Playstation 5 [PS5] [Release November 12 2020]

Ok, obligatory clarification here: I'm not campaigning for Barlog's new project to be based on an existing IP, nor the opposite.
All I'm saying is I can't know for sure, based on the information that is publicly released.

Barlog mentioned he was apparently going to pitch an idea towards Sony, but we don't know if he was successful. There are arguments on both sides to support whether it's a new IP or not.
Yes, Horizon was a major success but not all new IPs were as well received, like Knack orOrder 1886.

We can bet whether it's a new IP or not (and perhaps I'd bet in the same way you would), but the fact that we're betting means we don't know for sure. That's all that I meant.

 

We know for sure when they actually announce something. All this is guesswork nothing more.

 

Again if it was not a new IP, Cory barlog would not be at Sony Santa Monica. He quits Crystal Dynamics because they did not want to to do the "one shot" camera idea. He is a creative and he will find another job if he is not satisfied. Same watch the postmortem of God of War, he needed to pitch the idea of a reboot of God of War to Sony. They wanted to stop the franchise. The problem they did a bad demo to Shuhei Yoshida doing the pitch and he was not happy but they decided to continue because Sony Santa Monica studio worked on two failures successively God of War Ascencion and the cancelled project. The second failure was the reason Sony Santa Monica stopped to help indie for development(for example Jouney was created with help of them). All the indie guys of Sony Santa Monica created Annapurna Interactive after this. If God of war reboot was a failure, the studio would have close. And this is the reason he cried when he saw the metacritic/opencritic reviews because he was under pressure. He didn't want to be the guy reponsible of Sony Santa Monica closure.

Sony knows they need to refresh ip, and create new one and it works well this generation with Horizon, Ghost of Tsushima and Days Gone was a commercial success too, it did not sold as much as bigger critical success but the game sold well. Same Naughty Dog is on a new IP too and closed the Naugthy Dog Uncharted cycle with Uncharted 4 and the Lost Legacy. It does not mean the franchise will disappear. Rehash the same franchise again and again only create franchise fatigue. Sony needs a mix of old ones and new ones. They have Uncharted, TLOU, God of War, Horizon, Ghost of Tsushima, maybe Days Gone, Ratchet and Clank, Spiderman for the moment, Astrobot, Sackboy, Dreams and Gran Turismo.



I am sure at 99.9% this is a new IP. All the usual suspect, some working in the industry seems to say this is a new IP. And I don't think Sony Santa Monica has valuable IP out of God of War(Kinetica..). If it is not a new IP, this is the next God of War.

EDIT: For The Order 1886, this is very difficult to do a huge upgrade of a game engine and do a game and at the same time and the studio grow to a much bigger team coming from doing PSP/PSvita game to PS4 games not easy too with new management process. This is probably the reason Sony Bend choose Unreal Engine 4 to do days Gone.

Knack is another problem, this is Japan Studio... And multiple creatives quit the studio recently...

 

Well, I can guess Barlog was one of the loudest voices for the PS5 to focus so much on its I/O performance.

 

Cerny didn't decide anything by himself. He's known for doing long tours (2 years long I think?) among 1st and 3rd party developers asking them what they'd like the most to get in the next gen. Hes' done it for the PS4 and for the PS5.
Barlog, with his vision of games without loading screens, seems to have had one or two things to say about asset streaming being a limitation this past gen. GoW's seamless experience would have been much less of a challenge had it been developed for the PS5.

 

In the Road to PS5 presentation he said he will "take a tour once every two years" and "this requires weeks on the road".

 

Yeah 2 years long really wouldn't make much sense. Thanks for the clarification.

 

Well he is the one making the tours and collecting the information from a lot of developers, so yeah I d say, Cerny is the one to thank

 

Its not like developers weren’t already working on solving loading times with streaming way back when cds were a hot new thing or before. SSD was obvious to nearly everyone who ever used one in a PC. And it is in the very nature of a developer like Cerny and many others to then think about how to make the most of it.

That is not to say that there will be various ideas about the best way to do it that will have come from the developers he’s talked about and so on, it’s just that I’m not ready to give Cory a huge piece of credit here.

But I do look forward to seeing new IP from Santa Monica so here’s hoping.

 

Cerny's role as system architect of Vita, PS4, PS4 Pro and PS5 marked the change in Sonys hardware creation process from one where the console hardware, specifications and APIs were developed with zero regard for developers to one where developers arguably got the biggest input. If you've not seen Mark Cerny's the Road of PS4 (GameLabs) presentation, check it out.

This was a major turning point. If Ken Kutaragi was running running PlayStation, we likely would never have got a PS4 Pro and the PS5 made never have happened because Ken's PS4 would probably have bee powered by technologies incomprehensible to anybody else but himself and developers would have left the platform in droves

But I agree with you that in terms of things you can do to improve I/O and loading times, the bottlenecks are easy to identify and the options to resolve them fairly limited. It wasn't a how-do-we-land-on-the-moon problem, it's a matter of how much budget can we have for this custom silicon. The fact that Microsoft implemented a very, very similar solution in Xbox Series consoles demonstrates this.

 

And still I miss the custom hardware era :/

(but yeah, it wasn't possible to continue like that... Or you would have needed some crazy amount of people to make incredible dev kits...)

 

I was always a bit nostalgic for custom hardware too but the reality is the 3D consoles have always offered the same games with only a marginally different experience - controllers, UI, performance etc - and none of that changed with Sony moving from deeply-custom to custom-COTS silicon.

 

Some consoles exclusives (at the time) were not really possible on other hardware for a long time if my memory is correct... ? The best exemple imo is MGS2 on PS2. Rogue Leader on Gamecube was heavily using the strenght of the custom hardware too. On PS3, I still think Killzone 2 is very good looking and was great at the time, thx to the SPUs... Anyway, I'm probably wrong, and too nostalgic : ) IDK, reading or listening to devs explaining how they tape into weird hardware always interest me : )

Sorry for the OT.

 

Has Sony released an official list of NVMe SSDs that are better suited for PS5? I'm currently eyeballing the Sabrent 1TB Rocket NVMe model because I'm almost out of space.

 

Sony's lack of [timely] communication at times is downright awful.

 

You know what is wierd? Not having a PS5 firmware update to improve stability for over a month. When was the last time that happened? Probably the PlayStation 2.

 

Do we even have a list of stable external drives/SSD caddys etc yet?

I hate all the juggling and would rather have the PS4 games sit externally seeing as there is minimal advantage to taking up the internal SSD.

 

I picked up a cheap external HDD for PS4 games. Works fine. You only need to wait for confirmation of the internal SSD for PS5 games.