculous. Is this how computers work? I’ve made peace with the tweaks and fiddling required to be a PC gamer. But I’m not willing to accept that playing a game could require deleting processes, messing with my registry, or playing in 20-minute increments. I could accept a problem with the controller or Bluetooth causing input lag, but the whole game? It probably doesn’t help that I’m still on Windows 10, which I can no longer update. But this is one more reason I’ve been dragging my feet on getting Windows 11. Why would I go deeper into an ecosystem that has a known bug with using a controller to play games?

I’m even more baffled that this isn’t just a me problem, which I could blame on my shoddy, aging PC build and my own stupid luck. So many of you have experienced this, living in this absurd status quo, that I’m extra furious on your behalf. It’s not even due to the new enshittification being shoved down our throats. This is just how the PC works. This problem goes back nearly a decade, and it seems like if we want to use the computer, we just have to accept it.

This is some first-rate bullshit, and I refuse to go quietly. Of course, none of my raging is actually fixing the problem. It will most likely be sorted when it stops raining and I can buy a cable to wire my expressly wireless controller to my PC. In the meantime, playing First Light like I’m binge-watching episodes of a sitcom is annoying as hell. The game is pretty good. I just wish I didn’t have to deal with the computer to play it.