PlayStation 5 officially announced by Sony, out in 2020

Rumors and speculation have run rampant around Sony’s next-gen console offering aimed to usurp the PlayStation 4. For a while it was unofficially referred to as the PlayStation 5 because ... well, it seems logical, right? Now, however, the company has not only officially announced that its next console will be the PS5, but released a whole slew of official details to whet the appetites of gamers and tech nerds alike.

Sony confirmed plenty of technical details about the console, but most excitingly they gave fans a release date for the PS5: the holiday season of 2020.

That date will give fans plenty of new musclebound tech to look forward to, like the graphics-enhancing ray-tracing ability locked into the GPU hardware and lightning-fast solid-state drive, as players marvel at their PS4 discs (Spider-Man, anyone?) thriving in the PS5’s backward-compatibility. It’ll double as a 4K Blu-ray player, and allow gamers to install only, say, the multiplayer portion of a game onto their console rather than the whole experience. The announcement also came with some tactile hardware changes.

The controller, not yet officially named the DualShock 5, will no longer have rumble technology. Instead, haptics (as in an iPhone, for example) will replace them for more nuanced physical sensations. "With haptics, you truly feel a broader range of feedback, so crashing into a wall in a race car feels much different than making a tackle on the football field," the company’s official blog states. This new feedback will be augmented with the controller’s "adaptive triggers" (the L2 and R2 buttons).

These mean that games can now tweak how hard it is to pull the triggers, meaning that Lara Croft pulling back the drawstring in the newest Tomb Raider can become more physically linked to the act of pulling the trigger. More information is on the way, especially about the final console and controller design, but for now fans can officially add the PS5 to their 2020 wish lists.