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."
Click to shrink...
![[[Solid_Snake]]](/data/avatars/m/90/90851.jpg?1623672954){kind=avatar}
