PS5 Adaptive Triggers

[Ikagura Ikagura]

Good idea fundamentally for gaming or just another gimmick that would get barely used by third party devs?

 

[Miles Miles]

It's just a gimmick that barely got used by third party devs.

 

[ShadowsofCreationAga]

It's an amazing feature, one of the many reasons the PS5 controller is my favorite controller. I also use it for PC games. Best way to play Cyberpunk 2077, game feel from the controller adds so much to the experience for me.

Then again I absolutely love (and collect) controllers, I'm fascinated by the way they change the way you interact with a game. It feels significantly less impactful now to pull a standard trigger to fire a gun or to not have resistance when pulling back a bow string. I wish every game implemented the features.

 

[Kamako]

Every time I used adaptive triggers in games it felt great. Unfortunately, the springs in the triggers of earlier Dualsense models have a habit of giving up the ghost early, leaving the controller with no adaptive function, beyond feeling like a "hair trigger"

 

[Ikagura Ikagura]

It's an amazing feature, one of the many reasons the PS5 controller is my favorite controller. I also use it for PC games. Best way to play Cyberpunk 2077, game feel from the controller adds so much to the experience for me.

Then again I absolutely love (and collect) controllers, I'm fascinated by the way they change the way you interact with a game. It feels significantly less impactful now to pull a standard trigger to fire a gun or to not have resistance when pulling back a bow string. I wish every game implemented the features.

The bigger issue is that in the future, emulating that feature may be harder to do. Same with the mic on the pad.

There are PS2 games with analog face buttons (like MGS 1&2 used) so maybe we'll never see accurate emulation.

The DualSense having a mic almost made me feel like it's something Nintendo could've done back in the Wii/Wii U days in a way.

 

[ShadowsofCreationAga]

The bigger issue is that in the future, emulating that feature may be harder to do. Same with the mic on the pad.

There are PS2 games with analog face buttons (like MGS 1&2 used) so maybe we'll never see accurate emulation.

The DualSense having a mic almost made me feel like it's something Nintendo could've done back in the Wii/Wii U days in a way.

So? Because features may be hard to emulate in the future devs should just stop experimenting with them now? I can't think of a single game that uses dualsense specific features where they aren't optional bonuses. Examples being... every playstation 5 game that has been ported to PC.

I guess I'm just not understanding the argument. Like... The Nintendo DS should never have existed because it wouldn't be easy to emulate touch screen controled games in the future?

 

[TamagotchiTamaHero24's icon TamagotchiTamaHero24 TamagotchiTamaHero24]

I’ll be the devils advocate, as it’s my favorite hardware feature the system has. Or, rather, the controller. It’s pretty brilliant for giving a little immersion! But it came at the wrong time. If this happened on the PS2, the feature would last about a decade plus on each controller, but we are in the midst of the “en-shittening” of everything, so it gets a bad reputation as yet another thing that can break in your $80 controller. Like your breaks wearing down.

Against all odds, I still live for how they feel in shooters or games with Rocket engines or whatever else! I think they aren’t good in Doom Eternal, but that’s because that game is so fast and intense that it doesn’t need it. It needs a keyboard and mouse, frankly. And, of course, Team Asobi are the gods of this feature. They use it SPECTACTULARLY, and show off how it can be both immersive and also make the analogue feature of the controller more of a thing, as you can use the different resistance levels to get more accurate measurements of how hard you’re pressing. Imagine how MGS3 will be with this feature! I assume it’ll be much easier to not accidentally kill in that game.


But, yeah, it’s a sick feature that is handicapped by how much it wears down a controller that is infamous for breaking.

Post automatically merged: Aug 20, 2025

An addendum: it would also be something that could make exclusive games for the system stand out. However, that is only wishful thinking, as most of the high end AAA industry is PC focused anyway, so there aren’t enough exclusives to justify it being a feature we pay for in EVERY PS CONTROLLER WE BUY. It’s the kind of feature you’d get a smaller game to show off back in the day, but modern PlayStation….sucks, so we don’t get that courtesy.

 

[iamthemilkman]

I really like them in some games (Astro Bot, for example). However, games where you're constantly shooting, like a Control or something, I had to turn them off. When they're used in a creative way, they're good, when it's just to squeeze a trigger, it gets old real quick. Overall, I like the idea when they're used right. Just wish more devs did creative things with them.