Sony enters the high-end custom controller arena with the DualSense Edge

As long rumored, Sony announced details about its plans to enter the high-end controller game with the DualSense Edge, an advanced cousin to the PlayStation 5’s DualSense controller with added customization options and features.

If you’ve seen or used Microsoft’s Xbox Elite Series 2 or controllers from SCUF or others in that market, you’ll see a lot that’s familiar here.

The DualSense Edge includes all the same features seen in the DualSense, like haptic feedback, but it adds the ability to customize button mapping, stick sensitivity, trigger travel distance, and dead zones in multiple swappable control profiles.

It also offers changeable stick caps, and it supports back buttons that allow you to perform the same inputs you would with the (for example) triangle, cross, square, and circle face buttons without taking your thumb off the right stick. That’s particularly helpful for serious first-person shooter players, as it allows you to initiate jumps or slides in many games’ default control schemes while maintaining control of your aim.

The controller ships with multiple options for the stick caps and back buttons. That includes either half-dome or lever shapes for the back buttons and either standard, high dome, or low dome stick caps.

The stick modules can also be replaced to extend the life of the controller, Sony says, but those replacement stick modules will be sold separately—not included in the box like the caps or back buttons.

A “dedicated Fn button” will allow players to swap between pre-set control configurations, adjust game and mic relative volume, and head to the PS5’s controller profile settings menu directly from the controller itself.

The DualSense Edge will come with a case to store all those extras in, as well as a USB-C cable that locks onto the controller to prevent accidental unplugging.

Sony hasn’t named a release date or price for this controller, but judging from other competing high-end controllers like Microsoft’s Xbox Elite Series 2 or SCUF’s Reflex for PS5, it’s not likely to be cheap. Those controllers typically range anywhere from around $180 to more than $200. Sony’s base controller for the PS5, the DualSense, is already quite pricey, with an MSRP of $70.

For the most part, the DualSense Edge seems almost a feature-to-feature counter to Microsoft’s Xbox Elite Series 2. That said, Microsoft’s controller also emphasizes nicer materials and in-hand feel, and Sony’s announcement hasn’t said anything about how the DualSense Edge will (or won’t) differ from the DualSense in that regard.

PlayStation VR2 gets a release window

Sony also finally named a release window for the PlayStation VR2, the PlayStation 5-exclusive follow-up to the highly successful 2016 PlayStation VR headset for the PlayStation 4.

In a tweet and an Instagram post, Sony announced that the headset is “coming early 2023” and accompanied the social posts with an image depicting the headset and its two controllers—though we’ve seen both before.

As we’ve learned previously, the headset will have a 110-degree field of view, 2,000 x 2,040 per-eye resolution at either 90 Hz or 120 Hz, and it will feature HDR OLED displays for each eye.

Perhaps most importantly, it will support eye-tracking that enables foveated rendering, a technique that allows VR headsets to focus their horsepower on the pixels that are clearest at the center of your view while allowing for natural blurriness in your peripheral vision.

And it will connect to the PS5 with a single USB-C cable with no external camera required—a far cry from the wire-laden unwieldy connections seen in the original PSVR.

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Listing image by Sony