With its new patent, Sony wants to make your PS5 games look like… DVDs!

Known for solo exclusives with rich storytelling, Sony intends to offer a new way to browse them on PS5.

The Japanese firm has thus published a patent simply called “display of content with launch of gameplay” (or “ content streaming with gameplay launch “) in the language of Shakespeare. Roughly speaking, this would make it possible to relaunch a single-player game affected by this functionality from a specific point, provided that you go through the streaming of the game in question.

Previously, in the PS5 game of your choice…

In most cases, unless you have enough save slots, returning to a high point in a given game inevitably requires restarting it from the start. Very few titles offer to revisit a particular passage, one of the most recent examples in this area being Detroit Becomes Human.

With a majority of Sony’s flagship exclusives being single-player games with a certain emphasis on storytelling, it seems that the Japanese giant intends to generalize such a practice on PS5. In any case, this is what we can take away from his latest patent.

As indicated in the title, the functionality advanced by said patent proposes to divide a given game into chapters to which we can return at any time, a bit like a DVD or Blu-Ray in the case of a film. If the prospect appears interesting, its implementation remains rather nebulous for the moment.

A series of chapters in ideas?

To access this feature, you will need to have completed the game at least once. This will make it possible, according to the patent, to create sequences of data which will be used to divide the game into different chapters, or “ trigger points » in the verbiage of the Sony document.

From there, “ the gameplay can be launched by the user based on an identified sequence of game data associated with a key point “. However, this would involve streaming the game, and would therefore not necessarily require playing the game or even launching it. It would indeed be possible to use this functionality to simply rewatch a cutscene or see us play a given passage of the game. Implementing such a functionality would, however, require additional work on the part of the developers, unless Sony finds a solution by exploiting the console system.

Since we are talking about streaming, we are thinking in particular of the PlayStation Portal, the operation of which is exclusively centered on this process. This could be another selling point for Sony, since this device is entirely dependent on a PS5. That being said, even if the patent raises interesting points, it often happens that the Japanese firm never exploits such inventions. The future will tell us whether the same fate is reserved for this one or not.

Source : WIPO