Sony has officially just confirmed that their next-generation console will be called PlayStation 5, and will be arriving ‘Holiday 2020’.
The company also laid out some details about a few new changes in the new controller, which according to WIRED looks an “awful lot like the PS4’s DualShock 4”. Although Mark Cerny says that the controller doesn’t have a name yet, judging from the history I’d place my bet on DualShock 5, unless Sony decides to go with a different naming in the name of next-gen innovation.
“One of our goals with the next generation is to deepen the feeling of immersion when you play games, and we had the opportunity with our new controller to reimagine how the sense of touch can add to that immersion.”
There are two key innovations with the PS5’s new controller. Firstly, Sony is ditching the Rumble tech in favor of far more capable Haptic feedback, allowing for a broader range of feedback via the controller. You can get a sense for a variety of textures when running through fields of grass or plodding through mud.
“Driving on the border between the track and the dirt, I could feel both surfaces.” – WIRED
The second big change is the new Adaptive Triggers. These will allow developers to program the resistance of the triggers. This can make shooting a bow and arrow feel like the real thing—the tension increasing as you pull the arrow back—or a machine gun feeling far different from a shotgun. In combination with the haptics, this can produce a powerful experience that better simulates various actions.
The post also mentions that developers have already started receiving early versions of the new controller, so we can expect launch titles supporting these new features. It’ll be interesting to see how game developers will utilize these new features, as these can bring about some really immersive experiences if implemented correctly.
There have already been a lot of leaks and rumors regarding the upcoming console. Like the patent for PlayStation Assist, an AI-powered Voice Assistant or the price leak via a Swedish retailer from a couple of months ago. But many details are now confirmed. The next-generation console will boast a CPU based on AMD’s Ryzen line and a GPU based on its Navi family. It’ll also ditch the spinning hard drive for a solid-state drive, allowing for much faster load times.
Thanks to WIRED for their interview with Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan and System Architect Mark Cerny, we now have some details officially confirmed.
“There is ray-tracing acceleration in the GPU hardware,” says Cerny.
So hardware-based ray-tracing is now official, unlike a rumored software-level fix as many had feared. The physical games for the PlayStation 5 will use 100GB optical disks, which go into the optical drive which also doubles as a 4K Bluray player.
“Rather than treating games like a big block of data, we’re allowing finer-grained access to the data.”
This could mean the ability to install just a game’s multiplayer component, leaving the single-player campaign for another time, or just installing the whole thing and then deleting the single-player campaign once you’ve finished it. You get the idea.
Now all this sounds really exciting. Sony is yet to share many more details about the new console, but judging from all we know yet, what do you think about the PlayStation 5? Does it live up to your next-gen expectations? What more features do you think would be useful on the console? Throw in all your thoughts in the comment section!