Sony's Plans for the Next PlayStation

Straight from the man making the machine.

Apr 17, 2019

By: Max Cannon

A follow-up to the current video game consoles was certain from the day the PlayStation 4 was even announced. Rumors have been flying around about both the PS5 and the Xbox Two, and earlier this week the lead designer of the PlayStation 4 finally gave us some concrete news on what we can expect from Sony's latest system.

Could we see an announcement event similar to the one unveiling the PlayStation 4?

So Long to Loading

In an exclusive interview with Wired, the Lead System Architect Mark Cerny gave an in-depth description on the tech powering the successor to the PlayStation 4. While Cerny described some powerful technology, a lot of it would likely be confusing to the average person -- myself included. However, there were a few intersting points that are easier to understand. First off, this new console (which they avoided actually calling the PlayStation 5) has an ambitious goal ahead of it: eliminating loading times.

Which games could be getting sequels on the PlayStation 5?

To demonstrate this impressive idea, Cerny showed off a snippet of Marvel's Spider-Man for the PS4 running on a box called a Dev Kit which is made to match this new console's potential parts. When having Spider-Man fast travel across the map on a PS4 we'd be looking at a 15 second load time, while this new console could cut things down to 0.8 seconds. That's hard to believe, but with updates in hard drive memory it's maybe not so unlikely.

The PlayStation 4's controller leaked early, could we see the same type of leak with the PS5 at some point?

Playing PS4 Games

One of the biggest concners with Sony moving on from the PlayStation 4 centers around hanging on to your old games. When the PlayStation 3 was replaced by Sony, all of those glorious PS3 games were stranded on the system because the PS4 couldn't read them. However, in this interview it was confirmed that this system is made similarly to the PlayStation 4 and it'll be fully capable of playing any PlayStation 4 game that you want on it. With the other confirmation that this new console will also still take in physical discs, it's not a bad idea to hang onto your PlayStation 4 game discs. Though it wasn't confirmed in this article, it's also incredibly likely that any of your digital purchases on PS4 will work on this supposed PS5 as well.

This loading screen from Marvel's Spider-Man could be a thing of the past on the PS5.

The PlayStation 4 was made by asking game developers what they'd want from a Sony system and cramming as much as they could into one package. This seems like a similar standpoint for the creation of this new PlayStation and will hopefully make this machine as awesome as the current console sitting in under our TV. Unfortunately, we didn't get any type of news on when we'll actually see the PlayStation 5 and there's no sign of when we'll even get that information with Sony sitting out from E3. With this update out in the open, all eyes are on Xbox to see how they'll win over players with their next Xbox that we're likely to see during their own E3 show at the start of the summer.