Valve Shows Off Steam's New Controller

I have a question.

... why?

I am impressed. It looks great.

I don't mean to sound like a negative nancy, as you point out: worst case scenario you just won't use it.

However, I do think it is a bad idea to make people believe this is going to be a functional replacement for Keyboard/Mouse games, its not like all the sudden DOTA dudes will be switching to this.

Death to analog sticks!!

The real crime is that the "default" control scheme was fundamentally wrong all this time, and so the logical control for a camera has had to be called "inverted" as a result.

Seems cool, hope its not over 100 bucks.

It doesn't look like a comfortable or pleasant solution, but I am impressed by how precise the controller is in Counter-Strike. Of course, he has to stop moving every time he wants to aim at a target, but still pretty impressive.

I’m a happy Steam customer happily using my happy mouse and keyboard. I don’t want a controller?

meh...we'll see when it comes out...maybe for games that don't support the xbox controller...

Ok Valve, I'm officially starting to be convinced that that thing works, please show me more. I want to see how the left hand uses the buttons next to the touchscreen while the right hand is moving with the touchpad.

I think the litmus test for the controller will be Dota 2. Can't wait for this controller.

Looks interesting, but I don't know if I'm going to like it more then the analog sticks on current controllers. At this moment I think I'm happy with my current controllers.

It looks way more competent than I thought it would. Still doesn't hold a candle to a mouse, but it looks way better than a joystick for mouse driven game. I don't know this might be a compromise in the middle of control stick and mouse that pleases no one, but I think it looks like they might be able to pull it off. This video has me in a complete 180 from the initial announcement. This video should have been there for the announcement.

Double swipe with the right thumb told me everything i needed to know.

What I find interesting is that he mentioned Portal was using Legacy Mode, meaning this is what you get if you plug in the controller and don't change anything about your controls so the game reads the controller as a regular keyboard and mouse, mapping the left pad to wasd and the right pad to the mouse. I get the sense that all of the games shown were that way, just to show off that with this controller you can turn it on and play any game in the Steam library with it without changing settings. Now, the interesting thing is what can you do by changing settings, or if the game supports the controller? It's an interesting concept that needs to be shown more to convince me. Basically, I want to play Dota 2 as Meepo and see if anyone can tell the difference.

Why they didn't have this video when they announced it is beyond me.

The gaming community would have laughed a lot less at the weird looking design.

At least they are kind of trying something new with controllers. There hasn't been that much evolution since the Dual Shock. I hope it works well.

I tried playing CS on a trackpad and trust me, this seems infinitely better.

Seems impressive actually. Probably not for me since I don't even have a couch anyway so I just play games right on my PC, but even at this early stage without any modification of games to support it, looks like it handles pretty well. Certainly better than a controller with joysticks (for precision movement). Having both pads jointly control the mouse seems like it has a lot of potential too.

Doesnt look any different to analog controls if i'm totally honest

The movement looks more natural in-game. By that I mean it looks closer to how I'd be moving and looking with a M+KB rather than a controller.

I'm sure I could get better at using my controllers, but this seems like a good in-between. Actually holding and using it still seems totally bonkers. I gotta get my hands on it and try it out.

Because?

My issue with the Papers Please demo is that is was still just so slow. Part of that game is speed, you are paid based on how many people you process and it just didn't look like you could emulate the speed of a mouse using that controller. Perhaps the team is still learning the controller and how it feels, I mean most of use can put a mouse cursor exactly where we want it without thinking so it may be possible to train your thumbs in the exact same way on that controller.

The real issue for me is that these demos didn't really sell me that this was a viable alternative to either M&K or a 360 controller. For the demos where it was emulating a dual joystick theme it didn't look like it was any better (and with all that swiping possibly worse). At the same time the demos showing mouse driven games didn't really look all that comfortable. Sure it may work for playing those games but that doesn't mean it works well. I can't pass final judgement until I get one in my hands but I am skeptical.

This was actually very impressive, I looked at the comments and either you didn't watch the video or were not paying attention to what they were saying.

@ronald said:

That's not exactly what he said. Actually it's not what he said at all. Legacy mode means the game code has not been messed with to make it work with the new controller. Pretty sure he never said he didn't have to assign the controls he were using to the pad. Two very different things.

He was going slow in PP because he was checking the data. You could easily tell it was the person playing it going slow and not the fault of the controller.

I think it looks great, can't wait to try one out.

I'm super interested to try this out myself once it comes out.

Honestly I wasn't interested in this controller at all... before this video. Now I am. Probably not gonna be my first choice for playing with pad, but I can definately see this piece of hardware to be my 2nd controller, for games that do not work well with 360 pad - generally the games, that are meant to be played with mouse are probably way better with this controller.

Why not use mouse then? Well, I work with mouse and keyboard atleast 8 hours per day and when I come home, I don't want to play in that same posture, if you know what I mean (have to give some rest for my wrists, elbows and shoulders). So for me this looks very interesting option.

Mouse movement looked pretty impressive in papers please, though I can imagine it feeling a little weird using both thumbs.

I'm really interested in this control and it seems more viable then before even if this video doesn't do a great job at showing it. I'm more interested in some more details on the price point, wired and wireless options and how long the cord will be or what type of wireless.

What is even a good price for a controller these days? Official Xbox and PS3 controllers MSRP is 50-60 dollars and most still think that's high and they dont have touch screens, so what will these cost.

on a side note Yes Keyboard and mouse might be the best input option at a desk but this whole SteamOS is trying hard for the living room where it's a controller would be better while leaning back on a couch.

Looks awesome.

i think it will depend on the games

if dev put the extra time to make a default calibration of the controller then it could work

but if the calibration is left to the user that no one will want to calibrate it for each game

Does the UI in Civ V scale enough to play it from a couch?

Seems like Valve looked at The Grid and realized they were on to something with that trackball.

Unless steam do something like make it super easy to share calibrations, or release their own or something, kind of like the way you can share calibrations for xpadder etc.

Until I get one in my hands, I just don't know...they better have kiosks with these things eventually.

I would have to use it to really judge, but off the bat it looks really stupid. Reminds me of trying to navigate on a laptop.

Eh, I don't know about this, it looks a bit too much like a trackpad. I'm not going to pass judgement on it yet though, it might end up feeling just fine, and I hope it does.

Just a guess, but I imagine they'll use the workshop for controller configs for games, or some variation of it. So you launch a game, hit the steam interface, and somewhere in there there's a list of controller configs you can download. Hopefully with community voting etc as well.

@mercury228: Or maybe not everyone agree with you?

The Wii U GamePad is better for PC style games than that.

Wow, this thing looks awful! I can see why they chose an incredibly slow portion of Portal, a non-competitive part of their highly competitive FPS and had to work around it's immediately apparent limitations on the only game with a timer. The controller looks like it is struggling to emulate both sides of the argument poorly.

I would really like a video showing Team Fortress on a multiplayer server and a non-local game of Dota.

I'm happy with my Xbox wired controller and keyboard and mouse on a laptop table (or better yet, at my desk.)

For the most part it looks like valve have very loudly said "control in games hasn't evolved in decades" and then struggled to cobble a solution together, forgetting that sometimes you don't need an alternate solution to a problem nobody really has.

Public Service Announcement - if you intend to continue playing games from a desk, this controller was not made for you.

Looks interesting. Would love to own just the controller itself, personally.

It will probably be about as good as using a laptop trackpad, when it comes to being a mouse control analog. Though, presumably, a bit more comfortable.

If it's like a trackpad of a laptop it's terrible. I don't think this will feel similar to that, because anything is better than that.

@treetrunk said:

Then don't buy it?

I'd like to see how this works with Half Life 3...

Well I'm sold; I think it would take a lot of getting used to but very viable for many different games. The dual pointer control for papers please, and emulating mouse and keyboard controls in portal 2 especially looks good to me.

What I want to see now is if they can play diablo 2 with it.