Armed with tangible information about the next generation of consoles and what new advancements they’ll be bringing to the industry, there’s a lot that we can now actually look at and get excited about. Among all the things that have been revealed so far, the talk of the town is the inclusion of solid state drives – or SSDs – in both the PS5 and the Xbox Scarlett.
The excitement is definitely understandable, because it’s something that promises to have a proper impact on actual game design and the way games will be played, most noticeably with the removal – or at least minimization – of the need to load. Developers are just as excited about that, if not more (well, not all of them), and one such developer is Remedy Entertainment.
We recently sat down for a chat about the upcoming Control with Remedy’s Mikael Kasurinen and Brooke Maggs, director and narrative designer on the game respectively, and eventually got around to asking them about what their thoughts are on what we know of the upcoming next gen consoles so far. More specifically, we asked them about their SSDs- and they’re quite excited about that bit in particular.
“Well, having an SSD is fantastic because it deals with a lot of streaming issues that games tend to have,” the Remedy devs said to GamingBolt. “I’m with everybody else, I hate those slow moving elevators where you need to wait until a new part of the world loads up. Or awkward tunnels that you have to walk through. Getting rid of all of that is good news for everybody.
“And of course, we all love more powerful hardware. It allows us to do creative, striking visual things, and so on. Especially, because we as a studio, strive for really high fidelity. We’re down for technical and visual achievements as well. So I think that’s good news.”
Right now the impact of SSDs is something that remains theoretical – for instance, we can’t really say how they will impact the need for loading in games that are built natively for next gen consoles and are thus more demanding – but even on a baseline level, we do know that an impact they will have. And seeing new hardware that can tangibly affect game design rather than making games look shinier (which, don’t get me wrong, is great) is indeed something to get excited about.
Remedy’s Control is due out on August 27 for the PS4, Xbox One, and PC- the game recently received over 25 minutes of stunning gameplay footage, which you can view through here. Our full interview with the devs will be going live soon, so stay tuned.