It was also tedious to get games working too. I used to be able to use profiles outside of Big Picture on non steam games, and now I have to be in BPM. Steam updates a lot and messes up stuff with my profiles every now and then. I voted awesome hardware, annoying software.
I wish SC wasn't so tied to steam, and I wish better controllers or SC2 came out, but game developers outside of Nintendo system are so stuck on dual analog. It has gyro and a touch pad, and maybe the people that make reWASD will do some good things with the haptics. I'm getting Dual Sense to be able to use reWASD (it looks a lot better than Steam Input), and use Flick Stick for big movements in the place of the right touch pad. Gyro, touch pads, a good enough game profiler (steam input) it all works together well. Over time I learned what sensitivity I wanting certain things at like mouse look, and now the controller is the best I'll likely ever have. What I did was play a 3rd person game (Saints Row 4) and went to town collecting orbs, shooting, super jumping, and adjusting to the controller making tweaks to the control settings as I went. When I got the Steam Controller I understood it would have a learning process.
Did you love the hardware and hate the software side of things like me? Do you just want touch pads to die in a fire? Might as well make it a poll thread as well. Valve put so much effort into making the controller technically work for anything, and not enough effort into getting developers to just properly support the damn thing so you'd want to use it for anything.Ĭurious to see what Era largely thinks about the steam controller. I suppose the ultimate point of this thread is that, while I'd love a hardware revision of the steam controller, what I'd love even more is a more focused software push.
Normally I'd hit one of those issues that prevents me from using the controller how I'd hoped, and end up reaching for the trusty Xbox/PS4 controller. I honestly love the hardware for certain types of games, but I can't remember the last time I thought "wow the steam controller would work well for this" and it actually worked out well. These issues culminated in the steam controller being a good option for an absolutely minuscule amount of games in my library (and I own like 800 of em), which is a damning situation to be in when your controller also requires you to really practice with it to become proficient. To be honest here, that "mouse-like joystick" was at best serviceable, and at worst unusable with the way thumbstick acceleration worked in a game, and outright using that touchpad as a thumbstick replacement was clunky and bad. This often left you with picking between good aim (mouse + keyboard) or good movement/button mapping (controller). Some games would hitch when the input swapped, some games would flat out not allow them to work together, and other games would rapidly swap the input prompts (honestly this was the best case because it's at least usable in an optimal fashion). What really killed the steam controller for me was the vast majority of games not working well with simultaneous use of a keyboard + mouse and a controller. But prompts aren't the big thing that held it back, because you can adapt to not having accurate prompts. I don't know what Valve did to make supporting the controller itself easy, but I can't recall a single game that even had prompts for it (I'm guessing some Valve titles would have, but other than that there was nothing I played with them). By far the biggest thing working against the steam controller was the lack of proper in-game support from developers.
Kind of a random topic but this is an idea that bounces around my head every time I want to dig out the steam controller and play something with it.