Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart uses DualSense "to take each weapon’s unique personality even further"

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is putting PS5 to work with over-the-top new weapons, including new ways to make each gun feel unique with detailed haptic feedback.

We talked to Insomniac Games about its upcoming PS5 exclusive series for our latest Big in 2021 spotlight, and you can't talk about Ratchet & Clank without talking about its array of cartoonish firearms. Game director Mike Daly told us how DualSense gives the team "powerful new tools to take each weapon’s unique personality even further."

"The adaptive triggers not only give us another channel for weapons to feel unique, in some cases they enable extra functionality," Daly explained. "Partially pulling the trigger or feathering it gives us a way to add nuance to weapon functions that just weren’t possible before the trigger itself couldn’t give feedback. Our Burst Pistol, for example, can be fired accurately by pulling the trigger up to a middle threshold or you can pull through to go all out at the cost of accuracy.

"It's much more intuitive to have this secondary function directly on the trigger than have players learn different buttons for it, it’s that much easier for you to get into the flow of combat and execute advanced strategies without having to think of the controls."

As another example, Insomniac found that players still do well at tracking haptic feedback even if there's a lot happening on screen at once (which is pretty standard for the hectic combat of the Ratchet series), so it's perfect to use for indicating when slower weapons are ready to fire again. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is still set to be released sometime in the first half of this year, so keep your DualSense charged up until then.

See what else is on the way to Sony's new system with our guide to upcoming PS5 games.