Loading screens — the bane of our gaming existence. Long have we waged a war against this necessary evil, often taking up a good fraction of our time in games due to how long they take sometimes. However, it seems that may not be the case when the PS5 rolls out in the near future.
Recently, yet another patent filed by the gaming giant at the United States Patent and Trademark Office revealed plans for a new gaming machine that possessed the ability to “dynamically” load the game software whenever transitions in between areas occur, as such smoothening gameplay overall.
Here’s the abstract of the patent itself:
A system and method are disclosed for dynamically loading game software for smooth game play. A load boundary associated with a game environment is identified. A position of a character in the game environment is then monitored. Instructions corresponding to a next game environment are loaded into a memory when the character crosses the load boundary, such that game play is not interrupted.
In lay man’s terms, what this new patent explores is breaking down the loading process into smaller chunks, instead of one whole piece, to ensure that gamers’ transitions into new areas of the game are a constant, progressive thing.
For example, in a game such as Horizon Zero Dawn, where there are different large areas that could be seen in the distance, but still require you to pass through a loading screen to be able to actually render and traverse them when you head there. What this patent aims to do is make sure you enter those areas as they are rendering so you effectively won’t have to sit through chunks of often boring loading screens.
This makes sense considering how the PS5 also has much more powerful load times compared to its current-gen predecessor, and as such would prove to be a game-changing (pun intended) new addition to how we play games in the future.
So not only will you be able to experience backward-compatible games such as God of War a lot more smoothly on the PS5, upcoming games such as Cyberpunk 2077 and Ghost of Tsushima will be undoubtedly boosted in terms of performance thanks to the PS5’s superior internals. Even games notorious for loading screens such as Destiny 2 will benefit from this., How well exactly, though, remains to be seen.
If anything, this makes our already agonising wait for the PS5 already more so. Late 2020, perhaps?
Marion has a serious RPG addiction. Sometimes it bleeds into real life; he forgets to sleep because he thinks he has a Witcher’s body clock. Forgive him in advance if he suddenly blurts out terms such as “Mind Flayer” and “Magic Missile”, because never once does he stop thinking about his next Dungeons & Dragons game.
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