Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida recently tweeted that next-generation PlayStation titles would not “install”, but rather “cache”, to the system’s hard drive – a solution, many assumed, to the forthcoming software’s 40 or 50GB file sizes, coupled with the PS4’s 500GB storage space.
Today, however, the PlayStation 4’s lead architect Mark Cerny has provided some clarity on just how the mandatory game installations on Sony’s next-gen machine will work. The crux of the matter here is that all games will install considerable chunks of data to your HDD, and no, it won’t be automatically deleted.
The confusion regarding “caching” seems to have arisen around the way Sony are choosing to install this data. Rather than waiting indefinitely for a title to load at various points, as is often the case now, disc-based games will instead begin caching data immediately, and after a nominal wait the game will begin. Knack, says Cerny, will see players wait only 10 seconds before getting into a game. After that, the remainder of the game’s 37GB will be installed intelligently in the background, as you play.
Streaming the files from HDD as-and-when they are required – rather than reading from the far slower Blu-ray drive – allows for far more complex operations to be performed in real-time. This, said Cerny, helps alleviate issues raised by current-gen developers regarding the immersion breaking in-game load times we’re used to.
Cerny also said that despite earlier internal discussions to the contrary, all installed game data will stay on the hard drive until the user chooses to delete it, as is the case with current-gen machines. Microsoft’s Xbox One will, unsurprisingly, also require installation from Blu-ray, although the use of game-caching or pre-loading as Sony have mentioned is currently unknown. Regardless, It seems we’re going to be swapping out our 500GB stock hard-drives sooner than first thought.
PlayStation 4 launches in the US this Friday, November 15th, before coming to EU shores two weeks later, on November 29th.
Source: Kotaku.
hazelam
i liked the sound of the temporary cache thing.
but if you can start playing quickly enough while the rest of the game installs in the background it won’t be an insurmountable issue.
but they better make sure deleting installed data is a damn site quicker than it is on the PS3.
being stuck watching the please wait screen while it spends minutes deleting data is not fun.
if you can start playing while a game is still downloading, and while a disc game is installing, it might not be so bad.
it could make swapping game in and out a bit less laborious.
certainly a lot bloody better than having to wait for the download to finish and then spend a bloody age installing the thing afterwards.
that was the one thing that annoyed me most about the PS3, the whole download then install thing.
not only did it take ages, you needed twice the hard drive space.
djdustb
Yeah I hope the deletion tool is a lot better handled than before. In theory if you can play while downloading there should be nothing stopping you hitting delete and getting on with something else on the PS4.
I bet though that they get the minor things like this wrong.
beeje13
How many games do people play at once? 3 or 4 for me personally, so ill still have around 300GB left, which coincidently, is more than the total space I have now. The problem is download titles, which can’t simply be reinstalled in less than 10 minutes, especially as I can see even the smaller titles getting bigger this gen with better quality assets, etc.
If anything it puts people off buying full ~40GB titles from the store.