A month before the release of the PlayStation 5, Sony released a video showcasing the new “user experience” for the console. It was, as you might expect, slick and well crafted. Dozens of new features and changes were designed to “be completely centred around you”.
New user interfaces are an odd aspect of a new console’s release. They don’t make or break its success – that’s primarily down to the games, raw horsepower, price and where your friends are playing.
But nonetheless, they are an essential component to every console. It’s a persistent part of the experience of gaming. You have to look at it every time you boot your console up. While we tend to ignore that it’s there when it works well, a bad interface can ruin a gaming session. The PlayStation 3 user interface, for example, became insufferably slow by the end of its life. You still have to wait a good two minutes for the PlayStation Store to load there.
Microsoft took the unusual step of not developing a bespoke user interface for its new generation of consoles, instead opting to develop a cross-generation interface that builds on the Xbox One interface. That only leaves the PS5 with a completely new interface for this generation.
It’s been over eight months since the release of the PS5, which has been enough time for Sony to iron out the creases in the operating system, and for players to get adjusted to the new experience.
So, I think it’s also the perfect time to assess just how useful the advertised features have been.
Look and feel
The PlayStation 4’s interface was already quite fast, but slowed down when a game was running, likely because the mechanical hard-drive was fully utilised. With its super-fast SSD, PS5 has no such problem. Everything loads in a snap, even when a game is running in the background.