[hyperpallium]

Ratchet & Clank is the only demo with new gameplay based on the SSD.

But it's overused, giving each game world less weight. The technological imperative, preoccupied with whether they could, etc. In contrast, artificial constraints add depth to gameplay, e.g. limited movement speed/duration ("sprint").

All that said, keeping processors fed with data is a central problem of CS. The innovations here are not just the SSD itself, but elimination of bottlenecks in the architecture (e.g. direct placement in GPU RAM).

Typically, storage is 1000x slower than RAM. On PS5, it's 50x. That has got to be a revolution in algorithmic space-time tradeoffs... which has got to be reflected in gameplay, somehow, somewhen.

[an_opabinia]

Because execs will only be seeing demos after they’re loaded, and there’s no way some 55 year old is going to spend more than 5 minutes playing some Star Wars game and therefore trigger no world loading, games that do something special with the SSD will not be financed by anyone other than Sony. The technology is basically DOA for third parties. The stuff that third parties are saying is basically moot.

Conversely when Nintendo makes new hardware, it’s the same deal - they’re the only ones financing games that use the balance board or gesture controls or labo or whatever. They just put up a lot more money and have internal studios with more autonomy. SSDs are a Sony problem not a game design/engineering problem.