On Oct. 28, Sony released its
launch ad for the PlayStation 5. Like some final-week campaign message by a presidential campaign, all aspiration, it came bearing a message. In the ad, pupils dilate. Torrential rain pelts the windshield of a plane making its lonely sojourn through an all-encompassing storm. There’s sweat. Snow. Sand. Hot wind. Color, reflecting off a lens. Dust caught in a ray of sunlight. Bubbles stream past a diver’s face as he descends into a chthonic darkness. The extremes — they’re all here. Travis Scott, a maximalist in his own work, narrates. In a split second of footage, bright orange numbers tick up on a display. At one point, the camera zooms in on a fighter pilot’s dashboard, closing in on a label that simply reads “x100.”
Back in 2013, at a Game Developers Conference talk titled “Overview of PS4 for Developers,” a presenter walked the audience through some of the more fanciful features available on the PS4. The console could detect where players were sitting. It had
facial recognition capabilities. One demo shown at the event had
AR robots entering the player’s living room, as well as a horde of little guys — PlayStation’s Astro Bot character — living in the controller. Shaking the controller would send the robots screaming through an interior modeled after the inside of the Dualshock.
A lot of these ideas didn’t really catch on.
The PS5 feels different. Immersion is the watchword, and every advertised feature of the PS5 is meant to bring players a step closer to that ideal. Forget the zany, out-there stuff (
for now at least). Just give the players what they want, but better and more of it.