The PlayStation 5 just passed eight months of being on the market and is just about to get its next big update. While the next PS5 firmware update doesn’t yet have a release date, its recent beta has revealed a lot of its new features, which include the ability to upgrade the internal storage, better trophy management, a more streamlined UI, and more.
As shown by The Verge’s Tom Warren on Twitter, the M.2 SSD is at the top of the list of enhancements. M.2 SSDs are quite fast and therefore limit what type of drives can be internally put into the PS5. These SSDs must have PCiE of Gen4 or later and must be between 250 GB and 4 TB. Users have been able to use external drives to store their PS5 games since the April, but users couldn’t directly play those PS5 games from that external drive.
There are also a handful of UI upgrades, too. Games will now more obviously delineate between PS4 and PS5 versions of the same game. While Sony has added warnings and taken some steps to address the issue in the psat, it can be a little difficult to discern the immediate difference between cross-generational games from the home screen. They’ll now have their own platform-specific icons and both versions will appear separately.
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The Library section will also now default to the installed games and carry over the more obvious platform markers. Players can now hide games more easily, too.
The Game Base portion is set to get more functionality. Users can now access party chat and messages from the Game Base section and can even delete parties from there altogether. The Friend List section is now more detailed and shows how many friends are online. It’s also now possible to delete or accept multiple requests at the same time. The control center got some improvements, too, as it can now be customized, will even display a tutorial for new players, and can show players if their friends are in a game they can join.
Trophies have arguably seen the biggest update. Many criticized how trophies are displayed as its horizontal layout makes it difficult to see many trophies at a time and obscures the unlock conditions. When the update drops, the menu will automatically sort them horizontally like the PS4 (and, technically, the Vita and PS3). Players can also pin up to five trophies on the command center so they can easily check what they need to do without going through too many menus. These can even be pinned to the side of the screen during gameplay.
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Saved media clips now have more length options as the current ones are 15 seconds, 30 seconds, five minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, and a full session. While more fonts will be in the Media Gallery, the bigger addition is the ability to disable the notification that pops up when taking a screen shot. This would often pop up in screen shots if players took many in quick succession. Broadcasts will also have separate audio settings for party and mic audio.
There are also a whole host of upgrades to the 3D audio and users can now change EQ settings in the command center, have 3D audio for speakers, and more. While this is a long list of upgrades, it’s possible that the final firmware release will not have every feature here as well as more not listed here.
