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Immersion Queries Lack Of PS3 Controller Rumble
simoniker writes "Following the announcement that the PS3 controller will lack a rumble feature, Gamasutra spoke to Victor Viegas of Immersion Corporation, which is currently suing Sony over the PS2 rumble functionality, about what he feels the company's reasoning truly is. He claims of the PS3 controller having both rumble and tilt: 'I don't believe it's a very difficult problem to solve', and also said that his employees thought the PS3 controller 'felt light, that it felt cheap and flimsy, and that it lacked weight or substance.'"
. . . that one could find wrong with the PS3, the lack of a "rumble pack" feature in its controllers is the least of my concerns. Rumble packs are worthless. After you get over the initial "thrill" of a force-feedback experience, what good are they? All they do is interfere with gameplay.
(shoving the damn thing down your pants doesn't count as making it useful)
If only it were a cheap piece of crap.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Copied from the above link :
"Viegas is confident, however, that his company's technology will be at home on video game systems in the future."
They call this technology ?! They call this piece of crap of two different weight lead spinning over an axis a "force-feedback and so-called "haptic" (engaging the user via the sense of touch)". A Patent was awarded over this ? Surely I'm not the only one to think that PATENT LAWS should be revisited ?
Happy for me that this technology is a piece of crap I can live without... and I'm a video game programmer specialized in Input.
I saw an interview with the creator of the Metal Gear Solid games talking about 4 on the PS3. They asked him about the lack of rumble (MGS being on the of few, if only games that used it for something that legitimately enhanced game-play). He said that his understand was that the PS3 controllers are going to have motion sensors in them (I guess like the Wii controller) and that you couldn't do both motion sensors and rumbling.
That kind of makes sense, but you could certainly provide both and let the game pick which to use (using both simultaneously would probably not work for obvious reasons). I'm guessing that is Sony's official excuse rather than saying "we lost a patent lawsuit".
Given the choice, I would much rather have a controller with motion sensors (and games designed to used them intelligently) rather than rumble any day. Contra would have been more fun for me if throwing the controller around actually made the player move a little faster or jump a little higher when I needed it. Let's face it, we all did this anyway, might as well make a controller that understands it.
Finkployd
I've bought two wireless controllers from in the past. The first thing I do in any game is disable rumble. Rumble sucks the batteries down. Check the back of any wireless controller package and you'll see two expected play times listed: one without rumble, one with rumble. (I suppose it doesn't help that I find rumble annoying more often than not)
So Sony has to deal with the fact that rumble sucks batteries, interferes with the tilt sensors, and has to deal with the Immersion lawsuit. It's a no-brainer, kill the feature.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Under normal circumstances, I would agree here. One of my favorite things about the Wavebird on the gamecube was that it didn't have rumble, which meant I never had to hunt for the configuration menu to turn the rumble off.
However: these are not normal circumstances.
Have you ever played a game called Wario Ware Twisted?
Wario Ware Twisted was a Game Boy game that came out last year. It is very possibly the best GBA game of all time. It also, interestingly, is probably the best glimpse we have into what the PS3 tilt controller will work like.
Wario Ware Twisted had some kind of gyroscope built into it which could both tell which way you were tilting the GBA, as well as provide rumble feedback. The point of the game was that it would provide you a bunch of tiny tasks in rapidfire succession ("cut this carrot!" "stomp on this turtle!" "dodge this rock!" etc.), give you 5 seconds to complete the task, and then immediately move on to the next one, as if someone had put an NES in a blender. The trick is, all of these microgames were played using nothing but the tilt sensor and the A button.
Because, unlike the Nintendo Wii and its remote control / 3d mouse, WWT is played on something that "feels like" a traditional controller (i.e. a GBA or DS), Wario Ware Twisted is probably actually closer to how the PS3 controller ought to work than the Wii demos that Nintendo has shown so far.
One of the surprising things about Wario Ware Twisted is that, although under normal conditions I personally consider rumble to normally be a stupid gimmick, once you slapped in the tilt sensor the rumble became absolutely necessary, and after playing Wario Ware Twisted it is very hard to imagine tilt sensing working without rumble.
This is why: part of good interface design is providing feedback. An example we see on a computer might be a button; when you click on the button, it provides feedback by visually highlighting, signalling to the user, hey, you pressed a button. That would be an example in a graphical user interface. However when you are designing a tactile interface, like a video game controller, you need to provide tactile feedback. When you press a button on a controller or a key on a keyboard, you feel the key depressing under your hand. When you move a mouse on a desk you feel the mouse dragging across the mousing surface. The point in all cases is, the user needs guidance to know, hey, that thing you did, it did something. The user can figure out what's happening even withut this guidance, but it just won't feel natural.
And part of what makes Wario Ware Twisted feel natural is the guidance of tactile feedback. Whenever the tilt sensor is active, it emits little rumble jolts every time it registers a reading. This means that when you turn the controller, it "resists" in your hand, or provides the illusion of doing so, to give the impression you are actually "turning" something. Furthermore the game is set up so that the "heavier" the thing you're controlling is, the greater the feedback. The rumble "resistance" is greater in a microgame where the controller is moving the earth than in a microgame where you are moving a fly. Meanwhile when you turn the GBA quickly the resistance comes quicker than when you turn it slowly, giving immediate feedback that you are having a greater effect.
The GBA is no harder to turn when the resistance is present, but just the feel of the thing gives you a clear idea, straight to your reflexes without any need to think about it, when I tilt the controller, is it having any effect? And how much effect is it having? The extent to which this adds to the natural feeling of the game is quite startling.
This is why, hilariously-- although there are claims that Sony took out the rumble to prevent it from interfering with the tilt control-- the Dual Shake needs rumble exactly because it has tilt control. Sony's tilt control is going to be effectively one step behind a Game Boy game released last year.
Is it because the rumble would throw off the sensors? What's wrong with that? Get shot by an enemy, and the rumble throws off your aim for a second. Wouldn't that, in the end, be more realistic?
An excellent use of the rumble feature is in the Madden football series. If you have to make a critical field goal try at the end of the game, it puts you into a first person view, plays the sound of a heartbeat, and the rumble mimics the feel of a heartbeat. It really does totally immerse you in the moment. So, let's end this nonsense about how rumble packs are totally useless.