I'm sure that was the sum of it parts but you have to admit that instantly zipping through completely different levels is something we hadn't quite seen before and probably wouldn't be possible without the SSD tech (not just the SSD).

There were loads of cross gen and multiplatform games at the ps5 event but we've already seen glimpses of what developers can do with the ps5 exclusives. Ratchet & Clank showed a pretty cool implementation and we'll probably see more stuff like that in other games. I'm thinking stuff like we're seeing in movies where the main character gets a flashback and you're instantly in a completely different environment, or things like time-travel happening in real-time. HZD 2 seemed to be using it in a different way and is aiming for loads more variation in its level design with sick looking underwater, outdoor and indoor environments. It also seems to have some pretty awesome wind and weather effects. Spider man 2 also seems to have a lot denser world and a much greater sense of speed. And Demon Souls seems to be doing the original cgi intro in real time. 

All in all it was pretty impressive stuff. Bit of a shame that the game play clips were so short. But I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot more of those games leading up to the ps5 launch.

Games used to be tied to clockrate on the PC for the longest time for a games internal tickrate. (Hence why PC's introduced a Turbo-button)
So consequently when you dropped in a new CPU, the games speed would increase at the same rate.

Zipping around levels is entirely possible to do at that speed on even an Xbox 360 without an SSD. - You just need that working set data entirely in Ram... Which means you will need to make cutbacks to asset quality to ensure all the required data is available on demand in working memory.
So yes, it was entirely possible to achieve on older hardware.

Think of it this way... On older consoles you needed to preload "possible" data 30 seconds ahead of time, we saw this in games like Metroid Prime on the Gamecube where the game would start preloading the new level area as soon as you started to approach the door to a new area and unload that data if you started to back away.

With the SSD we only need to preload data a couple of seconds ahead of time, which means that we don't need to start preloading that level until we hit the "open door" button.
What that ultimately means is that we don't need to reserve a chunk of the working memory for future level areas, we can use more memory for the current area improving overall visuals. - But we will still need to preload data ahead of time, the SSD is only 5.5GB/s, it's still a limitation.

In short, it's making more efficient use of the limited 16GB of Ram, it doesn't solve all of our I/O limitations and ills.

As for the expediency of traveling through landscapes, many racing games have been able to do it for years, they just keep less assets in memory in order to pull it off, there have been other city-scape games where you have traversed over city areas without that "hitching" seen in the Spiderman demo. GTA 5?

Plus loading and streaming data is not just attributed to storage capabilities either, the CPU needs to do allot of heavy lifting in order to handle things like draw calls, procedural generation, decompression/unpacking, scripting and so forth. Allot goes into it, more than people realize.

The difference this time around is that, although the SSD is still very much a hard physical limitation as it's only 5.5GB/s verses the 448GB/s of Ram bandwidth, it's significantly alleviated as it's leaps and bounds ahead of mechanical disks... And that means big things for developers.

My issue is that people aren't focusing on the other generational defining hardware characteristics of the next-gen consoles like the very impressive memory bandwidth, the ray tracing cores, the very capable Ryzen processors and so much more which will hopefully result in far more interactivity and degrees of simulation that just wasn't possible on older devices.

The good thing is... Usually when a company makes an audacious claim, the internet will react with great hilarity and turn it into a running meme, so that does keep some of the more ludicrous claims in check.

As for bandwidth/latency and cloud processing, not all tasks need to be done in just 1-2ms or require 1MB/s of bandwidth, some tasks like doing weather simulation calculations can occur 100-200ms late and require just kb/s of bandwidth.

It's great for some tasks, but not everything, which is why the "Power of the Cloud" turned into a running joke.

But the compute power of a server farm cannot be understated, we are often talking super computer levels of computational capability on demand, it's just it's limited in how it can be applied to games being rendered locally on a console or PC... And ultimately that is where the issue lays.

Pretty sure this would not be possible on 360 lol, at least not without ruining the whole effect.

Obviously there's more to the ps5 than just the SSD, but we saw like 3 games where inter-dimensional travel seemed to be a core gameplay mechanic. Ratchet & Clank, Returnal and Dead Loop. My guess is that's because the developers went out of their way to use the SSD as some kind of tech-demo. If that'll make the gameplay better is another matter, but I definitely believe SSD will end up being the biggest leap compared to current gen.

With early games, developers are typically just testing the water when it comes to new tech, but hopefully it'll change the sense scale and immersion of games in more meaningful ways later on.   

I don`t remember any game with this smooth of transition from a world to the other.

Heck on PS3 GT5 and GT6 to reload a race that you were already playing took a good 30s or more, and fighters on PS4 still in some cases take several seconds and that is same small scenario where you actually only need to reset health bar, special bar, timer and fighters positions.

Yeah it really looks like a game changer to me. Sure, maybe warping through levels doesn't make sense for most games, but the implementations can totally change the way we're used to experiencing games. IMO that will have much more impact that just some Ray Tracing reflections here and there.

Take Outer Worlds for example. It's not a bad game but you're supposed to feel like you flying a space ship, explore planets and are on some epic adventure. However you just get a loading screen when you fly to a different planet, then another one once you leave the ship and again a loading screen when you go into a building. It totally breaks the immersion, because the level design had to be cut in tiny hubs. But if it would be more like No Man's Sky with seamless transitions between landing on planets, and visiting amazingly detailed indoor environments, it would be something else.

There are rumours that ND's second team is doing a new sci-fi ip and it totally makes sense as that sounds like the perfect game to showcase the ps5 hardware. 

Yep world warping is just one of the possibilities of the fast I/O.

We could have something like a char growing 100x or even 1000x and the landscape change seamlesly. Same for microscopic. Also you could have FFXV car really working.

Yup, maybe we'll get an Ant-man game, that would be awesome! It's pretty exciting stuff and can't wait to see what developers will come up with.

Shifting worlds was done this gen in Titanfall 2 with the time device. Also Quantum Break with time. Among others across different gens. Hell on PSone you could shift worlds in Soul Reaver. Ratchet looked great but the world warping looked like an on rails sequence with little to no control over what was happening, basically a scripted sequence. I don’t see PC or XSX having any trouble running a sequence like that.

I didn’t notice any dimension jumping in Returnal or Deathloop. Just time mechanics and rewind when you die. Nothing various games didn’t do this gen, just now has better graphics. Super Time Force and Superhot come to mind, among others.

True, but that was on a much smaller scale. No way you can swap that many assets on the fly like we saw with Ratchet & Clank on current gen consoles. It might not sound like a big deal with some of these early games, but rich, seamless worlds is a pretty awesome thing to look forward to. 

Go back and look the example you gave on Soul Reaver.

It was a very simple distortion of polygon and change of color palette. It wasn`t transporting you to a whole different world in less than 1s.