PS5's SSD Has Developer Dreaming Big and Thinking of New Frontiers

I can imagine some funny Sony commercial haha

Fast traveling with no load time is something I have wanted since FT became a thing...

What games does he develop? The God of War picture doesn't really help.

@Jaz007 From what I can tell Pizza Titan Ultra for iOS and android.

@Ryall Yeah, I mean for the kind of games that this developper tends to specialize into, I understand the lack of need of better GPUs...

Look, I'm not a programmer, I don't know how these things work. I need some examples because from what I am reading everywhere - the only changes we can expect are better graphics and perhaps faster load times. And frankly I haven't had an issue with load times since the days of the PS1 and graphics are of only very minor importance to me.

Constant 60fps at 1080p, thats all i need

No load times is the biggest draw for me this coming gen. Not BC, not a graphical boost, nope! Playing a game like ESO or The Witcher 3 and not having load screens would be a dream come true. Please make it as good as they say it. 🤞🏾

@Heavyarms55
No problems with load times? Man you must not play Division 2 or to many open world games. Honestly I can imagine Cyberpunk having some load screens I wonder if we will lose them entirely?

This would be the top of the mountain for me. I've been around since floppy discs and mono color computers and Atari/Colecovision (sp?). So to finally get to no load screens, and I thought beating E.T's score was the best.

@Darthrau You can hand pick an example here and there. But I have no problem with loading overall. It's true I haven't played that specific game, but I've played a lot of open world titles and never had much issue with loading. Not on any platform for a long time. Early CD rom systems like PS1 and Sega CD had nasty loading times. But in recent years? Especially PS360Wii Wii U era onward? Naw, no issue at all.

@Heavyarms55 Developers won't have to design their worlds around loading times anymore. I don't know if you've played Jedi Fallen Order, but it's a pretty obvious example of this. There are part of the game where you have to squeeze through corridors and it was obviously put in to hide load times. But there are lots of less obvious examples in almost every open world and some non open world games. A fast ssd will remove the shackles of designing around load times for developers.

@Jaz007 The God of War picture helps to remind you what this is all about (if you ever played that game) because in that title you have numerous veeeery slow elevator sequences (while the loading is going on) and also the 'Fast Travel' in that game isn't so fast; you actually have to wait for the door on the branch to your next destination while the loading is going on.

An extremely good game, but the loading times are tedious. So I imagine this will be likewise extremely satisfying in the next installment when this is a thing of the past.

Imagine GTA6, where every interior location can simply be walked into. No load screens or transitions. Imagine builings collapsing and being destroyed. Getting an invite to an event, and not getting moved into a separate session, freeplay is your lobby. A quick menu pops up, you select your vehicles/weapons, while doing your thing; still in free mode, and when everyone is ready, instant teleport to the start line, 3, 2, 1, go.

Imagine giant dynamic Uncharted style chase scenes & set pieces in a multiplayer game. Happening on a whim, without warning.

Imagine regular first-person style games supporting VR optionally AS A NORM, and the capability of mixing players in with regular players in multiplayer games. FPS's, racing/vehicle style games, horror games, etc. All w/ VR capability out of the box. And for devs, implementation is made easy, & it's a matter of a simple plug-in for them to make it possible. Proprietary tools courtesy of Sony's dev kit.

Earthquakes, tornadoes, tsunamis, etc. happening in-game in realtime, with cinematic style transitions into gameplay. Trees swaying & falling over, the ground bulging up, parting, and revealing crevices in the earth, looking up & seeing an asteroid in the sky, bigger multiplayer lobbies, 1,000's players leaving earth in space ships, multiplayer co-op Days Gone zombie herds, happening on an even more epic scale with a 1-million zombie survival mode, 1,000 racers in an open world Gran Turismo café race/cruise session w/ custom vehicles, etc.

Some ideas may be a stretch, or maybe not... But when I hear fundamental change in game design, things like this come to mind.

@SZRT_CIC_Ice
What comes to mind for me is when I had my old Amstrad cpc loading screens on tape...eereeeeeeeeeeeeeewweeeeerrr... and then I tried a friend's computer with a floppy disk drive... I got it then haha

as long that dream dont have "live service" and "always online" bs in it.

@Heavyarms55 well load will be instant, games will be lighter as they don't have to duplicate assets as the SSD can load it instantly HDD needs a lot of the same assets, from what I understand a lot of games have poor level design and don't look unique or even particularly nice because they use tricks to stream assets in and out of an environment smoothly, well with SSD, you can turn around and assets will load in and out, that fast. So you will notice these things and it will be good for your gaming experience. Maybe.

@SZRT_CIC_Ice and there's probably a whole lot more that it'll be capable of as we reach the end of its timeline

Forgive me if I'm mistaken here, but doesnt the Xbox Series X also plan to launch with a fast SSD too?

Hey, if developers are loving the SSD of PS5, this could lead to more console-exclusive games in the future of PS5.

@theMEGAniggle That does sound nice from a programming side of things. But none of these things are issues I've really had.

I keep hearing that the lack of duplicate assets will reduce game sizes but at the same time, higher resolutions and more complex textures and such seem like they would easily offset that and we'll still end up with larger games.

@Heavyarms55 these aren't issues you face directly, you still face them though, we all face them because at the end of the day, the Devs have to essentially pull back features by employing sh*tty design or straight up removing stuff in order to avoid reaching the limits of the console, it'll benefit us greatly. Watch mark cernys video.

@robjewitt Series X streams 2.4GB of data a second. PS5 is more than twice as fast, at 5.5GB a second. This measurement, is more of a significant difference than having 1.7 more teraflops at a 10.3 & 12 TF comparison. Seeing how both consoles are teraflop overkill for games running at 1080p-4K, since they can both do 120fps & 8K, I wonder how many devs will even push these things to the peak percentage of what they can do graphically.

@SZRT_CIC_Ice Apologies, only just saw this now! Has anything changed spec wise since April? And do you think developers will take advantage of the speed differences in cross-platform title development?

No changes, just confirmations. I think it depends on underlying factors, like cost, ease of implementation, and if Sony coughs up cash for exclusive features, or MS coughs up cash for platform parity. The easiest thing to do, would be to port over the version with the most compromises for weaker hardware over to the more powerful one, so it will likely be a case by case scenario, as it also depends on how strict Sony's standards are, as games still need to get the okay from them. The playerbase is also going to set the standard, as games that fall short or likely to be criticized and met with some backlash, so it will be in developers best interest to push the features of the hardware, as the consumers are who have the final say-so on what flies.