I get the impression so far anyway that some reviewers arent going to do much customising or literally playing with different settings.Basically reviewing an out of the box product and no futher.Mine is due tomorrow i shall give it the full works.
So, I dunno if I'm allowed to say this or not, but what has been going on is that, in the interest of trying to make the controller "plug and play" out of the box, testers have been going through every game on steam and checking to see if the controller works based on a heirarchy. First, we test to see if the game supports gamepad + mouse, and if it does, we default to that. If it doesn't, then we see if it'll support gamepad + joystick camera. if it does, we default to that. If it doesn't, then we go to Generic gamepad. If that works, we default to that, otherwise, knowing that it doesn't support gamepad in any real capacity, we create a custom KBM config.
The reason being is that dealing with mismatching button prompts is, initially, much harder for people to deal with. So, take for instance Metal Gear Solid V - it doesn't support gamepad + mouse right now. But, if you make the steam controller identify as an xbox pad, it works without any real problems - the on-screen prompts match the controller, and you can technically do everything you could possibly want to do in the game with the controller. In other words, it "works" but it's not optimal. When playing MGSV with the default, "recommended" controller scheme, the right pad is set to analog stick emulation, using joystick camera. What that means is when you touch the right pad, where you touched it becomes the deadzone, and as you move your thumb away from this deadzone, it mimics pulling an analog stick in those directions. So if you pull right a little bit and leave your thumb there, it'll act like you're tilting the analog stick just a little bit and slowly turn the camera until you "let go." If you pull to the right a lot, it'll act like you're tilting the stick a lot.
And, as I said, the heirarchy we're following means that this controller configuration takes precedence, and is actually the "recommended" controller scheme at the moment.
By contrast, I have a custom controller configuration for MGSV - it's listed under "Krejlooc's Action A bindings." This binding, rather than treating the steam controller like an xbox 360 controller, is purely mouse and keyboard. I've set up the controller so that the keyboard buttons are in the right spot so that, if you've played on an xbox controller, you know where everything is. I.E. Y is mount, Left bumper is whistle, right bumper is binoculars, etc. But they're being handled with keyboard commands, so that, when you approach your horse, it'll tell you to press the "E" key instead of the Y button.
Despite the mismatching button prompts, in this configuration, the right pad acts like a mouse. Meaning you manually select which position you are looking. If you set your thumb down and move to the right and hold it there, it doesn't keep turning right. Instead, it moves to the right every "click" of the pad and holds there until you move your thumb.
The vast, vast majority of "recommended" controller configurations for the steam controller out of the box are the Xbox 360 emulation setups. This is by design. We have been going through, game by game, setting them to work like this. Most of the time, when I have set a controller configuration to work like this, I have also spent some time creating a "Krejlooc" binding that works with buttons in the same spot, but using KBM mode.
I'm reading these reviews, and it's very obvious what is happening - these reviewers are launching games and using the default, recommended controller schemes. In fact, if a game has a recommended controller scheme
at all, the steam controller will never even prompt you to change the settings. Like, you launch a game and boom - it automatically selects that xbox 360 emulation setting for you.
Rule of thumb - if you see my bindings on steam, they are the xbox 360 controller layout, only adapted to work with KBM instead of an analog stick.
Valve, eventually, wants a recommended or official controller scheme for every game on steam, which is a great goal. Given the manpower required to do that, they couldn't realistically expect every game to have personalized settings on day one. but they wanted at least a majority of games to have a recommended setting. Again, I dunno if I'll get in trouble for revealing this, but I felt it was necessary to point out because it is obviously affecting these reviews, and explaining why it's being done this way at the moment helps understand the mentality, and how the controller will evolve in the upcoming weeks. The way the controller works "out of the box" today is not the way it'll work "out of the box" in 6 months, and heck, it's not the way it worked "out of the box" 3 weeks ago.
