In WR:SR (a Industrial City-Building Economy and Transport Simulator), there are different placing and overlay modes, like Snap-to-Grid (L4), Elevation (R4) and Underground view (R5), but I still need the first two buttons for zooming/radius(L1,R1), placing(R2)/removal(R2) confirm and the small buttons for placement elevation (for road/rails (and their bridges), pipes/cables) (X,B), mirroring (Y). (I forgot what A was for).

Basically every time you need more than two keys on the keyboard and the mouse simultanously, for the equivalent on the SD, the lower backbuttons come in handy.

I have a game that I was afraid of figuring out the controls yet; it is Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. In this game I will likely need every available button twice or something.

I use the back buttons for all sorts of stuff. But the most common use is remapping ABXY to them. That way, I dont have to lift my thumb off the joysticks as much.

Also some games have easier menu navigation with a mouse, so I’ll map left and right click to r1 and l1 and use a track pad to navigate menus.

I mostly play modded minecraft on my deck, and they’re really handy for modifier keys or macros that you need to keep active while pressing something else using the front controls

I use them in WoW for tricky keybinds. and in terraria they’re pretty useful as well

When I’m going from my desktop to the deck I miss being able to do things like press I for inventory or M for map, things like that. So usually I set them up to replace those little shortcuts to get me though games that need me to flick about a few menus to get to them.

Almost nothing. I don’t like how loud they are.

Going back.

I use them in place of the bumpers so my fingers can stay on the triggers.

In games that don’t have good auto-save (like Skyrim), I’ll map one of the back buttons to quick save.

In first-person games, I always rebind the jump to one of the back buttons. Coming from kbm, it weels weird that looking around and jumping at the same time is not possible.

GTA V. I mapped the top right to hold down the trigger for flying helicopters, or when I don’t want to let off the gas in a car. Bottom right releases it. I use this when I am hauling stuff with the cargobob so I don’t have to keep my hand on the trigger which can be painful after a while. I use them in Valheim to do things like repair when I am at a crafting table. I really like having them and how programmable they are.

So far the only games I’ve ever played on Deck that require them would be Portal 2 alongside the Portal 2 mod Revolution (or something along those lines). I think jump and maybe 1 other function is tied to the back buttons. Otherwise, I haven’t messed around with controls enough to find a use for them.

In a visual novel, as another “advance text” button. In Crosscode, I have the “switch elements” arrow keys on the back buttons (you need to flip it on the fly a lot). In some games, I’ll put the B-button action on R4 (particularly when it’s a dodge-roll). If a game needs a random keyboard key out of the blue, I’ll bind it on a paddle.

I’m playing through New Vegas right now. I have one of the back buttons assigned to quicksave. I also changed the default camera button to one of the back buttons, because I don’t use it often enough to warrant it being on the bumpers. And I have just assigned one to toggle collision, because sometimes you need that when playing something built in the Gamebryo engine.

Some games have button layouts that make certain actions a pain. Two examples.

Horizon Zero Dawn - Healing is by default done by hitting dpad up. You generally want to press this button whenever you take damage to essentially trigger health regen, but doing so requires taking your thumb off the left stick, which means you can’t simultaneously avoid even more damage. Bind to back button, problem solved.

BallisticNG - Weapons are bound to X, discard weapons is bound to B, and accelerate is on A. So when you pick up a weapon, to discard/use it you either have to drop thrust (bad, never do that) or awkwardly shimmy your thumb to either hit X or B without letting go of A. Bind X and B to back buttons, problems solved.