“Playable” and “good experience” don’t necessarily mean the same thing though. Those rift transitions in R&C are rough on anything less than a decent NVMe SSD. Though there may be some room for improvement, as even high end NVMe drives struggle to handle these transitions as gracefully as the PS5.

Whether or not playing off an HDD is truly a dealbreaker though depends on where in gameplay the storage speed bottleneck causes problems. For Rift Apart, it’s mostly just an issue with these rift transitions, and the gameplay effectively pauses while it waits for them. For an open world game it could be more problematic (i.e. pervasive traversal stutter during combat.)