Roughly 5 million PS5 consoles have hit consumer’s homes after a slow rollout and high-remand holiday season. To this day, some people are still having trouble getting their hands on Sony’s new console for availability and financial reasons.
If that sounds like you and you’re feeling salty over having to sit with your old PS4 for a few months longer, don’t fret. As we’re sure you know, the PS4 is an excellent console and one you can renew your love affair with by leveraging a few PS4 tips and tricks.
Curious to know what those tips and tricks are? If so, keep reading to take in some low-hanging things you can do to get the most out of the console that has brought you so much joy over the years.
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Sweep Your Database
Like any computer, when you use your PS4 for years, it’ll eventually start to exhibit some performance problems. With a regular computer, you might clean up files, repair your computer’s registry, or reinstall a fresh copy of your OS.
It’s a little bit less clear what you can do with your PS4 to give it a tune-up.
What we will say is that the PS4 has a great option where if you boot into safe mode, you can click a database restore button which will safely sweep up any junk that has been added to your machine’s memory/hard-drive that’s taking up space.
If you do a database restore once per year, you’ll notice your machine will work a lot more nimbly
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Try Shareplay
Your friend on PS4 is playing an awesome co-op game you don’t have. You’re feeling left out…
Enter Shareplay!
Shareplay is an amazing perk that accompanies a PSPlus membership. It allows gamers to hop into their friend’s games for 60-minute play sessions without owning a copy of the game themselves.
That creates conditions where you can sample titles to see if you like them enough to buy them. And hey, even if you don’t, you’ll at least get to share a few quality gamer moments with one of your buddies.
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Get Custom With Buttons
A game with a bad controller scheme can overshadow great storylines, awesome action, and everything else. Fortunately, Sony allows you to remap buttons across all of its titles to customize your experience.
You can find button remapping in your console’s settings window while you’re in-game. From there, you can let your PS4 know which buttons you’d like to do what.
Controller schemes are saved on your console so you’ll only have to do this one time!
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Replace Your Hard-Drive
We’ve all been in that place where we thought the amount of hard-drive space we invested in when we bought a device would be enough to support our use of it. Then, we run out of storage.
While that can spell needing to replace your device with some electronics, with your PS4, you can actually buy a larger hard-drive that fits your console’s case, open your console up, and easily replace your old hard-drive with a new, larger one!
Before you swap drives, back up your PS4 data to an external USB drive, clone that USB drive to your new, more spacious hard-drive, pop it in your machine and you should be good to go!
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Dim Your Remote
We love the PS4’s controllers. We don’t love the fact that its LED lights can get annoying after a while.
Knowing that different people would have different levels of tolerance for lights, fortunately, Sony created an option in your console’s settings that enables you to dim your controller.
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Use Cloud Saves
If you don’t have cloud saves enabled on your PS4, you’re taking your gaming life into your hands. All it takes is one console drop for you to have to start from square one in every title you’ve ever played.
By turning on cloud saves, all of your in-game progress will get stored on Sony’s servers. After that’s done, any time you log into your account, your save files will automatically sync with your console enabling you to always keep your progress no matter what machine you’re playing on.
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Play on the Go
While not the most practical of PS4 tips and tricks, you may find it handy to stream your PS4’s content to other devices in your house. For example, you can download the PlayStation Play app on your smart TV in another room and could then play your games as if your PS4 was plugged into it without needing to hard-wire your console into the screen.
The same is true for playing games on your laptop or any other device you can download the Play app onto!
Have fun experimenting with all the different places in your house you can enjoy your favorite titles and if you’re having connectivity issues, check out this guide that can help you tune-up your internet settings.
We Hope Our PS4 Tips and Tricks Allow You to Play Better
As gamers, we’re always looking for ways to enrich our relationship with the games we love so much. We’re hopeful that the PS4 tips and tricks we’ve shared with you will enable you to do just that!
What’s even better is that our tips just scratch the surface of all the incredible things you can do to enjoy more enriching console experiences.
To take in more insight, explore the web for additional ps4 for beginners tips, your PS4 owner’s guide, or of course, more of the newest content on our blog.
