I don’t think the idea was mature enough. Yes it did try to innovate and do new things but it also was trying very hard to be familiar to an audience that was never going to embrace change while not changing enough for a new audience to develop around it. I would compare it to the Dvorak keyboard, a device that offered only marginal improved efficiency and use while requiring the user to completely relearn from the ground up and have to fight muscle memory for those who used the popular medium it meant to replace. And in the end, most people said it wasn’t worth it.
I was initially intrigued by having buttons on the bottom of the controller, where your fingers naturally would be thus freeing your thumbs to stay on the pad/sticks. And imagine my frustration to realize those rear buttons are just extensions of triggers already on top. Huge missed opportunity imo that a redesign could have given dedicated buttons on the back of the controller to each finger and expand the possibilities for input combos a player can perform.
TL;DR I think the controller was a valiant effort to innovate but didn’t go far enough or do anything sell enough to stick.
This isn’t true, the back buttons on the steam controller can be mapped independently.
You are most likely misremembering, there are many controllers that do similar things to what you describe, but the steam controller isn’t one of them.
No they weren’t. I used to play Elite Dangerous and the paddles were used as modifiers, so for example the left paddle held down would change all the face button inputs to distributing energy while the right pad would swap them to common cockpit functions (landing gear, fsd, lights…) Meanwhile both bumpers and triggers remained as a single function: yaw and weapon groups
I was initially intrigued by having buttons on the bottom of the controller, where your fingers naturally would be thus freeing your thumbs to stay on the pad/sticks. And imagine my frustration to realize those rear buttons are just extensions of triggers already on top.
My set up approach to having both my thumbs stay on the pads a majority of the time has been to set up a dpad modeshift with an inverted outer ring bind so clicking up, down, left, right, center output different inputs. And depending on the game I’d set up a chord so holding the left grip and clicking the right pad would output a different set of 5 inputs. And my right grip is set to jump so with the left grip chord function for 5 additional inputs on a right pad click if needed for a total of 10 that’s been my way of doing that.
So for like Doom Eternal I swap between weapons every shot to bypass reloading through the right touchpad. I like that approach better than using stuff like weapon wheels, which in some games actually slows down the actual gameplay and interrupts the flow.
I wanted to like this thing so bad. I tried it so many times I just cannot get used to the trackpad for anything beyond top down environment or platformers. Once I need a second joystick as an input it was game over.
I had a setup for fromsoft games that activated the gyro when I touched the track pad. So I could swipe the pad for fast camera turns and use the gyro for fine aim. My steam controllers battery terminals were both damaged by cell bursts though. I miss the camera agility now.
How did you use the touchpad. My approach has been to adjust the sensitivity of the touchpad until an edge to edge swipe does a 180, and for gyro having a 90 degree rotation of the controller do 675 degree rotation in game for first person and 450 degrees for third person. Made it a consistent aim experience no matter what game I played as long as the mouse input in the game was good and didn’t do things like emulate a joystick causing negative acceleration.
And I just saved the template so I didn’t need to set it up all the time.
Liked it for Doom Eternal, since I could activate gyro, swipe the camera to quickly turn, and click to swap between weapons every shot to bypass reloading all on the right touchpad.
And pvp games like The Finals clicking the right pad to switch through gadgets and using the touchpad to quickly turn and activate gyro, and not feeling like my inputs were too slow versus mouse users. And not having to bother with aim assist.
And pvp games like The Finals clicking the right pad to switch through gadgets and using the trackpad to quickly turn and activate gyro, and not feeling like my inputs were too slow versus mouse users. And not having to bother with aim assist.
Mind sharing the setup, please? I’ve played The Finals on my Steam Deck and gave the trackpads+gyro a fair try, but couldn’t land a scheme that made me really comfortable and let me perform well at the same time - lots of unintentional clicks as well as not pressing shoulder buttons to activate the modifier.
Having a trackpad act like a touch-sensitive dpad with gyro felt very close to perfect, though. Just couldn’t tweak the entire scheme well enough.
I uploaded the config for the Steam Controller with the name “Dualpad with Gyro Updated…”
Problem is that if you try to use the config on the Steam Deck I don’t think it’ll work the same way, since on the Steam Deck trackpad click is set up through soft press as opposed to the physical click that the Steam Controller uses.
I did play around with trying to set up something similar in the past on the Deck touchpads and did it through action layers instead of mode shift. Set it up so that clicking the touchpad switched to the action layer where the touchpad was set up as a dpad that I had stuff mapped too, and release press removed the same action layer to return back to the default action set.
But, when I did this workaround modeshifts weren’t available in the current UI yet, so maybe a normal dpad modeshift setup would work on the Deck pads now. This was how I set it up in the old Steam Input UI youtu.be/4vN1Jj7EPZk. If not then action layer approach is the other method.
Update: so I decided to try it on the Steam Deck and I was able to set up a dpad modeshift on a pad click and even get the chord function to work so the inputs change if I hold one of the left back buttons. Only issue is I couldn’t find a way to adjust the pressure required to register a click for the touchpad when it came to the modeshift pad click.
Yeah, I find myself gravitating towards this kind of setup every time I want gyro and (at least) five more buttons on one of the trackpads. Kinda glad to see I’m on something that seems to have some proven record.
Can’t wrap my mind around the difference between modeshifting and action layers, though. The former seems much easier to use, but somehow doesn’t work that consistently for me, so yeah, I end up doing what you’re showing.
Were you yourself ever able to adjust to this kind of scheme on Steam Deck? It seems to be working well for me for some time, but there’s moments when I somehow get lost in the inputs despite knowing them to a degree that I don’t have to think about them at all.
Some games doing a poor job at mixed input doesn’t help either: things like prompts rapidly switching between that of MKB and controller, or the game not allowing you to switch on the fly, etc.
Can’t wrap my mind around the difference between modeshifting and action layers, though. The former seems much easier to use, but somehow doesn’t work that consistently for me, so yeah, I end up doing what you’re showing.
Action Layer
So action layers is like a copy of your default controller config that you can switch to and have the changes you want made to it. Example of how I use this in the Finals is when I play light I have it set up so left touchpad click is dash/grapple compared to the default config I use for medium and heavy where left touchpad click is crouch as opposed a specialization. I switch between my light and medium/heavy controller set by holding down the select button. Action Layer is similar and I’ll use it for temporarily switching between configs. Example is if I hold down the left bumper going to an action layer where my right trackpad is outputting a right joystick to make selecting from the conversation wheel easier and when let go reverts back to the default where right trackpad is a mouse.
Modeshift
Modeshifts are similar but more reliable when it comes to in game actions. So use cases of modeshifts might be having the trackpad when clicked modeshift into a dpad, and it’ll revert back to a regular trackpad afterwards. Or when the left trigger is fully pulled it modeshifts into a different gyro sensitivity that is lower than what the gyro is normally, which comes in useful if a game doesn’t offer aim sensitivity adjustments for ADS.
Chords
Chords are similar to modeshifts and I use them to add on additional functions on top of the modeshift. Like if I have the trackpad modeshift into a dpad on a click with the inputs 1,2,3,4 mapped to it. Then I might set up a chord, so that when the left grip is held and the trackpad is clicked the inputs are 5,6,7,8. Or in some games like the Finals sprinting can take you out of ADS and I bind the sprint button on the outer edge. So I’ll set a chord so that when I am holding down the left trigger to aim the outer edge become an empty bind so I don’t take myself out of aiming by accident. If you find yourself accidentally triggering things on the dpad modeshift you can set up a chord that returns an empty bind to help. Like in the Finals I found myself sometimes accidentally reloading (left click) or meleeing (center click) on the touchpad when I was firing a gun and interrupting it during tense moments, so I set up a chord so that when I am holding down the right trigger the left click which normally outputs reload and center click which is melee turns into an empty bind that outputs nothing.
Were you yourself ever able to adjust to this kind of scheme on Steam Deck?
As for the Steam Deck and fps. I find myself playing more hack and slash and platformers on the Deck, since I haven’t found the touchpads ergonomic for my hands. I’ve found the touchpad experience feels like a downgrade compared to the Steam Controller touchpads, since the location is better on the Steam Controller. I also found the concave circular shape of the steam controller touchpads to be more consistent when it comes to swiping the camera to turn 180 as shown in this demo. With Deck I found I was only able to replicate it adjusting the rotation until it went from corner to corner, but did not find it comfortable. So I stick to joysticks on the Steam Deck.
Some games doing a poor job at mixed input doesn’t help either: things like prompts rapidly switching between that of MKB and controller, or the game not allowing you to switch on the fly, etc.
Yeah that has been an annoyance for a long time. And even worse when there is no mixed input support. When that happens if the game allows sprint and walk to be set to a hold as opposed to a toggle I will use soft presses to set up a pseudo analog experience.
Wow, thanks for such a detailed response! Really helps me see it now. I think I just often used Action Layers instead of Modeshift in many cases, blurring the line between the two in my mind.
Chords sound amazing. When I use the trackpads in The Finals, I often press them in doing certain things (especially on the modifier button layout) and mess things up. Somehow it never occurred to me that I could just disable some actions during specific scenarios. The sheer ability to do that is a long known fact for me, though, so I’m ultra confused as to why I didn’t include that in my config.
Yeah, chords are very powerful for fixing a lot of issues. Especially for mixed input since some weird things can occur. My favorite fix is for Red Dead Redemption 2 where left stick click when mouse input is detected caused the game to enter Dead Eye. So I solved it by setting up a chord so that when I am touching the right touchpad ‘L3’ becomes ‘Ctrl’, which let me enter crouch without dead eye being activated.
I’m probably going to have to create multiple configs to play around with. So much to experiment with so much variety.
Thanks for sharing all this! Super happy to see that my months of tinkering didn’t exhaust the possibilities that Steam Input provides.
Crazy to think how much Valve has done for gaming and tech being just one company with arguably not that many people working there; especially given the rumors of extreme freedom in terms of what the employees can focus on.
I didn’t like it. I got it on sale and tried it. I just have muscle memory for Xbox style controllers and that didn’t give me any advantages that made it worth retraining.
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Mine hasn’t gotten much use lately because the steamdeck itself has indirectly usurped it but man I love my steam controller. It’s genuinely the best controller ever made for certain types of games. I find it very difficult to play FPS games without it (or the steamdeck) due to getting so used to gyro aiming with the capacitive touch sensors. My only real gripe with it is the subpar build quality. They’ve learned a lot since then in terms of hardware manufacturing so I can’t wait for them to put out a new steam controller.
My dream steam controller 2 would be the steam controller layout with the large circular concave touchpads in the top most position, better bumpers, two extra bumper buttons like the 8bitdo, 4 back buttons in total, alpakka quality gyro, and nice premium feeling material used for the shell.
But, they’ll go with the Steam Deck layout if there is one, which unfortunately has not been good for using touchpads as primary inputs for my hands. Which has me hording Steam Controllers, since it’ll likely be the only dual touchpad focused controller around. And hoping Alpakka comes out with a standalone gyro module I can stick on the Steam Controller to at least have the gyro component updated.
Yeah thats kind of the point. It doesnt have 2 joysticks so I just buy an Xbox one instead. So it cant compete with the gold standard of crontrollers.
And you can say it has pursose in non controller games but its still worse than a traditional keyboard and mouse in that repect as well as a keyboard with an integrated trackpack.
So theres maybe a small niche of playing non controller games in situations where you dont have a desk and you dont want to use an integrated keyboard, where it does a bit better than the competition. Any other situation you have better options. Which IMO if its worse in most use cases and only a bit better than the competetion in designed niche, then its not really a good product.
Not everyone’s a big kb/mouse fan. My sister refuses to use one on the HTPC.
Hence I think that was its non-insignificant niche; couch usage. Portable keyboards are really awkward and clunky on laps, and the steam controller is way better and more ergonomic than an integrated trackpad.
Personally I think it was a smart business decision, because of this:
It doesnt have 2 joysticks so I just buy an Xbox one instead.
No one’s going to buy a steam-branded Xbox controller, but making it different does. And I think what killed it is that it wasn’t plug-and-play enough, eg it didn’t work out of the box with many games.
I would love to get ahold of one for my PC. I’m hesitant to buy a used one though. Maybe one day Valve will make more or even better, make a SC2. Until then my PS5 controller will continue to serve me well
I’m currently doing a replay of the series and am in the middle of 3, and while 2 is definitely better in a lot of ways, I am still enjoying three, but it does have some issues. The difficulty is not to par, would be my biggest gripe, there really hasn’t been any level of challenge playing on proud mode, but the gameplay holds up in my opinion. The worlds are bigger and have a better layout than in 2, but the world stories are pretty lame for the most part and don’t really have anything to do with the plot, you’re just kind of there during the events of the movies for the most part, and a lot of times it’s just kind of “and Sora and the gang were there, too!”
If you haven’t played the side games to know the full story then things feel like a bit of a mess and they don’t really go over much from those games, which all have very important plot elements happening.
As a part of the whole story, I think it’s worth playing, but not really until near the end of the game. If you’re into the games for the combat mechanics then I’d say it’s worth it, I really like the gameplay. If you haven’t played the side games and are playing for the story then it’s going to be rough.
All in all, I enjoy it for a lot of reasons, though it has some issues, but that’s sort of the deal with all of the games. If you play Dream Drop Distance first I feel it adds a lot to KH3, but had I not played that first I’m not sure I would have enjoyed KH3 as much as I have, since it is a huge part of the story setup for what is happening in the third game, and if you go from KH2 directly to KH3 you’ll be missing a shit ton of what is going on with the story, why the power of waking is so relevant, and what happened with Sora and Riku’s mark of mastery exam.
So, not the best of the series, but I think it’s worth the time to play if you’re invested in the story or gameplay.
Edit: They also completely reworked the gummi ship stuff, in my opinion, for the better. You actually get to fly it around in space in an interactive world map deal that you can explore as it’s own thing, and you actually have to navigate to new worlds. It’s polarizing, and I can see why some wouldn’t like it, but I think it’s a huge improvement to that part of the games.
I honestly love the idea of it more than using it for most gaming. I’m going they make a new one that mirrors the layout of the Steam Deck a little more.
I got mine way back when they were discounted to $5 bucks. I used it like once and wasn’t a fan. Plus, back then, I didn’t really play too many pc games. Funny enough, my friend texted me a few days ago and told me the controllers are becoming goldmines online now selling for $150-$200. It makes me want to find mine and sell it. I even have the box it came in still somewhere.
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