The PlayStation 5 is very good – it’s excellent, in fact, as we explained in our PS5 review. Sony’s next-gen console is not perfect, however, and there’s a fair amount that the organisation could address in the short term to make the experience even better. In this article, we’ve compiled 10 improvements that we believe the organisation could introduce to give its new system an extra boost.

1440p Monitor Support

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For the overwhelming majority of people, the PS5’s display output settings are perfectly fine. Whether you’ve got a 1080p television or a 4K screen, you’re going to have a good experience. There are a small number of people who prefer to game on 1440p monitors, however, and there’s really no reason why Sony’s new system can’t support them natively. Let’s hope a future firmware update patches the feature in.

Identifying PS5 and PS4 More Clearly

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There are a significant number of next-gen early adopters who mistakenly gave their supercharged system a workout with Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War on PS4 this weekend, purely because of how poorly the PS5 differentiates between next-gen and last-gen software. In some cases the console even defaults to the PS4 version, and there’s an overall lack of feedback to show you which version of a game you’re playing. This will need to be tidied up in the next few weeks.

Managing Storage Space

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Activision’s done a great job with Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, allowing you to manage the game’s overall install, and remove parts you’re not playing. However, not many games are supporting this feature. With so little PS5 storage space available, we’d appreciate it if more titles enabled you to pick and choose which parts you actually want installed, so that you can eke more room out of your SSD.

Cold Storage for PS5 Games

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Speaking of better storage space solutions, Sony needs to include the ability to offload next-gen games onto an external HDD. We understand the console is designed around its SSD, and that’s fine – but re-downloading enormous game files each and every time you run out of space is just not feasible, especially for those with data caps. A better solution would be the ability to temporarily store titles on an external HDD, then you could transfer them back when you’re ready to play.

Folders

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We can’t believe it’s a new generation and we’re already asking for it, but here we go again: the PS5 needs folders. In fact the organisation of the overall Game Library is messy to say the least, with it defaulting to all of your PS Store purchases, rather than what you’ve actually got installed on your system. We’d like to be able to categorise our software neatly, and perhaps even pin certain apps and folders to the home screen. Don’t keep us waiting an eternity, Sony!

VRR Support

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VRR, or Variable Refresh Rate, is a feature that allows supported televisions to dynamically adjust their refresh rate based on the output they’re receiving. In layman’s terms, what this means is that even when a game drops frames – as is common depending on what’s happening on the screen – the judder that’s typically associated with this happening will be smoothed out. This is particularly important for games running at 120 frames-per-second, but can also improve titles at lower framerates, too. Sony did initially say PS5 will support this, so hopefully it’s patched in soon.

Transfer PS5 Saves to USB

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For whatever reason, it’s not currently possible to transfer PS5 saves to a USB stick. Sony will point to the PS Plus cloud, which is no doubt more convenient, but you have to pay for the privilege to use that. Hopefully the platform holder makes it possible to copy data to a portable drive soon to avoid this needless headache.

Auto-Download PS Plus Saves

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A nice quality of life improvement we’d like to see on the PS5 is if it automatically pulled game saves off the PS Plus cloud each time you download a game. Right now, you have to manually find the data for the title you want to play, and while it doesn’t take a huge amount of effort, we can’t but feel the whole process could be streamlined.

Squash the Bugs

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PS5 is generally launching in a stable state, but it’s not without its issues. Some users have experienced crashing in a number of launch titles, while connected external hard drives can lead to rebuild database issues. Sony needs to tidy all of this up, and quickly.

Activity Card Organisation

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We absolutely love PS5’s Activity Cards, but they can get a bit cluttered in some games. It’d be nice if there was a way to organise this a bit more, perhaps by putting them into “stacks”. For example, you could have a Trophies stack, a multiplayer stack, and a leaderboards stack. This would give the Control Centre a little more organisation, in our opinion.


Which aspects of the PS5 experience do you think Sony should improve first? What's frustrated you about the next-gen format so far? Share your feedback in the comments section below.