Sony added a screen to their controller to create a handheld, whereas Valve removed the screen from their handheld to create a controller.
The video of two people playing the steam deck with two steam controllers in a fast food joint. Completely natural scenario! Just casually bringing your steam deck and two steam controllers to a fast food joint. Feels like they want to copy the nintendo switch advertisements, but it’s not comparable at all since the switch is smaller and has the joycons which you can use as make-do controllers for e.g. public places.
As someone who brought my deck and 2 controllers with me on a trip with my friend, I’m the person in the advert. We were killing time waiting for another friend and we just chilled somewhere we could get food and drink and played indie games
As a big fan of the Steam Deck something I want to emphasize here is that even if you didn’t want both the joysticks and the touchpads on the Steam Controller and wish they had picked one or the other, this kind of setup means the controller has essentially the same layout as the Steam Deck which is HUGE for ease of finding custom control schemes already uploaded by the community for complex games.
I prefer joysticks+gyro over touchpads for aiming and so for me the touchpads might seem superfluous, but in reality I heavily use them for virtual menus in all of my control schemes I make for complex games with lots of controls and inputs. The nice thing is that even though I am in the minority of people in that I prefer joysticks + gyro over touchpad for aiming, because the Steam Deck and Steam Controller both have two touchpads and two joysticks, somebody who is touchpad centric can use a control scheme I make pretty much right out of the box just by flip flopping the touchpad and joystick bindings so the virtual menus live on the joysticks instead.
I think this will be one of the subtle things people look back on and credit the Steam Deck and now new Steam Controller for having, it might seem silly and extraneous to have both touchpads and joysticks but it opens up a very wide range of capability and also makes it easier for touchpad and joystck focused players to share custom keybinding schemes with each other.
You say that because you prefer joysticks, but imagine using touchpad for camera movements and then going for buttons. Hella uncomfortable, something that was a plus in the old steam controller. Basically a downgrade.
I think the easy solution here is release an identical controller except switch the location of the touchpad and joysticks. I think this would also be good for people with all different kinds of hand shapes as someone who likes joysticks but has small hands might prefer the same controller as someone who has large hands and prefers touchpads and equal and opposite for the other version.
Idk it is a weird idea I guess but I think it makes a lot of sense if you think about it.
I agree, no way in hell we are getting it though lol.
I thought I’d use the touch pads more but gyro is the first thing i set up in most games.
This is wild to me. Holding my arms perfectly still is practically impossible for me. The idea of a game using my pose and unconscious arm movements as input is positively gameplay-wrecking.
The joysticks on the steam deck are touch sensitive and can bet set as the gyro aim activation you can also set it to be a combination of that + another button so aim down sight and finger on aim joy could activate it if you want or some other combination. Its slick as shit
A bit how, most of the time in Breath of the Wild, the gyros don’t do anything. They only activate while aiming a bow, using Magnesis or a few other context-sensitive moments. Because yeah, if it was constantly doing something like camera control that would get turned off immediately.
I play shooters and rts games with a gyro toggle, and I only toggle gyro off when I am putting my steam deck down or some other random thing. To each their own!
Super weird to me. I can’t imagine playing DOOM like that.
It is very effective for me, I can play multiplayer fps games against mouse and keyboard players fine and honestly I enjoy it more than mouse and keyboard, probably because I grew up playing xbox/consoles (not that I find it difficult to use a mouse and keyboard, just not as fun) but also because it just feels like I am aiming so snap shots and such are wayyyy more satisfying to me than if I just moved a mouse to click on them.
In practice it isn’t necessarily easy to tell I am using gyro except for when I do brief quick reaction shots just relying on gyro for aim, the rest of the time I don’t ever think about using the gyro consciously, I just use the joysticks for rough aim and let my brain figure the rest out with the gyro. Recoil in FPS games is also way more fun to control with gyro, it is a more direct control relationship rather than dragging a mouse down a mousepad, at least for me.
I don’t move the Steam Deck much though, it isn’t like I am getting a work out whipping the Steam Deck around, the gyro is really just there to lock in broad joystick movements to be accurate and on target consistently thus avoiding the small aim adjustment problem that joystick deadzones create. Also once I got used to it, my brain automatically cancels unintended gyro movements with joystick movements and thus I don’t have to hold the Steam Deck totally still in order not to have my aim utterly thrown off from a normal amount of arm shake/movement.
Sounds like lot more work than “move stick left, guy go left”
Same, I always have to disable it or greatly dial it back, for example in fallout nv I leave it on with low sensitivity while I’m holding the trigger to ads, so I can have the fun aiming experience when I want to, what I really can’t stand is “thumb on joystick activates gyro” MF I leave my thumb on the thimbstick when I want to use it, why would I want to trigger gyro?
I have mine set so if I want it to stay still, I lift my thumb off the movement joystick, turning off the gyro control. If I still need to move, I nudge from the side where the sensor isn’t
You use both thumbsticks for identical movement control?
One is lateral movement, the other is aiming. My deck’s offline at the moment, so I’m going from memory… but now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure I have the right stick set to aim. Then I have the gyro set to only activate when my thumb is on the right stick. Big rapid changes in direction I use the stick and the fine adjustments don’t much matter; then for fine control I hold the stick still, with thumb on top, and physically shift the deck to aim. Sometimes bracing my wrists on my knees or whatever’s handy.
Then when I end up angled weird, I lift my thumb and settle back in. My play style tends to end up with me twisting around while I play anyway, this just lets me harness it a bit!
That sounds like too much cognitive load. Stick go left, guy go left.
Like I said, I tend to move like this regardless; this just lets it actually do something!
Magnetic hall-effect thumbsticks
SEE NINTENDO?! IT’S NOT THAT HARD!!
I really liked my hall effect keyboard until a few keys decided to start triggering by themselves making the keyboard unusable
Is that common with that technology?
the og steam controller has hall effect triggers and I never heard any issues with them, some third party controller companies like 8bitdo have also used hall effect on their sticks for a while and I don’t think I’ve seen any complains.
that said, the sticks are gonna be TMR which is … slightly different magnetic technology.
TMR, not Hall Effect
Even better
As someone who was an absolutely massive fan of the original Steam Controller (in fact I still have two of them) I absolutely love these. Yes I know they’re clearly a different design but like last time they seem absolutely perfect for my larger hands. The touchpads seem to be less of a primary focus but honestly im just happy that they included them at all especially two of them. Also USB C plus rechargeable battery and four back buttons instead of two, this is absolutely everything I could have hoped for and then some.
I really hope that with the release of this sc-controller either starts being maintained or somebody makes a fork of it that is (standalone original steam controller/steam deck/steaminput driver)
But this isn’t the first Steam Controller, is it? The first one (and also the first Steam Machine) was released on 2015.
I’m so thrilled for a new steam controller. I was a huge fan of the original, I just wish it were built Better. I hope the new one is built well, I’m planning to purchase one as I think it will be a good controller for my flight sims
Hold up, Steam Frame? New Valve VR hardware??
That looks uncomfortable to hold ngl.
Steam Frame is a PC, and runs SteamOS powered by a Snapdragon® 8 Series Processor.
I’m more excited about this tbh. It’ll be quite something if Valve ends up solving the firmware problems of Linux on snapdragon powered phones.
It’s funny, I was thinking the opposite. Lol. The design reminds me of the Dreamcast controller. I remember the first time I held a Dreamcast controller and how insanely comfortable it felt compared to NES, SNES, Genesis, N64 and Playstation. Granted, modern PlayStation and XBox controllers are also much more comfortable than all of those too, so the Dreamcast one might be uncomfortable by modern standards, but I don’t know since I haven’t held one in 25 years.
I’m hoping this new Steam Controller is as comfortable as I remember the Dreamcast controller being.
Steam Frame is their new VR headset (not an Index successor, more a Quest competitor).
Steam Machine is their pc.
Yeah, but they said the frame is a complete pc as well
