First-person shooters just don’t feel right on the PlayStation 3 controller. The DualShock 3 is a great device for plenty of the industry’s most-played genres, but the spongy nature of the triggers has always made pulling up the iron sights and squeezing off a few rounds less than comfortable. Sony has realized that, thanks to its very vocal community, and that’s why the PlayStation 4 controller has been optimized for what really is the world’s most-played type of game.
“First-person shooters are very important to us, so we wanted to make sure that we had a controller that was optimized for those games,” Sony architect Mark Cerny said in an interview with IGN. “We contacted teams across the industry who make the best of the best in that genre, gave them prototypes, and got them to evaluate them and received guidance on the triggers, the dead zones, and the joysticks to really make it an ideal controller for FPS.”
That doesn’t mean that the DualShock 4 is simply a device designed to lead Call of Duty protagonists down tight corridors, but the importance of shooters couldn’t be taken lightly this time around.
“Historically, we’ve heard for many years that PlayStation hardware is great, but that the controller, when it comes to FPS, is not as good as others out there,” he continued. “FPS and TPS are big. It’s a theme of us listening as actively as possible to the developers and the consumers as to what it is that they want.”
Sony has listened in just about every imaginable way with the PlayStation 4. Let’s hope that trend continues when the console launches later this year.
