Sony has been using its new SSD in the PlayStation 5 as a major selling point. The SSD is supposed to be so fast that players will rarely see any loading screens. While all this seems too good to be true, Naughty Dog VP Neil Druckmann is excited about it. According to him, the new SSD will make future games much more immersive as it will cut down on long loading time. The less time players spend looking at a black screen means more time they spend actually playing the game.
In a podcast with the New York Videogame Critics Circle, Druckmann really emphasized the new SSD and talked about its benefits. "We do so much work, on our end, once you start the adventure, you never see a load screen. And there's so much work that happens behind the scenes of how we design the levels, how we chop them up, and it's all invisible to the player; you never see any of that work," he said in the interview. "But now, knowing that we're going to be able to load things more quickly, it just means the designers don't have to be as constrained by how they lay things out. How we think about things. When we load new characters. So I'm excited to see the doors that opens for us."
Druckmann also claimed that starting a new generation is always a “double-edged sword.” The developers will have to make a product that is supported by the next-gen consoles, which is no easy task in itself. However, their job becomes slightly easier as their limit for memory, CPU, and HDD are increased. They can achieve more crazy goals as they are not as strictly bound by the hardware limitations of the previous console.
"At the end of a [console] generation, you always feel the constraints. You always feel like you're pushing against a bunch of walls and finding the little cracks where you can take things a little further whether it's memory or CPU or hard drive speed. When you start a new generation, it's a double-edged sword," Druckmann said to Critics Circle. "On the one hand, you have to build new tech for the new hardware, and that can be an uphill battle. But on the other hand, all of a sudden you feel this freedom of, 'Oh my god, we can breathe again!' 'We can break away from these constraints.' And one of the things that we're excited by is the solid-state hard drive and what it means for almost seamless loading."
Naughty Dog's latest game is The Last of Us Part 2, which was released only for PlayStation 4. The next game that the company is developing is not known to us yet. It could be a PS5 port for TLOU Part 2 or a completely new game, and some rumors suggest that an online component for TLOU2 is planned. I am personally hoping for a PS5 port for The Last Of US Part 2. It also seems more likely because several games developed by Naughty Dog for PS3 were later ported to PS4.
