“We can change ‘should I start playing’ to ‘which part should I start playing?'”
– An internal PlayStation presentation aims to remove some of the friction from single player games.
Top secret pitch documents obtained by the folks at Vice Games seem to show that PlayStation built PS5 features like ‘Activities’ to address common concerns with single player experiences.
According to Sony’s data at the time, players were spending more time in offline play than online play, but there were still a number of friction points that could easily detract from the single player experience.
The slide deck passed along to Vice Games from an unnamed developer shows that Sony spoke with at least 3,000 players to determine what factors influenced how they play single player games.
Those concerns, which included common worries like not knowing how much time an open-world game session requires or difficulty tracking down concise guides while playing, helped Sony build the basis for some of the PlayStation 5’s quick menu features like its built-in guides or the ability to select an in-game challenge and teleport to its starting area.
Check out the full story on Vice for a look at some of these features in action, and other insights gleaned from Sony’s single player-focused slides.