Since the PS3, DualShock controllers have had a nice, round home button between the analog sticks that you can easily press to quickly return to the console main menu. The PS5’s DualSense changes that. I hate it.
Instead of a small acrylic button with a PlayStation logo on it, the DualSense’s home button is an entire miniature PlayStation logo. It is barely above the surface of the plastic; you do not immediately feel the button, because your thumb sweeps the lower part of the controller to look for it, and the edges sting you as soon as you finally do. It’s camouflaged in black, almost as if the main button of the controller – the one that switches on the console and can let you out of the games – does not want to be found or used, or enjoyed the least.
Look, redesigns are always a hard pill to swallow, especially if they follow on the back of pretty decent wallpapers that you have become very accustomed to. I spent seven years with the DualShock 4 and the PS4’s menu system, of which I do not like one, but both gained a familiar warmth after thousands of hours of treating them like my body and body. A few months into the PS5’s life, the strange design choices are still annoying to me. I do not see things like the DualSense home button immediately taking me to the home screen, and the button itself will soon be more of a piece of iconographic flair than a practical interface.
I am also not alone. Here’s how Kotaku freelance editor and Rock, paper, shotgun co-founder John Walker put it to me about Slack DMs:
What throws me off is that it looks like branding, not a way of interacting. I completely forgot several times that it’s a button, and then assumed that the reason I could not find the menus was because of the complete mess of the new dashboard, rather than because I had a whole other part of its overlap forget Möbius interface.
I agree that it makes little sense on my part – it’s in exactly the same place as the ‘PS’ marked round button on the previous controller, so I don’t really have a good excuse. But still, there is something so powerful, that it is now this peculiar enlightenment. The semiotics of it scream, “DON’T HUG ME!” Before you even touch on how unpleasant it is as a tangible interaction.
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The button also plays an important role in customizing DualSense. Kotaku senior reporter Mike Fahey recently had the controller mud Colerware send him a DualSense in pink and black. The thing looks sharp as hell and speaks of flexibility when it comes to personalizing your PS5 controller, except for the home button. “The only downside to customizing the DualSense controller is that you can not really do much with the damn PlayStation logo button,” he wrote. “No matter what color you paint it, it’s still what it is.”
The rest of the controller is excellent. The triggers are so ergonomic that I sometimes forget to pull them unless the haptic feedback is turned on and I can see the tension grow as I pull back a bow Astro’s playroom. The grip feels better than the DualShock 3 or 4 ever did. Shrinking the light bar is a power-saving relief. The analog sticks feel more substantial, though time will tell if they are really better than their slim predecessors.
In so many ways, the DualSense is a huge step of the last generation. Too bad the button I touch first every time I turn on my machine is not one of them. Maybe Sony will fix this with a DualSense Pro.