With no fanfare whatsoever, Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan has announced that the next PlayStation console will indeed be called the PlayStation 5. The PS5 launch is scheduled to be “in time for Holiday 2020”.
Ryan made the PS5 launch announcement in a post on the PlayStation Blog. No further details of the console itself were announced, but he did reveal a couple of exciting new features for the PS5 controller.
New in the PS5 controller
The first of these is haptic feedback, which will replace the vibration or rumble feedback that controllers have offered for decades now. With haptic feedback, Ryan says, “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”. This can also be used to convey the difference between textures like grass and mud, he added.
The other new feature is adaptive triggers, which essentially means that developers will now have control over how hard or soft the R2 and L2 buttons and how much resistance they offer during various situations. Here Ryan gave the example of a bow and arrow, where the tension felt when drawing the arrow could be conveyed by a tightening of the triggers. In racing games, the triggers could become stiffer when taking a vehicle off-road.
A separate report by Wired magazine shed further details on the console hardware itself.
We already knew that the PS5 would be powered by AMD’s Ryzen CPU family and a GPU based on its Navi line, and that it would come with a solid state driver (SSD) as opposed to a hard drive. Sony had also vaguely mentioned that the PlayStation 5 would support ray-tracing, which would allow for more complex lighting and audio enhancements.
A peek under the hood of the PS5
Today, PlayStation’s system architect Mark Cerny confirmed to Wired that ray-tracing would indeed be powered at the GPU level itself, and won’t be software driven.
Multiplayer game servers will provide the console with the set of joinable activities in real time. Single-player games will provide information like what missions you could do and what rewards you might receive
Games for the PS5 will ship on 100GB optical discs, the report confirmed, and the console’s optical drive will also double up as a 4K Blu-ray player.
Players will also have more control over what part of a game is installed off the disc onto the console. “That could mean the ability to install just a game’s multiplayer campaign, 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,” the report says.
PS5’s UI overhaul
The PS5 will also revamp the UI, which will give players a lot more information to help them jump right into game missions or multiplayer sessions.
“Multiplayer game servers will provide the console with the set of joinable activities in real time. Single-player games will provide information like what missions you could do and what rewards you might receive for completing them—and all of those choices will be visible in the UI. As a player you just jump right into whatever you like,” Cerny said.
For more details on the PlayStation 5, click here to read the full Wired article.
Sony has not announced a specific PS5 launch date, and it looks like we’ll have to wait a while to learn Sony’s launch plans for India. But the PS4 still has some legs in it, with major titles like Death Stranding, The Last of Us Part 2 – which is now available for pre-order in India – and Ghost of Tsushima on the horizon.