Big news, or something: The Verge did that thing they do where they look at some new piece of tech and explain it with the PS4’s DualShock 4, and it turns out that the face buttons (X, Square, O, Triangle) on this new gamepad are not pressure-sensitive, meaning there will no longer be degrees of pushing those buttons — it’s either you press them or you don’t. Most people will read that and think, “The face buttons used to be pressure-sensitive?” and then shrug, but Gran Turismo fans who still press X to accelerate might be disturbed.
Also, some folks on r/metalgearsolid seem upset about this, because Joystiq’s discussion of that news didn’t specify that the change is only to the face buttons. Metal Gear Solid 4 didn’t do anything with that feature on the face buttons anyway, so there’s no reason to worry that Metal Gear Solid 5 will shake up the control scheme for that reason. Plus, the newly cross-platform and cross-gen MGS5 already needed to accommodate the Xbox 360’s lack of sensitivity in its controller’s face, as the game will be functionally identical across all platforms.
So what does this really mean? Not much of anything. LittleBigPlanet used X’s sensitivity to determine how high sackboy would jump, but LBP for Vita, which also has those on/off digital buttons, demonstrated that Sony has a solution there. And whenever you play Gran Turismo 7 (or GT6 if it’s ever ported up) the controls will default to the triggers for accelerating and braking — those are still pressure-sensitive) which most folks have grown accustomed to by now with that being the current standard.
In other words, don’t expect this change to affect your gaming on the PS4. After all, the reasoning that Sony’s Toshimasa Aoki gave for the change is simply that developers weren’t using the extra information granted by the sensitive analog face buttons in their games. That being the case, I doubt you’re gonna miss the function much.
