Mark Cerny isn’t the only one from Sony speaking about PlayStation at Develop, as Neil Brown, R&D Senior Team Leader at SCEE, revealed that digital games on PS4 will work in a similar fashion to the PS3 when going to a friend’s house, but with the added benefit of being able to play as you download:
You can visit your friend’s house, you can log into your account and play any game from your digital library, which is good. But how useful is that if it takes half a day to download the game you want to play? With Play As You Download, you get much quicker access to at least the first section of the game so you can start playing quicker. So this makes a digital library a practical option in the real world.
While that is definitely good news, Neil then talked about background installs on retail games, which eliminates the majority of the wait when starting up a physical game you just bought:
A similar system also works on Blu-ray, chunks are automatically copied to the hard drive in the background. This means that after the first few minutes your game can rely on having faster read speeds from the hard drive. Which provides a better experience for players, and this is a completely background process for the player. They don’t have to wait for anything to install before playing the game. The game will launch as soon as the disk has been put in the drive.
What is the longest you’ve had to wait for a PS3 game to install and what did you do to pass the time? Let us know in the comments below.
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