Sony Reveals the New Controller for PlayStation 5

It’s been awhile since Microsoft revealed their new con­troller for the Xbox Series X. Today was Sony’s big con­troller reveal, and it’s quite a dras­tic change. 

It’s been titled the DualSense, as it will “cap­ti­vate more of your sens­es” while you play. The fea­tures of the DualSense, along with the PS5’s Tem­pest 3D AudioTech, will “deliv­er a new feel­ing of immer­sion to players.”

Sony decid­ed to keep much of what gamers loved about the Dual­Shock 4, but also added new func­tion­al­i­ty and a refined design. Devel­op­ers dis­cussed that the sense of touch with­in game­play has­n’t been a “big focus” for many games. There­fore, Sony had a great oppor­tu­ni­ty with the PS5 to inno­vate by “offer­ing game cre­ators the abil­i­ty to elop­er how they can height­en that feel­ing of immer­sion” through their new controller.

The new­ly added hap­tic feed­back brings a vari­ety of pow­er­ful sen­sa­tions you’ll feel when you play, like the “slow grit­ti­ness of dri­ving a car through mud.” They also incor­po­rat­ed adap­tive trig­gers into the L2 an R2 but­tons so you can “tru­ly feel the ten­sion of your actions,” like when draw­ing the string of a bow to shoot an arrow.

Sony spoke about the chal­lenge this cre­at­ed and how the design was adapt­ed to account the new features:

This pro­vid­ed us with an excit­ing chal­lenge to design a new con­troller that builds off of the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion, while tak­ing into account the new fea­tures we were adding. For exam­ple, with adap­tive trig­gers, we had to con­sid­er how the com­po­nents would fit into the hard­ware, with­out giv­ing it a bulky feel­ing. Our design team worked close­ly with our hard­ware engi­neers to place the trig­gers and actu­a­tors. The design­ers were then able to draw the lines of how the exte­ri­or of the con­troller would look and feel, with a chal­lenge of mak­ing the con­troller feel small­er than it real­ly looks. 

Hidea­ki Nishi­no (Senior VP, Plat­form Plan­ning and Management

The con­trollers angle of the hand trig­gers has changed and there were some sub­tle updates to the grip. They also took con­sid­er­a­tion into ways to main­tain a strong bat­tery life for the DualSense, and to lessen the weight of the con­troller “as much as pos­si­ble” as new fea­tures were added. 

There’s no longer a “Share” but­ton, it’s been replaced by a new “Cre­ate” but­ton. With Cre­ate, Sony is giv­ing play­ers new ways to cre­ate epic game­play con­tent. They’ll be shar­ing more details on this fea­ture clos­er to launch.

DualSense also has a built-in micro­phone array, enabling play­ers to eas­i­ly chat with friends with­out a head­set. It was empha­sized that this was for quick con­ver­sa­tion, and if play­ers want­ed to chat for longer peri­ods, it would be “good to have a head­set handy.”

As you noticed, this gen­er­a­tion of con­troller has a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent base col­or scheme. Instead of a sin­gle col­or, the DualSense is two-toned. There was no men­tion of oth­er col­ors. Sony also changed to posi­tion of the light bar, plac­ing it on each side of the touch­pad, instead of on top of the con­troller like the Dual­Shock 4.

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Sony also men­tioned they test­ed sev­er­al con­cepts and hun­dreds of mock­ups over the last few years, before they set­tled on this design. It was also test­ed by a wide range of gamers with a vari­ety of hand sizes. 

Sony’s Jim Ryan, the Pres­i­dent and CEO, gave a state­ment regard­ing the reveal of their new con­troller and shar­ing more infor­ma­tion in the com­ing months:

We are thrilled about shar­ing the final look of the DualSense con­troller with our fans, and we can’t wait for every­one to get their hands on it! I’d like to close with a mes­sage from SIE Pres­i­dent & CEO Jim Ryan to the community:

“DualSense marks a rad­i­cal depar­ture from our pre­vi­ous con­troller offer­ings and cap­tures just how strong­ly we feel about mak­ing a gen­er­a­tional leap with PS5. The new con­troller, along with the many inno­v­a­tive fea­tures in PS5, will be trans­for­ma­tive for games – con­tin­u­ing our mis­sion at PlaySta­tion to push the bound­aries of play, now and in the future. To the PlaySta­tion com­mu­ni­ty, I tru­ly want to thank you for shar­ing this excit­ing jour­ney with us as we head toward PS5’s launch in Hol­i­day 2020. We look for­ward to shar­ing more infor­ma­tion about PS5, includ­ing the con­sole design, in the com­ing months.”

Jim Ryan, Pres­i­dent & CEo, Sony Inter­ac­tive Entertainment

Source: PlaySta­tion