Valve’s Steam Deck is aiming to turn the entirety of your Steam library into games that can be played on a handheld console and, while many of those experiences will translate naturally to using thumbsticks and buttons, others could feel a little odd to play without a mouse. That led to the Deck’s designers working hard on the console’s trackpads and gyroscopic controls, which they say help simulate the speed and accuracy of mouse controls.
Speaking to us as part of our IGN First on the Steam Deck, several of the console’s creators talked us through the process of making sliding your thumbs across a trackpad feel analagous to moving a mouse across your desk – and it started long before the creation of the Deck.
“Certain games are just not going to be as great with thumbsticks, right?”, explained John Ikeda. “So there’s some learnings from other products that we’ve made on those trackpads, for sure. Everything from the underlying electronics, to even the texture and the material on the top of the trackpad itself, is something that we’ve gotten to from learnings on other products.”
“Obviously we have history with trackpads,” continued hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat. “I mean, there’s a lot of research that was done a long time ago that made it feel like trackpads are really one of the most versatile input methods, [and give] you the best bang for the buck in terms of being able to play all these games on Steam.
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“But we didn’t really take any of that for granted. We did re-verify all that, and also did a lot of improvements. So the trackpads themselves, in terms of hardware, they’re lower latency than [those on] Steam Controllers. We added the force sensitive sensors on there, so you could adjust how much force you need to exert to actuate certain events. It’s a very versatile input method. I mean, people who really want to invest the time to customize it will get a lot of benefits out of it. Yeah, we’re excited to see how people use it, really.”
The addition of lower latency and customisable pressure sensitivity should make a big difference to the certain games. Designer Lawrence Yang explained that the latency is far improved beyond that on Steam Controllers, and specifically pointed to one kind of game that will benefit, saying that it offers “extra responsiveness when you’re in a firefight situation in a FPS game.” Similarly, being able to choose how much pressure you apply to the pad to trigger a click will let users have low pressure for an action like typing, but high pressure for something like a melee attack in a shooter, to reduce the chance of misclicks.
Yang also points out that the trackpads have far more functions than simply working as a mouse-like control: “They can be used for many different things. We have a keyboard that lets you do a dual thumb typing. In game, you can map them to areas of the screen for the mouse cursor to jump there and be kind of a one-to-one region-type input. You can create onscreen menus that pop-up on top of the game and have many customizable macro buttons or keyboard keys. And you can just use it for mouse input, where it’s really powerful and reliable for the people that are comfortable with that sort of input.”
The designers are keen to point out that trackpads are only part of a solution to replicating traditional controls, too. The console also features a touchscreen – helpful for precise use of a cursor – and programmable buttons on the rear of the console, which can be used like keyboard hotkeys. Perhaps most importantly, there are also gyro controls, which can offer minute changes to your aim by simply tilting the console.
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“The gyro is also something we’ve been working on for a long time,” Yang explains. “[On Steam Deck], it can be enabled by both touching the trackpad or touching the thumbstick – we have been developing a new type of thumbstick that is actually capacitive, so, it can sense whether your finger is on it or not. And the gyro has also been improved latency wise, to provide more responsive aiming experiences. I think that it can be used to augment power and flexibility for any game that supports mouse input [and] developers don’t have to do any sort of specific work to integrate these controls.”
In a separate demonstration, designer Scott Dalton explained how the combination of trackpad or joystick movement with gyro controls can fundamentally change the precision of your aim:
“It just makes it so that things that before would be hard to do, like if you have to make these minute movements or say a target’s running across your screen, while you’re trying to get a headshot, you have to track that target. It’s super easy to use your whole arm to get that precise movement, where it might be much harder to get the exact amount of stick deflection to do that really smooth movement. It’s a very one-to-one, mouse-like experience, right?”
Gyro controls are implemented seamlessly into the Steam Deck scontrol schemes, with no need for developers to add them manually – and, of course, they’re entirely customisable for the user, including turning them off. But Dalton says he’s a true convert:
“It’s one of the things that takes a little time for your brain to totally click with. But after you get it down, it feels so normal that you’ll wonder how you ever played without it. I literally can’t play FPS games without this on, at this point. Because my brain, every time there’s a target a little bit off, I start moving the controller, wanting it to work and if it’s not there, it just feels broken. So it’s one of those things that you’ll just totally incorporate after a pretty short time.”
The upshot is that Steam Deck should be able to offer a control solution to any game you throw at it, with enough customisability to give any player a useful way of tackling their chosen game on the move. As Ikeda puts it: “I think it’s really about giving them a diverse set of inputs that people can customize and play the games that they want to play, as they like to play it.”
Revealed with IGN earlier this month, the Steam Deck is a new handheld PC from Valve, designed to play the entirety of the Steam library, and able to do much more besides. Keep track of all our coverage on our Steam Deck hub.
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