Video game visuals have very comfortably hit the point of diminishing returns, making the traditional jump from the PS4 to a PS5 less obvious.
To combat this, Sony invested in a meaningful SSD and DualSense controller features as differentiators, and the Team Asobi studio director Nicolas Doucet believes these are the kinds of things that make Sony's current console "special".
Speaking to The Game Business, the Astro's Playroom and Astro Bot lead touches on how, to the "untrained eye", it can be difficult to notice the difference between the visuals of a late-gen PS4 title and a PS5 launch game. Therefore, to make its experiences feel different to what was on offer last generation, Team Asobi invested in those new features.
As it played around with prototypes for the DualSense controller, it "tried to understand what could be different about having this kind of trigger, so you can simulate pulling something, or cracking something, or crushing something... We tested all of that".
The experiments resulted in two of the best use cases of the PS5 pad this generation, and this is where the generational leap is probably best felt, says Doucet. "There are some leaps, but they’re maybe less obvious than when we went to HD graphics. That’s something that you can just stare at the screen for a few seconds and understand. With the controller, you have to get it in your hands and get a feel for it."