Games are designed to be as fun as possible—but sometimes, limitations in hardware can constrain possibilities considerably. Games should be more fun than ever, however, now that we’re on our way to a new era of consoles. And now we have some indications from Chameleon Games studio boss Omar Sawi that this is exactly what is likely to happen. Devs will be able to focus on what is fun.
What Developer Omar Sawi Said About Making Games for PS5 that “Focus on What is Fun”
Omar Sawi, speaking to GamingBolt, said, “This [the SSD in the PlayStation 5] is great. Because loading times are a pain. And it’s hard to mask them away. We had to think very hard about it on current gen, because we didn’t want loading screens. So we had to design levels around that, for example making a tunnel a bit longer than necessary or creating an intermediary cave level so the next big level would load in time without a loading screen, since a regular HD is quite slow. An SSD would make it easier to focus on what is the most fun.”
He went on, “With action games, having everything being very immediate and responsive is part of what makes them pleasurable. That starts with the controls of the character, that it is very responsive and preferably at a high frame rate, but it also extends to how the game starts and everything happening in between.”
This does seem like it makes sense. The more freedom the hardware gives you, the more flexible things like level design will be. Of course, a lot of games simply settled for having load screens, not altering levels to avoid them. But with the PlayStation 5, there may no longer be load screens at all. That means that levels can flow naturally and we will not be twiddling our thumbs and reading the same tips over and over again as we wait to get back to our games.
As we hear more about the PS5 and Xbox Scarlett from other devs, we’ll keep you posted. Be sure and keep on top of all of our PlayStation-related news in our PlayStation news section.