Sometimes I feel like people think there's some kind of cross-gen playbook. I've been a developer for years (not in the gaming industry). The only real limitations are usually time and budget. Everything else is discovered using what is usually some kind of "art of the possible" design sessions. People can get really creative when the vision of the product is on the line.
So the PS4 version could have a cutscene where you get on your mount to hide the load. PS5 could just have you jumping on it and going. That handwaves a bunch of design work on the back end, but the PS5 seems well suited to weaving it together seamlessly.
I getcha, and that would be a decent solution. I just think it's a bit naive of people to assume that the crossgen version of a game is the version we still would have gotten if it had been exclusive to the more powerful hardware (outside of spinoff/midquel type games like Miles Morales)
That's a whole lot of assuming that you are doing though. We don't know what Guerilla's design goals and motivations are so we can't start ascribing things that we want to to see in the sequel and then getting upset when we don't get them and blame it on cross-gen. That's unfair to the devs.
That's fair, I was just using a convenient example since that's an idea that gets tossed around a lot. It doesn't really matter what the specific mechanic or design choice is, the overall point is just that crossgen absolutely does hinder the extent of the innovations that devs can make