After spending months leaving fans in the dark about the aesthetic of the PlayStation 5, Sony caught everyone by surprise today by not just revealing the PS5’s next-gen controller, the DualSense, but revealing arguably its most unique design for a controller to date.
While the basic shape is pretty similar to the PS4’s DualShock 4, it’s everything else about the look of this controller that has captured the internet’s attention. From the sleek white and black color scheme to the transparent face buttons to the thin light bars set against the sides of the touchpad, it’s a noticeable departure from the more uniformly grey and black DualShocks of previous PlayStation consoles.
This has led some fans to wonder what the controller might look like with a more traditionally monotone color scheme. Not long after Sony’s announcement, Twitter user AlphaOmegaSin shared the edit below, which swaps out the white covering most of the DualSense to give the controller a more familiar, fully black finish that’s only broken up by the DualSense's light bars’ hint of blue.
The edit has been well received so far by Twitter’s PlayStation community, and other fans have offered their own tweaks to the DualSense as a result. These have largely focused on adding a little more color to the controller by giving the grey face button symbols their traditional green, red, blue, and purple, in addition to replacing the PlayStation emblem between the thumbsticks with its more colorful PS1 era version.
Now that an actual physical part of the PlayStation 5 has officially been revealed, it’s possible that this is the first real hint of the aesthetic Sony is going for with the design of the PS5 itself. Until Sony says anything more on the subject, one can’t know for sure, but it’s safe to assume that Sony will maintain consistency with its marketing and give the console a similarly white-centric color scheme.
Not only would this set it apart from its main competitor, the predominantly dark grey Xbox Series X, it would make it distinct from the general black and grey color scheme of pretty much every major video game console of the last decade. So while it’s possible the PS5 will look very different from what everyone was expecting, the signs are suggesting that, at the very least, it will certainly stand out.
The PlayStation 5 is set to launch this holiday season.
