Planetside 2 Uses DS4 Touchpad & Sixaxis

It’s been a while since we’ve heard more from Sony Online Entertainment about Planetside 2‘s PlayStation 4 version. It was supposed to come out in early 2014 but it was then delayed, mainly due to issues while porting the UI, which developers described as an enormous undertaking.

In a video interview published on the PlayStation YouTube channel, Game Director Matthew Higby confirmed that this is still the main hurdle they are facing while porting Planetside 2 to PS4, but things are progressing well nonetheless. He also mentioned that they are taking advantage of the peculiar DualShock 4 controller features.

Yeah, right now we’re taking advantage of the touchpad, we’re using that a lot for doing navigation on things like our map. It’s really cool to be able to use that pinch&drag&swipe functionality to navigate all that, so we’re working on those kind of things. And the Sixaxis is really cool for flying model, so we have that built in and you can use it to fly. There’s so many things that open up, a lot of time players ask if people are getting a disadvantage by using a controller, but in many cases you have advantages like with the Sixaxis: being able to fly and move in 3D, that’s a really good control method that gives you a strong controller advantage that you don’t get on the PC.

There’s good news in terms of resolution and frame rate as well: GamingBolt reported that SoE is targeting 1080P@60FPS, and even with many players on display at the same time frame rate shouldn’t drop below 30FPS anyway. A release date hasn’t been finalized yet, but they hope to launch Planetside 2 on Sony’s latest console this year; you won’t even have to be subscribed to PS Plus to play it, by the way.