We’re now into our second month of car-wrecking, platform-leaping action after PS5 exclusive Destruction AllStars made its debut on PlayStation Plus in February. We’ve witnessed first-hand (and been the cause of) the beautiful visual carnage that’s a metal-shredding headline of the game’s 16-player matches. We’ve watched tornados explode vehicles into a cascade of parts, seen superstars parkour around arenas and flow over fast-moving cars, and felt every shunt and crunch thanks to the DualSense wireless controller.
To find out how this all came together, we spoke to its creators, developer Lucid Games and Sony xDev, who gave us a tour under the hood.
PlayStation Blog: If you had to pinpoint one tech pillar as being the most critical for Destruction AllStars, what is it and why?
Colin Berry [Game Director, Lucid Games]: For me, it’s the DualSense controller. It’s enabled us to do some really subtle and nuanced things.
So we’re able to do directional haptics. When you get hit, you’ll see it, but importantly you’ll feel it as well. And we vary the weight of that hit; from big smashes to smaller, subtler scrapes. We put haptics on characters’ footsteps. You’ve got the sound effects, the little pitter patter coming out the speaker, and you’ve got the feeling of the feet.
We were worried it’d be too much, as it’s continual. But when we took it out [during development] to test reactions. Everyone was asking what had happened, asking why they’d gone. It showed it worked; really nuanced, subtle. It’s like when you play a game with a character and there’s no shadows; they don’t feel connected to the world. Put a shadow in and they do. This is like the next step of that.
And then the triggers let you feel when your vehicle’s damaged; the brake feels harder to use. When your vehicle is super damaged, you feel that on the accelerator as well. There’s no resistance when you first start driving. That’s deliberate: we found having resistance all the time was not pleasurable.
John McLaughlin [Senior Producer, XDev]: [PS5] is great in terms of the GPU and CPU. That we can throw all these particles around, throw all these vehicle parts around at a very high resolution. We’re doing real time deformation on vehicles. It’s a good looking game, and I am a graphics man. But the DualSense controller is probably the biggest game changer.
But I have to say, as a man of a certain age, who remembers consoles on cartridge and instant loading it feels gr