Valve came out with the final announcement of the week, with the Steam Controller. They seem to be set out with a singular goal: to bring the Steam experience, in its entirety, into the living-room. Here are the few brief highlights of the controller.
Complete catalog
The Steam Controller is designed to work with all the games on Steam: past, present, and future. Even the older titles in the catalog and the ones which were not built with controller support will can be played using this new controller.
Superior performance
Traditional gamepads force us to accept compromises. With a goal to improve upon the resolution and fidelity of input that’s possible with those devices, the Steam controller offers a new and, we believe, vastly superior control scheme. Steam claims the controller is just what the living-room ordered.
Dual trackpads
The most prominent elements of the Steam controller are its two circular trackpads. Driven by the player’s thumbs, each one has a high-resolution trackpad as its base. It is also clickable, allowing the entire surface to act as a button. The trackpads allow far higher fidelity input than has previously been possible with traditional handheld controllers.
In addition, games like first-person shooters that are designed around precise aiming within a large visual field now benefit from the trackpads’ high resolution and absolute position control.
Haptics
Trackpads, by their nature, are less physical than thumbsticks. By themselves, they are “light touch” devices and don’t offer the kind of visceral feedback that players get from pushing joysticks around. As we investigated trackpad-based input devices, it became clear through testing that we had to find ways to add more physicality to the experience. It also became clear that “rumble”, as it has been traditionally implemented (a lopsided weight spun around a single axis), was not going to be enough. Not even close.
Read More Here : Steam
