2d ago

is there any PS4/5 game that meaningfully uses the touchpad on the controller

i’m not a super prolific gamer by any means, but I have 30ish games on PS4, a good mix of indies and triple As, and basically none of them seem to use to touchpad in a way where you couldn’t just use a normal button or a normal button plus an analog stick.

13 comments

Days Gone lets you swipe in cardinal directions to quickly access submenus. Ghostwire Tokyo makes you trace symbols to purify spirits. You can draw stuff in littlebigplanet 3. By your metric though, only the last one is meaningful.
Nothing that couldn't be a simple button press. I believe you can slide your finger across it in Ghost of Tsushima to activate the guiding wind, but don't quote me on that.
It's an odd inclusion on the controller. The only thing I can think of is that when the PS4 came out in 2013, phone games were more prolific and perhaps they wanted an avenue to port those types of games over. Maybe it would help with a built in web browser or something, but even the console UI doesn't make much use of it.
It works as a mouse with ds4 on pc

I click icons sometimes
- It does this natively on Linux.
- I use it on my steamdeck when im streaming from my pc, its great. That way i don't have to have a wireless miuse hooked up.
This is like asking if there are any N64 games which use the D-pad (there are none, don't @ me).
- The Tetris game did
- This is Kirby 64 erasure (but that's fine tbh, I don't remember it being particularly fun)
Both Astro games
I'm blanking on names but I have played some games where different swipe gestures on the touchpad have been meaningful which I felt like were good uses.
In Gravity Rush 2 you flick it in different directions to change modes.
On a smaller scale, some games split the button in half so the right side is the Start button and the left side is the Map button
You can play guitar on Last of Us 2 with it. The DS4 seems to have better sensitivity than the 5. I could pick individual strings on it and it doesn’t seem to work as well on the ds5, but both are a neat use. Ghost of Tsushima has functions mapped to swiping the different cardinal directions. Not really anything else I know of
Not really. The main use I've seen for it is typing on the onscreen keyboard

13 comments