It’s supposed to simulate momentum, like a trackball continuing to roll after your thumb leaves the ball, and the haptic feedback (supposedly) supports that feeling. It shouldn’t work like a trackpad when used in that manner, as it would indeed be far too fatiguing.
I haven’t actually used one myself, so I’m just going by what Valve has told us.
I think the bigger point is that, with controller-based gaming, the vast majority of people don’t need to configure anything. If the out-of-the-box experience is not good, the Steam Controller is doomed.
Nah. As long as Valve offers it for sale, I doubt it will be doomed. There’s always going to be an audience for buying stuff that’s not the “standard” no matter what.
Was anyone else charged a sales tax?
Yes, shipping to MD
Oh… yes, it’s a shipping cost, not sales tax. My bad. I’m so used to ordering from Amazon, it’s been a while since I’ve paid for shipping lol.
Preordered, video looked great. Wonder how long it will take to get comfortable with it to match the level of precision showed with Cities Skylines. If that’s even possible?
Controller itself though is an amazing level of fugly.
This looks really cool. Stupid question - is this just for the Steam Machines or for any PC running Steam?
Any computer, running steam or not. It looks like a mouse and keyboard to your computer. The high-level configuration stuff is steam-only though.
Any machine running Steam.
I have one of the older dual pad only prototypes and I reached a comfort level pretty quickly. While it was never quite mouse level, it was definitely trackball level within just a couple play sessions. Probably because of the spooky haptic feedback creating a ghost trackball under your thumb.
Whenever you think a controller looks ‘fugly’, just remember the Atari Jaguar.
I don’t really play on my TV (my PC is in my office) - I really like my mouse and my keyboard. I do have an XBO controller that, while I’m fond of, I would be willing to replace with this if there were solid reasons to do so (not the mouse stuff, obviously).
Thanks for the info guys!
I used it in both monitor and TV setting and it worked great. The shift paddles on the back are a revelation that need to be added to all controllers everywhere.
I pre-ordered both the controller and the Link. I’m all in!
Perfect, this is exactly the kind of thing (innovation!) that I am hoping to read about with stuff like this. $50 is only ten bucks more than I paid for an XBO controller, so I will likely grab one of these. I don’t know if I’ll go so far as to pre-order it, but I’ll be keeping an eye out for sure.
I pre-ordered the controller. Don’t really need the link so I’ll wait for the first 75% steam sale, probably the next winter sale. ;)
Would pre-order but doesn’t seem available in Australia.
Not available on Brazil either, but I already expected that.
The steam store page makes it sound like the only way to view/edit configurations will be in big picture mode.
I’m hoping it’s just an exclusion from the pre-order, and not a complete online exclusion with them saying something like “You can buy it for $120 at your local EB Games”. I wouldn’t put it past many videogame companies but I don’t believe valve has ever screwed us like that before (at least directly, not by retailing regionally priced games from other publishers).