Did everyone still play with the keyboard with the arrow keys or did anyone play use the mouse?

I find it awful hard playing at the hard setting on the mission 4 late in the game. Those turrets is killing me because i can't accurately shoot them before i take a ton of damage from them. I can't make it through alive in one play without dying once.

Way back in 95, us old folks played it with a keyboard and the game auto aimed for you. It should still do that but it can be a little tricky because if you aren't the right distance away it will shoot strait forward instead of up and forward.

I did it back then as well but i don't think there were a way to strafe? The left and right arrow keys only turns the player not strafing and it is set as default. Is there a way to use the aforementioned keys as strafe keys instead? The page down and up keys works quite well looking up and forward. But as i said the missing strafe keys is what makes it so hard sometimes.

I played the heck out of the demo disk version which only had the first three levels.

What joy it was to experience mission 4 for the first time years later when I finally got the full version. We had no mouse controls and we liked it, dammit.

Back in 1999 (when I actually got this game), I used to play with keyboard only, running almost the whole game, and using Alt to strafe (I think you can use "<" and ">" for strafing, but it's more comfortable to press Alt + right/left keys).

Considering that even in Wolfenstein 3D the in-game "READ ME" screen suggests at some point to use a mouse, i suspect that the more advanced players used mouse and keyboard :-P.

Personally i've only played the demo of this game in the 90s and, yeah, i used the keyboard :-). In fact i used the keyboard until pretty much into early 2000s when a game that came with my GPU (Will Rock) refused to allow me to bind keys for turning. So i had to learn to use the mouse :-P

Currently playing Dark Forces again (many many years after first playthroughs), and after many keyboard remapping tests, I find this solution really playable and quite intuitive for people used to mouse+WASD:

- WASD for standard FPS movements (forward, backward, strafe left, strafe right)
- numeric pad keys 4 & 6 to look left & right
- numeric pad keys 8 & 2 to look up & down (5 to reset view)
- numeric pad keys 0 & ENTER to shoot and alt-shoot (using respectively the thumb and the little finger)

It requires a bit of time to get used to it, but again, I find this configuration to be really playable and intuitive for FPS gamers. At least it works really well for me so far.
And no, I don't even use the mouse. The fact that it can make the character go slightly forward and backward involuntarily is just too dangerous in this game.

Keyboard. Also played with only keyboard for the few Quake 2 LAN parties I participated in since it's just what I was used to.