The real question is “does it have a way to wake a steamdeck up from sleep”
Apparently the OLED model can already do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNiENNEvkP
I hope the d-pad is better than the steamdeck one, other than that I’m looking forward to it.
They were talking about “magnetic joysticks” so they’re hall effect?
No TMR.
So fucking hyped for this thing. Hope the price is good.
I’m so thrilled for a new steam controller. I was a huge fan of the original, I just wish it were built Better. I hope the new one is built well, I’m planning to purchase one as I think it will be a good controller for my flight sims
I think at this point Valve has a lot more experience with hardware/handheld design. My steamdeck is more than rigid enough, and this at least looks like a steamdeck, without the screen
I certainly hope so, the index was a promising piece of kit, never got the deck because I shouldn’t have access to my escapism simulators on mobile.
Magnetic hall-effect thumbsticks
SEE NINTENDO?! IT’S NOT THAT HARD!!
TMR, not Hall Effect
I really liked my hall effect keyboard until a few keys decided to start triggering by themselves making the keyboard unusable
Is that common with that technology?
the og steam controller has hall effect triggers and I never heard any issues with them, some third party controller companies like 8bitdo have also used hall effect on their sticks for a while and I don’t think I’ve seen any complains.
that said, the sticks are gonna be TMR which is … slightly different magnetic technology.
Been using the 8BitDo TMR sticks for a while, and they’re great so far. There’s no super long-term usage yet, the technology just isn’t old enough yet for anyone to have 10+ years of real world usage, but it’s fantastic hardware thus far, and I have faith in it to last as long as I’ll want to use the controllers for, unlike say, my Switch Pro Controllers (which I promptly replaced with 8BitDo controllers with TMR after discovering how bad the drift was on my OG ones).
As a big fan of the Steam Deck something I want to emphasize here is that even if you didn’t want both the joysticks and the touchpads on the Steam Controller and wish they had picked one or the other, this kind of setup means the controller has essentially the same layout as the Steam Deck which is HUGE for ease of finding custom control schemes already uploaded by the community for complex games.
I prefer joysticks+gyro over touchpads for aiming and so for me the touchpads might seem superfluous, but in reality I heavily use them for virtual menus in all of my control schemes I make for complex games with lots of controls and inputs. The nice thing is that even though I am in the minority of people in that I prefer joysticks + gyro over touchpad for aiming, because the Steam Deck and Steam Controller both have two touchpads and two joysticks, somebody who is touchpad centric can use a control scheme I make pretty much right out of the box just by flip flopping the touchpad and joystick bindings so the virtual menus live on the joysticks instead.
I think this will be one of the subtle things people look back on and credit the Steam Deck and now new Steam Controller for having, it might seem silly and extraneous to have both touchpads and joysticks but it opens up a very wide range of capability and also makes it easier for touchpad and joystck focused players to share custom keybinding schemes with each other.
I thought I’d use the touch pads more but gyro is the first thing i set up in most games.
This is wild to me. Holding my arms perfectly still is practically impossible for me. The idea of a game using my pose and unconscious arm movements as input is positively gameplay-wrecking.
The joysticks on the steam deck are touch sensitive and can bet set as the gyro aim activation you can also set it to be a combination of that + another button so aim down sight and finger on aim joy could activate it if you want or some other combination. Its slick as shit
A bit how, most of the time in Breath of the Wild, the gyros don’t do anything. They only activate while aiming a bow, using Magnesis or a few other context-sensitive moments. Because yeah, if it was constantly doing something like camera control that would get turned off immediately.
I have mine set so if I want it to stay still, I lift my thumb off the movement joystick, turning off the gyro control. If I still need to move, I nudge from the side where the sensor isn’t
You use both thumbsticks for identical movement control?
One is lateral movement, the other is aiming. My deck’s offline at the moment, so I’m going from memory… but now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure I have the right stick set to aim. Then I have the gyro set to only activate when my thumb is on the right stick. Big rapid changes in direction I use the stick and the fine adjustments don’t much matter; then for fine control I hold the stick still, with thumb on top, and physically shift the deck to aim. Sometimes bracing my wrists on my knees or whatever’s handy.
Then when I end up angled weird, I lift my thumb and settle back in. My play style tends to end up with me twisting around while I play anyway, this just lets me harness it a bit!
That sounds like too much cognitive load. Stick go left, guy go left.
Like I said, I tend to move like this regardless; this just lets it actually do something!
I play shooters and rts games with a gyro toggle, and I only toggle gyro off when I am putting my steam deck down or some other random thing. To each their own!
Super weird to me. I can’t imagine playing DOOM like that.
I played through Doom Eternal like that on my Steam Controller where I mapped mouse to the touchpad for quick turns, gyro activated on touch, and mapped some of the weapons on the touchpad so I could swap to them when I clicked by setting up a dpad modeshift on right pad click with an inverted outer ring for center click.
Turned off aim assist and went my way.
It is very effective for me, I can play multiplayer fps games against mouse and keyboard players fine and honestly I enjoy it more than mouse and keyboard, probably because I grew up playing xbox/consoles (not that I find it difficult to use a mouse and keyboard, just not as fun) but also because it just feels like I am aiming so snap shots and such are wayyyy more satisfying to me than if I just moved a mouse to click on them.
In practice it isn’t necessarily easy to tell I am using gyro except for when I do brief quick reaction shots just relying on gyro for aim, the rest of the time I don’t ever think about using the gyro consciously, I just use the joysticks for rough aim and let my brain figure the rest out with the gyro. Recoil in FPS games is also way more fun to control with gyro, it is a more direct control relationship rather than dragging a mouse down a mousepad, at least for me.
I don’t move the Steam Deck much though, it isn’t like I am getting a work out whipping the Steam Deck around, the gyro is really just there to lock in broad joystick movements to be accurate and on target consistently thus avoiding the small aim adjustment problem that joystick deadzones create. Also once I got used to it, my brain automatically cancels unintended gyro movements with joystick movements and thus I don’t have to hold the Steam Deck totally still in order not to have my aim utterly thrown off from a normal amount of arm shake/movement.
Sounds like lot more work than “move stick left, guy go left”
No I only use the gyro for aim, movement is just the left joystick like normal controller style FPS controls!
Same, I always have to disable it or greatly dial it back, for example in fallout nv I leave it on with low sensitivity while I’m holding the trigger to ads, so I can have the fun aiming experience when I want to, what I really can’t stand is “thumb on joystick activates gyro” MF I leave my thumb on the thimbstick when I want to use it, why would I want to trigger gyro?
I use them both together, touchpds for quick movements and gyro for precision.
Yeah, this is something that I’ve been wanting for a while now too. I flip flop between my steam deck and a steam-machine-like desktop pc with an original steam controller for a while now, and not having my control mappings translate from one to another has been annoying (but in an understandable way). This is gonna be sweeeeeet.
You say that because you prefer joysticks, but imagine using touchpad for camera movements and then going for buttons. Hella uncomfortable, something that was a plus in the old steam controller. Basically a downgrade.
I think the easy solution here is release an identical controller except switch the location of the touchpad and joysticks. I think this would also be good for people with all different kinds of hand shapes as someone who likes joysticks but has small hands might prefer the same controller as someone who has large hands and prefers touchpads and equal and opposite for the other version.
Idk it is a weird idea I guess but I think it makes a lot of sense if you think about it.
I agree, no way in hell we are getting it though lol.
Probably not, but it might be suprisingly economical given you are making a product that simultaneously targets two niche ends of two markets at once (people who have larger hands and use touchpads and people who have smaller hands and use joysticks) and compliments the new steam controller perfectly as a sort of mirror image.
I am sure it would be more costly than just sticking to one controller design, but you wouldn’t presumably have to change thatttt much about the controller production. It wouldn’t really change keybinding stuff either just you would have to change the steam ui to reflect the changed position of the joysticks and touchpads.
My hope after seeing that the joysticks themselves look like they can be removed from the main board is that the touchpads can be relocated to the top without too much hassle and put into a 3D printed top shell made by the community. So if that were possible what I’d probably do is pop off the XYAB, dpad, and board holding the joystick so the touchpad can be moved up to make the touchpads comfortable for primary use.
And then I’d rely on the back buttons and set up a dpad modeshift on a right pad click to enable edge and center clicks, so I wouldn’t miss the absence of the other inputs too much. I also use touchpad for movement where I’ll often set outer ring to sprint and map crouch/slide/dash on touchpad click, so cuts down on needed inputs further.
So that’s my hope that modifying the new Steam Controller for touchpad users will be as simple as 3d printing a shell and opening the controller and not require further things like soldering.
As someone who was an absolutely massive fan of the original Steam Controller (in fact I still have two of them) I absolutely love these. Yes I know they’re clearly a different design but like last time they seem absolutely perfect for my larger hands. The touchpads seem to be less of a primary focus but honestly im just happy that they included them at all especially two of them. Also USB C plus rechargeable battery and four back buttons instead of two, this is absolutely everything I could have hoped for and then some.
I really hope that with the release of this sc-controller either starts being maintained or somebody makes a fork of it that is (standalone original steam controller/steam deck/steaminput driver)
C H O N K
Hold up, Steam Frame? New Valve VR hardware??
Whole gaming set, in fact. Steam Machnes are finally coming! Checking it, seems that it is going to be a powerhouse that will blow up console market.
That looks uncomfortable to hold ngl.
Steam Frame is a PC, and runs SteamOS powered by a Snapdragon® 8 Series Processor.
I’m more excited about this tbh. It’ll be quite something if Valve ends up solving the firmware problems of Linux on snapdragon powered phones.
It’s funny, I was thinking the opposite. Lol. The design reminds me of the Dreamcast controller. I remember the first time I held a Dreamcast controller and how insanely comfortable it felt compared to NES, SNES, Genesis, N64 and Playstation. Granted, modern PlayStation and XBox controllers are also much more comfortable than all of those too, so the Dreamcast one might be uncomfortable by modern standards, but I don’t know since I haven’t held one in 25 years.
I’m hoping this new Steam Controller is as comfortable as I remember the Dreamcast controller being.
I’m not worried. Valve absolutely nailed the Deck ergonomics. They knew what they had to do here.
Yeah, people had said the same thing about the Steam Deck’s face layout, but everyone who has actually used one loves the ergonomics.
I need to actually hold one because, yeah; I see it and it looks awkward, but I have heard what you’re saying from pretty much everyone with one. 🤷♂️
I don’t know if you can demo one somewhere. Microcenter, maybe?
As someone who loved the idea of the original steam controller but found it uncomfortable to hold, the steam deck really does feel stellar in the hand. Most similar to an Xbox controller imo. So I for one am stoked that valve just deleted the screen for the new controller here
Steam Frame is their new VR headset (not an Index successor, more a Quest competitor).
Steam Machine is their pc.
Yeah, but they said the frame is a complete pc as well
I’m quoting their post
Steam Frame is their new VR headset
And Valve literally say on the Steam Frame website that it has a desktop mode running Plasma, just running on an ARM processor instead of x86, and can be used as stand alone PC.
Not sure I wanna blow battery charge on editing spreadsheets in LibreOffice in VR but it’ll be possible.
It’s the all-time great PS controller, except I can’t actually hold the bottom protrusions in my hands.
What’s not to like? Just don’t hold the controller with your hands like you would normally do!
Is your complaint that your fingers do not wrap entirely around the grips or something? It looks very natural to hold to me. Like an even more ergonomic Steam Deck.
https://clan.fastly.steamstatic.com/images/clan/45479024/1ab321a5b909c722f49d45554decb171.webm
It says it’s a zen 4 custom AMD chip?
https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steammachine?l=english
Edit: sorry I got th machine and frame mixed up. Whoops
Touchpads on the Deck are really great for on screen menus for things like ability bars and whatnot.
But this isn’t the first Steam Controller, is it? The first one (and also the first Steam Machine) was released on 2015.
I can’t find a reference to first - where did you see it?
You’re right, of course. I still love my Steam Controller (and Steam Link) after all this time.
There’s no prefix in this second one, so it implies it is the first.
I don’t think that’s how it works. The Xbox One wasn’t the first Xbox, DOOM didn’t get a number for its reboot, etc etc.
But you are right that it’s the second one!
I’ve never used the first one but always heard good things about it so looking forward to the second one
Thank you for making the analog stick aligned like sensible human hands are. Fucking can’t stand the offset sticks on the Xbox.
Thank you for making the analog stick aligned like sensible human hands are. Fucking can’t stand the offset sticks on the Xbox.
I understand the frustration, but personally I’ve always preferred the Xbox/Nintendo stick layout over the PlayStation one myself. For many games, my thumbs are primarily on left thumb stick and face buttons. Obviously anything with camera controls is different, but the offset has never bothered me as much as extending both thumbs down to the sticks like on PlayStation, which sit where they are as a relic of the DualShock introducing analog sticks to an existing controller. (Though I’ll admit the PlayStation setup doesn’t bother me that much, it’s just slightly less comfortable in my opinion.)
The Steam Deck works fine for me because both sticks are higher up, like where the left stick on Xbox/Nintendo falls, rather than below the D-Pad and face buttons like on PlayStation. With this one being somewhere in between, I think I’ll like it just fine. I’m excited to get my hands on one to find out.
My issue on PlayStation controllers is my thumbs hit each other If both sticks are inward, for example moving right while turning left.
I don’t have large hands so I don’t understand how it’s not a more widespread reported issue. Xbox style controllers completely solves this and things like my deck of course its on opposite sides of the screen
I prefer the same PS layout, but some other people complain about the left stick not being under the ‘default’ thumb position, and thus like Xbox controllers more.
Does the computer have to be powered on in order for the puck to charge the controller?
Some computers have special USB ports that stay powered even when the computer itself is off. Guess you’ll have to see if yours has one or if it’s an option you can turn on in the BIOS or something.
Probably?
