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The Fixes Sony's DualShock 4 Controller Still Needs
An anonymous reader writes Sony's PS4 has been on sale for more than a year now, and while its revamped DualShock 4 controller has been critically lauded, it's not without its faults. A new article flags up the issues — both hardware and software — that Sony could look to improve. Almost all of the points — a bigger battery, more options for the lightbar, repositions Option button — could be fixed with a bit of elbow grease. After all, as the author points out, Sony has already quietly changed the model it ships with each console once already.
Most 3d games use most of the controls on a standard controller, though L3/R3 (which as you say are awkward) are generally avoided where possible. The Cube controller was missing enough buttons that games needed serious redesign. The Classic Controller was closer to being fully-featured, but was an optional peripheral anyway.
In the early part of the last decade, I was housemates for a while with a guy who worked at a middle-budget developer whose niche was putting out reasonably good (but not exceptional) games based on other people's licenses across the major platforms - at the time, PS2, Xbox, Gamecube and sometimes PC. His commentary on the state of cross-platform development at the time was interesting.
The Xbox was a delight to develop for; nice simple architecture and reasonable power. The PS2 was horribly tricky and all kinds of compromises had to be made, but its installed base was so huge that you couldn't commercially afford not to release for it. What was inside the Cube was perfectly nice to design for, but the controller limitations meant that entire sections of their game had to be redesigned for the Cube version, and features sometimes cut. So some movement abilities would have to be automated, or combat simplified, which meant difficulty had to be retuned and significant additional QA testing was needed. Towards the end of the cycle, when the Xbox notably overtook the Cube on installed base (having more or less level-pegged until then), they dropped Cube development; redesigning games to fit the controller was costing more than the money was justifying.