Thanks to their solid state drives, the PS5 and the Xbox Scarlett are promising to offer developers the sort of console hardware that can actually have an impact on the way games are developed, and the way they will perform when they’re in the hands of players. Shorter loading times have been the talk of the town ever since initial specs for next gen consoles were revealed, and while that’s going to be a huge boon for game, the impact SSDs will have will go beyond that.
Speaking with GamingBolt, Renaud Charpentier, Game Director at Tower Five – developers of the narrative action strategy title Lornsword: Winter Chronicle – got to speaking about the PS5’s inclusion of an SSD, and what sort of an impact we can expect it to have on games. According to Charpentier, having access to a solid state drive in a console will allow games to have “more complex simulations and richer worlds”, thanks to the extra memory they will afford to the hardware.
“You will notice that Lornsword loadings are pretty short, even on current generation consoles, we believe it’s important not to be taken out of the experience when you are in the flow,” said Charpentier. “SSDs will help a lot with that even on heavy games, but it might also help with what is possible in real time. If the mass memory is really fast to access it can become a kind of secondary “slow” RAM where you can store big data structures, you don’t need every frame. That can open to more complex simulations and richer worlds, so it will be very interesting to investigate.”
You can read our full interview with Charpentier through here. In our conversation, he also spoke with us about the PS5’s AMD Zen 2 CPU, and what sort of benefits that will provide to development of games. Lornsword: Winter Chronicle is currently in early access on Steam, and is due for a full launch on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.