Sony Had Developers Speculate on PS5 SSD Possibilities

In the lead-up to the PlayStation 5’s debut, Sony’s been having featured PlayStation Blog posts with different developers pontificating about what its features could mean. For example, we saw the first global commercial not long ago. Now, quotes from developers of upcoming games like Demon’s Souls, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart shared their thoughts on the PS5 SSD.

First, here’s the compilation of quotes about the PS5 SSD and what it could mean for the system’s games, which were collected by Sony.

• Far Cry 6 Lead Programmer Neil Hill: “The SSD is a gamechanger, I think as this generation matures we will see some amazing innovation in streaming and open-world game design.”
• Hitman 3 Game Director Mattias Engstrom: “Hitman 3 pushes you to explore and experiment in huge sandbox locations – and being able to save/load frequently is key to that. The blitz-fast load times we are seeing on the PS5 console encourages [player] experimentation more than ever.”
• Insomniac Games Creative Director Marcus Smith: “Hopefully players were able to see the new extended gameplay demo we recently revealed for Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart.The SSD and custom I/O architecture around it allows us to send players across dimensions with near-instant speed. It fundamentally changes the rules and allows us to think about ideas and game designs that are only possible on PS5.”
• Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales Creative Director Brian Horton: “Beyond near-instant loading and fast-travel, the SSD and its speed allow us to more quickly load and display more detailed assets. This should lead to the city looking better than ever, and this is just the beginning for our team unlocking those possibilities. It’s a fundamental change that we can’t wait to take more advantage of in the years to come.”
• Returnal Lead Programmer Ari Arnbjornsson: “A bit further into the next generation I’m expecting we’ll start seeing developers make more use of the not-so-obvious benefits of the SSD. This is what excites me the most! What does it mean for developers when everything can be loaded from the disk that fast? Will we even need the concept of “levels” anymore?…. The possibilities for this tech are exciting for me as a developer, and exhilarating for me as a gamer.”
• SIE Japan Studio Creative Director Gavin Moore: “As developers [of Demon’s Souls], we are already changing the way we think about the SSD. We see it not just as storage but also memory, utilizing the speed of the SSD to load data at blistering speeds, bringing you straight back into the action to avenge your many deaths.”

Sony’s commentary collection was accompanied by a new video clip promoting the system.

The PlayStation 5 will be released in 2020. People can register for an invite to pre-order one through Sony.