As a lot of reviewers are saying, it feels very close to the Steam Deck controls. The trackpads are slightly different texture and a bit more refined (in a good way). The D-pad and face buttons feel good to me as a longtime gamer.
I’m used to the Xbox Elite 2 these days and this is quite a bit lighter in weight and feels more like plastic, but still solid enough (again, like the Deck). I do maybe prefer the 8-edged D-pad and I’ll probably miss the trigger stops, but gyro and trackpads and grip sense should more than make up for it.


The Steam Deck and Steam Controller (2.0, but w/e) use Voice Coil Actuators spread throughout the device for both haptics snd rumble.
They’re both measured/set in decibels.
https://www.electricity-magnetism.org/voice-coil-actuator/
It could be that you’ve found something actually worth posting a bug report about on… well I’m not sure where lol.
It could be a Steam Input issue, it could be a Proton issue, it could be both.
It might be the case that the style of command the game sends is basically ‘formatted’ in such a way that its not being properly interpreted/translated the way it would be by the kinds of controllers the game was/is specifically designed to work with.
As far as I can tell, while the Steam Controller and PS5 Controllers use VCAs… the Xbox One Controller uses a more old school, ‘eccentric rotors’, unbalanced psuedo wheels that spin on an axis.
So… for a system like that, a straight pulse of linear input command would feel to get more instense, and then gradually taper off.
If you give that ssme input to a VCA, it … ‘interperets it literally’, if that makes any sense.
Its kinda like VCAs are digital, and ERs are analog… sorta.
So… there would have to be some kind of … additional emulation required, basically, to translate rumble ‘commands’ that were made to work with an ER system, to a VCA system.
Like uh, 2 seconds of ON would have to be translated into an accumulating VCA amplitude, that would then taper off after the ON input ceases, some kind of buffer.