Impressions of testing the Valve controller

Game developers who have tried the new unusual controller from Valve have called it promising, although quite different from the usual ones.

“This week we were at Valve and only experienced it a bit, and yet the increase in responsiveness is noticeable right away,” says John Clark, vice president of digital distribution for Sega in the United States and Europe.

Clark is only one of the creators of the games from large and small studios that visited Half-Life, DOTA 2 and Steam at home and experienced the third part of the Valve announcement, consisting of SteamOS, Steam Machine and Steam Controller. All three parts will be combined for a game in the living room, where they and the library of PC games will face Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.
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The key to everything, of course, is the controller, and since Valve says that it can be modified, it most likely has characteristics that separate it from the mouse with the keyboard and traditional Xbox 360 controllers. Styles are replaced with circular trackpads, equipped with vibration motors for tactile feedback; The traditional AXBY buttons are moved to the center of the controller, surrounding a small touchscreen. Beta versions, as in the picture above, replace the touchscreen with temporary buttons.

Clark and his colleague, Jürgen Post, CEO and President of Sega Europe, were stuck in Valve for a few days with the Sega development teams from Relic and Creative Assembly.

Jurgen tests the controller

Indi-developer Ichiro Lambe of Dejobaan Games also tested the controller and tried to explain what it looked like: “It’s hard to understand what feedback is until you try - you take it in your hands and just run the fingers for the first minutes on the trackpads, marveling at the sensations.” .

Lambe played FPS with a new gadget. It seems that tactile feedback has left a strong impression; the idea is to create a sense of the edges of the trackpad, buttons, depending on the game. Trackpads are sensitive to movement and pressure.

“It sounds strange, but it’s more like two heavy trackballs that are too big to fit into the controller,” continued Lambe’s explanations, “By moving your finger, you feel as if you are moving a physical element. If you move your finger quickly, the imaginary trackball will react as something weighty, continuing to rotate for some time, and since it is controlled programmatically, the same trackpad becomes more like a mouse or laptop trackpad when moving through the menu. Dynamics!"

In a similar way, Jamie Cheng from Klei spoke about feedback, a colleague of which also tried a controller. “He told us that the feedback was supernatural, and the trackpad was really like buttons.”

Ichiro Lambe: “The controller is familiar enough to be able to use it (they probably tried less familiar designs before returning to the traditional form factor), but much more precisely than, say, a WASD + mouse. This controller makes FPS more convenient on a gamepad and transfers other genres where precise control of the mouse is needed into the living room. ”

And if Lambe is a good tester for first-person games, Tommy Refenes from Team Meat is ideal for assessing the responsiveness of the new controller in classic 2D games. He played Spelunky and his own Super Meat Boy. In his blog, he described the impressions, summarizing: “TL; DR; A great start, we need some improvements, but it was very convenient to play any game that I wanted. ”

The whole post Refenes is worth reading: it not only describes the sensations from the controller, but also describes the attitude towards him in Valve. Engineers are ready to make changes on the fly, pushing the controller to the beta.

About handling in games Refenes writes:

I could play Meat Boy at an advanced level. The right round button was the jump button, and both triggers were responsible for running, just like on a regular Xbox 360 gamepad. It worked fine, but it was somewhat tingling with the fingers, rather because of Meat Boy, than because of the controller's design.

and...

Spelunky requires the buttons of the Whip, Jump, Bomb and Rope. We set up the controller as an Xbox gamepad, so the left trackpad was again responsible for the movement, and the right one was used as A, B, X, Y buttons in the same position as on the Xbox gamepad ... I played Spelunky, and the controller showed itself just fine

Refenes said that he still prefers the controller from the Xbox 360, just out of habit, but could also play on the Steam controller. Lambe also expressed warmth to the habitual: "There is something special in the movement of the physical stick and pressing the button."

A Valve representative said that other developers also tested the controller, including Paradox Interactive and IO Interactive. A variety of developers show that Valve expects flexibility from its new controller.

Jürgen Post: “We would really like to see how developers are experimenting with RTS. Games like Company of Heroes 2 and Rome II are the basis of Sega and, of course, they can rather be attributed to games for the mouse and keyboard. I myself am wondering how these games will work with the controller. ”