Sony has revealed new and rather exciting details about its next-gen PlayStation console. To begin with, the company has confirmed it’ll stick with the existing naming pattern, which essentially means that the next console will be officially called the PlayStation 5.
Besides, Sony has also confirmed the console’s release date. In an interview with Wired, company CEO Jim Ryan confirmed that the console will launch for the 2020 holiday season. Also, the company shared some specific details about what we can look forward to in the PlayStation 5. For instance, the DualShock controller that’ll come bundled with the PS5 will feature haptic technology and adaptive triggers.
“First, we’re adopting haptic feedback to replace the “rumble” technology found in controllers since the 5th generation of consoles. With haptics, you truly feel a broader range of feedback, so crashing into a wall in a race car feels much different than making a tackle on the football field. You can even get a sense for a variety of textures when running through fields of grass or plodding through the mud”, explained Sony.
The second innovation is called adaptive triggers, which are incorporated into the L2/R2 trigger buttons. Cerny stated that adaptive triggers offer varying levels of resistance.
“Developers can program the resistance of the triggers so that you feel the tactile sensation of drawing a bow and arrow or accelerating an off-road vehicle through rocky terrain. In combination with the haptics, this can produce a powerful experience that better simulates various actions. Game creators have started to receive early versions of the new controller, and we can’t wait to see where their imagination goes with these new features at their disposal,’ explained Sony.
The upcoming DualShock 5 controller will also get USB-C charging and larger battery capacity.
Another notable mention is ray-tracing support. System architect Mark Cerny stated that ‘there is ray-tracing acceleration in the GPU hardware, which I believe is the statement people were looking for”.
Cerny also mentioned the console’s sold-state-drive id designed to keep everything nice and smooth. He added that SSD will not only offer faster reading, but it’ll also save space. Now, this implies that the extra space can be used to make games or patches smaller or to make more detailed environments. The PlayStation 5 will come equipped with a 4K Blu Ray player that supports discs of up to 100GB.
“Rather than treating games like a big block of data, we’re allowing finer-grained access to the data,” explained Cerny.
Meanwhile, Marco Thrush, President of Bluepoint Games, the studio behind Shadow of Colossus remake, also seemed excited about the PS5’s solid-state drive.
“The SSD has me really excited. You don’t need to do gameplay hacks anymore to artificially slow players down- lock them behind doors, anything like that. Back in the cartridge days, games used to load instantly; we’re kind of going back to what consoles used to be,” said Thrush.
As far as games go, Thrush also mentioned that ‘we’re working on something big right now’, I’ll let you figure out the rest”.
Sony plans to launch the PlayStation 5 during the 2020 holiday season. More details about the console are likely to surface as we near its official release. We’ll update you as soon as we hear anything new. Until then, keep checking back for more.
