Several days ago I decided that I wanted to start a new video game on my PlayStation 4 console. I put the disc in the drive and waited for it to copy a few files to the hard drive. The process didn't take very long and I thought I was ready to start playing the game. Unfortunately that wasn't the case. I now had to wait for an Internet update before the game actually became available. I could play part of the game but quickly got bored and wondered why so many people enjoyed it this particular title.
The download took about an hour or two and I never waited for it to finish before quitting the game. Today I thought I would try again and see what difference the update made. Let's just say it is significant. I now have a story and natural progression to follow. I played for an hour or so this afternoon as I had the day off and earned several awards and trophies. Those little gems keep you wanting to play and made for a much more enjoyable experience.
Most gamers spend a long time deciding which video game they want to play next. Once they decide, they are patient enough to wait for updates to load. If you leave your PlayStation in stand-by mode and have a digital copy of the game you want to play, you can even start the download from your computer and have it notify you when it is done. Unfortunately that is not the way I sometimes play video games.
As someone that works for PlayStation, I have access to a lot of different games. Sometimes I will invite a group of people over to play but don't have any idea which game or games they would like to sample. This means starting a download and doing something else while we wait for the game to download and install. If I know what games people want to play before they arrive I can have everything queued up and ready to go. Unfortunately most of the groups I have had don't know what they want to play until they see my extensive library. Even then, picking a title to play can take a long time.
I don't see the trend of taking a long time to download a video game getting any better. If anything games are getting more complex and larger. I know that one of the advantages of the PlayStation 5 is that the included solid-state drive (SSD) allows you to keep a single copy of a graphical asset such as a tree and then reuse it multiple times throughout the game. I hope this means game files will shrink significantly. In order for that to happen though, game developers need to take advantage of that capability. Only after the PS5 is released will we be able to see if that has happened. I sure hope so because I really hate waiting so long for games to be really playable.
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