Watch Valve show its Steam Controller in action
See how it works with Portal 2, Civ 5, CS: GO, and Papers, Please.
Valve has released a video showing how its upcoming dual trackpad-based Steam Controller will work with a variety of games.
First off, Valve engineer Jeff Bellinghausen shows how it'll work with Portal 2. Since the trackpads are configurable, for this particular game the left pad is separated into pie-shaped segments like a virtual D-pad, while the right pad has one-to-one movements like a mouse.
Next we see how the Steam Controller will handle Civilization 5, with the right pad moving the cursor while the left scrolls around the map. So far, so keyboard and mouse.
The Counter-Strike: Global Offensive demo doesn't deviate much from what we saw in the Portal 2 segment, only this has more headshots. As someone who can get on with a mouse, but loathes keyboards, this compromise sounds appealing, assuming the electromagnetic haptic feedback is adequately responsive.
Perhaps the most interesting use of the Steam Controller is in Papers, Please where both trackpads control the cursor. What's the point of this, you ask? The main benefit is that you don't have to re-position your thumbs as much, since if one digit runs out of space the other will likely have room. One could infer from this that the trackpads' limited real estate could be problematic in other games, but perhaps it's a sensitivity issue and since Papers, Please requires use of the whole screen it might have the sensitivity dialed down relative to say, a first-person shooter where a tinier movement will radically alter your aim.
Now that you've seen it in action, what do you make of experimental way to combine analogue stick and mouse and keyboard inputs into the same one-size-fits-all controller?