The PlayStation 5: A Next-Gen Experience

I was excited to try out the new PlayStation 5 controller with four thumbs, but I have to say that there's just so much more happening inside this controller. It's not necessarily noticeable as a longer battery life, but it's definitely a change for better or worse. One thing I noticed right away is that there are no screws on this thing, which makes it a lot harder to replace the battery or mod the controller if you want to add some scuff controller-style upgrades.

One of my favorite features about the DualShock 4 controllers was their thumb sticks, and I'm happy to report that they feel exactly the same in the PlayStation 5. The d-pad is a different story, however - while it's not terrible, I've always found Sony's d-pads to be hard to use, especially for fighting games. If I ever find myself playing a game that requires a good d-pad, I'll usually stick with an Xbox controller just because of the better tactile response and clicks.

Speaking of which, I finally tried out some older titles on the PlayStation 5, including Street Fighter 5, which plays amazingly well. But what really impressed me was how easy it was to switch between games - in fact, every game I wanted to play was available as a PS5 title, which is a major selling point for me. According to Sony, over 99% of PlayStation 4 games will be compatible with the new console, although I suspect that some VR games might not make the cut.

One thing that really stood out to me about the PS5's controller was how quiet it is compared to the original DualShock 4. The fan noise on the PS4 was always a major annoyance, but this system is as quiet as can be - even with the exhaust fan blowing air out at the back, it doesn't make a sound that's noticeable in most environments. And while the console itself does run slightly warm, I don't think that's an issue.

The system UI on the PS5 feels much more intuitive than its predecessor, and I was able to navigate it with ease right from the start. However, there are still some features that aren't quite ready yet - one thing I didn't love about the original PS4 was Quick Resume, which allowed players to switch between multiple games in an instant. While it sounds like a fantastic feature on paper, I'm not sure how useful it would be for my type of gameplay. Still, I do think the technology is available, and I hope that Sony will implement this feature at some point in the future.

One thing that really impressed me about the PS5's storage was just how fast it is - loading times are almost instantaneous, which makes a huge difference when playing games. And while you only get around 670 GB of usable storage space (the console comes with an additional 825 GB of internal memory), upgrading the storage is relatively easy. You can simply plug in an external USB drive and swap it out whenever you need more space.

Overall, I'm thoroughly impressed with the PlayStation 5 - it feels truly next-gen, from the controller to the overall system design. If you're considering pre-ordering one or picking one up over the holidays, I think you'll be thrilled with what Sony has created here.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enokay the playstation 5. so maybe you saw that thumbnail and you thought wouldn't it be cool if you get custom playstation 5's like that like that would look really neat right you can do it this is a real playstation 5 that's been customized to well a spider-man theme and i did this really quickly right this was truly done with very little effort and if you spent some effort on this thing you could create some crazy stuff and i think over the next little bit people are going to go wild with these things the reason why it's so easy to customize two things number one these side panels pop off really easily i can't showcase it in this video i've been embargoed not to kind of show the disassembly but it's a tool-less five-second operation but secondly that white plastic shell holds paint really well like really really well so if you've been thinking of like spray painting or doing anything you want with these shells it's awesome you can go crazy with it so i just spray painted these red got a blue sticker up front white spider stickers on the side and i was able to make a pretty decent spider-man themed playstation 5. like this isn't perfect this isn't even like the official spider-man logo it's just a white spider thing that i drew and cut out but you can tell us with a pretty casual attempt at this it comes out pretty decent i'm just putting this out there for people that have been interested in modding their playstation 5 it's very good for it now the reason why i did this is because one of my favorite playstation games of all time was the spider-man game on playstation 4. i loved that game and the flagship title for the playstation 5 launch is the sequel spider-man miles morales and this game is awesome it's very similar mechanics to the spider-man and playstation 4 but it's just on another level the graphics and the visual experience are really something special and this is coming from someone who's pretty immersed in high-end pc builds right i love that stuff but it's a visual treat what they've done with spider-man miles morales is like it's pretty cool now the ray tracing this game a quick note about it if you're unfamiliar with what ray tracing is it's this rendering technique that gives games an extra layer of visual realism so the new spider-man uses it and it looks awesome so if you have it enabled in 4k you're kept at 30 frames per second if you disable it you get gameplay at 60 frames per second which is a lot smoother but the visual fidelity that you get with ray tracing enabled is really nice now in this scene you can see spider-man just chilling on the side of the building right and there's reflections on the glass but they're actually fake reflections like if you pan around you can just tell it's not an actual reflection of the environment they've loaded an environment map onto that building it's not a real-time reflection of what's happening like the billboards aren't reflected properly and even spider-man's reflection isn't accurate and this is with ray tracing off but if you enable ray tracing stuff looks so much better the lighting the shadows all of it's just a little bit more believable but the reflections in particular are significantly better it's a more accurate reflection the billboards now change appropriately everything is mirrored the way that it would be in real life and it makes the whole game look really nice now last week i did a video on the playstation 5 controller and the takeaway if you haven't seen it was that this controller is very advanced it's got haptics it's got the adaptive triggers and in games like astros playground it's unbelievable like you can literally feel the materials of the ground as you walk around it's done really well dual sense is so much better than any other kind of rumble or like no one even comes close like hd rumble on the switch nothing like this dual truck 4 is nothing like this the rumble on xbox series x controllers is nothing like this nothing comes close this is truly next-gen controller okay but i have to say that the way that spider-man implemented the haptics and the adaptive triggers in this game it wasn't great like there were a couple spots that were kind of special some of the cutscenes were cool but i don't think they took proper advantage of the haptics or the adaptive triggers and it was one of the issues i talked about right because plenty of people are going to be playing spider-man and miles morales that don't have playstation 5s because it's going to be available on playstation 4 as well it's it's difficult for the developers to commit that you know development time to make a really robust haptic system in the game it's just a shame um but this is one of the things i was talking about if you have a really well done haptic kind of component to a game it's awesome like an astros playground but if you don't then it becomes this ancillary like like forgettable experience which is what i felt like the haptics were like in miles morales so i think for a lot of people if you turned it off like if you just turned off the rumbles and stuff in spider-man miles morales i don't think it would change the game very much but i await those games where they really take advantage of the controller because this has so much potential if it's done a certain way now in terms of battery life on the controller so i plugged this up to several games and just let them run in spider-man with the haptics on i got like five and a half hours uh not a ton but that's not a super haptically demanding game like it vibrates a little bit but it doesn't go crazy in astros playground if i stand this thing on a very rumbly part of level i only got a little bit more than four hours of battery life so depending on the type of game you're playing and whether or not you have haptics enabled i'd estimate between four to maybe seven and a half hours of battery life so it's got a bigger battery than the dualshock 4 controllers but there's just so much more happening inside this controller this time around so not a noticeably longer battery life per se now one thing i noticed there's no screws on this thing and if you ever get to a point where you have to replace the battery or if you want to mod it like if you want to put you know scuff controller stuff going on here it's a lot harder this time around the thumb sticks are unchanged they feel exactly the way that the dualshock 4 controllers felt the d-pad i don't love this d-pad i don't feel like it's that different from the dualshock 4 controllers but i've always found the sony d-pads to be hard to use like if i ever play fighting games i prefer a stick but if i have to use a controller i much prefer the xbox d-pad like the tactile response there with the nice clicks is just better to me but it's a very personal preference so i tried a bunch of other older titles like street fighter 5 plays really well obviously but every game i wanted to play was available as well on the playstation 5. sony says like 99 of playstation 4 games are gonna be compatible i think it's just mostly vr games that won't make the cut and i finally tried apex on a console like i've always played on pc and i've never tried that apex console experience and it looks really good on the playstation 5. it's a very visually enjoyable experience now one of the things i didn't love about the playstation 4 was fan noise it was just weirdly loud like it didn't make sense to me that something that was so small and so elegant looking was also so loud and it just got worse over the years right as dust built up in there it was just stupidly loud this system is so quiet even on full load and because it exhausts at the back like if you have it oriented in a normal position it's just a very quiet and pleasant sound signature like the xbox series x blows up the top not that it's loud or anything they're both extremely quiet but because this exhaust at the back it just has a more pleasant kind of audio signature when you're around this thing it does run a little warm but i don't think it's an issue i do think it's cooled very well now the system ui is very different this time around right it feels more intuitive to me but there's certain elements that i can't show yet because they're not final software now there is no quick resume this was something that xbox series x has and just allows you to swap between games instantly like you could have game a and then game b running at the same time and you can switch between them it's a very convenient thing it sounds really cool on paper when i was reviewing this thing and i was switching between games i was like i really wish i had that feature on the playstation 5. i don't know if it's something they can implement in the future like it doesn't seem impossible i feel like the technology is available it has a good amount of ram and good storage space it's just i don't know if they'll do it but that being said i don't know how useful that really is for my type of gameplay right it depends on the person some people really love that stuff but if i'm not reviewing games i'm just playing normally i tend to just stick with one maybe two games for a night but yeah no quick resume the storage is super fast it's got quick boot times quick game loading times it's really nice the system comes with 825 gigs of storage but you only get about 670 that's usable the rest of it is used up by the system and that can fill up quite quickly it obviously depends on the games you're downloading but realistically when it comes to like aaa titles eight maybe ten games of like high-end fully decked out titles the good thing is that upgrading the storage is quite easy you can just plug up an external usb if you want like i connected an external ssd worked fine and you can pop it open and insert an nvme again i can't showcase it like that would be disassembling it but it's one screw it's like tool-less until you get to that part you just pop open the thing that's one screw so if you want to do it it's a relatively easy and painless process so my overall thoughts on the playstation 5. it's an awesome system like it feels truly next-gen the controller the overall system just feels on point if you've pre-ordered it or you plan on picking it up over the holiday season i really think you're gonna enjoy it okay hope you guys enjoyed this video thumbs if you liked it subs if you loved it see you guys next timeokay the playstation 5. so maybe you saw that thumbnail and you thought wouldn't it be cool if you get custom playstation 5's like that like that would look really neat right you can do it this is a real playstation 5 that's been customized to well a spider-man theme and i did this really quickly right this was truly done with very little effort and if you spent some effort on this thing you could create some crazy stuff and i think over the next little bit people are going to go wild with these things the reason why it's so easy to customize two things number one these side panels pop off really easily i can't showcase it in this video i've been embargoed not to kind of show the disassembly but it's a tool-less five-second operation but secondly that white plastic shell holds paint really well like really really well so if you've been thinking of like spray painting or doing anything you want with these shells it's awesome you can go crazy with it so i just spray painted these red got a blue sticker up front white spider stickers on the side and i was able to make a pretty decent spider-man themed playstation 5. like this isn't perfect this isn't even like the official spider-man logo it's just a white spider thing that i drew and cut out but you can tell us with a pretty casual attempt at this it comes out pretty decent i'm just putting this out there for people that have been interested in modding their playstation 5 it's very good for it now the reason why i did this is because one of my favorite playstation games of all time was the spider-man game on playstation 4. i loved that game and the flagship title for the playstation 5 launch is the sequel spider-man miles morales and this game is awesome it's very similar mechanics to the spider-man and playstation 4 but it's just on another level the graphics and the visual experience are really something special and this is coming from someone who's pretty immersed in high-end pc builds right i love that stuff but it's a visual treat what they've done with spider-man miles morales is like it's pretty cool now the ray tracing this game a quick note about it if you're unfamiliar with what ray tracing is it's this rendering technique that gives games an extra layer of visual realism so the new spider-man uses it and it looks awesome so if you have it enabled in 4k you're kept at 30 frames per second if you disable it you get gameplay at 60 frames per second which is a lot smoother but the visual fidelity that you get with ray tracing enabled is really nice now in this scene you can see spider-man just chilling on the side of the building right and there's reflections on the glass but they're actually fake reflections like if you pan around you can just tell it's not an actual reflection of the environment they've loaded an environment map onto that building it's not a real-time reflection of what's happening like the billboards aren't reflected properly and even spider-man's reflection isn't accurate and this is with ray tracing off but if you enable ray tracing stuff looks so much better the lighting the shadows all of it's just a little bit more believable but the reflections in particular are significantly better it's a more accurate reflection the billboards now change appropriately everything is mirrored the way that it would be in real life and it makes the whole game look really nice now last week i did a video on the playstation 5 controller and the takeaway if you haven't seen it was that this controller is very advanced it's got haptics it's got the adaptive triggers and in games like astros playground it's unbelievable like you can literally feel the materials of the ground as you walk around it's done really well dual sense is so much better than any other kind of rumble or like no one even comes close like hd rumble on the switch nothing like this dual truck 4 is nothing like this the rumble on xbox series x controllers is nothing like this nothing comes close this is truly next-gen controller okay but i have to say that the way that spider-man implemented the haptics and the adaptive triggers in this game it wasn't great like there were a couple spots that were kind of special some of the cutscenes were cool but i don't think they took proper advantage of the haptics or the adaptive triggers and it was one of the issues i talked about right because plenty of people are going to be playing spider-man and miles morales that don't have playstation 5s because it's going to be available on playstation 4 as well it's it's difficult for the developers to commit that you know development time to make a really robust haptic system in the game it's just a shame um but this is one of the things i was talking about if you have a really well done haptic kind of component to a game it's awesome like an astros playground but if you don't then it becomes this ancillary like like forgettable experience which is what i felt like the haptics were like in miles morales so i think for a lot of people if you turned it off like if you just turned off the rumbles and stuff in spider-man miles morales i don't think it would change the game very much but i await those games where they really take advantage of the controller because this has so much potential if it's done a certain way now in terms of battery life on the controller so i plugged this up to several games and just let them run in spider-man with the haptics on i got like five and a half hours uh not a ton but that's not a super haptically demanding game like it vibrates a little bit but it doesn't go crazy in astros playground if i stand this thing on a very rumbly part of level i only got a little bit more than four hours of battery life so depending on the type of game you're playing and whether or not you have haptics enabled i'd estimate between four to maybe seven and a half hours of battery life so it's got a bigger battery than the dualshock 4 controllers but there's just so much more happening inside this controller this time around so not a noticeably longer battery life per se now one thing i noticed there's no screws on this thing and if you ever get to a point where you have to replace the battery or if you want to mod it like if you want to put you know scuff controller stuff going on here it's a lot harder this time around the thumb sticks are unchanged they feel exactly the way that the dualshock 4 controllers felt the d-pad i don't love this d-pad i don't feel like it's that different from the dualshock 4 controllers but i've always found the sony d-pads to be hard to use like if i ever play fighting games i prefer a stick but if i have to use a controller i much prefer the xbox d-pad like the tactile response there with the nice clicks is just better to me but it's a very personal preference so i tried a bunch of other older titles like street fighter 5 plays really well obviously but every game i wanted to play was available as well on the playstation 5. sony says like 99 of playstation 4 games are gonna be compatible i think it's just mostly vr games that won't make the cut and i finally tried apex on a console like i've always played on pc and i've never tried that apex console experience and it looks really good on the playstation 5. it's a very visually enjoyable experience now one of the things i didn't love about the playstation 4 was fan noise it was just weirdly loud like it didn't make sense to me that something that was so small and so elegant looking was also so loud and it just got worse over the years right as dust built up in there it was just stupidly loud this system is so quiet even on full load and because it exhausts at the back like if you have it oriented in a normal position it's just a very quiet and pleasant sound signature like the xbox series x blows up the top not that it's loud or anything they're both extremely quiet but because this exhaust at the back it just has a more pleasant kind of audio signature when you're around this thing it does run a little warm but i don't think it's an issue i do think it's cooled very well now the system ui is very different this time around right it feels more intuitive to me but there's certain elements that i can't show yet because they're not final software now there is no quick resume this was something that xbox series x has and just allows you to swap between games instantly like you could have game a and then game b running at the same time and you can switch between them it's a very convenient thing it sounds really cool on paper when i was reviewing this thing and i was switching between games i was like i really wish i had that feature on the playstation 5. i don't know if it's something they can implement in the future like it doesn't seem impossible i feel like the technology is available it has a good amount of ram and good storage space it's just i don't know if they'll do it but that being said i don't know how useful that really is for my type of gameplay right it depends on the person some people really love that stuff but if i'm not reviewing games i'm just playing normally i tend to just stick with one maybe two games for a night but yeah no quick resume the storage is super fast it's got quick boot times quick game loading times it's really nice the system comes with 825 gigs of storage but you only get about 670 that's usable the rest of it is used up by the system and that can fill up quite quickly it obviously depends on the games you're downloading but realistically when it comes to like aaa titles eight maybe ten games of like high-end fully decked out titles the good thing is that upgrading the storage is quite easy you can just plug up an external usb if you want like i connected an external ssd worked fine and you can pop it open and insert an nvme again i can't showcase it like that would be disassembling it but it's one screw it's like tool-less until you get to that part you just pop open the thing that's one screw so if you want to do it it's a relatively easy and painless process so my overall thoughts on the playstation 5. it's an awesome system like it feels truly next-gen the controller the overall system just feels on point if you've pre-ordered it or you plan on picking it up over the holiday season i really think you're gonna enjoy it okay hope you guys enjoyed this video thumbs if you liked it subs if you loved it see you guys next time\n"