@oldschool2112 said:
@amafi said:
@oldschool2112 said:
@amafi said:
@oldschool2112 said:
@amafi said:
@oldschool2112 said:
@karkarov said:
So who this uh..... obelisk.... designed to be held by exactly? Screw the fact that supposedly I am going to be using two trackpads for not only my analog sticks but also buttons apparently (????) it looks about uncomfortable as hell to actually hold in your hands.
I cant believe so many users are blinded by "it's valve" to the point where they think the steambox is anything other than a mini pc (we call them HTPC's by the way, they already exist) and this "controller" is anything but a train wreck waiting to happen.
Seriously Gabe, stop believing the internet. You are not actually Jesus.
Have you never used a game controller before? Are you seriously not seeing the resemblance in form to a 360 controller? Have you never used a 360 controller to play a PC game?
The reactions like this are what I imagine people were doing when wireless controllers were first introduced: "It'll never work! There will be tons of lag between pressing a button and seeing the action on screen! Do these professional electric and mechanical engineers with years of training and experience think we're idiots or something?"
Those people were absolutely right though. The input lag DOES matter. That's why games today are generally much less precise than they were when they were played on CRTs and wired controllers. They can't demand that tight timing anymore because the of the latency introduced by modern hardware.
Yes to professional gamers. To the rest of us whose living isn't being made by the difference of milliseconds in response time, the convenience way outweighs any potential 'missed shot' (which is more often our own biological reaction time delays then the technology we use).
But my point is people running around screaming with their hands in the air, similar to the poster I quoted, is almost laughable. History repeating itself whenever some new groundbreaking/game changing technology is introduced. Indoor plumbing - oh noes!
My point was, if people had not changed the way they made games to compensate for the new televisions and controllers, that shit would not have worked. You can't reliably pull off, say, 3 frame jumps on a modern setup, and there were quite a few games in the early 90s and later that required that kind of precision.
This thing will not create a sea change in the industry, developers will not design the way gamers interact with their products with this thing in mind, and therefore the button placement is going to not work all that well with the vast majority of games for sale on the steam platform. That's not just awful design, it's stupid as hell.
Its funny that you say that when devs have already been building 360 controller support in to new PC games - Skyrim and Borderlands 2 for instance. That controller support took some programmers time to build in to the PC versions. So how can you pronounce "developers will not design the way gamers interact with their products with this thing in mind" when its already being done with current gen controllers/games? Especially when this controller is trying to undo the fatal flaw of the thumbstick - aweful performance in FPS style games.
Anyways if you don't like the input device, just stick with mouse/kb. The real excitement is moving away from Microsoft being the gatekeeper to PC gaming and letting devs small and large use the open environment of Unix. The controller is what I'm most excited about as it will increase my physical comfort while gaming/reduce chances of chronic RSI injury IF it can mimic the precision of a mouse.
What? Borderlands 2 and Skyrim were designed to work on the consoles as well as PC. The work they did on the PS3 and 360 versions were directly transferrable to the PC with no extra thought or work required on the design end. They had a HUGE install base to incentivize implementing that support and it took very little to implement it in windows. That's hardly the same as designing the game to work with two radically different input methods, where one has x amount of easily reachable buttons and the other has y.
And considering there are millions of people out there with 360 and PS3 controllers playing on consoles, that the majority of games are multiplatform (of the games people actually care about). So you can design for the PC, the xbox and the playstation and only have to figure out how the controller inputs will work ONCE. The you look at the install base of the steam controller and decide if it makes sense to dedicate the resources to actually design the game to work with that as well. I'm willing to bet money that most large publishers will not be willing to do that for a long long time, if ever.
So if consoles have brought "a HUGE install base to incentivize implementing that support", why is there no native PS3 controller support in Borderlands 2 and Skyrim? And given Steam is THE default platform for PC gaming communities, how is it that a controller developed for Steam won't garner industry wide support?
"The Steam Controller is designed to work with all the games on Steam: past, present, and future. Even the older titles in the catalog and the ones which were not built with controller support. (We’ve fooled those older games into thinking they’re being played with a keyboard and mouse, but we’ve designed a gamepad that’s nothing like either one of those devices.)"
"Traditional gamepads force us to accept compromises. We’ve made it a goal to improve upon the resolution and fidelity of input that’s possible with those devices. The Steam controller offers a new and, we believe, vastly superior control scheme, all while enabling you to play from the comfort of your sofa. Built with high-precision input technologies and focused on low-latency performance, the Steam controller is just what the living-room ordered."
...don't you think gamers will gravitate to an input device that offers all the convenience of a mouse without the wrist/shoulder agrivation and all the convenience of sitting comfortably on a couch or chair without having to pony up to a desk?
Its your point of view that perplexes me. This is future tech - give it a chance before writing it off.
Because they have the exact same button layout. Minus the casing, the stick placement and button names they're the same device, essentially. And the reason everyone goes for 360 pad support in windows games is two-fold. One is, it's fucking free with dxinput. Couple lines of code and it just works. Number two is that the 360 pad is the defacto standard for windows. Works out of the box without a driver, wired or wireless, that sort of thing. Installing the PS3 pad under windows is still a bit of an ordeal, and it does other unfortunate stuff to your system as well (takes over BT controller or USB port, making it useless for any other device you want to stick in there)
Also, we are talking about completely different things here. I'm talking about how people sit down with the controller in hand and design the interactions the game will have with that controller in mind. Shit like, they don't want you to have to do dumb stuff like pushing the left stick all the way to the left while hitting the d-pad. Or limiting the times you have to hit L1 and L2 at the same time while moving the left stick. How no game has you hold the A and Y buttons at the same time. That shit is like it is because someone sat down and thought about it early in the process of designing the very fundemental gameplay.
This thing, with the divergent button placement will not get the fruits of that labour. And yeah, Steam sells a lot of games, but not more than consoles, and I'm willing to bet that for a long time yet there will be more 360 pads hooked up to computers playing steam games than there will be steam controllers. Hence, the designers do that work once, because it works for a majority of people, and they only have to do the work once. Then maybe they think about mouse and keyboard support, but most of the time they just slap something together in a hurry (try playing any fifa game from the last decade with mouse and keyboard. That game was obviously not designed with that type of input in mind).
What you are talking about is just basic support. That will obviously be there. Along with remapping and everything else. Doesn't really negate the bigger issue of fundamental design choices made based on the layout of the other pads though. And of course, like I said earlier, maybe computers being relabeled steam machines is all it will take and consoles will disappear from the face of the earth by xmas 2015, and then developers will have the steam controller in mind when laying out the basic interactions the games will feature. I wouldn't hold my breath though.
Oh, and there's another huge dumb issue with the thing, from what I've seen some people point out. You can do stuff like map the inner circle of the right pad to mouse look and buttons around the outside. There are a million different ways of laying that stuff out. With ZERO labeling. And no physical buttons, so you're feeling your way for the jump button and accidentally move the camera. Or you move your thumb a little too far up and hit whatever, the software button you mapped to melee attack or something. Usability HELL.
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