Most Recent: PS5

Sony’s Future of Gaming event included a nice overview of what gaming will look like going forward, but some of the games on display weren’t afraid to wink at the past. For example… there’s Lucid’s Destruction All-Stars.

The car combat genre feels like it belongs to another era entirely (can you believe Twisted Metal for the PS3 was released in 2012!), but Lucid has gone one step further and infused Destruction All-Stars with the same wacky spirit you’ll find in Fortnite. They’ve also changed the game slightly as players will now be able to exit their vehicles and cause mayhem on foot:

Master the art of intense vehicle-based combat through timing, tactics and skills to cause colossal amounts of damage, destruction and devastation in vibrant arenas across the globe.

Lucid is probably best-known for their work on Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions, which was released for nearly every platform imaginable between 2014 and 2015. However, it looks like they’re going a different route with Destruction All-Stars, which will be exclusive to the PS5.

We don’t know when Destruction All-Stars will launch, but the first trailer has been embedded above.

Insomniac’s Spider-Man has been one of the PS4’s best-selling (and best-reviewed) games since it launched in 2018. Sony was so impressed, that they even cracked open their piggy bank to purchase the studio last August.

A sequel felt inevitable, and we finally got our first look at it during today’s Future of Gaming event. But rather than focus on Peter Parker, the PlayStation Blog confirms that Spider-Man: Miles Morales will put the spotlight on a different webhead:

Spider-Man: Miles Morales from Insomniac Games and Marvel
The latest adventure in the Spider-Man universe will build on and expand Marvel’s Spider-Man through an all-new story. Players will experience the rise of Miles Morales as he masters new powers to become his own Spider-Man. With PS5’s ultra-fast SSD, players can near-instantaneously fast-travel across Marvel’s New York City, or feel the tension of each one of Miles’s web-swings, punches, web shots, and venom blasts with the DualSense wireless controller’s haptic feedback. Highly-detailed character models and enhanced visuals across the game intensify the story of Miles Morales as he faces great, new challenges while learning to be his own Spider-Man.

The first trailer for Spider-Man: Miles Morales has been embedded above, and it’ll be released exclusively for PS5 this Fall.

Sony has flirted with discontinuing the venerable DualShock line of controllers before, most notably when the PS3 made its public debut alongside the “Boomerang” controller. But despite occasionally stepping towards the road not taken, the consolemaker has always turned back towards the DualShock design.

But there’s a first time for everything, so say hello to the DualSense, the official controller for the PS5.

Tossing aside the DualShock design for something that should look more familiar to Xbox One players, the DualSense has been rebuilt to feature adaptive triggers, haptic feedback, and a two-tone color scheme:

After thoughtful consideration, we decided to keep much of what gamers love about DualShock 4 intact, while also adding new functionality and refining the design. Based on our discussions with developers, we concluded that the sense of touch within gameplay, much like audio, hasn’t been a big focus for many games. We had a great opportunity with PS5 to innovate by offering game creators the ability to explore how they can heighten that feeling of immersion through our new controller. This is why we adopted haptic feedback, which adds a variety of powerful sensations you’ll feel when you play, such as the slow grittiness of driving a car through mud. We also incorporated adaptive triggers into the L2 and R2 buttons of DualSense so you can truly feel the tension of your actions, like when drawing a bow to shoot an arrow.

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. In the end, we changed the angle of the hand triggers and also made some subtle updates to the grip. We also took thoughtful consideration into ways to maintain a strong battery life for DualSense’s rechargeable battery, and to lessen the weight of the controller as much as possible as new features were added.

Slightly less noticeable is the repositioned Light Bar (it now sits under the Touchpad on the front of the controller) and the renamed Share button (the three lines symbolize that it’s the Create button now).

You can learn more about the DualSense controller at the PlayStation Blog.

Jim Ryan, Sony Interactive Entertainment’s President and CEO, took the stage at CES yesterday to talk a bit about the PlayStation 5. During his speech, the executive even unveiled the console’s logo… and it looks about how you’d expect.

But if you’re looking for more substantial PS5 news, you’re going to have to keep waiting. Though Ryan did reconfirm that the console will launch this Fall, and he briefly mentioned that the PS5 will support 3D Audio Sound, Haptic/Adaptive Triggers, Hardware-Based Ray Tracing, an Ultra High Speed SSD, and an Ultra HD Disc Drive.

Ryan actually had more to say about the PS4, and he was happy to report some great numbers for Sony. More than 106 million PS4 consoles have been sold since its launch in 2013, along with 1.15 billion games (for an average, or tie ratio, of 10.84 per console). Sony has also sold more than five million PlayStation VR headsets since the peripheral debuted in 2016. Finally, Ryan revealed that Sony has signed up more than 38.8 million users for their PlayStation Plus subscription service.

Will the PS5 be able to match those figures? Perhaps, but we’ll have to wait until this year to learn more about the next-generation console.