PS5 Game Installs Will Still Be Required, With One Major Change

Sony has been keeping a tight lid on its next-generation console, now officially called the PlayStation 5, but the company has revealed some interesting new tidbits about the system in an interview with Wired. Among other details, Sony confirmed that PS5 will require players to install games onto the system, much like PS4. This time around, however, you'll have greater freedom over choosing which parts of the games to install.

"Rather than treating games like a big block of data, we're allowing finer-grained access to the data," system architect Mark Cerny says in the interview. An example Wired brings up is only installing a game's multiplayer component, or being able to delete a game's single-player portion from your system once you've completed it. It's unclear if developers will be required to support this feature.

This ties into other changes Sony is making to improve the user experience on PlayStation 5. As the company previously confirmed, the system will use a solid-state drive rather than a standard hard driver, allowing for significantly faster load times than were possible on the PS4. Sony is also improving the system's UI to let you see what's happening in games without booting them up.

"Even though it will be fairly fast to boot games, we don't want the player to have to boot the game, see what's up, boot the game, see what's up," Cerny said. "Multiplayer game servers will provide the console with the set of joinable activities in real time. Single-player games will provide information like what missions you could do and what rewards you might receive for completing them—and all of those choices will be visible in the UI. As a player you just jump right into whatever you like."

Other topics Sony touched on include PS5's new controller, which will feature haptic feedback for a more "immersive" game experience. The company also confirmed that Bluepoint, the studio behind high-profile ports such as PS4's Shadow of the Colossus remaster, is working on a "big" PS5 game, although no other details were shared beyond that.

PlayStation 5 will release Holiday 2020--the same window as Microsoft's next-gen Project Scarlett console. In the meantime, you can read more about Sony's new system in our roundup of everything we know about the PS5 so far.