Anyone playing Elden Ring with steam controller?

[Hexton]

I love keyboard mouse, but with Elden Ring I'm trying an xbox controller for the first time (its been rough learning).

Is How is it?

How is the steam controller in general for games like Dark Souls and Bethesda games like Skyrim?

[Mennenth]

Steam Controller is great for Dark Souls games, as well as Elden Ring!

Elden Ring supports "mixed input", using gamepad and mouse at the same time. This means the right trackpad and gyro can act as mouse for camera control, but everything else can be gamepad for things like analog movement.

The back buttons are also great! I have one bound to A for jump and the other bound to B as a start press so it is dedicated to dodging (I sprint via other means).

[Hexton]

attacking? esp dual wielding or staff n sword combo?

[Hexton]

Well I guess it doesn’t matter, I didn’t realize Valve stopped making them. Hopefully they will try V2 soon

[Epic Store Exclusive]

I originally started playing with the default configuration provided by them. It's prettty much your standard gamepad configuration, but with mouse-joystick on the right pad.

Overall, I found it good, but it leaves a lot to be desired, namely:

1. Having to click the left pad for d-pad actions always feels super awkward
2. Mouse-Joystick speed is inherently capped, and feels pretty decent but mouse mode feels a lot better
3. Back buttons weren't assigned.
4. Using the d-pad is painful because you have to take your right hand off the camera controls (and other buttons, crucially the heal button) in order to change any items.

I had a look at some of the community configs but I find them mostly overengineered or not very good. I don't understand the need to change most of the controls, away from say the left joystick to the trackpad, as I find this game works just fine with the joystick, and moving it always means other things have to be moved to other areas. This often results in weird inconsistency in the game or, at the very least, usually affects the on-screen glyphs.

I decided to make my own config, starting with the vanilla one as a base, but with some significant changes. I use mouse mode for the camera as I find it is a lot nicer feeling because the speed isn't capped like it is in mouse joystick mode, so I can easily flick around to see what's behind me, especially with low trackball friction. Because you can't rotate the camera without a joystick while in menus, I reset it to mouse-like joystick when in menu mode (i.e. when the cursor is showing) using an action set.

I also made the left pad (the d-pad) no longer require clicks to use, since clicking the d-pad like that always feels awkward to me. Pressing the right pad down in the center selects a target like usual, but pressing on the edge of the pad instead changes item slots (same as the normal d-pad) based on which edge you press. Long pressing left or right on the right pad changes left or right hand weapon to 2-handed, since I find pressing Y and LB or RB really annoying, especially during combat..

I also made the left and right rear paddles B and X, respectively. Being able to drink tears while keeping my hand on camera controls is nice, as is being able to roll.

If anyone wants the link, I can share it.

[Mennenth]

There are several reasons why people would swap to left touchpad move over using the joystick.

Chief among them is outer ring sprint, which is sublime once you get used to it as it makes sprinting an extension of movement instead of a dedicated button. Outer ring sprint typically works better on the touchpad versus a stick, because a; it has more space to give up to the outer ring without sacrificing range/precision for normal movement, b; its easier to hold an arbitrary value in between zero and max, and c; changing directions without accidentally activating the outer ring is typically easier on the touchpad. Its a case where the physical feedback of the stick pushing back against your thumb that everyone loves and criticizes the touchpads for lacking actually works against you, because its typically easier to just peg a stick at its max most of the time which compromises control over the outer ring.

In most games, outer ring sprint is really easy to set up. The only reason it gets "over engineered" in Souls games is because From Software often ties dodging and sprinting to the same button. Separating dodge out of that pairing is easy - just set the button you want to be dodge as a start press activator. Separating sprint is a bit harder because avoiding accidental dodges is desireable, and the solution some of us use is instead of putting sprint on the outer ring directly the outer ring goes to a layer that holds spring and can only be removed by lifting the thumb off the pad entirely.

As far as displacing other controls... It really only displaces the dpad, which is very easy to set up on the joystick for "normal" controls AND right touchpad modeshift click for alternate controls so you can access the dpad while still moving the character.

Everything else is more or less the same as standard controls, though yes right pad (and gyro) mouse is better in game and thankfully the game uses the type of mouse cursor steam can detect for making a dedicated menu control set.

The Steam Controller represents different ways to play. Configs that take advantage of that arent inherently bad, though they may be less accessible (left touchpad move is a learning curve).

[Epic Store Exclusive]

Well the main one I was talking about is the "Guided by Grace" RambleTan config, which does things like roll on the left bumper. Which is weird.

Normally I would agree with you - sprinting makes sense on the pad. However, in Souls specifically, sprinting comes with some pretty major drawbacks, like the small delay from when you stop sprinting to when you can attack (which can matter in some circumstances) or the weird "stop" your character does when changing directions really fast while sprinting. While it's possible I could learn the exact usage of the outer ring binding, personally I don't see much reason to as it's already very easy to simply hold the rear face button down, and Elden Ring doesn't really have any extra commands worth binding.