Mark Cerny’s presentation earlier in the year disappointed a lot of PlayStation fans. Not because it was bad or he wasn’t entertaining, rather he was just discussing the inner working of the PlayStation 5 architecture while not showing off games. I mean, why would he just show off hardware when he could be giving gamers a preview of the next generation first-party titles? Lots of skeptics wrote this presentation off as a waste of time. No games to show, huh? Well, sounds like Sony didn’t have a plan or didn’t understand their audience.
Sony had a plan for everything.
While everyone was griping, Cerny knew what he was doing. He was telling the competition that ‘these are our cards and you better be prepared for them’. Certainly a ballsy move on Cerny and Sony’s part, but one that brimmed with confidence, which you can’t fault. Within those cards lay a blueprint of a customized I/O, how efficiently information was stored, distributed, and handled on every level of the PS5. His presentation also drew upon the ease-of-use developers would experience during the game creation process, a tactic that made most console manufacturers winners amongst development groups. What was also outlined in the presentation was an insanely fast SSD that defied any benchmark a PC owner ever experienced. A drive that blazed 5.5gb raw information and 9gb of compressed was something not any PCs could boast about. The cards shown baffled the Internet, made Xbox fans laugh and brag about their 12 teraflops, and…excited hardware experts who knew what was happening but couldn’t believe it.
After the presentation, Cerny, in his soft-spoken manner simply smiled thanked everyone, and walked off his stage.
The next generation had just been given its first success story and no one knew it.
Digitalchumps has had the PlayStation 5 for a week. We’ve seen every nook and cranny of it, though we cannot tell you yet about some items of interest, and we’re ready to tell you what we think of Sony’s beast.
Dive Right Into the Heart of this System — SSD
This is a fast drive. This is a quiet drive. This is a stable drive (so far). The system launches quickly, it loads its OS really quick. The games? They vary, but I have examples. The following load times are from the moment the start menu is ready (after the credits) until the actual gameplay begins:
– Spider-Man: Miles Morales — 2 seconds — Everything in the game is loaded and ready to go. This includes all environments, all ray tracing, every single detail including a gigantic draw distance that helps spread out New York City. This also includes people in the streets of NYC, cars honking and moving, and a sky that is actually active, plus active weather conditions (depending on the type of day). No pop-ins. No renders. No blurred buildings. It’s all there right from the get-go. It all stays there the entire duration of the game. There are NO load times beyond the start of the game, even when the game shifts between cutscenes and action. It’s impressive to see in real-time.
– Unnamed Game — 4 seconds — I can’t tell you anything about this game yet, but it takes four seconds to load the entire world. It is impressive with its graphical landscape with no rendering or pop-ins happening. It’s a lot of landscape too.
– Astro’s Playroom — 3 seconds — Fully loaded with no stopping. Switching between lands and going anywhere in real-time. This includes world jumping, moving around, and transitioning between stages — it’s all instant with no rendering or pop-ins. It’s fully ready to go.
I would expect that this generation of games will maintain this speed consistency. The reason this is important is that it doesn’t break away from the game itself. Keeping players immersed in the game and their attention focused on the screen will do wonders with narrative gameplay and player connection. This is important because it will make for a wonderful gaming experience…unless the game is bad. It might magnify that, sadly.
Regardless, this hard drive is efficient, it gathers and distributes information beautifully thanks to a number of hardware factors (mainly custom hardware), and it’s quiet. You won’t find your hard drive activating your PlayStation’s fan to make it sound like a 747 ready for take-off, such was the case with the PS4 and PS4 Pro. The system seems prepped for this SSD speed and it handles it all quite well. It also seems to distribute the heat from within the system evenly, which also accounts for the lack of fan noise.
Now, the ugly elephant in the room, which was reported this week, is true. The hard drive is limited in space. It’s 825gb large and no more. What that means is that all I can fit on the system at the same time is Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Astro’s Playroom, God of War, an unnamed game, Destiny 2 (all of it), Horizon Zero Dawn (complete edition), Ghost of Tsushima, Death Stranding, and Diablo. All of those at once with room left for the newest Call of Duty (reportedly 200+gb — I’m going by that unconfirmed assumption). I personally can survive on those types of games and space being rotated. I don’t need everything at once because I won’t be playing everything at once. Will the system need expansion at some point? Probably, but that issue is something that is ongoing for an all-digital generation, which is what we’re heading towards any day now. Until Sony announces the drives that are compatible with the PS5 and that can achieve the same speeds like the one built into the system, drive size will be an issue. Is it a bad issue? Not really, in my humble opinion, because I know a solution will happen in the next sixth months, but I know it matters to a lot of gamers.
Anyway, at the end of the day, the SSD is amazing. It’s everything that it was advertised to be in the March presentation by Cerny, and it’s a game-changing piece of hardware that is light years ahead with how it functions compared to its competition. Sure it isn’t a piece of hardware that acts on its own, it needs the right direction through the controller and such, but it’s impressive and delivers what Sony promises it would. You will see how impressive it is the first time you boot up Spider-Man: Miles Morales and you won’t be able to unsee it for the rest of this generation.
Expectations will certainly be raised.
Controller
The technology keeps on rolling with this system. After picking up my jaw from the load times and details, the controller is the next item on the list that creates a unique experience. The DualSense controller is properly named. The haptic feedback that the controller provides and along with the adaptive triggers will have you questioning why you need another controller in your life. When Sony first announced this item, I didn’t know what to make of it. I have felt adaptive triggers before on the HTC Vive controllers and the Oculus Touch and had enjoyed those experiences, though the games generally didn’t live up to the hardware. This time around, the PS5 controller imitates what you’re doing in the game and enhances the game experience, which makes for something special.
The first game I fired up on the PlayStation 5 was Astro’s Playroom, a gloried tech demo that is actually a fun platformer. Why doesn’t SIE just adopt the bot as their mascot? They need to do that and be done with it because Astrobot is so adorable. Anyway, the controller played a huge role in this game with all its haptic feedback and adaptiveness. Starting with the latter, adaptive triggers are the most fascinating part of this device. When Astrobot grabs a bow and arrow/plunger and pulls back on the bow, you get resistance from the R2 button. The trigger physically pushes back during your press to emulate the strain of the bow. It’s genius and it adds so much to the moment and it will shock the hell out of you on how immersive it makes the moment feel.
The adaptive trigger also finds its way to Spider-Man: Miles Morales. When you swing from building to building, the button will get tighter as you are in mid-swing. Imagine being on a swing set and throwing your feet out, the adaptive trigger would happen right at that moment. You can feel the tension of the web through the adaptive trigger and you will instinctively want to push harder to get Miles to swing through his form with full guff. It’s odd but effective.
The adaptive trigger concept is fantastic. I never knew how much this particular feature would add to a game’s design. I’m anxious to see how developers take this and use it because it isn’t a gimmick. It literally makes the gameplay better.
As for the haptic feedback, it’s nice. Astro and Miles demonstrate how far rumble can go beyond just the handles of the controller. For example, in Miles Morales, you get to feel the bioelectric shock that our favorite new Spidey dispenses throughout the entire controller. You get to feel the small crisp electric current that sparks and is left behind after you dispose of an enemy. It’s oddly satisfying to feel and it adds to the moment, which is weird to say about a controller feature. The feedback manages to cover the entire controller and will go off in games, especially in Astro’s Playroom, at any appropriate and given time. It’s such a step up over rumble packs, so expect greatness from this feature.
On the comfort side of the controller, it’s incredibly snug and not at all heavy, which the latter was surprising. With so much tech packed into the controller, I would have expected it to have some decent weight to it, but it didn’t. It felt light and at the same time durable. For those looking for seamless comfort between the DualShock 4 and DualSense, you’ll be in for a treat.
Finally, as for the motion-sensing and mic, Astro’s Playroom will show you both are valuable. While the motion is nearly 1:1 with movement, and it’s incorporated cleverly in AP, the mic is still something I have to test out when the system goes live next week. The inclusion of a mic in the controller is brilliant and I think a lot of people who don’t own headsets are going to benefit from it. The quality of the mic is something I have yet to determine. I will update this review when we get to that point.
The DualSense is a new step up for a PlayStation console. It’s definitely something to be excited about when it comes to hardware improvements over the last generation.
It’s tall.
The mother is tall. I didn’t know how big this thing was going to be until I saw the SIE video where the system was taken apart. Unbeknownst to him, that poor man was a measuring stick to the height of the console and his video didn’t lie one bit. When I streamed Astro’s Playroom this morning, I had to finagle the system to stay out of the way of my C100 shot. My desk didn’t have enough width with two monitors and a keyboard/mouse to hold it horizontally, so vertically was the only way to go. It will certainly give entertainment systems fits and make cat owners nervous when standing up. It took me about 3-4 days before I could start trusting my kids and cats around it because it seemed easily knocked over. BUT that was just me being paranoid. The system is quite sturdy when standing up and it will fit in a standard entertainment system, though it is certain to take up an entire row. The heat distribution might have you rethinking where to put it, as it did for me, as it will get quite toasty when trapped in a small space (the space gets hot, not the system — it’s never good to keep systems in heat). I wanted the thing to breathe because it took up so much space, even though it fits fine in my entertainment system, so standing it up was the way to go in my book. Plus, it looks cooler. No pun intended.
As for the foot, it’s a neat concept. I don’t like sitting it horizontally, as the foot does slide a bit, but vertically with the screw that foot fits just fine and holds up perfectly. This review category might be the biggest caveat for this release, but not an unexpected one for those following PS5 news.
Overall
The PlayStation 5 proves that customizing the innards of hardware and pushing for efficiency rather than power is the best route to go. I’m thoroughly impressed by the PS5 hardware. It runs smoothly, quietly, and efficiently. It makes good on promises made from Cerny’s March presentation and those promises show in the new games, and I know it will only get better. Is it a bit tall? Sure, but that’s a good conversation starter with friends, rather than a hindrance in the long run. To date, this is the most impressive piece of hardware Sony has produced. The Xbox Series X will have to really come through on its promises of power to even touch the likes of the PlayStation 5. I’m not sure that is going to be possible, and this generation hasn’t even begun.
