PlayStation 5 (PS5): The Five Things We’re Most Excited About

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4 years ago

The gaming console wars are about to go hot again. One week in mid-November of this year will see the two major gaming console manufacturers, Sony and Microsoft, release the next-generation versions of their consoles. If you’re Microsoft and you hate your customers, your naming convention goes: Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox X. Good luck explaining to grandma which one of those is the right one to buy for your birthday, kids. Sony appreciates the simple things, their fifth generation console will be called PlayStation 5 (PS5).

Sony smartly cancelled their PS5 unveiling event this week, stating “… we do not feel that right now is a time for celebration and, for now, we want to stand back and allow more important voices be heard.” Bravo. Earning my console money once again.

PS5 – Five Things We’re Most Excited About

Both the PS5 and Xbox X will have tremendously beefed up features. In reality, both are terrific machines and offer their individual upsides, making the choice between the two something of a personal-taste and brand loyalty issue. I was an original Nintendo kid going way back, eventually switching to the PlayStation when Nintendo fell off the map for a little while.

Full disclosure, I’m what I would call a serious casual gamer. I have hours on hours logged on my various consoles over the years, but I prefer single-player adventures, strategy games and sports games, rather than online multi-player or first-person shooter games. I’ve only ever lightly dabbled in PC gaming, which I know is better. My point is, if I get some tech stuff wrong or my thoughts seem a bit basic to you, it’s not because I’m trying to destroy something about your favorite console or game.

There have been a few exciting feature announcements about the PS5 since Sony first announced its development in April of 2019. The machine seems like Sony took time to consider feedback about their previous console generation, with several key additions answering direct complaints about the PS4.

Graphics and Sound

I’m old enough to remember when Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis first arrived. I distinctly recall arguing with some friends about which looked “more realistic” in their stunning 16-bit graphics. To be clear, this was the “realistic” game-play we were debating:

Years have clearly changed things for the better. Sony made a deep commitment to prioritizing sound and graphical upgrades, with a custom-built 3D sound drawing “significant hardware resources” according to senior hardware developer Mark Cerny.

This video from Epic Gaming unveiling some of the incredible features of their Unreal 5 Engine says more than I could about how far things have come:

Backward compatibility

This one is huge and was actually the first thing I looked for. When the PS4 was released users worldwide were disappointed to learn that it would not be able to run their old PlayStation 3 games. Sony has rectified this with the PS5, making it backward compatible “with the overwhelming majority of PS4 games.” An even cooler aspect of this is that the new machine will offer cross-console play, meaning PS5 users can play a game of Madden against their friends who still own a PS4, and game-saves can be transferred between console generations. Development studios like EA will continue to release games for both consoles for the moment, eventually phasing out PS4 development. Sony CEO Jim Ryan was quoted in an interview saying “Whether it’s backwards compatibility or the possibility of cross-generational play, we’ll be able to transition that community to next-gen, it won’t be a binary choice about whether you have to be ether on PlayStation 4 or next-gen to continue your friendship.”

Not splitting up their 94 million global players into multiple camps seems like a smart move. It’s nice to see Sony make it this time around. Kudos to them for not forcing the “we remade it, buy it again!” model on their customers.

SSD Drive/Loading time

The difference in performance between a solid-state drive (SSD) and a traditional hard drive cannot be overstated. If your PS4 has aged anything like mine, it’s louder than your air conditioner at this point. The PS5’s massive upgrade to an SSD hard drive should fix some of this auditory issue by removing the traditional spinning hard drive. Native storage for this beast is an 825 GB SSD drive. This SSD dramatically improves input/output rates for the machine, allowing for much faster loading times, up to 8k UHD resolution and Sony’s custom immersive sound. To take full advantage of the SSD users will have to install an entire game to their drive, but tools are provided to throttle the amount of data, allowing play-from-disc options. The load times for menus and worlds should still see a tremendous uptick with the hardware in this box, hopefully eliminating forever the wait times that snap us out of immersive gaming experiences. In a demo for Wired, Sony showed a 15-second load time for a location transition in smash hit Spider-Man. The same transition on a PS5 took less than a second.

Dual-Sense Controller

I’ll admit it: as these controllers get bigger and add more buttons, triggers, speakers and whatever else, I get worse at games. It has to be them not me getting old. Bring back four buttons, two-triggers and get off my lawn!

This one legitimately sounds cool, however. Sony took the time to do a deep dive with players on what was most important in a controller and it seems to have paid dividends. Sony upgraded the controller for the PS5 to include a better speaker and microphone, stronger haptic feedback (“the use of touch to communicate with users” thanks Google!), and coolest of all, the Dual-Sense buttons will adapt to in-game scenarios to change the resistance a player feels in a button action. This adds realism to experiences that require physical effort from your in-game character, such as moving a heavy object or drawing a bow and arrow.

Games

This is what it all adds up to. The amount of immersion that is clear from the looks we’ve had at PS5’s capabilities looks weekend-consuming. Whether you prefer to get lost in the open worlds of next-gen versions of games like Elder Scrolls (Skyrim), Red Dead and Grand Theft Auto, adventuring through platformers like The Last of Us or Uncharted, taking the field against Gronk and Tom Brady, or the field of battle in first-person shooters like Modern Warfare, these games look like a big step toward the future of gaming that sci-fi has promised us. Combined with the rapid development of virtual reality, which the PS5 is built to be compatible with, and we really have something exciting to look forward to. I don’t know the franchise, but this trailer for Godfall is one of the first to drop and it looks pretty awesome.

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