Those lucky enough to have got their hands on a PlayStation 5 despite the recent shortages can look forward to another large download in the near future, as Sony gears up for the release of the console’s first major update tomorrow, as announced on the PlayStation Blog.
With the first PS5 update you’ll now be able to store PS5 games on external storage, but you won’t be able to play them from there. Copying games from a USB SSD sure beats deleting them and re-downloading, or reinstalling from a ‘disk’ (whatever one of those is) if you’re short of space on the internal SSD, but it’s not a perfect solution.
Elsewhere, there are some changes to social features and personalization options. The popup Game Base menu that covers parties and chat has been improved, you can hide titles you’re ashamed to own in your game library, and trophies are now handled better with (finally!) the ability to see a quick summary of your trophy stats. The PlayStation smartphone app is also getting some love, with added abilities including console storage management and notifications of when your friends are online.
While there’s quite a lot baked in to this update, it’s more notable for what it doesn’t contain: there’s still no way to expand the internal storage of the monolith, and Sony maintains it’s still ‘working on this feature’. For those of us used to whacking an M2 drive into any spare slot and it working first time, this seems like an unnecessarily drawn-out process, especially as Microsoft’s partnership with Seagate has seen expandable storage modules for the Xbox Series consoles become readily available.
