The next generation of consoles is releasing this week and fans everywhere are having to decide between investing in the PlayStation 5 or the Xbox Series X this generation. Both the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series promise quick load times and more gorgeous visuals than ever before.
While the PS5 is certainly a hardware upgrade, it is missing some features from the PS4 that may sway Sony fans to reconsider purchasing the newest console, at launch at least. Not only is there no PSVR support at launch, but the PS5 will also not allow early adopters to use any external hard drive.
The PS5 comes installed with an impressive SSD for ultra-high speed that will significantly reduce load times for games, but only 667GB of that SSD will be available to install and play games on. While the amount of available launch games won't put players over that limit, it won't be long before stories of fans running out of storage start popping up. To put things into perspective, the Xbox Series X does allow purchasers to store games on an external hard drive, but will also require them to transfer those games over to the internal SSD before they'll be allowed to play their games.
The storage limitations are quite worrisome for a new console. Not only are PS5 games going to have larger file sizes, but its certainly possible that the new trophy recording feature could fill up consoles quicker than fans realize. Though, it should be noted that the PS5 is going to allow any of the backwards compatible PS4 games to be transferred between internal and external storage.
Woes aside, the limitations make sense in the realm of understanding that the PS5 games are reliant on performing well at launch and Sony will want to work out all the kinks before allowing third-party storage to muddy the promises. Fans will have to be patient to hear anything else from Sony regarding allowing them to use external storage and in the meantime, will have to delete their installed games, which have a time counter this time around, to free up space if they happen to fill up their console.
Limitations as they may be, this is not intended to disparage the PS5 but only to make aware of some hurdles fans may have to jump through if they plan on purchasing the console at launch. The lineup of games is still impressive, such as Spider-Man: Miles Morales, which has had its trophy list appear online, as well as Sackboy: A Big Adventure. The games are there, they might just have to be deleted to make room for more after players complete them.
The PlayStation 5 will release on November 12, 2020.
Source: PlayStation Blog