Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan is still ready to answer it. The console, he tells me, will be called PlayStation 5. "It's nice to be able to say it," he says. "Like a giant burden has been lifted from my shoulders."
So. There you go. PlayStation 5, holidays 2020.
Before they do, Cerny wants to clarify something. When we last discussed the forthcoming console, he spoke about its ability to support ray-tracing, a technique that can enable complex lighting and sound effects in 3D environments. Given the many questions he's received since, he fears he may have been ambiguous about how the PS5 would accomplish this—and confirms that it's not a software-level fix, which some had feared. "There is ray-tracing acceleration in the GPU hardware," he says, "which I believe is the statement that people were looking for."
About UI and game installation:
However, game installation (which is mandatory, given the speed difference between the SSD and the optical drive) will be a bit different than in the PS4. This time around, aided in part by the simplified game data possible with the SSD, Sony is changing its approach to storage, making for a more configurable installation—and removal—process. "Rather than treating games like a big block of data," Cerny says, "we're allowing finer-grained access to the data." 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.
Regardless of what parts of a game you choose to install and play, you'll be able to stay abreast of it via a completely revamped user interface. The PS4's bare-bones home screen at times feels frozen in amber; you can see what your friends have recently done, or even what game title they might be playing at the moment, but without launching an individual title, there's no way to tell what single-player missions you could do or what multiplayer matches you can join. The PS5 will change that. "Even though it will be fairly fast to boot games, we don't want the player to have to boot the game, see what's up, boot the game, see what's up," Cerny says. "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."
On the controller:
He says this like he says many other things: knowing he'll fend off any follow-up question that ventures beyond what he wants to talk about. Like, What does the UI actually look like? Or, How big will the SSD be? Or even, Is that a microphone? Which is exactly what I ask when Cerny hands me a prototype of the next-generation controller, an unlabeled matte-black doohickey that looks an awful lot like the PS4's DualShock 4. After all, there's a little hole on it, and a recently published patent points to Sony developing a voice-driven AI assistant for the PlayStation. But all I get from Cerny is, "We'll talk more about it another time." ("We file patents on a regular basis," a spokesperson tells me later, "and like many companies, some of those patents end up in our products, and some don't.")
The controller (which history suggests will one day be called the DualShock 5, though Cerny just says "it doesn't have a name yet") does have some features Cerny's more interested in acknowledging. One is "adaptive triggers" that can offer varying levels of resistance to make shooting a bow and arrow feel like the real thing—the tension increasing as you pull the arrow back—or make a machine gun feel far different from a shotgun. It also boasts haptic feedback far more capable than the rumble motor console gamers are used to, with highly programmable voice-coil actuators located in the left and right grips of the controller.
Combined with an improved speaker on the controller, the haptics can enable some astonishing effects. First, I play through a series of short demos, courtesy of the same Japan Studio team that designed PlayStation VR's Astro Bot Rescue Mission. In the most impressive, I ran a character through a platform level featuring a number of different surfaces, all of which gave distinct—and surprisingly immersive—tactile experiences. Sand felt slow and sloggy; mud felt slow and soggy. On ice, a high-frequency response made the thumbsticks really feel like my character was gliding. Jumping into a pool, I got a sense of the resistance of the water; on a wooden bridge, a bouncy sensation.
Next, a version of Gran Turismo Sport that Sony had ported over to a PS5 devkit—a devkit that on quick glance looks a lot like the one Gizmodo reported on last week. (The company refused to comment on questions about how the devkit's form factor might compare to what's being considered for the consumer product.) Driving on the border between the track and the dirt, I could feel both surfaces. Doing the same thing on the same track using a DualShock 4 on a PS4, that sensation disappeared entirely. It wasn't that the old style rumble feedback paled in comparison, it was that there was no feedback at all. User tests found that rumble feedback was too tiring to use continuously, so the released version of GT Sport simply didn't use it.
That difference has been a long time coming. Product manager Toshi Aoki says the controller team has been working on haptic feedback since the DualShock 4 was in development. They even could have included it in PS4 Pro, the mid-cycle refresh—though doing so would have created a "split experience" for gamers, so the feature suite was held for the next generation. There are some other small improvements over the DualShock 4. The next-gen controller uses a USB Type-C connector for charging (and you can play through the cable as well). Its larger-capacity battery and haptics motors make the new controller a bit heavier than the DualShock 4, but Aoki says it will still come in a bit lighter than the current Xbox controller "with batteries in it."
From PS Blog:
To that end, there are two key innovations with the 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. 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 mud.
The second innovation is something we call adaptive triggers, which have been incorporated into the trigger buttons (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. 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.
Bluepoint are working on a PS5 title:
"We're working on a big one right now," says Marco Thrush, president of Bluepoint Games, which most recently worked on last year's PS4 remake of Shadow of the Colossus. "I'll let you figure out the rest."
That doesn't mean they're not exploring. "The SSD has me really excited," Thrush says. "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."
Laura Miele, chief studio officer for EA comment:
"I could be really specific and talk about experimenting with ambient occlusion techniques, or the examination of ray-traced shadows," says Laura Miele, chief studio officer for EA. "More generally, we're seeing the GPU be able to power machine learning for all sorts of really interesting advancements in the gameplay and other tools." Above all, Miele adds, it's the speed of everything that will define the next crop of consoles. "We're stepping into the generation of immediacy. In mobile games, we expect a game to download in moments, and to be just a few taps from jumping right in. Now we're able to tackle that in a big way."
https://www.wired.com/story/exclusive-playstation-5/
tldr (thanks to Nibel):
- Official name is PlayStation 5
- Ray tracing support is hardware based
- New SSD will help boot times, loading times and streaming
- Controller has now adaptive triggers, haptic feedback, new speakers, USB Type-C
- PlayStation 5 devkit is real and that developers already have access to both the devkit and the new controller
- better DS5 battery
- heavier than DualShock 4, but lighter than a XBO controller with batteries in it
- haptic feedback could have been included in the PS4 Pro but they decided against it
- Wired also seems to speculate that game installs will be more modular and that you can choose which parts to install/uninstall (SP/MP/both) They also mention a "completey revamped user interface" that allows you to join multiplayer activities instantly from the OS for example
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