If you’re wondering whether the PS5‘s hard drive space will going to be an issue, I can definitely confirm that that will become the case.
The console isn’t even officially out until tomorrow. I’ve had the PS5 in my house for over a week — the full Blu-Ray version — and already, already, I’ve hit the limit of the hard drive.
It happened so suddenly. I started up by downloading a bunch of things from the PlayStation Plus Collection to see whether they’d get any benefits from the PS5. Bloodborne, Fallout 4, Persona 5, Monster Hunter: World. The results there were mixed. Monster Hunter: World definitely gets a big boost from the PS5, thanks to its uncapped frame rates across all of its various graphics modes.
A game like God of War benefits too — if you’re playing in performance mode. Sure, it’s only running at 1080p, but 60 FPS Kratos is a hell of a lot nicer than not-60 FPS (and the game upscales really nicely on my TV anyway).
But after installing a couple of newer games last night — Yakuza: Like a Dragon and the PS5 version of NBA 2K21 — I ran into a very awkward wall:
Oh no.
What the hell. I’ve had the console for a week.
It’s not like I’ve gone ham with installing everything. Quite literally, it’s been one week. And it’s not like I’ve downloaded everything imaginable from my library. I’ve gotten a couple of major titles — Final Fantasy 7 Remake is a big beast — but I’ve also downloaded some smaller games like Wipeout HD Collection. Mirror’s Edge Catalyst installed from the drive; I wanted to see how the PS5’s backward compatibility worked, because I knew that game ran at 60 FPS on the PS4 Pro, save for some dips in different scenarios. (It’s still nice and vibrant, still not quite as good as the original Mirror’s Edge, but the frame rate dips are gone.)
Perhaps the bigger note here is that I could comfortably download all of these games within a week and I didn’t have any problems with the PlayStation Network. The PS4’s download speeds were notoriously bad, so much so that users found their own workarounds. But this has been during the review period, and speeds are liable to be much slower later in the week when everyone hits Sony’s servers all at once. And that’s not even factoring in what happens when everyone wants to download updates for games like Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, which is so popular in Australia and such a drain on our national infrastructure that even NBN Co had an official whinge about it. (By the way, if you’re still on a slow-arse NBN plan, you might want to think of upgrading real soon.)
In case you’re wondering, here’s what my hard drive looks like broken down per game:
(I’d thought I’d copied the screenshot of the rest of my page to my portable SSD, but alas I hadn’t. We’ve just started transitioning back into working from the office, so bare with me here.)
Games like Fallout 4, Wipeout Omega Collection and Persona 5 came in under the 30GB mark, with the smallest title on my drive being Sonic Mania (as you’d expect). I haven’t really installed a ton of indies from my library yet, because most of those generally ran at a locked, buttery smooth frame rate on the PS4 Pro anyway. (You’ll also notice how Yakuza: Like a Dragon has the PS4 tag — the game won’t get its PS5 optimisations until March 2, 2021.)
Bloodborne and The Last of Us Remastered are a fraction bigger, so you can see how quickly that 667GB disappears. All in all, I’ve only got 13 games installed on the drive, including Astro’s Playroom which comes pre-installed:
- Astro’s Playroom
- Bloodborne
- Fallout 4
- Final Fantasy 7 Remake
- God of War
- Mirror’s Edge Catalyst
- Monster Hunter World: Iceborne
- NBA 2k21
- Persona 5
- Sonic Mania
- Spider-Man: Miles Morales
- Wipeout HD Collection
- Yakuza: Like a Dragon
I know there’s good reasons for Sony not publishing that compatibility list yet, but after this I’m pretty damn sure I’ll be getting a new NVMe drive as soon as that list is released.
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