Sony has announced the PlayStation 5’s new controller, dubbed the DualSense and debuted a distinctive black-and-white color scheme for the product, with some significant design departure than what Sony has fielded with the last few generations of PlayStation.
The new design is more curved than previous iterations of the PlayStation 5 controller, with a distinctly different color scheme. The “Share” button has been removed — it’s being replaced with a “Create” button, but it isn’t entirely clear what the Create button does yet. The new consoles include both haptic feedback and adaptive triggers into L2 and R2, “so you can truly feel the tension of your actions, like when drawing a bow to shoot an arrow,” the company said. There’s also a built-in microphone array, the obvious two-toned color scheme difference, and the light bar now sits at the side of the touchpad rather than directly on top of the console.
I’ve always felt as if PlayStation controllers were made for someone with smaller hands than me. This isn’t uncommon — I often feel as if controllers are smaller than I’d like, I appear to be one of the handful of oddities that liked Microsoft’s original Xbox controller (though I admittedly never had to actually play games with it). This controller looks like it would fit in the hand more comfortably than the current interactions. Wags have already pointed out that Sony appears to have added a dedicated “Honk” button to support Untitled Goose Game.
A whole button dedicated to honking is a galaxy-brain move from Sony. pic.twitter.com/ZXhJDRzotI
— Elizabeth Zelle 😷 (@kohizeri) April 8, 2020
The DualSense charges via USB-C with the port on top of the controller, as shown below. There also appears to be a microphone mute button on the front of the controller below the logo. The patent documents that leaked back in November appear to accurately describe the device.
SIE President and CEO Jim Ryan said the company will share more details about the controller and the system ahead of the planned “Holiday 2020” launch. It’s pretty rare these days for either Sony or Microsoft to field a bad controller, so the experience from both companies should be solid. But we’ll have to wait for hardware to see how they compare in a head-to-head test. Polygon put together a compilation of the jokes and silly renders people are making out of it, if you’re looking for more laughs on aspects of the design — but the fun seems to be more good-natured than anything.
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