I'm close to finishing The Quarry, and despite how much I enjoy the multiple options leading to different scenarios, its nowhere close to the complexity of Heavy Rain or Detroit Become Human.

I like how most of the QTE is streamlined but its very on rails for a good chunk of the story. The exploration feels like a step down from Until Dawn with how heavily guided you are in this game. I find the characters, and some of the dialogue, to be very cheesy, but it has its charms. The visuals I find to be very inconsistent but some very detailed character models.

Overall I had a fun time with it, but I'm very into the "choose your own adventure" experience, which this game scratches just enough of.

Its likely that there might be slowdowns for some parts of the game (like special effects) or long loading screens.

Just greed - they wanted to maximize as much profit.

I guess I'm part of the problem lol - majority of my game library is digital lol

Oh yeah I'm fully expecting long loading screens. Basically the big question will be how will rift jumps work on an HDD? Which now that I think about it, I wonder if Nixxes was able to circumvent the lack of an SSD by instead of loading the worlds you pull yourself into in real time, they use the inevitable long loading times to load every world you'll be accessing in that level so that there isn't any hiccups in gameplay.

Idk, I'm just talking out loud on that one lol. I'm anxious to find out soon though! 

There were games in the past that basically done it for some quick moving, loaded the level and some other levels that it could be connected all into the RAM or whatever to give you the impression of fast travel but you paid that on some other big loads

Japan loves physical. Why there are so many physical releases there that are digital in the west.

So this may be how Nixxes is able to get R&C Rift Apart working on an HDD. I always thought you needed an NVMe drive to get DirectStorage to work, but I guess further enhancements have been made that don't require it.

Nixxes elaborated a bit further, “To enable quick loading and instant transition between dimensions, the game needs to be able to load assets quickly. DirectStorage ensures quick loading times and GPU decompression is used at high graphics settings to stream assets in the background while playing. Traditionally, this decompression is handled by the CPU, but at a certain point there is an advantage to letting the GPU handle this, as this enables a higher bandwidth for streaming assets from storage to the graphics card. We use this to quickly load high-quality textures and environments with a high level of detail.”

Aren't Rift Apart's PC requirements more lenient than recent PS ports too?  

I'm curious if people on HDDs are going to have particularly low quality textures and models, so there's that much less data to transfer.

I would say yes, but, the PC requirements display has since been deleted. So.....there may be a change or two.

It appears that my PS5 had no issues that needed to be repaired, which is frustrating for all the hassle and losing some data from the internal drive (some games and capture data). It must be the M2 SSD that's the issue. I plan on returning my SSD if I can and getting a bigger HDD. The internal SSD and a 2 TB HDD Is not enough for me. I'd like to get a 4 or 5 TB HDD and keep the 2 TB HDD as a spare since the PS5 can't use 2 HDDs at once (yet another annoyance).
As frustrating as this all is, the first months of the PS5 with no extra SSD support and no cold storage of PS5 games on HDD seems awful. So, I'm glad I didn't have one then.