Quantic Dream "very interested" in PS4 touchpad for "designing games that are adapted to a larger audience"

Quantic Dream, the do-it-differently developer of adult thrillers Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls, is "very interested" in the new DualShock 4 PlayStation 4 controller.

Heavy Rain used a lot of gesture commands and quick-time events to make a new kind of adventure game experience people other than core gamers might enjoy. Quantic Dream even retro-fitted PlayStation Move controls after the game launched.

Quantic Dream was one of the first studios in the world to receive PlayStation 4 dev kits, and has been working on an idea for a PS4 game since the middle of 2012.

The DualShock 4 pad has Move's glowing motion-sensing ability built in, and it also comes with a touchpad - a style of control an ever-spreading audience now understands because of touch-screen iOS and Android gaming.

"Yes, we're always thinking about the controller," said Quantic Dream chief operating officer Guillaume de Fondaumiere, talking at the Digital Dragons conference in Poland this weekend passed. "In the past we've made several propositions to Sony, who is the console manufacturer, to make sure that the controller is not a barrier to the experience for certain people who are not used to this controller.

"On one hand, if you think of it, up until now at least, no-one's invented a better interface than a game controller to enable [us] to interact [with] a huge variety of styles of games.

"On the other hand, we see today the emergence of new interfaces such as the touchpad and you've seen that, for instance, on the new PlayStation 4 controller there's going to be a touchpad-type of system so that you can interact through it. That's very interesting and we're looking forward to designing games that are adapted to a larger audience," he added, "but I can't talk too much about it right now."

While in Poland I also asked Thomasz Gop - who worked on The Witcher games and who has been working on a next-gen RPG at City Interactive (Sniper) for two years (more on that soon) - how his game would use the PS4 touchpad.

"The most obvious thing are the elements that - for example, PC games sometimes took advantage of extra gamer-friendly keyboards with LCD displays. If I'm not mistaken, the touchpad allows you to display things as well, so that's one of the things. Probably a lot of other people are going to be doing user-interface elements on it - it's the thing that comes to mind first. I still don't know 100 per cent of what things are going to be implemented in [his game].

"I don't think it's a breakthrough feature, not to disrespect it - it's still very cool."

Gop wasn't sure, however, about integrating the light-up part of the DualShock 4 controller in his game.