SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
Those seamless open worlds are bottlenecked by streaming speeds. We have seen this in Spiderman where a glitch lets gamers fly through the city at really fast speeds and the game just pauses while it loads the rest of the map.How many seamless open world have we had , how many fast paced racing games have we drove through . One type of design philosophy existing doesn't really exclude the other.
We also have Avatar devs talking about how SSDs let them do faster traversal at higher quality graphics.
It's not just that the world needs to look good as you lazily soar over it – it's that it needs to stay looking good while you travel very, very quickly, as Jansén explains: "You're flying at enormous high speeds on a Banshee over this very, very detailed landscape. It doesn't matter how much we can render, unless we can stream it in as fast when we're moving very fast from one place to another. So just this shift to these newer hard drives, it can't be underestimated because, and it really has a lot of implications."
Map Design
One of the less visible benefits of new hardware is in changing not just how the open world looks, but how it's pieced together. Because of more limited tech, older open world games needed to balance detail with density, which can lead to large areas of relative nothingness between major points of interest (I'm looking at you Assassin's Creed: Odyssey). It seems that new-gen tech will allow Frontiers of Pandora to be built a little more organically:
"It's not just the old 'I'm taking this slow walk as I enter into the place because we have to stream everything in'," explains Jansén of the benefits to his maps, "it's little subtle things that people don't think about, which is how close together are all the places in the world. If you look at, with the old hard drives, they had to be spaced out very far [apart], because you had to stream out the old and stream in the new, so it just created a formulaic world. So, there's a ton of stuff like that."
Now thats a multiplatform game that will likely target the slower 500 MBps SATA SSD drives like Matrix is doing which basically means a 10x increase in streaming speeds is allowing them to do all of the above. Well, the PS5 SSD is capable of 10x that so if these devs can do so much with just 500 MBps then imagine the possibilities and i keep stressing this, the possibilities and potential of a 5.5 GBps 10x more powerful than the SATA SSDs most games will target. Even if they target the 2.4 GBps SSD in the XSX, you still have 2x more bandwidth. You can do a lot more with 2x more anything.