Topic: PlayStation Portal -OT-

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As one of the resident Portal enthusiasts, I should drop some early impressions after the recent huge Portal update —

Overall, I’d say it’s been wonderful. I’ve spent about 6 hours with the unit over the last couple days and so these thoughts are definitely not battle tested, but I’m pleased so far. For reference, these hours were on WiFi internet with average download speeds of 200-300 MB, with some played at home and some in public WiFi away from home.

First off, the new UI is intuitive and functional. You now horizontally scroll through three screens, one for remote play to connect to your PS5, one for cloud streaming, and one a search screen. On the cloud streaming screen there’s a large tile for “stream from your collection” and a separate tile for “stream from PS+ library” (or some labels similar to that, I’m not in front of my Portal atm). When I clicked on the one to select from my own digital library, it immediately pulled up a list of my games which are available to cloud stream. It includes PS+ games I’ve claimed, as well as digital purchases, so the list is very large.

I immediately went to the game I’ve been playing, Baldur’s Gate 3. After clicking on it the standard streaming load screen immediately popped up and after a few seconds I saw the splash screen for Larian studios, just as if I were loading the game from my PS5. From there, loading the game took about the same amount of time it takes to load when booting it up from the console, which I was really surprised with. My saves were all present, pulling from my cloud saves (which I have all my games auto-upload to the cloud, of course) so loading my progress was simple and exactly as if I were sitting on the couch in front of my PS5. The game save loaded up and there I was at Sorcerous Sundries in Act 3 where I left off the day before.

At first I got a fair amount of lag and stuttering as graphics sometimes loaded onto the screen late as I moved around. During my first 5 minutes I thought “eh, this might not really work well on AAA games with a huge game file like this” but after a few minutes, the stuttering smoothed out and it started to feel responsive and graphically clean. It remained so for the duration of that play session (about an hour). On my next play session when I loaded up the game it didn’t take a few minutes to “catch up” and load on the background like that and I was in a smooth experience from the start, so I’m not sure if that was just a bit of internet bad luck at first or if the initial launch of a game takes time for the cloud to preload stuff in some kind of personal queue (I’m very ignorant of how these things work and the technology behind streaming). When streaming movies I sometimes get a lag at first and the picture quality is poor for the first few seconds or minutes while it loads, so perhaps it can be the same with a large game too. But I’ve probably loaded up BG3 four or five times for small game sessions since then and it’s been pretty smooth from the start each time. Given how large the game is I’m quite impressed. It really did feel close to the experience of playing on the TV, although sacrificing the large scale 4K graphics, of course. But on the small screen in 1080p it still looks pretty nice most of the time. I have been in the one Sorcerous Sundries area the whole time so I’m curious if I will get screen tearing and frame drops in the really busy sections of the city like I do when I’m on console, or if it will be even worse. We’ll see.

Of course the responsiveness and input lag is going to be a big question, and in a turn based game like BG3 any lag was usually imperceptible and if present, inconsequential. Occasionally I would click an action and there would be a millisecond delay before it triggered. So definitely not perfect.

On that subject, the other game I’ve been cloud streaming on the Portal is Dark Pictures: Man of Medan. Ironically it has fared worse than BG3. It would seem a good one for the Portal, but I’m pretty sure I failed a couple QTE’s due to the lag. It could have been my own poor reaction time, but I doubt it. So it was a bummer to experience that where I didn’t know if I actually failed the moment or not, but either way, I did and it ended up affecting the outcome of my story, obviously. So narrow window timing actions are probably still going to be a problem with cloud streaming, depending on the internet speed and stability, I presume. But 90% of Man of Medan was perfectly fine, including many QTE’s that I passed without issue. I wouldn’t be opposed to playing another QTE heavy game on it in the future, but we’ll see. I definitely am still doubtful that Souls games or others that are punishing for missing an input (like Silksong, etc) are worth the gamble of a random lag at an inopportune moment.

For me, the other downside is that a lot of my backlog is on physical disc (FF7 Rebirth, Death Stranding 2, HFW, etc) so that negates cloud streaming a large portion of my library, unless I were to repurchase those games digitally (which honestly, for large time-sinks, I might just be willing to do that if I have a long trip ahead or something). Also, some of my digital library is not streamable, unfortunately. For example KCD is not available to stream, although KCD2 is. I suspect some of the older games may never get the streaming treatment.

Anyway, there you have it. Anyone else tried the new update?

Tagging @Ravix who was wondering about my thoughts on it.

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@Ravix Yes, I have continued to use the Portal more and more even since I’ve posted that a couple days ago. Like you said, one of major use cases is ‘hobby multi-tasking’; playing a game whilst lazily watching NFL or NBA. More so NFL because of all the down time in that game, during commercials, and long half time shows. But the new update has really stretched my usage beyond that. I find that in addition to a travel companion, I’ve used it in the house when I have a smaller amount of time to play. So for example, if I have an appointment or commitment in an hour, it’s not enough time for me to turn the TV on and fire up the PS5 and get all cozy on the couch because I’ll just have to turn it off in like 45 minutes and it’s not worth the set up. But I can grab the Portal and turn it on immediately and be in a game in 2-3 minutes and turn it off quickly as well when it’s time to go. So shorter burst game sessions have been a nice application of the Portal. But that’s the time when I would normally read or scroll through the web, read a few articles, catch up on Push Square or sports news. So it’s all a balance but I like having the option.

It’s interesting that you bring up the second PS5 and I think you’re correct - the Portal is going to take some of the time away from using it. My breakdown of gaming time over the last 2 weeks has been: 60% PS5 Pro, 40% Portal, 0% second PS5. Before this update it was 75% PS5 Pro, 15% Portal, 10% second PS5. So yeah, I feel like maybe I can sell back my backup PS5, but I don’t know. I like having it just in case. I’m weird I guess.

And you’re absolutely right — the big screen OLED PS5 Pro session is hands down a superior experience from a fidelity and spectacle standpoint, as well as better gameplay performance. So I would never want to crank up Ghost of Yotei for the first time on the Portal and play the whole thing on it. For BG3, I am happy to have spent the first 170 hours playing it on the big TV, but I’ve got the whole visual wonder and marvel of the the game over many many hours and I’m perfectly content to play it on the small screen if it means I can get through it more efficiently by getting in small sessions I would have never had the time and opportunity to do before. I’ve got back to playing some Balatro on it lately, which is absolutely not in need of a 65 inch OLED display. 😂 In fact I prefer to play it on Portal instead of the TV. I’ll probably play Alan Wake mostly on Portal (but not AW2), and Nobody Wants to Die, Jusant, stuff like that. Not the big AAA games but something like Expedition 33 might be like BG3 in that I’ll start it on the big TV so I can get the full immersive effect, and then squeeze in time on it with the Portal later, since it’s turn based (although parry timing so we’ll see if it’s too latency sensitive).

It’s just similar to movies, in that you want to see the biggest spectacles in the theater, then rewatch them on your TV and then the smaller stuff you’re fine to watch on your phone like Seinfeld episodes and documentaries and whatnot. There’s a proper use scenario for each sized screen.

And your feeling on the Switch is kind of like my feelings on the Vita over time. Everytime I tried to make myself play the few games I have on it left, I always felt like I’d rather be playing PS5. So my Vita has collected dust for the last several years. The Portal however lets me keep working on my PS5 backlog whilst still being a handheld, rather than playing some other lesser games I’m not that enamored with on a proprietary device.

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As far as your first question though, what would I like for a ver. 2 or next gen iteration? Well, yeah definitely the OLED screen. Better battery life is also a must. Much like the Dualsense, with haptic triggers, vibration, and lights all enabled, it really doesn’t last very long on a full charge. I’ve never completely run the battery all in one game session but I don’t think it will last more than 3-4 hours, depending on how much the game uses haptics and tactile feedback. I tried disabling the haptic and vibration features and noticed that helped drain the battery a lot slower and so you might double your playtime by doing so, but I love that kind of stuff as it’s all part of the PS5 experience to me, so I’m willing to just charge the unit more often, and keep my rumble and clicky triggers.

Another hardware update we need is a solution for the DualSense touchpad. The double tap onto certain areas of the screen to press that is just not ideal. The only other things I can think of for them to work on are continued improvement in the streaming tech and maybe add the ability to download games onto a hard drive, which just makes it into an actual offline device which is what most of the detractors want.

Other features I’d like to have is some messaging and media capabilities, and access to screenshot library. I guess those are software things that can be implemented later though. My dream (which they’d never do) as far as firmware/system/PSN upgrades would be to somehow have access to stream my physical games from the cloud. I’ve spent money and time collecting some nice PS4 and PS5 discs, but I can’t cloud stream them, unlike my digital library. It will never happen though.