Evolution Studios, the developer of the MotorStorm series and upcoming PlayStation 4 racing game Drive Club, says it was instrumental in the designing and development of the DualShock 4 controller.

Speaking to Edge, Evolution's technical director Scott Kirkland revealed that the studio, along with Killzone developer Guerrilla Games, has been involved with the development of Sony next-gen console for a number of years.
"I think this goes back to Christmas 2011," said Kirkland. "We started working with the guys in Japan on what became the DualShock 4.

"We were instrumental in securing the specific gyro components that [will] go in the DualShock 4; we had prototypes that demonstrated that the really high frequency gyros were the ones that allowed us to chuck the controller around like a steering wheel, and the ones that they were considering [meant] you could get a fair degree of lag and have to rely on accelerometers to compensate for that. So we put a very compelling case forward to the guys in Japan, they listened and they're the components that are in the DualShock 4.

"The control side of things has always been a really important thing for racing games, so we made sure that we got involved in the controller discussion very early on."

Evolution used downloadable Vita racing game MotorStorm RC to refine the analogue sticks, and collaborated with Guerrilla Games to work on the triggers.

"We did a prototype using MotorStorm RC that allows you to exploit the reduced deadzone size on the controller and the more accurate sticks," Kirkland said. "It's scary how long we've been involved in this - we've been secretive about it for so long.

"The triggers is another area where there's been a huge amount of development. There's been a great back-and-forth between the likes of ourselves and some of the firstperson shooter guys at Guerrilla. They wanted specific things out of the triggers and, from a racing game perspective, we wanted lots of subtlety of control and to have really analogue brakes and acceleration, and so in some cases we had to reach a little bit of a compromise on that. But the controller sits on the desk beautifully, it doesn't accidentally press the triggers, [and] they've got really nice resistance to them."

Earlier this month, Ubisoft Montreal CEO Yannis Mallat called the PlayStation 4 "a really pleasant surprise", noting that developing for the console is easier than PS3 thanks to a "radical change" of hardware strategy from Sony.

Posted: Apr 14, 2013 9:28 am
Related Forum: PlayStation Forum

Source: http://www.computerandvideogames.com/400854/ps4-drive-club-dev-details-contributions-to-dualshock-4-design/