Sony’s PS5 fight stick looks great, but it won’t compensate for your lack of practice

The act of choosing a fight stick for your PS5 is about to get a little more varied, because Sony recently announced Project Defiant. If you happened to miss this week’s PlayStation State of Play live stream, then you likely also missed the announcement for Project Defiant. This is Sony’s upcoming fight stick controller for the PS5, and while it’s not currently available, Sony wanted to give players an early look at the controller’s design as well as some of its features.

You won’t find as many fight stick options for the PS5 as you will regular controllers, so it’s nice to have another option on the table that you can use your hard-earned money on. Especially if you don’t really care for the currently available options on the market.

The Project Defiant PS5 fight stick uses PlayStation Link technology

Sony’s upcoming fight stick is a wireless controller, so you won’t have to worry about cables and will still be able to sit on the couch from across the room. You also won’t have to worry about anyone tripping over the cable if they pass through the area.

Interestingly, the Project Defiant controller will use Sony’s PlayStation Link technology, and this is so it provides ultra-low-latency connections. PlayStation Link is also used for audio on the PlayStation Portal. In other words, Sony doesn’t want you to have to worry about missing that sick combo because your input relay was a fraction of a second slower than your opponent’s. Of course, ultra-low-latency connections can’t compensate for a lack of skill, so you may still want to practice.

You can swap out the restrictor gates and store them, as well as the stick, inside the controller

There’s no doubt this is going to be a great home controller for people who love fighting games. It’s also no doubt going to be carried from home to tournaments and friends’ houses who play those games with you. Sony knows this, so it came up with some ways to make it more portable.

For starters, you can store its restrictor gates inside and the PlayStation Link cable inside a storage compartment on the controller. This should make it easier to store in your bag. The restrictor gates can also be swapped out. What are the restrictor gates? They’re the little section that surrounds the joystick. Sony is including a Circle, Octagon, and Square restrictor gate with the controller so you can choose which suits you best. You also don’t need tools to swap these out. So, you can do this on the fly if you want to. Additionally, the controller comes with a sling bag to store everything in. There’s no mention of a price or a release date yet. Since it’s a project, though, don’t expect it for at least a little while.