Naughty Dog President: PS5 Will Allow Us to Deliver Content That Has No Friction for the Players - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 07 December 2019 / 5,551 Views
Naughty Dog president Evan Wells speaking with The Verge in an interview was asked about the PlayStation 5. He said the solid state drive will mean gamers won't have wait to get back to playing their games.
"I think it will allow us to deliver the content in a way that has no friction for the players," he said. "They’ll never have to wait to dive back into their games."
Sony has previously said the solid state drive for the PS5 will mean near instant load times.
Naughty Dog's next game, The Last of Us Part II, will launch for the PlayStation 4 on May 29, 2020.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Although loading time isn't a big hussle to me I welcome this improvement.
Damn the potential PS5 exlusive line-up is making me exclited af.
Uncharted 5 for PS5. Calling it.
I'd be shocked if they came out with Uncharted 5. Unless it's called Uncharted Drake's Misfortune. It's where Nathan dies trying to uncover his last treasure before hanging it up and his daughter needs to find him and the treasure only to find him perished with a note saying to find that last treasure for him and it's general coordinates. All kidding aside there will be another Uncharted game but I doubt it will have a number beside it especially seeing that Naughty Dog will likely continue with Nathan and Elena's daughter Cassie.
Yeah I thought they can continue with the Lost Legacy entries, like it does not need nathan drake, just intresting characters. Call it Uncharted, and then some name, make it an awesome adventure. there you go. Uncharted 1-4 had lots of intresting characters
Nate, Sam, Sully -> Cassie, Chloe, Nadine
I'm pretty sure most people and especially gamers enjoy a lot of friction. Corporate speak is such an oddity. It's almost like they don't understand who their audience is...ever. It's why Nintendo's Direct format will one day likely be the standard. Nothing takes me out of the gaming mood than listening to developers and industry bigwigs try to relate to their audience by explaining their thought process when creating a game.
I'm curious how they expect to accomplish that, because even with my high-performance NVMe SSD in my PC, I definitely still have some pretty hefty load times in some games. Maybe Naughty Dog will do better about it than these other devs, but I still don't hold much hope.
These games are not built from the ground up for your NVMe drive. They have to be capable of working on everything from a 5400RPM all the way up to your SSD.
With PS5, all software will be built and optimized around the SSD storage.
It is the same thing with RAM or Cores on a CPU. There is always talk about how we don't need more cores or RAM, because no games even use them on PC at such and such settings.
If a no software is being built to take advanatage of 8 cores/ 16 threads and 32GB of RAM, then no software is going to use it, because it is not optimized for it. Once PS5 and XBS arrive, then all of the sudden games will start taking advantage of all those cores and RAM.
Software is built for hardware, you don't build software for hardware that doesn't exsist or is only in a few thousand homes.
As far as the SSD storage/NVMe drive, that's... not how development works. Being built around the other hardware, sure, I can give you that, but around 5400RPM vs NVMe, that's not a factor in the optimization.
Data is stored specifically to match the very slow speeds of hard drives. Data is duplicated multiple times so it doesn't take long for a hard drive to find a certain asset instead of searching through the whole game files over and over again. Building for the ground up for SSD storage means you don't have to do that anymore and things will naturally be much much faster. Even vs PC games on SSD's, unless developers start releasing SSD only builds alongside HDD builds.
I use an SSD on my Gaming PC for everything and load times are way better but if the game was build for them they would be significantly faster, and until SSD's become the norm for the majority of people that's the one and only thing consoles will have on PC's next generation.
The SSD seems like a major talking point, which is kind of concerning for me. I'm not saying SSD and faster load times are not a nice feature, but to me that's kind of a "oh and by the way" kind of thing. Maybe they just don't want to reveal anything bigger right now, but if faster load times are the main selling point, I'll be holding off on next gen systems for a while.
I don’t know why you had a couple of downvotes for this, because I’d totally agree. I’d rather hear about what new experiences I’ll have. Actually, if I’d want to be an a** about it, I’d say they’re only just finally back at the start because everything before the 5th gen already had instant load times anyway.
Not exactly for the fifth gen, since you'd still have to start the game each time, and you couldn't suspend your games. Portable systems since the DS have had it, and Switch nearly has it. To me it's a little like the Wii U's off TV play. It's nice. Just not buy a new console nice.
We're you gaming back in the cartridge days? In my opinion, we took a big step back when we went from carts to optical media, because of the load times. This stuff about significant reductions in load times is among the best things I've ever heard about a new console generation. But, if one started gaming after long load times became the norm, I can see where they'd not feel the same. You can't miss it if you never had it.
Yeah, I've been gaming since the cartridge days. Especially seeing as those days essentially lasted till the 3DS anyway. The benefits of cds vastly outweighed the load times. If you could have those benefits without the drawback of load times all the better. But this isn't the PS1 days. Load times for Spider-man on the PS4 Pro are already down to about 8 seconds. Assuming that you see a load screen every 5 minutes you play (you don't) we're talking about less than 3 minutes of load times per hour you play (and this is a pretty exaggerated figure). And all current gen systems already support suspending so front loads are mostly eliminated.
So, are those three minutes really among the best things you've heard about a new generation? PS1 gave us true 3D gaming. Dreamcast was a monumental leap in graphics (and had primitive online features even). XBox 360 gave us HD graphics, true online connectivity, an indie marketplace, and made games that weren't possible before possible (play Dead Rising on Wii if you don't believe me). Switch gave us a hybrid console.
We're all entitled to our opinions, but if you think the reduction in the already limited load times compares to those things, that's a little out there for me.
People are waiting 2 minutes to load TW3, and many other current gen games. We see boring flight animations for a minute or two every time we load a new planet in Destiny. Then there are 3-15 second freezes when traveling in-game between zones on those planets. As a Destiny player myself, I'd estimate that it's more like 5-7 minutes per hour of loading. So, while some games on premium hardware may have short load times, those are the exceptions, I think.
I chose Spider-man as an example, because that's what Sony used to demonstrate the benefits of next gen SSD in a video. I assumed that they would pick a game that would make the feature look good. And also I've played it, so I know about how often you see load screens. With Destiny I don't know how often you would see a load screen.
But let's split the difference and say Spider-man is on the low side and Destiny on the high side, and that it's going to be about 4.5 minutes per hour. Sure, who wouldn't want to save 4.5 minutes, but is it really more exciting than those other features?
It may not be better than the other features. But, it's very important, at least to me.
I think my underlying point is this: we see a power increase every generation. There's always a new graphical term or two to be thrown in the mix. But, the change to SSD is a fundamental change in hardware mechanics that seems like it may make a big difference. That's exciting to me, and I think to many others.
Anyway, I'll trade you half of my ray tracing for half of your load time savings.
I would say that we've generally seen reduced load times every gen since the switch to CDs. This is maybe the most drastic reduction (although I think PS1 to PS2 was pretty big too) but it's always been part of it, generally due to the increase in RAM. At this point I guess we'll have to disagree but to me it's just an "oh that's pretty cool" feature, not an "I'm going to go and drop 4-500 dollars" feature."
I'm not all that tech savvy, so Ray Tracing sounds like Blast Processing to me. I'll have to wait until I see it actually implemented in games to really judge.
