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Here's where the creator's intent comes in. The PS5 is not merely sanding off rough edges, nor is it agnostic to how game development works, and the orthodoxies and hierarchies that have, over time, hardened into plain fact. It is, in some ways, a corrective, meant to nudge how studios work.PlayStation 5 release: The PS5 aims to deliver a whole new feel for games - Washington Post
"There's a pecking order within the game teams. The graphics folks get the lion's share of the hardware resources and the audio team has to struggle to get much anything at all," says Cerny. Once, while briefing a developer on the PS5′s high performance audio processor, he says he was told, "Great, we'll use that unit for AI." During one of his studio tours, Cerny recalled meeting 120 workers -- none of whom worked in audio.
"It isn't as if the developers didn't know I wanted to talk audio. In fact, I'd made it fairly explicit. It's that audio is somehow viewed as being auxiliary to the rest of the game, when it's absolutely at the center," says Cerny. "During game development it's pretty typical to make a first playable demo that over-indexes on the graphics -- the graphics might be at near-publishable quality -- but have audio that's just placeholder."
3-D audio, which, as the name implies, positions audio in space around the player, is a passion of Cerny's. "Game audio is certainly functional," he says. "I wanted it to be amazing." To develop it, he enlisted the work of international experts across Tokyo, San Mateo and London. ("Trust me when I tell you that makes it rather hard to schedule a teleconference," said Cerny). Now, because audio is so crucial to immersion (and is thereby important to Cerny) the PS5 boasts impressive new audio capabilities. And in the meantime, the old way of doing things -- in this case, sidelining audio engineers -- is quietly being nudged.
"Returnal" is a third person shooter about a space pilot stuck in a time loop.
"Returnal" is a third person shooter about a space pilot stuck in a time loop. (Sony Interactive Entertainment)
"The audio side is now more of a full team blending a wide range of expertise, including level and enemy design," said Harry Krueger, game director on "Returnal," a third person shooter about a space pilot stuck in a time loop. It's also a horror game, where audio really matters in creating the proper tension for players. "Each sound source is recorded in relation to how a real person would hear the sound actually coming from each direction. … It's similar to the way we have always done things, but now we simply record things many times from many directions, apply more nuanced layers, and then of course spend even more time tweaking things in the final product."
The same holds for developers implementing haptic feedback in the controller, which replaces rumble to offer a more tactile play experience.
"Rumble always used to be something we would put in at the end. It was like, 'Oh we need to put the rumble in because there's camera shake.' Haptics is completely different," said Gavin Moore, creative director of the "Demon's Souls" PS5 remake. "It's something that you have to think about from the start because it works with the visual and the audio."