Sony confirms PlayStation 5 will arrive holiday 2020

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Gaming fans better start saving their coins, because Sony has officially announced a release window for their highly-anticipated new system, the PlayStation 5. There’s been much speculation over when the company would drop their successor to the current PS4, and this morning Sony put out a release confirming it would be dropping just in time for the holiday season in 2020.

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Given we’re a year away the details are still sparse on the new system, but Sony did confirm what will be one of the more enticing features for the new system: the new controller. While we can anticipate the design won’t be all that different from the classic look of current and past controllers, the new ones will be ditching the standard rumble feature for innovative haptic feedback and new adaptive triggers. For the former, what that means is the controller will provide a wider array of sensations to make the player feel more immersed in the gameplay.

According to the people at Wired (who got a demonstration), the new haptics makes walking through sandy and muddy environments feel “slow and soggy” while driving against the barrier in a Gran Turismo game have an actual grinding sensation as opposed to a general rumble. As for adaptive triggers, players will be able to tweak them so that players can make L2/R2 triggers have a certain weight or lightness. They can make it so you feel the tension of a bowstring, or make the triggers of certain guns have varying sensations. Simply put, the controllers are being designed to make the gameplay feel as realistic as possible.

Inside the new hardware, the typical spinning hard drive will be replaced for a solid-state drive, and with ray-tracing technology incorporated not only into software but into the system’s GPU as well. When it comes to the solid-state drive, it means downloading games will be infinitely faster and take up less space. Even the downloading of games will be more customizable, with players able to choose what gets downloaded from certain games. If you only want to play the multiplayer from one game, you can download that first and leave the campaign section for another time. Or you can download it all and delete the chunks you don’t want when you’re done with it. Games will use 100GB optical disks, which will be inserted into the drive, which will also catch Sony up to the Xbox One and double as a 4K Blu-ray player.

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What a key goal seems to be is making it more seamless to insert a game and jump right in. Laura Miele, chief studio officer for EA, compared what they're trying to do with the instant download of old cartridge games, going back to even earlier PlayStations. "We’re seeing the GPU be able to power machine learning for all sorts of really interesting advancements in the gameplay and other tools.," she said to Wired, emphasizing speed will be the name of the game. "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."

There are tons more questions to be answered, such as design and actual SSD size, and even what games will debut on the new system. Sony has already set the anticipated games DEATH STRANDING and THE LAST OF US PART II for early 2020, but titles with no current release date, like a sequel to last year's GOD OF WAR, will surely be among the PS5 titles.