I don't know if there have been announcements regarding the controller support and its development stages during the last 6 months of development, so if changes are due anyway, this post might become obsolete in a hurry.

Anyway, having spent almost all of my two playthroughs of the Stadia OpenDev with the controller and the TV, because it's so great to chill out on the couch with a 4X game, I feel that there are a few alternative control schemes that might be looked into.

Did you know that some people opening the demo for the first time using the controller didn't realize that they were supposed to move the analog sticks at all, instead pushing all the buttons in an attempt to "OK" the very first dialog box? When nothing responded, they concluded the game had frozen and turned it off.

Relying on movement of the cursor with the sticks is very unneccesarily time-consuming, and also frustrating when I overshoot the target panel or button by some pixels. I can think of a couple of ways to avoid this, both of which involve removing the zooming functionality from either the D-pad, or from the L1/R1 bumpers. The L2/R2 triggers are unused, as are the < and  > arrows on the D-pad. 

I suggest either:
1. Make the screen menu selections cycleable. Like pressing the tab key multiple times in a dialog box or a web page. Press and hold R1, for instance, and use the D-pad to navigate the cursor through all of the available clickable choices onscreen, or just within the scope of a particular dialog.

2. Create menu shortcuts which might be static or dynamic. Different combinations of triggers and bumpers + letter buttons yield different commands, just like ctrl-alt-shift-N, etc. The available choices for each will pop up as context menus. Some of these might also be cycleable, so that multiple presses (L2-B-B for instance) is necessary to get to a specific area of the UI.

3. A combination.

Good luck! (I've pre-ordered.)

Hi Larris,

Thanks for your feedback! We are aware that the controller support is not ideal at the moment, and we've already planned to make a few improvements. The cycling through the panels of the HUD should be feasable and it would prevent the player from constantly moving from the center to the corners. We will probably do something to allow a simpler validation of the dialog as well.

Benjamin

Hi Benjamin,

Can we hope to get the controller support of the Stadia version on the Steam/Epic Store version of the game?

Thanks and keep up the good work,

Jakub