Comment by creshal
16 days ago
HD2 started as playstation exclusive, and was retargeted mid-development for simultaneous release.
So the PS5's SSD architecture was what developers were familiar with when they tried to figure out what changes would be needed to make the game work on PC.
If what they were familiar with was a good SSD, then they didn't need to do anything. I don't see how anything Sony said about their SSD would have affected things.
Maybe you're saying the hearsay was Sony exaggerating how bad hard drives are? But they didn't really do that, and the devs would already have experience with hard drives.
What Sony said about their SSD was that it enabled game developers to not duplicate assets like they did for rotating storage. One specific example I recall in Sony's presentation was the assets for a mailbox used in a Spider Man game, with hundreds of copies of that mailbox duplicated on disk because the game divided Manhattan into chunks and tried to have all the assets for each chunk stored more or less contiguously.
If the Helldivers devs were influenced by what Sony said, they must have misinterpreted it and taken away an extremely exaggerated impression of how much on-disk duplication was being used for pre-SSD game development. But Sony did actually say quite a bit of directly relevant stuff on this particular matter when introducing the PS5.
Weird, since that's a benefit of any kind of SSD at all. The stuff their fancy implementation made possible was per-frame loading, not just convenient asset streaming.
But uh if the devs didn't realize that, I blame them. It's their job to know basics like that.
3 replies →
I don't really understand your point. You're making a very definitive statement about how the PS5's SSD architecture is responsible for this issue - when the isssue is on a totally different platform, where they have _already_ attempted (poorly, granted) to handle the different architectures.
No. Please try reading more carefully.