PS5 Hands-On Previews Show Some Gameplay and a Mysterious Bit of Metal

A handful of Japanese outlets and YouTube channels got a look at the PlayStation 5 over the weekend. For PS5, this is the first big hands-on with press, and we learned a few new things.

The first set of pictures from 4Gamer show off a mysterious bolt or latch. The Verge theorizes it could be a latch for opening the PlayStation 5 in order to expand the internal storage. Sony has said you'll be able to use off-the-shelf drives, given they meet the right criteria, for storage expansion.

For a real sense of scale, as well as some gameplay, Famitsu has a video of the PS5 in action. It shows off-screen gameplay, a DualSense in use, and importantly, a little more sense of scale for the PS5. It's pretty big!

Over at Dengeki Online, there's also a video with some more gameplay of games like Godfall and Astro's Playroom. It doesn't really show anything we haven't seen yet, but it's more footage of a PS5, to illustrate just exactly what it looks like.

Conspicuously absent is the PlayStation 5's user interface. Sony hasn't really shown what it looks like to boot up a PS5, hit the home screen or equivalent, and then start up a game. Getting a more tangible understanding of the system's size is nice, but there are still questions about the day-one experience that are lingering.

There are still a few weeks until the Nov. 12, 2020 launch of the PS5's two models, so there's still time to see more of the PS5 in action. Xbox, meanwhile, recently got some Series X systems in the hands of a few outlets as well, and the takeaways were fairly interesting. As these consoles ramp up towards a full-on launch, expect to see even more of these details get ironed out.