The PlayStation 4 got a lot of things right with its design and focus on gaming. As the lifespan of the PS4 begins to wind down, much of what was innovative about the console when it launched in 2013 has become familiar and expected, and many are looking forward to thePlayStation 5. And while there is a lot to like about the options the PS4 gives when it comes to downloading games and updates, there’s a particular segment of that experience that thePlayStation 5needs to change.
The PS5 needs to make an improvement to the speed of the downloading process. While there will also be fluctuation from person to person because of each person’s connection speed,the PlayStation Network is notoriously slowwhen compared to the Xbox Live and the download experience on PC. Adding to a network infrastructure that is overall slower, the way the PS4 goes about downloading, patches and updates especially, can lead to an even slower and frustrating experience.
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The common experience of downloading on the PS4 starts with downloading the game or update. This could be fairly quick depending on the file size, and some updates are only MBs, containing only the changes needed, instead of all the GBs that make up an entire game. The speed of this process varies depending on connection but is usually fairly fast. The issue usually comes in when the PS4 gets to the “copying” stage of the install process. This is a slow process as the PS4 copies over the entire game and applies the changes from the downloaded update.
Hopefully, the PS5 can streamline this process and deliver an experience on-par with the Xbox and PC. It’s a big reason why players want pre-loading of their games with plenty of lead time before the launch of the game. It’s disappointing for a game to hit its release date and time and to be stuck in the downloading process. The problem is especially noticed in the case of something like the release ofDestiny 2: Shadowkeep, where an expansion is about to release andPS4 players will need to pre-load the game on their consolein order to be able to play at launch time.
In the particular case ofDestiny 2, any loss time at the launch of an expansion can be even more frustrating because usually raids launch just days after new content (in the case ofthe last raid, which released the same day of the new content, it was just hours), and players want to jump in and start leveling as quickly as possible.
While the PS4 introduced some great features to the console space like automatically updating games and users being able to tell their PS4s to start downloading games and content while away from their actual consoles, the PS5 needs to speed up the download process. As PC and consoles are becoming more similar than different, thePS5 has some improvements it should maketo keep up and deliver a fast and frustration-free experience.
