After a couple of months with my PS3 now, I still miss force-feedback on it as much as I ever did.
As Sony themselves proved to us so well with the PS2 DualShock, rumble is just a great feature for game immersion. It provides stimulus and information to another of your senses, and there are certain types of games which just use it way too well. The feel of the road (and other cars, and the guardrail, depending on how things are going) in driving games, the recoil of weapons fire, the additional punch it adds when you're taking fire, or hits... so many kinds of effects from subtle to dramatic, all well done on the PS2 in so many games. I got used to it, I think it should remain a standard feature on present and future consoles, and I continue to miss it on the PS3. Even with the graphics fix for the backward compatibility now, I still play all my PS2 games on the PS2 instead, mainly because of this one issue.
I play the Motorstorm demo, and as impressive as it is graphically and audibly, I can't help but notice the absence of any kind of tactile feedback to match all the chaos and mayhem that the physics engine is showing off. It looks insanely great, but there's no feel -- it's flat and dead. I mentally compare it to a theoretical version of the same game which also offers Burnout's force-feedback, and I'll take that version, every time, no question. Same with Ridge Racer and NFS:Carbon. Heck,same with Fight Night, where the lack of feedback is also very noticeable to me. I even miss it in Resistance, though to a lesser extent.
All next-gen rhetoric and hype aside, the motion-sensing still feels like a rushed gimmick, poorly designed, and it does not impress me so far. But it's in its infancy, so maybe it is actually better implemented in the hardware than it seems to be. And maybe future titles will prove that with some really great use of it. I hope so, and would be glad to see it. But as it stands now, I would sacrifice motion-sensing in a heartbeat in order to get force-feedback on this thing. But the truth is, we know they could have opted to include both technologies if they chose to -- and I'm hoping they still can.
I don't know if the PS3's existing controller protocols and hardware in the console itself can even support force-feedback output. But I hope it can, and I hold out hope that at some point Sony will see the error of their ways and find a way to offer it. But if they're too stubborn to do it themselves, I darn sure hope they won't continue to stand in the way of game developers and hardware licensees who clearly want the feature, and who might be able to find a way on their own to provide us with it. Sony worked with these people before, and combined with their heritage of driving games on the PlayStation line, we got great things like force-feedback driving wheels. Now they seem to be working against them, and the idea that great peripherals like this may never be usable on Sony's next-gen flagship just baffles me.
Silvaryn
wow, very nicely said...
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