10 Features That Will Define Next-Gen Gaming

4. Quick-Launch Gets You Into Games Faster Than Ever

We're all busy people, and so nothing as a gamer is quite as frustrating as games taking their sweet time getting going, either by way of excessive, infuriating loading times, large game updates out of nowhere, or if you're a PC player, driver and compatibility issues.

But if the current generation prided itself on introducing brilliant suspend-resume features across all three platforms, the next generation may become fixed on getting as close to instant-launch gaming as possible.

Google's Stadia demo showed players loading into Assassin's Creed: Odyssey in less than 5 seconds - in a perfect network environment, of course - while Digital Foundry's comparison of loading times between Stadia and Xbox One X saw Stadia loading Odyssey in just 25% of the time it took Microsoft's console.

It's also well-documented that Sony has been pursuing patents related to quick-launch software, which would allow an unprecedented fast-boot for native hardware, though of course, a patent is far from confirmation that the PS5 will definitely adopt this tech.

In our mile-a-minute world where people have more entertainment options than ever, gaming which cuts down on opening preambles will be hugely valuable, and expect this to be a common feature across PS5, Xbox Two (?) and Stadia.