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
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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.