Sony’s DualSense controller continues to surprise gamers with its technology, namely adaptive triggers and feedback. PlayStation 5 games like Housemarque ManeuverableSpider-Man games from Insomniac and games from Bluepoint Demon Souls remake show that, when properly implemented, the DualSense’s detailed force feedback mechanics can be additive and immersive.
But when DualSense features are implemented haphazardly or out of necessity, they can feel downright bad. Nine times out of ten, if I’m playing a shooter or action game on my PS5, one of the first things I do is turn off the adaptive triggers — I don’t want a hefty drag when I’m trying to carefully headshot some video game enemy.
And then there is Astro Playroomdevelopment team Team Asobi’s excellent PS5 launch title, which provided an audiovisual and tactile showcase for Sony’s current-generation system when it launched in 2020. Next month Astrobotborn of universal recognition for Playroomhas a chance to top that game thanks to the Asobi team’s experience in researching and prototyping up-to-date mechanics using the DualSense controller.
I played the demo Astrobot in July and I was incredibly impressed with the gameplay experience: Astrobot plays like you’re holding an interactive toy in your hands. When you jump in the game on the DualSense-shaped spaceship, you can feel its thrusters firing up as if you were holding the ship’s helm. When Astro is equipped with spring-loaded boxing gloves (which look like adorable little frogs), each piece of these bouncy, clicky weapons realistically vibrates the controller.
The Asobi team has proven to be really, really good at this. Studio head Nicolas Doucet explained in a 2020 interview that the creators Astro Playroom AND Astrobot worked closely with the group of engineers that originally developed the DualSense.
“We have this old collaborative relationship with the team” that developed the mechanical features of the controller, Doucet told Engadget on the channel’s podcast“They certainly have a good sense of what can be good in games, but their primary discipline is mechanical engineering.” It fell to Doucet’s team to prove the concept to the PlayStation engineering team.
Doucet said his development team would take prototypes of controllers in development and quickly prototype dozens of game demos. They would simulate the feel of firing a gun or flamethrower using the unfinished controller’s adaptive triggers. They would play around with the haptic feedback system, simulating how a game character would feel walking on sand, rock, or water. Doucet’s team would take those compact game demos to show them to a team of hardware engineers, who would then reconfigure the motor layout to fine-tune the force feedback experience.
For this year AstrobotDoucet said Team Asobi has gone back to the prototyping stage, dedicating a compact team at the studio to developing up-to-date techniques for using the DualSense. He said Push square in June, “We spend a lot of time prototyping game mechanics in isolation, and then we think about how we can combine them in a way that makes sense. We had three or four people leave the team, and we called that team DualSense 2.0.”
This helps explain why Astrobot and its predecessors feel so familiar: Team Asobi influenced the DualSense hardware design and vice versa. And they didn’t rest on their laurels, revisiting the PS5 controller in the years since to generate up-to-date ideas, helping to make Astro’s next outing feel like a fresh, up-to-date adventure.
“We would never have thought of turning Astro into a sponge,” Doucet explained, saying the sponge experiment ultimately inspired the game’s up-to-date mechanic. The team also developed up-to-date force-feedback techniques for surfaces that range from velvety to gritty. In AstrobotPlayers can rub against walls to feel differences in their texture, which can assist them find a secret passage.
In other words, make sure your controller vibration settings are turned on when Astrobot will be available exclusively on PlayStation 5 on September 6. Interestingly, the game will also receive a special DualSense controller.
