Steam Hardware

Depending on a game, either of the two:

• Right joystick with continuous activation or release (latter being less reliable)
• Right trackpad menu in an action layer, sometimes through a chord

For example, I can have the right trackpad behave as mouse most of the time, but switch to a virtual menu on click, each item also being activated on click. Some of these items can be bound to weapons, but if that's not an option, like there's being more weapons than I can comfortably fit onto my virtual menu alongside all the other stuff I may want to see there, I could hold L5 to turn the trackpad into a different virtual menu, all dedicated to weapons. I often use gyro on right trackpad touch, so I'm okay with giving mouse input on it for a few moments when I'm switching a weapon.

Touchpad menus, left one as a simple click-to-select with a display of a numpad

You should give radial menus a try. I use one in Dishonored 2 and a different one in Warframe, both on the left trackpad.

In Warframe, the entries send keypresses for the eight numpad numbers corresponding to the direction that I press on the trackpad (bottom left is 1, top is 8, etc), which activate some of the hotkeyed gear items. In Dishonored 2, it just sends a number row keypress in order (first entry is 1, second is 2, etc), which switches the active power or weapon.

In other games, I just use it as a secondary D-pad (usually directional swipe) with a mode shift on one of the back buttons. My ideal setup would be to have an eight-way directional swipe without having to define a radial menu.

Steam Input is great, I just wish the config app was better.

I was fine with Doom Eternal's weapon wheel, since it slowed down time it gave me time to pick what I needed. If you're wanting to do quick weapon swapping like some high level players do that obviously won't cut it though. That said, I had the back buttons already mapped to dash/jump/chainsaw/etc so couldn't use them for weapons.

One way you could set it up is with control overlays, where you have one button cycle through multiple weapons. So you could have a back button that switches to super shotgun, but with a second press switches to the regular shotgun. Repeat that for the other weapon types with the other back buttons.

hard yes on the full numpad, but i’m also one of those freaks that uses an mmo mouse with 12 buttons on the side

The grip sensor on the Steam Controller 2026 works really well for this. I’d love to see it implemented on the next iteration of Deck.