So... What Exactly ARE the PS3 Limitations

[Kosmos992k]

nope, it was clearly a hardware problem of the PS3. on PS3 i had the slow retainer summoning and npcs, and i was unable to move out of some aoes. one day later, on the PS4, same internet, same servers, same everything else, i had zero problems, retainers were there in the instant i hit the bell, npcs too, and i could dodge all the aoe markers easily.

and yeah, i thought it was horrible - especially the aoe-dodging part. that's why i got my PS4 asap.

I've never seen the kind of slow retainer summoning or NPC reaction you're talking about when playing on PS3. When I had the PS3 version there were some fights where the polling latency of the game made dodging AoEs tricky, any marginal delays on PS3 will have made that a little worse, but switching to PS4 did not alter the delays for me. Even the notorious titan HM was not really any more of an issue on PS3 as it was on PS4. I got my PS4 and upgraded to the PS4 client as soon as SE had it available, even running the Beta for a while as a comparison with the two side by side.

Clearly some people's experience may vary, my PS3 has no SSD, we're on wired network connections and cable Internet. The biggest issue I've seen anyone encountering with AoE dodging is playing over wifi because of the inherent additional network lag induced by the use of wireless networking. Plugging the console into the router fixed that at a stroke.

I think you're indulging in a case of inverse rose tinted glasses here.

One thought that occurs is that when you interact with NPCs or open interfaces such as the retainer, the game is loading local files, if your HDD was getting towards the full end of the spectrum you may have had file fragmentation issues. That happened to me on a number of PS3 games until I got a newer, much larger HDD and re-loaded every game from scratch, resulting in much cleaner installs and almost no fragmentation. Just like on a PC, fragmentation is a problem, and don't let anyone tell you that consoles are unaffected by that.