The PlayStation 5 has been officially confirmed by Sony to land on Holiday 2020 as expected. Wired, which broke the original story on the system's first specifications (hardware ray tracing support, 3D audio and backward compatibility), has now managed to snatch additional tidbits from the manufacturer.
The User Interface (UI) will feature several improvements, as stated by System Architect Mark Cerny.
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. 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.
Perhaps more exciting are the haptics focused enhancements coming to the controller (which hasn't been named yet, by the way). According to the report, adaptive triggers, far more refined haptic feedback and an improved speaker translate in a greatly improved gameplay experience. For example, it'll be possible to feel tactile differences between various surfaces traversed by the player character (or car for racing games).
Interestingly, Sony Product Manager Toshi Aoki told Wired that this could have been added to the PlayStation 4 Pro system, but it was decided to hold it until the PlayStation 5 in order to avoid creating a split with the original PlayStation 4 user base. The controller uses USB Type-C charging and packs a larger battery, which means it'll be a bit heavier than the DualShock 4.
Wired also briefly got a quote from Bluepoint Games president Marco Thrush, who confirmed the studio behind Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection, Gravity Rush Remastered and the remake of Shadow of the Colossus is already working on a 'big title', though it is unclear whether this will be yet another remake or something new instead.
Thrush also shared his favorite new feature of the PlayStation 5 hardware.
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.
We'll have a lot more about PlayStation 5 in the year or so that separates us from the next-gen console's launch. Stay tuned.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.
