Check Out Valve’s Steam Controller in Action (Video)

Valve’s recent announcements about moving into the living room with the Steam Machine has been a big topic as of late, and one of the more interesting things to come out of it is their new original controller design for it, meant to properly capture and easily substitute the normally standard keyboard and mouse setup for PC games. This morning Valve released a demonstration video showing off the controller being used in four different games, primarily focused on the use of the two track pads.

Demonstrated first was Portal 2, which was being played in what Valve refers to as “legacy mode”, meaning that the controller is acting under a direct translation from keyboard/mouse to it (ie left track pad is wasd, right track pad is mouse). One important thing they clarified during this is that the right track pad is set up to a 1 to1 ratio of movement compared to a mouse, meaning how much you move your thumb is exactly how much distance will be moved on screen, which is a distinction from most thumbstick based controls in which how fast you move in a direction affects the distance traveled.

Next they showed off Civ 5, with one of the unique examples from this one being that they made use of one of the shoulder buttons as a grab command. So using the right track pad would still move the mouse, but then using the grab button with the trackpad is just like clicking and dragging with mouse controls.  After that we saw some gameplay of Counter Strike:GO, demonstrating fluid FPS controls without any use of auto-adjust aiming which is quite common on controller based console shooters.

One of the most interesting examples for me personally though was the final one, Papers, Please, a game that is simply a point and click interface. So instead of having the left track pad emulate WASD, they had BOTH pads act as a mouse, enabling you to quickly move across the screen by switching between pads repeatedly, or do more nuanced movement by using both. This gives us a good look at how the controller can be used in a number of genres popular on PC (FPS, Strategy, and point n’ click), but still leaves out one very important PC genre that is historically horrendous to use with a regular controller: RTS (and by extension MOBA’s like Dota). It’s nice to see the controller in action and I can’t wait to try one for myself, and Steam releasing demonstration Videos like this is a great idea, and I only hope we see more examples in the future, especially for it’s applications in RTS. Check the video out for yourself here and let us know what you guys think about the controller so far, whether or not it will be comfortable for PC games that are traditionally keyboard and mouse, or if it will atleast be a suitable replacement for when you want to do some comfier gaming on the couch. As always thanks for reading Tech of Tomorrow!

Source: Valve