I Can't Live Without The Steam Deck's Trackpads Anymore, And I Hope...

Trackpads could be the 21st century’s analog sticks.

Of the three hardware announcements Valve made yesterday, the Steam Controller is probably the least exciting at face value. It looks a whole lot like the original Steam controller, which hardly set the world ablaze. Also, it’s a gamepad. There are countless PC gamepads on the market, and many are better than what Microsoft or Sony have to offer. We have 1000 Hz polling rates, TMR sticks, and near-mandatory paddle buttons. Sometimes they even have a screen on them, and if you’re lucky, a sprinkling of RGB too. Surely we’re good.

Steam Frame: Valve's new wireless VR headsetSteam Machine: Compact living room gaming boxSteam Controller: A controller to replace your mouse

We’re good if we think about a gamepad as a fast-track to a conventional console experience on our PCs. But after a year spent with Steam Deck and its trackpads, I’ve come to appreciate, at least in part, why Valve put those gargantuan circular trackpads on their original design: because it makes swathes of otherwise unplayable PC games playable under circumstances where a mouse and keyboard isn’t practical or desirable.

Valve’s infiltration of console orthodoxy with the Steam Deck was so much more subtle than just: Cyberpunk 2077 on the bus and you can tweak the graphics. Among other things, it was soft power advocacy for onboard trackpads. Taking trackpads mainstream could be part of the Steam Deck’s legacy, or at least I hope that’s the case. I’m so trackpad-pilled that I can’t imagine another generation of consoles that doesn’t adopt Valve’s implementation. There are more powerful handheld PCs on the market than Steam Deck, but I will never consider buying them if they don’t have trackpads.

Pillars of Eternity turned me into a trackpad truther. It seemed a perfect Steam Deck candidate. It was among the first games I installed on the handheld when I got one, mostly because it’s a very text-heavy game (basically a novel at times) and I didn’t want to bend over a laptop or sit at a desk while reading tracts of high fantasy lore. Alas, while Obsidian’s CRPG eventually released for consoles, the console gamepad UI was never patched into the PC version. A community layout implementing the trackpads as a stand-in for a mouse is pretty much essential for the handheld-determined. I begrudgingly made do.

I begrudgingly made do for a while: for about an hour I was still annoyed that Obsidian hadn’t patched the PC version with the gamepad tri

Source: PC Gamer