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Comment on The Steam controller was ahead of its time

I don’t think the idea was mature enough. Yes it did try to innovate and do new things but it also was trying very hard to be familiar to an audience that was never going to embrace change while not changing enough for a new audience to develop around it. I would compare it to the Dvorak keyboard, a device that offered only marginal improved efficiency and use while requiring the user to completely relearn from the ground up and have to fight muscle memory for those who used the popular medium it meant to replace. And in the end, most people said it wasn’t worth it.

I was initially intrigued by having buttons on the bottom of the controller, where your fingers naturally would be thus freeing your thumbs to stay on the pad/sticks. And imagine my frustration to realize those rear buttons are just extensions of triggers already on top. Huge missed opportunity imo that a redesign could have given dedicated buttons on the back of the controller to each finger and expand the possibilities for input combos a player can perform.

TL;DR I think the controller was a valiant effort to innovate but didn’t go far enough or do anything sell enough to stick.

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atomicpoet@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Actually, those rear buttons are unique. They are not the same triggers and buttons. They are highly useful in FPS games for functions like crouch.

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- Rakonat@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  On the steamdeck maybe, on the steam controller they are only r1/l1 buttons, I tried many times to change them and the software can’t different them
  
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  - Persi@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    This isn’t true, the back buttons on the steam controller can be mapped independently.
    
    You are most likely misremembering, there are many controllers that do similar things to what you describe, but the steam controller isn’t one of them.
    
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  - Willdrick@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    No they weren’t. I used to play Elite Dangerous and the paddles were used as modifiers, so for example the left paddle held down would change all the face button inputs to distributing energy while the right pad would swap them to common cockpit functions (landing gear, fsd, lights…) Meanwhile both bumpers and triggers remained as a single function: yaw and weapon groups
    
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dualpad@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

I was initially intrigued by having buttons on the bottom of the controller, where your fingers naturally would be thus freeing your thumbs to stay on the pad/sticks. And imagine my frustration to realize those rear buttons are just extensions of triggers already on top.

My set up approach to having both my thumbs stay on the pads a majority of the time has been to set up a dpad modeshift with an inverted outer ring bind so clicking up, down, left, right, center output different inputs. And depending on the game I’d set up a chord so holding the left grip and clicking the right pad would output a different set of 5 inputs. And my right grip is set to jump so with the left grip chord function for 5 additional inputs on a right pad click if needed for a total of 10 that’s been my way of doing that.

So for like Doom Eternal I swap between weapons every shot to bypass reloading through the right touchpad. I like that approach better than using stuff like weapon wheels, which in some games actually slows down the actual gameplay and interrupts the flow.

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