I’m often close enough to my PC while playing games that wireless seems a little unneeded, but more than that, I just want fewer batteries to manage.
Adjusted title to mention preference for no batteries.
I’m often close enough to my PC while playing games that wireless seems a little unneeded, but more than that, I just want fewer batteries to manage.
Adjusted title to mention preference for no batteries.
Most wireless controllers today have an integrated battery and can be used in either wired or wireless mode.
So it’s really just that the battery adds a bit of weight, and someday the thing will fail and maybe cause electrical failure of the gamepad. If that doesn’t bother you, could get a dual one and just use it in wireless mode.
That being said, I agree with the general principle that one should use wired unless there’s a compelling reason otherwise. Avoids security problems, interference issues, and a mess of compatibility issues. I had a Logitech F710 that used a proprietary wireless 2.4 GHz protocol. It didn’t support wired mode. At some point, something in my environment started blasting enough 2.4 GHz radio emissions that every now and then, the connection would briefly drop, which was absolutely infuriating, since it could cause one to lose in fast-paced action games.
If you very specifically want a gamepad that is only wired…hmm. There are a bunch of low-end, generic wired-only controllers that leave out wireless support to help get the price down. I can’t specifically recommend one of those; I’ve used a few, but all the ones I’ve used have had some things that annoy me, and probably a lot of the brands are throwaway ones that have gone under. If you want high-end…most of those are dual wired/wireless. IIRC, Thrustmaster has a high-end gamepad with swappable elements, and IIRC it’s wired-only, remember seeing that and thinking “wow, weird, most high-end gamepads are dual”. I haven’t used it myself.
goes to look
Yeah, the Thrustmaster S eSwap Pro, and it’s wired-only.
https://eshop.thrustmaster.com/en_us/eswap-s-pro-controller.html
Thrustmaster has a long history of making pricey-but-nice high-end game peripherals — I think the first joystick I ever saw for sale was a nice metal thing from them at a computer expo in the early 1990s — so I’d generally be willing to try them, if you can live with the price. I don’t know if they have Hall effect analog sticks, which some people — including myself — like, as they’re immune to drift.
kagis
It sounds like the gamepad ships with standard potentiometer-based analog sticks, but that if one is willing to throw even more money at the gamepad, they do sell optional Hall effect sticks that can be swapped in.
https://www.thrustmaster.com/en-us/products/eswap-sh5-hall-stick-module/
However, the price is also pretty much in line with their history of being expensive. The basic gamepad is $140, and then each Hall effect analog stick module is another $40, which is very expensive for a gamepad; you can get inexpensive wired-only gamepads for something like $15, though they might not have amenities like rumble motors.
I’ve never actually owned a Thrustmaster product myself. I mostly went with CH stuff (another long-running American game input device manufacturer; they tend to make less-expensive, less-nice stuff). But I’ve definitely heard no shortage of positive stuff about Thrustmaster products over the decades. Might be worth considering if you don’t care about the price, specifically want wired, and are looking for high-end stuff.
Their https://eshop.thrustmaster.com/en_us/eswap-x2-pro-controller.html model looks good because you can swap out the dpad as well to give it the Playstation layout, but I wish I knew if their dpad was actually good. That is where nearly all third party controllers fail.
Emphasis added, yeah this is among the reasons I’m asking. The other reasons I’ve noted, but this underlies a lot of it. I don’t know how long the dual-use ones’ batteries may last if I’m primarily using them wired, so instead of having that in the back of mind, I’d like to get a wired controller for when gaming on devices I’m already close to (which is mostly PC, hence asking for it specifically).
Well, I can kinda answer that: I’ve got a launch PS4 controller that I mostly use wired on my PC and it’s fine.
If I use it wirelessly, it’ll still get about 5-6 hours, which basically means after 13 years it’s still right on spec for what it should be able to do.
Not really something that’s probably worth worrying about unless you’ve got some absolutely shitty batteries.
(Hell, I’ve still got some PS3 controllers that’ll do 3-4 hours, and they’re freaking ancient at this point.)
Ah, gotcha. Yeah, that’s a real thing. If a lithium battery sits around discharged for too long — and they’ll constantly self-discharge, so anything on a shelf will get there — it’ll never work again. I do kind of think that there are too many devices with non-removable batteries that are going to wind up dead at some point. Might be possible to open the thing up and replace the internal battery in a wireless gamepad, if it’s standardized. I don’t know what wireless gamepads typically use.
That being said, if whatever one gets is an inexpensive gamepad, I mean, one option is to just throw it out and replace the thing at some point down the line when it stops working. Also solves other wear and tear problems…