For a while, Valve produced prototype controllers that had a trackball replacing the right analog stick, eventually landing on an iteration with a giant ball that could be spun from the top (with a thumb) or the bottom (with your fingers). The ball, Coomer said, had “built-in haptics” — you didn’t need to simulate haptic feedback because you were spinning a large, heavy ball with its own momentum. It worked well. Simultaneously, Valve was playing around with touch interfaces, from simple circular trackpads for your thumbs to more complicated ideas. One abandoned idea looked like a smartphone that sat in a controller-shaped dock, and every game could have its own customized control display on the screen. Another concept was a modular controller; you could swap out the left and right inputs for a joystick, a touch pad or a trackball depending on the game.
“The physicality of buttons combined with touch and trackpad-style input was really where the sweet spot was,” Coomer said, “actually serving the needs of Steam customers and the Steam catalog.” Valve decided to go with two touch pads, and give game developers the ability to control, with their software, how those touch pads reacted to player input. It also designed the form factor of the controller around them. Just replacing a joystick on an Xbox 360 controller with a flat touch pad would not be a very good input method: Your thumb would lay flat against the whole pad and the game would have a very hard time figuring out what direction you were trying to push.
When Coomer handed me the Steam controller to hold, I immediately understood what was different. The handles are curved upwards, so they keep your thumbs spaced apart from the pads. And the pads themselves are recessed and tilted inward, so only the dead center of the tip of your thumb actually makes contact.
But I didn’t really get it until I tried it. As I sat down in front of the TV screen on the other side of the room, another Valve employee loaded up the strategy game Civilization V and handed me the controller. I passed my right thumb over the trackpad, expecting to see the mouse cursor move. And I did. But what I didn’t expect is that I’d feel and hear it, too. As I swiped the pad, the system of electromagnets under the pad whirred into action, firing under my thumb and making a noise like a ball rolling to a stop: cliklikliklik-click—click—–click———click. If I didn’t know better I’d have thought I was actually rolling a trackball.
The second piece of the puzzle: buttons. They’re everywhere. There are shoulder buttons for you to hit with your index fingers, of course, but there are also “back paddles” that you can easily press with the fingers that go unused on traditional controllers. Each trackpad can be clicked, too, and there are an array of buttons on the face that you can access if you remove your fingers from the pads (although Valve says these are for secondary functions). Finally — although it wasn’t on the prototype I was using — a small screen in the center of the controller will allow users to create their own virtual buttons to take care of any keyboard commands they can’t assign to the physical controller inputs.
“There’s been, I don’t know how many custom peripheral controller type things for gamers on PCs over the years,” Coomer says. “An issue they have all faced, which is giant, and impeditive to their success, is the lack of a mediator like Steam between the controller and the games, so that mediator could universally make sure the controller worked well with all the games.”
At this, Coomer brings up a menu screen that will look familiar to any gamer: a controller-configuration screen where you can assign actions to each input. “This is the kind of thing that is the nightmare for most PC controllers,” he says, “because you start a game and then you’re in this screen for half an hour before you ever get going. We believe we’ve designed a way around that.” When the controller launches, he says, players will be able to create, then share, their custom controller layouts.
“Steam users [will be] the ones driving the proliferation of configurations for all the games,” he says. “We think that as we start our beta, immediately the entire Steam catalog is going to fill up with very high-quality binding sets for all the games that were never meant for use with a controller.” Steam will have a system that lets players rate those bindings, and bubble the best ones to the top of the list, with the intent that most players will never have to configure their own setup.
touting gaming rigs, it'll be upgradeable and resolution-toggleable shyt and all that jazz? If so and it's affordable...hmm....
