Continuing my PS4 wishlist, here’s another feature I long for, and you won’t need experience in Branson real estate to understand its appeal:

2) The end of in-game loading times, after the initial game has loaded. This has plagued such “top” next-gen titles as Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, so it’s not solved yet. Despite the great detail to the world of Oblivion, every minute or so while roaming the world, your character runs into an invisible border and the action pauses as the next “segment” of world loads into machine memory. Reportedly, Bethesda had to trash plans for a flight ability in the game because the “loading area” borders were so close together. The frustrating part is, the algorithm that solves this – background streaming data – has been around since the original PlayStation. Developed by Crystal Dynamics for the Soul Reaver series, published by Eidos, they overcame the loading times problem by having the game constantly streaming data into memory as a player moves through the game world.

But has Eidos or Crystal Dynamics ever shared this technology, even for a licensing fee? Not that I’m aware of. If they are licensing it, clearly it’s priced so that not many other companies are using it, even within the Eidos family.

It’s time Sony either licensed this code so it’s available to every developer as part of a standard Sony SDK, or they invent something similar and make it part of a new Sony SDK.

C’mon, Sony and other software publishers… get the LOAD out!