Here is the story: I decided to buy a good and expensive controller for my PC for the first time, after 3 decades of using stock dualshocks and cheap knock-off brands. Googled “best controller for PC”, found a lot about elite series 2 controllers. Got excited about it (primarily the back-grip buttons and adjustable stick tightness), bought it.
After a month of playing Binding of Isaac I have decided to play some Doom Eternal to learn the hot new aiming technique - flick stick. Only to realize that this elite controller, that costs 130€ for the base kit, in current year, comes WITHOUT the gyro.
I honestly wish at least one of 5 reviews I watched and read mentioned this detail.
Is there any accessory I can acquire to get gyro, or would I have better luck returning the controller and buying something else?
Edit: I actually like everything else about the device, and not having the gyro is not exactly the deal breaker, but c’mon people
Not many PC games natively support gyro, however, because most controllers that people have on the PC don’t support it.
Yeah, it’s an input that you can use to rig something up with Steam Input or some sort of macro software, but if you don’t have a large proportion of the userbase with hardware support, game developers aren’t going to put resources into native support, and without native support, most people won’t use it, and if most people aren’t going to use it, not a lot of incentive for game controller developers to support it.
Same thing for the haptic feedback and the force feedback triggers on the Playstation controllers. You can use them on the PC, theoretically, but just not much native support out there for them.
I kind of wish that there were some kind of standard, cross-platform, open-source software package that you could have games hook into on one end and controllers on the other, have a developer-provided profile, but let the package provide some kind of profile that does something reasonable for an arbitrary controller (or multiple controllers, think HOTAS) if the developer doesn’t, and let game controller developers and players publish control scheme settings for games/controllers. Steam Input is kind of the closest thing to this, but is proprietary and tied to one distribution platform (Steam), which sort of sucks.
The sex toy crowd has something like this going on with buttplug.io – which, ironically enough, can actually support linking games to game controllers with vibration, not just sex toys, but for some reason we haven’t managed to get there with normal, actual game controller input. I kind of wish that given that they have their shit together enough to actually get something like this out there, that they’d rename the project to something uncontroversial like GameIO, support hooking up games to arbitrary output devices and input devices, and then expose an input layer to games. Have the option to use the game’s provided profile by default, but also use a custom one.
The Steam Deck is successful for what it is, and maybe one day it will have enough market share to be able to really drive game features, but as things stand, it’s something like a percent.
googles
https://pocketmags.com/us/maximum-pc-magazine/february-2024/articles/1399340/steam-deck-oled
That’s maybe the largest single bloc of people using a single specific non-mouse/keyboard input device on Steam, but it’s still a very small portion of the overall PC user base.
All PC games support gyro if they’re played with SteamAPI and the controller has gyro support. You can configure it however you want, it’s just a controller function being bound to an input.
You can even add gyro support to games that never had it, like PS2 and GameCube games. Because, again, it’s just a method of input.