The Little Things: A Few Improvements Could Take The PS4 A Long Way

I’ve had my PlayStation 4 since the day it launched in North America and while I’ve been happy with my purchase so far, there are a number of changes I feel Sony could make to their flagship console’s interface in an effort to make things more social, user friendly, and a bit less messy. Unlike a lot of requests I see from PlayStation users, most of this stuff is a tad nitpicky but they all involve areas of the interface I use on a very regular basis, and most of them are very practical ideas.

A couple of things I don’t mention below are MP3/DLNA support, quick resume from standby, and notifications for friends coming online, but that’s merely because I want to stick with smaller improvements I don’t hear a lot of chatter about, and those requests (among others) have been kicked around repeatedly since launch.

Let’s start with sharing screenshots and videos with your PSN friends. Putting aside the PS4’s bad track record for accurately recording the past few moments of gameplay footage (even after the 1.71 update), the audience that can see your shared stills and videos might be smaller than you think. I first noticed this when a friend that just bought a PS4 told me he couldn’t see my shared screenshots, even if he looked in my recent activity.

Since then, I’ve noticed that you can only see images and videos shared on Twitter and Facebook if you have that respective social network linked to your profile, meaning those of you who don’t have them (or choose not to link them to your PSN account) can’t see any shared media. If Sony wants to save some cash by having social sites host that content rather than doing it themselves, that’s fine, but at least allow all of your PSN friends to see them in your recent activity or the What’s New section.

Speaking of the What’s New section, it could use a few small tweaks. For starters, it seems there’s a decent amount of people that don’t see the activity of all their friends in this section. In fact, I see less than half my friends’ activity here, forcing me to go to their respective profiles if I want to stalk what they’ve been up to, which pretty much defeats the purpose.

Secondly, the manual refresh should be done away with in favour of real time updates or at least an auto refresh every minute or so, particularly if you’re already browsing friend activities. While they’re at it, maybe Sony could slightly dial back the number of adverts in this section.

To go along with a faster refresh of new activities, I think it’s time Sony finally addressed trophies that don’t sync in real time. I feel like after waiting several years on PS3 and the entire (albeit short) life of the PS4, there has to be a good reason Sony hasn’t included trophies that update in real time. Assuming it’s a bandwidth issue, maybe they should look for alternatives that don’t necessarily update instantly but do ensure trophies are still synced in a timely fashion.

Currently, if you have unlocked trophies that have not been synced with PSN servers when you launch a game, the PS4 will sync them for you as the game boots. I’d like to see them extend that batch sync to other areas, such as when you manually close a game, put the console into standby mode, or when the PS4 does its daily check for patches. Bandwidth would still saved over real-time syncs and trophies would be synced on at least a daily basis.

If you couldn’t tell by my quibbles with sharing media and recent activities, I’m a very social gamer, which means I love using party chat to talk with friends. While you can count me among the crowd that’s just happy to have party chat on a PlayStation platform this gen, a couple of small improvements would go a long way. I’ve noticed that when you start a party chat via the XMB or directly via a friend’s profile, you end up navigating through three different screens before the actual invite is sent.

Two of these three screens are barren wastelands of blue, leading me to believe we can trim this down to two or possibly even one page of party options. I can’t speak for everyone but I never change the names of my parties from the default, or send text messages along with my invites, so I wouldn’t be devastated if both those options were trimmed for the sake of speed. If they’re feeling generous when they’re tweaking party chat, maybe they could also add the ability to change a party to invite-only even after the party is created.

Sticking with the social theme, the profile screen could stand to have a minor facelift. I actually think the profile screen looks pretty great, but if there’s one piece of it that needs a change, it’s the Introduction section. Knowing what languages someone can speak is helpful but the About Me line allows for no more than 21 characters, which only holds about half of all the interesting things I can think to write about myself.

Age (so we can all be 18 again), location, and social network IDs would fit well here. This would also be a good area to add something shiny, like a fancy pie chart that shows how often you dabble in each genre, or maybe a trophy case to show off user-designated favorites, but I’d be happy with just a few small changes to how it currently appears.

Finally, I think patching a new game could be better than it is right now. Many of you have probably noticed that when you put a game in your console for the first time, it doesn’t actually check for any patches until you launch the game. If you’re hoping to play multiplayer immediately or use any network functions within the game, you have to back out to the XMB, close the game, then wait for the patch to finish downloading.

The preferable option would obviously be for the system to check for the update as soon as the game is inserted, that way you can just wait for the patch to finish downloading and launch the game only once. Assuming the game isn’t Battlefield 4 and you’re not using 28k dial-up, most of the patch could probably download while the game is going through its required short install anyway.

I don’t feel like any one of those changes are really going to make the PS4 dramatically better but I think they could collectively add up to offer a better experience. Sony made a point to dedicate a small piece of their E3 conference to user feedback so it would be nice to see them continue to pick up ideas from the community for the betterment of their platform.

What small changes would you like to see Sony implement? Are there any little hiccups or cumbersome tasks you’ve noticed and would like to see streamlined? Let us know in the comments.