Saturday, May 22, 2021
The Last of Us Part II‘s co-director, Kurt Margenau, has revealed that the game’s improved haptics included in its recent PlayStation 5 update are actually thanks to a DualSense firmware update that was released back in April.
In a Twitter thread, Margenau explained that he had the opportunity to provide feedback to the DualSense technical team a few months ago, which he availed to request improved controller response when the PS5 is in backwards compatibility mode. He asked, and the team delivered. As a result,
The Last of Us II‘s haptics feel noticeably better.
The DS4 has two different-sized rotating weights inside, and the DualSense has two weights that move forward and back and can express frequency and amplitude at extremely high fidelity and low latency (almost like a speaker). So the controller firmware in the DualSense has to receive the ‘old’ signals that are meant to spin up a motor (which has much higher latency), and emulate the resulting FEELING in the controller using a completely different mechanical method. This includes accounting for all the timing differences in the authored rumble that’s built-in when designing for the DS4, and emulating the inherent variation and ‘rumbly’ feeling that comes with a rotating motor. This is all done inside the controller without the game code changing at all.