Playstation 5 details and release date

Today was an exciting day for gamers as Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan announced that the next iteration of Sony’s console will indeed follow previous name patterns and be called the PlayStation 5 with a release date of Holiday season 2020.

Following on from their wildly successful PlayStation 4 that to date has sold over 100 million units worldwide the PS5 was originally unveiled with very little details back in April and Sony have remained tight-lipped until now.

Ryan posted a blog this morning on as well as speaking to Wired to confirm these as well as a few other details. One of these was a a preview of the new controller that will ship with PlayStation 5. He would not confirm if the controller would be named the Dual Shock 5 as history would suggest but he did talk about some exciting changes: “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.”

To that end, there are two key innovations with PlayStation 5’s new controller. First, we’re adopting haptic feedback to replace the “rumble” technology found in controllers since the 5th generation of consoles’

While previous Sony controllers used a simple device within the casing to cause a rumble feedback to convey in-hand things that happen on screen, the new haptics system will allow a broader range of feedback meaning that a character firing a gun on screen will give a different sensation to say an explosion happening. He went on to say that it would allow for players ‘to even get a sense for a variety of textures when running through fields of grass or plodding through mud.’

The second addition that Ryan refers to is something Sony are calling adaptive triggers, which have been incorporated into the trigger buttons on the controller L2 & R2.

“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.”  

Ryan and system architect Mark Cerny also shared more specifics when talking to Wired.com about the storage that the PS5 will use. The PS5 will indeed have a SSD which will not only allow gamers such things as faster load times but benefits developers as well allowing more freedom when developing software because it reads data faster than an average hard-drive.

As a result of this, installs can now be smaller as well as updates and patches and games being infinitely more detailed. Regardless of this PS5 games will come on 100-GB optical disks and be inserted into an optical drive that doubles as a 4K Blu-ray player inside the console.

It’s these details and anything else that Sony have up their sleeves (there’s rumours that their controller for the console will come with its own AI similar to Siri or Alexa built in) that will have gamers hotly anticipating this time next year.