What a great game! I'm about 1,5 hours in and I'm captivated. Not an easy game to put down for sure. Well it's true what everyone is saying, it's really extraordinary. Some of the best graphics I've seen real-time. I get why people compare it to Pixar. It's obvious we are dealing with expert devs here, they know how to get their point across.
The SSD is certainly being exploited here, but maybe not to the extend that most believe? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's techically impossible, but after checking out some things, It's more likely that some worlds are already resident in memory rather than loaded in on the fly. (some places are though, like the regular rifts) But the ones you open with L1 and you can walk back and forth and even the ones you smash to get to the alternating universe are probably already resident in RAM. I say "probably" because with the theoretical bandwith it's not impossible to acheive. But what I DO know is that we uasually take the easier path that than the hard one as long as the end result is the same.
I broke all the boxes right next to a dimension crystal to check this out. The premise being it's easier to flush all and load an entire new world with it's default "settings" (i.e. breakable objects placements etc.) But when spawning back again the boxes was still destroid. This dosen't PROVE anything mind you, they could still keep track of every breakable thing you did and restore it when you shifted back again. But this comes again back to my earlier statement that why "complicate things" if you "don't have to". Either Insomniac are GODS (wich they really are anyways) or we are still being "tricked" by smart programming as per usual;-)
Gripes: Insomniac should unlock the freecam in camera mode for cutscenes. We know it's real-time anyways since you can turn on or off the visual effects in the scene.(and changing filters etc)
Just my 5 cents, this is a hellowa game. Congrats Insomniac; The next-get has finally become current-gen!
Edit: With further testing the ammo crates are actually respawning when you change dimmensions.
Edit2: Now I see that energy boxes and a regular box (wich didnt respawn earlier) where respawned when going back to back in the dimensions, so flushing and loadning seems kinda dynamic. Seems like they have a system in place to know when it's most efficient to keep things in memory or flush it and reload.. Impressive.
Seriously guys; I'm seeing every PS5 owner bying this game, you really should. 9,5/10 (so far)