Valve is quickly hawking off their last remaining Steam Controllers and aren’t making any more, bringing what is in essence an end to what has been my prefered PC controller for 3 years now. It’s hardly been the most loved thing, it’s haptic pads were a weird step away from traditional buttons and sticks setups, but you know what, I love 'em, and if this thing I have now kicks the bucket it’s gonna take me a long time to get used to playing Warframe some other way. But hey, it came with Steam’s super comprehensive built in key rebinding system, so it’s legacy will live on in that.
So shoutout to the folks making those keybinding presets, shoutout to the games that natively supported this weird pad, shoutout to all the games you could never really play with a controller before, but most of all: Shoutout to the Steam Controller, you a real one.
I only use mine for a couple games a year but I love it. I prefer it over keeb and mouse for turn based or otherwise low APM games like XCOM or Disco Elysium.
Once I run a network drop into my bedroom and hook up the old Steam Link it will be nice to have for playing things like Battletech and other pointy clicky games.
Watching the most recent long Old Games stream on Giant Bomb and Brad mentioning that the track pads might be a good solution for emulating a track ball made me rush to get one. Alas, not in Canada.
Trackball emulation is actually the default mode of operation for desktop mode! Doing a flick gesture on the pad will cause it to “spin”, with the haptics doing a pretty good job of emulating that sensation, and the pointer will continue moving until “inertia” catches up or you put your thumb back down. It’s neat.
I never really enjoyed playing with the SC on games that were actually designed for controllers, though, which is half the reason I got it. And a lot of those turn-based games that it was good for actually have dedicated controller modes now, which really diminishes it’s usefulness for the other half of the reason I got it.
And the really advanced features like action sets were both a ton of work to set up and also added a huge amount of cognitive load on top of like, actually playing the game. Being able to create your own radial button wheels for games that don’t have them natively is cool, though.
I think a new revision could have really made this concept sing, but AFAICT we’re not getting one of those. Another casualty of Valve’s obsession with VR.
The only controller that topped the Steam Controller’s tacky-yet-useful BS was the Wii U’s Gamepad.
Like, as far as “raw potential” is concerned, having a second touch-screen bolted onto whatever you could be playing at any given moment could have been rad (just imagine, being able to sort through your inventory in Breath of the Wild without pausing the game XD). Sadly, the Gamepad was attached to a console that never took off.
I don’t know if the Steam Controller ever got massively popular, but it seems like it’s used fairly frequently by folks on Steam. I picked one up, if only just to see if I can wring any use out of it. If not, I imagine the resell value will be decent.
Also for clarity, Breath of the Wild has no Gamepad support whatsoever, as this was done to keep the Wii U version from having diverging features than the Switch port.
Which is a shame, because that game FEELS like it was built for the Wii U.
