But of course it’s the same now on PS5. I still have my PS4 pads and use them to round out 4p couch coop for broforce, overcooked, moving out, etc, but actual PS5 games will only work with PS5 pads.

So IIUC the PS4 gamepad can be used but only for PS4 games? That is ridiculous.

Meanwhile I'm rocking an original release day Xbox One controller on a Series X.

That said while I can understand them dropping X360 witeless due to protocol changes I'm still bitter that the X360 wired accessories were simply denied on the Xone, notably the whole Rock Band stuff as well as steering wheels.

It's because PS5 games can use the adaptive triggers functionality that is impossible to emulate on the PS4 controller. For example in Ratchet and Clank short pull on the trigger fires the gun, there is artifical resistance past that point, but if you pull past it it will fire the secondary weapon mode. On a PS4 controller you'd just fire the secondary mode all the time because there would be no way to find the threshold on a trigger without this functionality.

Of course games could be designed around this and support both - but Sony avoided placing such a requirement on devs so all PS5 games are presumed to be using a PS5 controller when going through cert.

Just don't mash the trigger all the way? You don't have the haptic feedback of such a trigger wall but claiming it's "impossible" is a bit extreme. A nice threshold mapping could arrange for that e.g 0-10% dead zone, 10%-80% main mode, 90%-100% secondary mode, _ factor in rate of press to avoid misfiring main mode. Which is probably the logic that it implements already, except with probably a bit more leeway thanks to the haptic feedback.

"Impossible" would be playing a typical† dual stick game with a gamepad that has none (e.g original PS1 gamepad)

† like a FPS that uses the now classic stick layout for quick yet precise movement + orientation

Honest question as I'm curious and don't have access to a PS5: what about PS5-only games that happen to exist on other platforms that don't have such features? Can they be played with a PS4 controller?

Oh and to be clear: it's not a Xbox vs PS thing, I find them both equally guilty of excessive e-wasting / platform locking, just in different ways.

Games that use PS5-exclusive features when played on PS5 obviously don't use those features when not run on a PS5, if it's been ported.

While your idea sounds neat in practice, with those thresholds and such, I'm not sure how practical it is in real-life. Lots of controllers eventually start reporting somewhat inaccurate values, sometimes rather large variance, so whatever you end up using as the actual values, they tend to not be perfect for everyone, so then the game will appear really buggy, almost broken.

I'm guessing they're favoring "works 100% for everyone who can run it" rather than "Kind of works for most people, broken for the rest".

>>what about PS5-only games that happen to exist on other platforms that don't have such features? Can they be played with a PS4 controller?

Sure, Ratchet and Clank has a PC version now which can be played with any controller, including a PS4 or xbox controller. Obviously for this version it was remapped to make sense when using such controllers.

Again, it's not about actual literal impossibility - it's Sony's choice to say "look we want to promote features of the PS5, so code your gameplay features to make use of the adaptive triggers and we guarantee that every player will have a ps5 controller. You don't need to code your game to support older pads" - so devs don't. They obviously do on platforms like PC where the player might be using anything.

As it turns out, there aren't all that many couch multiplayer games that are PS5-only, and a lot of what's there is two player only (Diablo 3/4, BG3, Hot Wheels, Borderlands, etc). So maybe the whole argument is moot, but the long and short of it is that any game which I think I might want to play with more than two people I buy on Switch instead, since I'm always going to have lots of those pads.

IIRC those can be disabled at the system level, and when streaming a PS5 game to a PS4 guess what, the DualShock 4 works fine.

I’ve got a Logitech steering wheel that I can’t use on 64-bit Windows because of the way the driver was implemented.

Speaking of oddball controller features, I was a bit surprised the PS5 retained the little trackpad, given how little use it seemed to get on the PS4— even in obvious situations like Assassins Creed where you're moving an on-screen cursor around a map, but only with the thumbstick.

The analog face buttons of the DualShock 2 are cool in concept but always made me press too hard out of fear of not getting up to full speed or whatever in games that used face buttons for acceleration (mostly Burnout 3 and Revenge for me) https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/List_of_console...

The amount of hand pain this one feature all those years ago has caused.

To this day I find my self having to loosen my grip and press the face buttons lighter because it makes no difference now.

(Though PS5 has added a whole new level of hand ache with adaptive trigger resistance).

Maybe I just need to look into reducing the "resistance" of them in the settings.

It was also short lived and replaced with the PS3’s version with rumble included – they were saying it’s because of a patent dispute.

256 levels on the ps2, 1024 on the ps3. Few games used this outside of racing games, and they were removed from the ps4 controller. It's most commonly noticed when configuring a ps3 controller on a PC.

I guess some ideas seem only obvious in hindsight.

Before Halo it wasn't really intuitive I guess?

A similar point holds for third-person games: Before Super Mario 64, all third-person games had Wolfenstein style tank controls where left/right rotates the character in place and up/down makes it move forward/backward. E.g. Tomb Raider or Mega Man Legends. The idea to make character movement relative to the camera viewpoint wasn't obvious.

(Though the Tomb Raider developers tried to work around this to a degree by fixing the camera behind the character, which prevented to most counterintuitive control issues Mega Man Legends had, but also meant free camera rotation was impossible.)

Which sounds pretty good. Of course having an actual stick for walking would have been even better, but buttons aren't that bad, considering that PC games still use them for walking to this day.

I'm actually wondering why PC games never converged on a "left joy-con" style controller with a stick and buttons, for one hand, while the other hand holds the mouse. I guess the ordinary keyboard is good enough so there wasn't much pressure to replace it.

Really does seem to be a matter of the keyboard being good enough and knowing that most everyone has one connected to their PC. I've just come to accept that I need to prioritize what matters most for a given game. So, selecting between KB+M or controller on a case-by-case basis. I think the only game recently that annoyed me for not fitting one or the other very well was Cyberpunk 2077 because the cars were very touchy and would have been better with analog input.

(For anyone else curious)

and the particular quote I was thinking of for the record.

But Ico indeed used the stick for the camera: https://strategywiki.org/wiki/ICO/Controls

However, I'm not sure whether it was only used for horizontal rotation or full arbitrary rotation (arbitrary combinations of horizontal and vertical) as in Super Mario Sunshine. But it might very well be the first game to have that, not Mario Sunshine.

Edit: Oh, sorry didn't see you mention third person.

Seems wrong too, archived manual (https://archive.org/details/ps2_Jak_and_Daxter-_The_Precurso...) seems to say "RIGHT ANALOG STICK ... Camera Rotate/Zoom" under the game controls. I think the page you linked to is for another game.

I guess then the first game I definitely know that had a free camera was The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, which came out a few months after Sunshine. This is also confirmed here: https://strategywiki.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_The_Wind_...

Of course the question is whether there might have been an earlier game which had it. Regarding Ico, apparently it also allows only horizontal rotation (camera "panning" is horizontal movement): https://strategywiki.org/wiki/ICO/Controls

Mario 64 had third-person camera movement, but it was with the N64's C-buttons, and had fixed angles, not free movement. Since it didn't have a second joystick, that rules out the N64 (some games did allow you to use a second controller as a second analog stick, but I don't think any third person games did so).

Likewise, the Dreamcast didn't have a second stick, so it's ruled out too. That basically leaves us with the PS1 or an early PS2/Gamecube game. Apparently Quake II on PS1 did allow for the second stick to aim, but that's not third person. The closest I can find is Ico on PS2, which allowed for analog stick camera movement, but I think only in the horizontal direction. Mario Sunshine might well be the first for full camera angle movement, which honestly really surprises me.

Regarding Alien Resurrection: Turok (another FPS game which came out a few years earlier) also had modern FPS controls as default, though movement was done with the d-pad, as the N64 didn't have two sticks.