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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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> 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.

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.

> 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?

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".

Ehhh let me put it in a different way - it's not impossible, of course. But it's about the fact that if someone is using a PS4 controller and they don't know about this, then they are going to have a bad time. And no dev wants their players to have a bad time, and neither does the platform holder. So they would rather just say no, you as a dev don't have to worry about this - every player will use a PS5 controller, done.

>>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.

What was remapped for PC? I don't have a PS5 so PC is how I played R&C:RA and I don't recall there being any difference in how the trigger pulls were interpreted between having adaptive triggers enabled or disabled.

I literally had to boot up the game to check - long press on the trigger fires the secondary mode. So basically if you press and hold the trigger it will do the primary fire then the secondary fire.

> It's because PS5 games can use the adaptive triggers functionality

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.

True, I have done that many times. So you're right that there is an inconsistency there - but Sony always treated remote streaming as a special case.

It's totally reasonable to expect the native pad for single player games; my contention is more around couch multiplayer scenarios. When each pad costs as much as a day 1 game, it's a big investment to have four of them— so most players have just one or two.

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.

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