What I want to see from Sony's PS5 deep dive

By Eric Abent/

Microsoft started the week off with a bang by giving the Xbox Series X a full reveal on Monday. Sony seems primed and ready to respond, announcing today that it will host a "deep dive" on the PlayStation 5 this week. The deep dive is slated to happen tomorrow, March 18th, and will be hosted by PS5 lead architect Mark Cerny.

Regarding the PlayStation 5, Mark Cerny has been in the picture from the start. Cerny was the one who provided initial details about the PlayStation 5 to Wired all those months ago, and whenever new information is officially shared, it's usually Cerny who's doing the sharing.

As for what we can expect from tomorrow's deep dive, we don't have a lot to go on at this point. Sony made the announcement on Twitter, saying that Cerny will detail the PS5's system architecture and talk about how the console "will shape the future of games." Beyond that, Sony is keeping details under wraps for now, so here are a few things we want to see.

The console itself

We've known what the Xbox Series X will look like for some time now, but we still haven't seen the PlayStation 5 in the flesh (or the silicon, if you prefer). It's time for that change, and tomorrow is the perfect opportunity for Sony to show off the PlayStation 5 in all of its new console glory.

Given that Sony calls this presentation a "deep dive," there's at least a decent chance that we'll see the final design of the console. That's helped by the fact that Sony was never planning to attend E3 2020 in the first place, meaning that the company has probably been planning to fully reveal the console in a presentation like this.

More details on the SSD

If there's one point that Microsoft's marketers have gotten across loud and clear in hyping up the Xbox Series X, it's that the SSD is at the center of a lot of the console's capability. Similarly, Mark Cerny has been singing the praises of the PS5's SSD since the very beginning, so tomorrow, we'd like to see him quantify some of the claims he's been making.

In that initial interview with Wired nearly a year ago, Cerny was talking up the SSD and the impact it's going to have on loading. Yesterday, Microsoft detailed some of the SSD-based capabilities the Xbox Series X will have, from Quick Resume for multiple games to Velocity, which allows developers to pull up as much as 100GB of assets quickly, presumably reducing loading times significantly. We want to hear something similar for the PlayStation 5.

Games, games, games

Of course, we don't want Sony's presentation to mirror Microsoft's entirely, because that wouldn't be very fun at all. One place where Sony could one-up Microsoft is by talking about some of the games that will be on the PlayStation 5 either at launch or shortly after. Thus far, the only Xbox Series X launch title Microsoft has talked about is Halo Infinite, giving Sony an opportunity to come out swinging with talk of launch titles.

Unfortunately, that probably won't be in the cards for tomorrow's presentation. Sony is clear in the tweet you see above that Cerny's presentation will be primarily about PlayStation 5 hardware, so we expect to hear little – if anything – about games. Still, it could be a good chance for Sony to make its presentation stand out.

The controller up close and personal

During his periodic check-ins with Wired, Cerny has also spent a considerable amount of time talking about the PlayStation 5's controller. While Microsoft showed off the Xbox Series X controller yesterday, it doesn't seem to make any dramatic changes from the Xbox One gamepad.

Cerny and Sony, on the other hand, have described some pretty wild functionality for the DualShock 5 (if that's what it will be called), from haptic feedback that changes depending on what you're doing in a game to adaptive triggers that can change their sensitivity on at least a game-by-game basis. It would be nice to see that functionality in action tomorrow, but we'd settle for some images of the controller itself.

Wrap-Up

Regardless of what's covered tomorrow, Sony's presentation is one to watch for the simple fact that most of the stuff that's been revealed so far has been announced through interviews and blog posts. Having a visual presentation like the one Sony is planning for tomorrow counts for something, even if the company mostly winds up retreading old news.

I don't think that will happen, though. Sony knows that it needs to match Microsoft's announcements from Monday, so we're thinking it'll go big tomorrow. Whether that means we'll get to see the final design of the PlayStation 5 is up in the air, but regardless of what Sony has to announce, we'll have plenty of coverage of it here at SlashGear.

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