Corsair announces a Hall effect stick-less fight controller with rapid trigger, in the hopes of button bashing faster than anyone else
I'm not great at fighting games. I have a main in Street Fighter (add Sakura to 6, please, Capcom) and don't often swoop to the lows of button bashing, but it doesn't take much panic to send me there. Well, luckily, Corsair has announced a new professional-looking fighter stick, and I can't wait to lose at my local tournament with it.
The Novablade Pro Wireless has Hall effect magnetic switches, which not only ensure a longer shelf life but also allow custom actuation on the board. Keys can be set from anywhere to 0.1mm to 4mm, which means you can make surrounding keys a little harder to press and important ones easier to hit.
Corsair says switches can be hit up to 150 million times, which is approximately three games for the average button basher. Speaking of button bashers, this fight controller has rapid trigger keys, which means they stop pressing the second you do. A more traditional switch starts and stops pressing at a certain actuation, which means you are losing milliseconds with each hit. That allows you to not only hit keys quicker, but also more often.
Being wireless, it can be connected via Bluetooth, or connected to your rig in 2.4 GHz mode, offering lower latency than the Bluetooth option. Or you could forgo the wireless and plug it in with a cable, of course.
Our Jacob had a chance to see the fight controller in person at Gamescom this year and got to talk to Corsair a little about it.
A Corsair rep told us that the fight controllers' use of keys and rapid trigger makes quarter-circle moves (and similar attacks) smoother than a traditional fight stick. Naturally, that will be down to the individual player, but this is supposedly why players have been opting for leverless pads as of late.
We also got a look at its swappable face plates and the RGB lighting around the controller. With 15 individual keys, they are all lit by RGB, but the controller also has storage for custom profiles and customizable keys.
Interestingly, this fight controller also comes with SOCD, for setting a key priority when you click multiple buttons at once. This has been banned in the likes of Counter-Strike 2, but in the fighting game scene, SOCD is still a bit of an open question. You could always choose not to enable it, I suppose, but it'll be interesting to see if tournaments allow such a device to be used at all.
If you like to play fighting games on multiple devices, the Novablade Pro is compatible with PC, PS5, and PS4 straight out of the box. And, If you want to grab the Novablade Pro Wireless for yourself, it will set you back a pretty hefty $250 on the Corsair site. All those features don't come cheap, do they?