PS5 release date, new controller and more details emerge

It’s official: Sony’s upcoming home platform will be called (as everyone expected) PlayStation 5, and here’s when to expect PS5 release to happen

In an interview with two of the top executives of the Japanese giant’s PlayStation branch, Jim Ryan, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment and Mark Cerny, chief engineer of the Playstation platform, several exciting new details for the upcoming PS5 platform were unveiled, including storage technologies in the used SSDs, ray tracing acceleration and the new controller coming as part of the new generation of devices, and of course, when we can expect PS5 release date.

“I’m proud to share that our next-generation console will be called PlayStation 5, and we’ll be launching in time for Holiday 2020,” Mr. Ryan opened his interview with Wired, answering the most important question for fans directly which means we will see the new device sometime from December for next year.

“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.” added Jim, who later started to discuss the new controller.

Apparently, this new PS5 controller may carry the greatest evolution in the history of Dualshock, thanks to haptic feedback engines rather than the rumbles that we’re used to since the PS2 era. With the haptic feedback of these tactile motors, you can feel everything in front of you on the screen, such as the feeling of walking on mud, sliding on ice or even hitting a wall. The new experience may not be describable in words, but it will be really noticeable according to those who have experienced the difference between DualShock 4 and the new controller.

Another new development of the controller is the adaptive trigger buttons, as Ryan revealed. What this means is that the L2 / R2 buttons will have several levels of actuation that will be used in new games to the developers liking, such as giving the sense of pulling back arrow in a game like Horizon for example, or gradually increasing the acceleration of different vehicles.

Mark Cerny also had little new information about the upcoming hardware, revealing the answer to the most frequently asked question regarding the new ray tracing technology: Will the technology support be hardware or software? In fact, Sony seems to have worked with AMD to develop an acceleration module for this task on the GPU, so we can expect much better performance than we expected.

Another important detail is that games will occupy less space on the new SSD, thanks to this technology, game developers will be able to quickly access game data, eliminating the need for repetition of the same objects that was necessary in the HDD era. Of course, it means either smaller games or larger worlds than we used to see with same storage space.

Another important focus for the PS5 platform lies in the all-new user interface, which will allow you to see a lot of details of what your friends are doing as information about the map they are playing in CoD for example or the stage they reached in Uncharted. The new interface will allow you to download parts of the game as you like. For example, you can just download the story mode without the multiplayer or vice versa, or delete either one after you’re finished with it and keep space for the other.

The PS5 discs will be Bluray with 100GB of storage, and will be played by the Bluray 4K reader on the device, which means that Sony will not take the full digital gaming trail and will allow countries with low internet speed to play games via DVDs as usual.

The new information joins the list of details previously disclosed most notably the ability of PlayStation 5 to play all the previous PS4 games, and we can expect to see more information in the next few months leading to the official disclosure of all the specifications of the device sometime in 2020.

(There is no formal picture of the console just yet, and the picture at the top is for prototype device used for development)