Sony is offering PS5 trials for Death Stranding: Director’s Cut and Sackboy: A Big Adventure. Unfortunately, there’s a major problem.
Trials for the PlayStation 3 were quite common. However, by the time the PlayStation 4 era arrived, trials became far less frequent. So, when trials for the two games in question were announced over the weekend, the news was welcomed by PlayStation gamers.
The trials would give you free access for a limited time. For Death Stranding: Director’s Cut, the trial would last six hours. Whereas Sackboy: A Big Adventure (on PS5) would offer five hours.
When I saw this news late Saturday night, I thought “great,” I can finally see if Sackboy: A Big Adventure was for me. After all, this looks like a fun co-op platformer that both I and my son would enjoy playing together.
The countdown begins straight away
Before going to bed, I started the download for the Sackboy: A Big Adventure trial so that I and my son could play the game in the morning. Upon waking up, I checked to see if the game had fully downloaded. Thankfully, it had. Sadly, we could not access the game.
The reason for this is that the trial time counts down the moment the game begins to download on your PS5. As a result, when I tried to play Sackboy, my trial time had expired. That sucked.
I can understand to some degree why Sony implemented this restriction. However, while it would have only taken a couple of hours to download Sackboy, it might take longer for others. Perhaps even longer than the set limited time.
It’s a race against time!
Even if some downloaded the trial during the day, depending on the download speeds, they still might not get to play the trial. For reference, Sackboy: A Big Adventure has a download size of just over 31GB. Death Stranding: Director’s Cut is over double that size at just under 69GB.
Sure, I could have played the trial on an additional account on my console. But if my son and I enjoyed the game, we would have liked our progress/trophies to carry over if I had bought the full game.
While I appreciate that trials are becoming a thing on PlayStation 5, in my opinion, Sony really needs to fix how the trial time counts down. Offering 1-3 hours from the moment you start playing the game could be a good compromise.
Please keep in mind
If you want to play the trials of Death Stranding: Director’s Cut and Sackboy: A Big Adventure on PS5, please keep in mind that the time begins the moment you hit download. The trials will only be available until midnight on October 28th, and are only available once per account. Furthermore, the trials are only available in Europe.
What are your thoughts on how Sony has implemented the free PS5 trials? Let us know across our social media channels.
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Featured Image Credit: Sony