I have really been loving my steam deck lately. I’ve now played through Fallout 3, New Vegas, all of their respective DLCs, and am about 100hrs into 4 right now.
Normally I play indie games since that’s where my interests are and I grow tired of the AAA jackassery.
I mention that to illustrate that I do use and live the deck. But I guess I’m not creative enough to use the back buttons at all. So to the title question:
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What games do you play that make the most use of the back buttons?
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What functions are mapped to those buttons?
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Or are you like me and just never use them?
I use the back buttons for all sorts of stuff. But the most common use is remapping ABXY to them. That way, I dont have to lift my thumb off the joysticks as much.
Also some games have easier menu navigation with a mouse, so I’ll map left and right click to r1 and l1 and use a track pad to navigate menus.
YMMV, I treat it on demand, but in most cases it’s unused.
Civ: End turn
Driving games: Shift paddle
It’s like the 4th mouse button. Sometimes you don’t realize how much you might enjoy having it mapped.
Almost nothing. I don’t like how loud they are.
Going back.
I mostly play modded minecraft on my deck, and they’re really handy for modifier keys or macros that you need to keep active while pressing something else using the front controls
I use them in WoW for tricky keybinds. and in terraria they’re pretty useful as well
I’ve been thinking about playing WoW with a controller recently. How well do you find it works on the deck? Last time I tried was a decade ago and that was a less-than-good experience but it worked. I know there have been a lot of improvements since then though. Is it fully playable without KB+m?
There’s good controller support in the game itself, and the add-on ConsolePort makes it more like FFXIV (a model all controller MMOs should take after). The movement scheme being forced backpedal is less great for controller use, but that can be overcome with muscle memory.
Sweet, will check it out! I’ve just started playing a bit of mop: remix so this will help with that.
Yeah, this was the only thing I could think of as well. But I haven’t played an MMO since City of Heroes, or SW: Galaxies, whichever was most recent. Don’t recall atm.
In WR:SR (a Industrial City-Building Economy and Transport Simulator), there are different placing and overlay modes, like Snap-to-Grid (L4), Elevation (R4) and Underground view (R5), but I still need the first two buttons for zooming/radius(L1,R1), placing(R2)/removal(R2) confirm and the small buttons for placement elevation (for road/rails (and their bridges), pipes/cables) (X,B), mirroring (Y). (I forgot what A was for).
Basically every time you need more than two keys on the keyboard and the mouse simultanously, for the equivalent on the SD, the lower backbuttons come in handy.
I have a game that I was afraid of figuring out the controls yet; it is Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. In this game I will likely need every available button twice or something.
When I’m going from my desktop to the deck I miss being able to do things like press I for inventory or M for map, things like that. So usually I set them up to replace those little shortcuts to get me though games that need me to flick about a few menus to get to them.
Yeah I have a game that pause is space, so I mapped one of the back buttons to that and it’s perfect.
I pretty much never use them, don’t have the right hand shape and grip for it.
I initially tried pressing the bit that’s not flat against the back by squeezing it and it really wasn’t comfortable for my hand, but pressing the bit that is flat against the back is way easier
I’ll try this.
I get a lot of joint pain from specific or repetitive movements (especially in my hands) and these are just slightly too stiff and in a hard enough to press place that using them for more than very occasional use will hurt. I bought some rubber things that make them a bit easier to press, but they still are difficult for me.
Yeah, I turn them off in a lot of games. Otherwise I accidentally hit them and trigger some weird effect.
I’ve only use them for emulation so far, to load & save states also for fast forwarding on the psx and 3ds to take the gring out of rpgs
I use them in place of the bumpers so my fingers can stay on the triggers.
flappy bappy wise the bottom ones are the joystick clicks, and the top ones are the shoulder buttons (i find my shoulder button pressed to be on the runliable side while using triggers)
In games that don’t have good auto-save (like Skyrim), I’ll map one of the back buttons to quick save.
GTA V. I mapped the top right to hold down the trigger for flying helicopters, or when I don’t want to let off the gas in a car. Bottom right releases it. I use this when I am hauling stuff with the cargobob so I don’t have to keep my hand on the trigger which can be painful after a while. I use them in Valheim to do things like repair when I am at a crafting table. I really like having them and how programmable they are.
Does Valheim still cause the fan to go crazy or did they further optimize on the deck? I admittedly haven’t tried it since right after buying the thing.
It doesn’t seem to make my fan go nuts. I have been playing it for a while on the deck and can’t recall that issue.
In first-person games, I always rebind the jump to one of the back buttons. Coming from kbm, it weels weird that looking around and jumping at the same time is not possible.
Yeah, ideal for any games where you don’t want to take your thumb off the right stick to press A/B/X/Y
Or games where you don’t want to take your finger off the left stick to hit a direction bound to some action on the D-Pad.
