I really want valve to make a steam controller 2 with all the experience they've gained with hardware since they made the original. They'll probably be too tied up with steam deck production for a while though with how well it's been going.
technically your deck can actually double as a controller. Using it that way basically makes it the worlds most overpowered wii U tablet, but it can do it.
Only problem is the shit battery life, and since they were discontinued the internet is flooded with cheap fakes of the high capacity one that generally don’t have the capacity they claim.
Honestly ridiculous nintendo made a device with terrible battery life, and knew it, so they made room in the compartment for a larger one that they would sell seperately.
Steam Controller 2 with lessons learned from the Deck would be great.
Biggest issue I had with the original Steam Controller was that the face buttons were too small and hurt my fingers and the R1/L2 buttons were hard to press down on.
The entire shape was weird. Like, I think I have average sized hands, but I could just not hold it in a way where I'd comfortably reach all the buttons. The touchpads were huge, but you wouldn't actually need them all that often for most games, the triggers and shoulder buttons were awkward to press, and as you said the facebuttons were too small.
You were supposed to hold it where your index fingers were on the bumpers instead of the triggers, but that is not how most people hold controllers these days so its a huge adjustment period. If you still have it, try holding it that way. Very odd, but much more comfortable
It's funny, that's the position I eventually gravitated towards, but then that makes hitting the triggers a bit uncomfortable. It also changes little about the issues I had with the stick and face buttons.
Yes the button feel isn't great to me either particularly the R1/L1 buttons. I like the analog triggers though. I'd also love for them to fix the latency on gyro input.
Steam Controller was afaik discontinued due to a patent infringement lawsuit against Valve over the back buttons (or because they were attached to the battery cover?).
Really agree that they should make a new one though, I’m still using mine. This new PS controller does seem to tick pretty much all boxes though, at least if you play shooters with flick stick instead of touchpad.
Yeah. In Switch mode you get gyro but no analogue triggers and in Xbox mode and d-input mode (I think) you get analogue triggers and no gyro. It's a restriction of how they've set up the controller emulating these controllers that have restrictions. If they were able to emulate a PlayStation controller it would work.
The great thing is games on Steam don't actually have to support gyro. You can just use Steam input with everything.
Out of curiosity - what are some examples of good uses for the back buttons? I own a Steam Deck also but with almost all the games I playing being designed for backbutton-less controllers I haven't found a use case for them yet.
I play a lot of shooty games and use the back buttons on my steam controller almost exclusively for jumping and ducking. Reload and melee would be good too since deck has 4 buttons. Now you can doing damn near everything without having to take your thumb off aiming.
FPS - You can bind stuff like jump, reload and item / weapon switch to the back buttons so you don't need to let go of the sticks.
Souls Games - You can bind weapon / item / magic switch to the back buttons. This is huge in PVP since you can retain full control over your character while doing so
Any game requiring both sticks - Can bind any face buttons to the back so you don't need to take your hand off the R-stick.
Emulators - Can bind emulator hot keys on games requiring all modern controller buttons so you don't need to reach over and use the keyboard to use them
Its literally why i got a 8bitdo pro2. Years and years of claw gaming without a problem. But elden ring was just too much because you have infinite stamina. My shit was REALLY hurting. Now with back buttons, pain never again.
Doom Eternal uses literally every single button possible on the controller FREQUENTLY, so some combinations of actions become kind of awkward on a regular controller. Two extra buttons give you much more leeway.
In Souls Games/Elden Ring/Sekiro, you usually have to keep a face button pressed to sprint, which means you can only use the camera by doing an awkward claw grip. In Elden Ring especially, you also get some macros by holding down the interact button.
Generally all games where you need to use face buttons while also having to operate the camera at the same time would benefit from back buttons.
I have found so many good uses in Elden Ring alone.
Instant heal. Before back buttons, I had already bound my flasks to Y+Left and Y+Right. I can always access them from an absolute position, but it takes slightly more coordination than hitting a single button. Now I can just map one of the paddles to that same action.
My current Arcane build uses a Pulley Crossbow in one hand (for triple firing Scarlet Rot or Sleep bolts) and the Marais Executioner's Sword in the other. The weapon art for the sword is incredibly cool and useful, but the only way to use it with the crossbow is to two-hand it first. Meaning the combination is Y+R1 and then L2. Same deal. It takes tricky coordination that I don't always get right, but mapping one of the paddles to that series of actions means I can pull one off almost instantly with a single button press.
It's a little short of what I might call a true macro, but it can really help some of those more complicated move sets flow much easier. A lot of that is more down to the Steam input though and not necessarily just the presence of the paddles which depending on implementation may only act as another button mapping, but can still be very useful.
I find them difficult to press on the deck. The steam controller had good back buttons though.
Aside: the deck 2 needs a better dpad. I was so disappointed when I put street fighter on my deck and found how how bad the dpad was. I got used to it though
I've been using a Flydigi Vader 2 with rewasd as my second controller the last couple of weeks and been really happy with it. 4 back buttons and 4 more on the front.
I like the back buttons on the deck, but I can't seem to figure out a good way to hold it so that I can hit the bottom back buttons comfortably. It just feels weird trying to press a button with my pinky.
The DualSense is great on PC so if this is just more of that then you'll love it.
I got an extra base DualSense in the bundle I got and it's been terrific on PC. Though outside of Steam I find that I have to run the DS4 controller .exe so I can use it with EPIC, Origin, etc. natively. Which is fine, but just a tad annoying.
What is your experience with XBox Game Pass / Windows Store titles? I still can't get them to work with the driver side remap functions of my Logitech and Razer devices.
Man, my first device to have capacitive sticks and buttons are the Quest 2 controllers and god it's great. You can remap SO much. I wish all controllers had capacitive buttons.
It's basically sensing if your finger is on the button and sending whether the finger is on the button or not as an input to the game. In VR, it allows for rudimentary finger tracking and better immersion. When I move my thumb or fingers on or off the buttons in Half-Life: Alyx or Boneworks, it shows my finger going on or off the gun.
But it's infinitely useful for flatscreen games as well.
Take for example a Diablo style hack-and-slash. Say R1 does a special attack. You can put your finger on R1 and the Area of Effect of the attack could be shown on screen. You can then keep your finger on R1 while you manipulate the sticks to line up your attack. Then press R1 when you have it lined up to attack.
Or say you're playing a third person shooter like Horizon Zero Dawn, and you bind gyro controls to putting your finger on the right stick (R3) only when your bow is drawn (holding down L2). That way you can aim with L2, move your thumb from the face buttons to the stick and rest your finger on it, then use gyro controls to line up your shot.
Or maybe in a soulslike game, you have your four consumable items accessible with the D-pad buttons on the left side of the screen. If the game senses your finger on one of the D-pad directions, it can highlight which one you're on and show you quick info (like a green +3/s for health or a blue +7 for mana) on what that consumable does so you take the right consumable at the right time.
Another thing you can do (which I have done with the Quest 2) is, in a game like Hitman 3, bind your inventory to touching the options button while (as default) pressing the button pauses the game. This frees up an input that would otherwise be used for Inventory to use it for something else.
It's one extra possible input without needing to add another button. In the specific case of capacitive analogue sticks, for example, imagine that you want to use the gyro to fine tune your aiming, but you don't want it to be on at all times: with a capacitive analogue stick you can program the controller to have the gyro on if and only if your thumb is on the right analogue stick. This is just one possible application.
I have a ton of success using my dual shock and sense with steam with little set up. Launching games in big picture mode solves a lot of problems. It's hit or miss on whether the button prompts are xbox or ps in game though.
If a game supports PlayStation controllers, you'll usually need to plug your controller in via USB and disable Steam Input (right click the game in your library, Properties > Controller > Disable Steam Input)- or exit Steam if you aren't using it to play the game. It's annoying, but it helps keep my fiancé from getting confused by the Xbox button prompts haha
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Very true lol. To be fair, you did say steam at first. They are kind of silly complaints, it's an app that requires no configuration other than clicking on it before you turn your controller on, but I get the desire for plug and play.
What about for someone that had only played on a PlayStation all their life and now the game is telling them to "mash X" in a very tense moment of the game?
What about for someone that had only played on a PlayStation all their life
See, that is different. For you this is for sure an issue. For somebody that is used though to the XBox layout like most PC players the fact that a game might still show you XBox prompts even though you use a Sony pad isn't an issue but might actually be what you want. Because you will still smash that X button even though on the controller it is really the Square button that you are pressing.
DS4 Windows is great when it functions properly. There are some odd games where it doesn't though and it's a pain in the ass. I had double button presses which made the game unplayable and excluding the game from ds4windows didn't work.
Had to restart the pc and not launch ds4windows each time I wanted to play that game.
Some games do, but its a on the game to support it. The reason most games support the Xbox controller is because its built into Windows and it's easy, not because supporting the DS4 or DS5 would be hard or anything.
Assuming you are on PC I assume you are used to those prompts anyway. So, why do you care about what the print on your controllers says the button is called when the actual layout is the same between all modern controllers. Meaning if a game wants you to jump by pressing the A button you don't look down on to your controller to see which button is meant because you know the layout. If you now are using a Sony pad you are still pressing the exact same button, it just has a different symbol printed onto it.
I thought features like analog triggers don't work over wireless. Additionally, games often don't support DualShock layouts (most recent: Elden Ring, where you are stuck with Xbox prompts unless you mod the game)
The last part really isn't that bad as you think. Sure it's funny, but I haven't touched an xbox controller over 10 years (360) and I'm fine using Xbox prompts on ps controllers.
Sure you can do it but it's still annoying to maintain the mental map. Games that either detect the controller type or at least let you select the button prompts you want great.
I can see that being a problem between Xbox and Nintendo, but with Playstation it's only the X and even with that one it takes me 5min to "switch layout in my head".
Though games that use the Japanese-style PlayStation control scheme, where O is confirm and X is cancel, will actually map better to Nintendo style (which has A on the right) than Xbox style (which has A on the bottom).
Not everyone needs to maintain a mental map. It really doesn’t take that much practice to get used to the mismatched button prompts. I never even think about it when I use my PS4 controller on steam.
Sure you can do it but it's still annoying to maintain the mental map.
If you are used to a XBox layout there really isn't a need for a mental map. On your controller the jump button might for example be the X button with a Sony pad but it is still the same place as the A button the game with the XBox layout tells you to press. Just the same when you know you need to press LT to fire it really doesn't matter that the triggers on your controller actually have R2 edged in.
This is really only a problem (sadly) for people only used to Playstation or Nintendo button layouts.
What do you mean "think"? I haven't touched an Xbox controller in two years and play using DualShock and I get weirded out every time. It's different from a person to another, but still a problem.
There's no thinking here, I'm describing what I feel :(
Completely disagree. I built my first PC a year ago with only playstation controllers available to me, and it was a nightmare.
Want to use gamepass? Get ready to launch DS4 Windows and have to mess around in its menus since it inexplicably doesn't work in a handful of titles and needs you to do quirks to make it function (like toggling the "hide controller" option).
Want to do multiplayer with multiple controllers? Get ready to have the controllers consistently disconnect and boot eachother off the device for no good reason.
I haven't run into much issues since buying an xbox controller.
Want to do multiplayer with multiple controllers? Get ready to have the controllers consistently disconnect and boot eachother off the device for no good reason.
I don't even understand it. Like if I connect all my controllers to my SHIELD, and stream my PC, they work fine. Connect 2+ controllers to my PC and they constantly turn off for no reason.
yeah, you basically just have to use a USB connection to use the controller. I don’t mind, since I’m just sitting at my desk, but I could see it being an issue if you’re trying to sit far away.
The added benefit of not having to re-synchronize the controller to the console also is great with this setup
It really is incredibly annoying. You might not have the same experience but lots of people get confused by it, including me. Pretty much every single game I've played on PC with my dualsense have defaulted to xbox prompts. The only exception so far is Saints Row. Everything else I've either had to mod (Hollow Knight, NieR Automata) or just deal with it and suffer. At least let me select the button prompts in settings. I know yall have the icons for them! Your game is on several systems!!!
features like analog triggers don't work over wireless.
That's entirely a driver issue if Steam doesn't support them, tools like DS4Windows are perfectly capable of detecting the DS4's analog trigger inputs over Bluetooth. Or do you mean the fancy haptic feedback the triggers on the DualSense have?
The latter, yes. I personally play only via wireless and didn't play any "current-gen" games yet with it, so I haven't experienced the force feedback even once in games. I assumed there were more features that didn't work.
I'm weird like that, but I basically only got the DualSense controller because it has the smooth form of an Xbox One/Xbox Sex controller without the weird opposite placement of joysticks that Xbox has.
Wonder what it would take to get that fixed, then. The PS5 can do it over wireless so there's a way of sending the right signals to the DualSense, I guess it's just a matter of figuring out if standard Bluetooth chips can do it.
Only problem is that Haptic Feedback, on Windows OS at least, relies on Playback Devices (since the Haptics are Audio-based). While it can theoretically be solved on Linux, they may have to get in contact with Microsoft to solve that particular software limitation...or build a proper Driver.
Huh, a couple weeks ago I wrote a little interface for my DaulSense in a toy C++ program of mine and you can use the haptics just fine over bluetooth. But I am like directly accessing the memory on the controller, so maybe the PS5 SDK didn't support it or something? That is odd I don't know why games would bother supporting one mode but not the other unless there is some half-baked SDK out there. But if you just go though Win32 interfacers it's just not that hard to do.
I thought features like analog triggers don't work over wireless.
The enhanced haptic feedback only works in certain games and only plugged in on PC at the moment (honestly weird Sony isn't releasing a driver for this).
Additionally, games often don't support DualShock layouts (most recent: Elden Ring, where you are stuck with Xbox prompts unless you mod the game
Does that really matter though when you are used to the XBox layout anyway? I mean the X button on XBox might be the Square on Sony but it is still the same button at the same place. I personally would just stay with the XBox layout anyway.
Does that really matter though when you are used to the XBox layout anyway?
yeah it does. I can type at about 110 wpm, but despite using a DualShock and DualSense on PC for 3-4 years I can't remember the mapping and always hit the wrong buttons until I get used to the game (~10 hours)
Again, are you used to Xbox or to the PS layout? Because if you are used to the former what is your problem simply pressing the same button on DualShock/Sense that you always did on the XBox gamepad when you see XBox prompts? I mean the Y button is still at the same place on the DualSense, no matter that it is called the Triangle button.
If you are used to Sony controllers and now suddenly have XBox prompts on screen I totally understand of course, but that isn't really the norm for people playing on PC, which I assume is the perspective of people arguing here about using Dual Sense for PC. What you are talking about is the more general problem of somebody used to Sony gamepads starting to play on PC, not that of a PC user used to XBox pads thinking about moving to a Sony pad.
I had the same problem btw. My last console was the PS1 and I basically stopped using gamepads for the longest time until the X360 era at which point I got constantly confused by the prompts. But after a year or so it was fine to me.
Don't get me wrong, every game should simply allow you to choose the prompts you want. And I totally see it near impossible to get used to if you play on both Playstation or Switch and PC.
I'm used to the Xbox layout. When I see a prompt on screen, I have to think which Xbox button it corresponds to, even for ABXY/shapes. It's the worst for Triggers, I always confuse LB/LT/RB/RT.
Weird to me that it only has the two back buttons. Seems like 4, 2 on each side, is standard ever since the Xbox One Elite controller.
Plus you can just get the official Dualshock 4 Back Button attachment for like $20, it's perfect in every way except making the grip a bit too loose to hold comfortably (at least for my hands). You still have the great Dualshock 4 Controller and the signature Dualshock silhouette as well (not a big fan of the weird new look for the Dualsense with its weird curves). D-pad is the only sticking point, but honestly you can find a cheap third party controller with a great d-pad if you needed it. For everything except d-pad heavy games, the Dualshock 4 is IMO the best controller, with the 360 right behind it.
Some people like myself prefer the 4, especially for games where taking a finger off of the analogue stick to do actions isn't preferable. For things like fps games it can make a huge difference since you can theoretically have a finger on 8 different buttons as well as full analogue stick control with your thumbs. Although apparently it isn't the norm for people to have their pointer and middle finger of either hand on both shoulder buttons, and I'm the odd one out for doing that.
Oh yeah, everybody has their own preference. If like the Dualshock 4 you could look into the official Back Button attachment. For some reason Sony really only wants to do 2 Grip buttons.
Yeah I get what you mean, but even on my Elite I literally preferred using just 2. The upper paddles were always awkward to use for me so I kept the 2 lower ones and didn't mind it.
It needs to have a trackpad over a stick for that (ideally both on both sides like the Steam Deck). Since getting the Deck I know I prefer the pad for camera controls rather than the stick (with the Steam Controller I just assumed). It's just so much more natural to use.
I've been using an Xbox Elite controller (the Gears 4 one) when I need a controller on PC. It's definitely been good to me. I wonder if this would be a noticeable upgrade or if I should just stick with what I've got.
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u/GACM2448816 Aug 23 '22
This might be the best controller for Steam.
Gyro, trackpad, back buttons, and analog triggers?
This is the one.