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VILLAGE ARCADE: PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X offer fast load times at a cost

The new consoles are fast, but is the cost worth the reward?
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As next-gen games require more space than ever before, developers are creating ways to install only specific game content.

Welcome back to Village Arcade! Last week I talked about how the new generation of video game consoles are levelling the playing field between PC and consoles. This week, I want to talk about an area where consoles are actually surpassing most custom-built PCs: storage.

Storage is a big deal with this generation of consoles. The new Xbox and PlayStation 5 are equipped with NVM Express solid-state drives (NVMe SSDs) that are actually a lot more exciting than their boring names suggest.

The specific generation of NVMe SSDs used in the new consoles have only been on the market for a short time, but they provide an experience that is about four times faster than standard solid-state drives found in most gaming PCs and about 15 times faster than the spinning drives in the Xbox One or PlayStation 4.

These speed increases were the first thing I noticed when I turned on my Xbox Series X for the first time. The console booted up quick and games launched faster than anything I had ever seen before. 

One of the first games I played was Star Wars: Battlefront II, a game I had been playing on the last generation of consoles. My routine for the past few months was to boot up the game, check messages on my phone while I waited for it to load and then start playing a minute or two later. 

But that habit died quickly because the Series X had loaded me into a match quicker than I could unlock my phone. The speeds were unlike anything I had experienced on my PlayStation 4 Pro and I ended up spending more time jumping back and forth between games to see just how much faster they loaded than previous generation games.

This jumping back and forth actually led to my first real problem with the new generation of consoles: where do I store all this stuff?

Early adoption pains

The answer to that question is a difficult one, because a trend that has become more and more common in the past few years of gaming has been forced installation of games—even when purchasing a physical copy of a game. 

The usual benefit of buying a physical copy of a game to conserve drive space is long gone, as data transfer speeds on Blu-Rays or other types of discs have been lagging behind for a while now. But on the flip side, as data speeds increase on drives (like the NVMe drives available in the new consoles), the cost of storage increases exponentially. 

This is where the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 offer a terrible experience for people buying the new consoles early to play a lot of games. The Xbox and PS5 only offer 1TB of storage space, but most of the games available take up more than 10% of that.

So if you’re someone like me—who loves having multiple games on the go at any given time—you’re going to be disappointed with the small number of games you can install. Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, for example, takes up 136GB of space on the Xbox Series X, according to the official website, and 133GB on the PlayStation 5.

Another popular game, Halo: The Master Chief Collection, takes up more than 100GB when installed on the Xbox Series X.

And unlike last generation’s consoles, the new Xbox and PlayStation don’t support playing games from external drives, but Microsoft does offer an proprietary expansion drive for $299—if you’re willing to pay the price.

This issue might seem insignificant at first, but considering that Microsoft’s less powerful Xbox Series S only comes with 512GB of storage space, it becomes a pretty significant issue quickly. 

As a Xbox Game Pass user, I had access to hundreds of games at launch but I found myself downloading and uninstalling games in the first 48 hours as I figured out what I actually wanted to have available on demand.

But luckily, if you’re willing to do some digging, Microsoft and Sony have some options available to make the most of your limited storage space.

Install what you play

The only cost-effective option to get around your storage woes at the moment is a new feature introduced by Microsoft and Sony to directly combat the need to efficiently manage your storage: the ability to only install parts of games.

With my experience playing Halo: The Master Chief Collection, for example, I was offered the ability to uninstall portions of the game that I might not be interested in (or even ready) to play.

Halo has a lot of moving parts, from dozens of multiplayer maps to various single-player modes, and these parts can be deleted to make room for other games. If you’re only planning on playing single player modes, you can delete all the multiplayer content to save space for other single player games you might want to play.

You can even prioritize the downloads so you’re free to start playing a specific portion of the game before other components have been installed. This makes it easy for people with slower internet connections to jump right in.

While it might not matter in a few years, being able to save storage space is a big deal while we wait for prices to drop. Besides, the new Xbox and PlayStation 5 don’t have a huge amount of games to play off the bat if you’re looking for a strictly next-generation experience—but more on that next week.