Sony have revealed a plethora of new details regarding their next home console, the PlayStation 5, in a press release on their website.

Perhaps most crucially, a release date for holiday 2020 (essentially, the Christmas period) has been confirmed, setting much speculation at rest. This coincides with the tentative release date for XBOX’s own Project Scarlett, setting the winter period of 2020 up as a battleground of market dominance between the two console titans.

The press release continued, with particular focus on the PS5’s new controller. Sony insist that ‘…one of [their] goals with the next generation is to deepen the feeling of immersion when you play games’, and that changes to the traditional PlayStation controller format have been made to this end.

First, we were introduced to haptic feedback replacing the ‘rumble’ feature present in Sony’s controllers since the PS2 days. Haptic feedback attempts to simulate the sense of touch by communicating with the user, whether it is by having them touch the controller or the controller pushing back at them.

According to Sony haptic feedback will allow a much broader range of kinetic feedback, ‘so crashing into a wall in a race car feels much different (sic) than making a tackle on the football field’. WIRED confirmed this, with Peter Rubin noting:

‘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.’

Essentially it is a more advanced version of Sony’s DualShock technology and follows both Nintendo and Steam’s innovations for their respective controllers.

The second new feature discussed was that of ‘adaptive triggers’, specifically on the L2 and R2 buttons. This feature is already present on the current-generation XBOX One controller and allows different levels of resistance to overcome the controller depending on the player’s own actions. Examples cited by Sony included drawing a bow and arrow, or accelerating an off-road vehicle through rocky terrain.

The combination of haptics and adaptive triggers makes the controller one of Sony’s most sensory, and certainly looks to make the PS5 one of Sony’s more immersive console experiences. This was all the information shared in this specific press release, yet Sony said there was ‘much more to share… in the year ahead’. Once such big blockbuster PS4 games as Death Stranding and The Last of Us Part II have released, one might expect to hear more of the console.

Until then, however, we finally have some (albeit) limited details of the PlayStation 5 – time to get excited.