The first Tanker section of Metal Gear Solid 2 was a breathtaking experience. The way objects seemed to behave like real ones, possessing physics, and reacting to your bullets was mind-blowing. This level came in the form of a demo, shipped with Zone of the Enders, which along with The Bouncer and Onimusha, was a first-year release for the PS2.
The PlayStation 2 had an incredible run of early games and I remember key moments from trailers and images at the time. The way light filtered through the trees in Trial Mountain on Gran Turismo 3. The astonishing cutscenes in Final Fantasy 10. The slowly dawning realization that GTA3 was so free, like a hilarious playground, before open worlds became a common thing.
All these games arrived within a year of the PS2’s launch in Europe and ushered in a new era of hype. Everything seemed possible with all those polygons and the ‘Emotion Engine’. The leap from the PS1 to its successor felt like a promise for great new things.
Cut to March 2022, 16 months after the launch of the PS5, and it feels like Sony’s powerful next-gen console is still waiting to take off, ready to deliver us properly into what should be the current gen. But beyond a tiny handful of PS5 exclusives – Returnal, Demon’s Souls, Ratchet & Clank – it feels like the PS5 is a glorified SSD, sitting atop a PS4 Pro.
I want that emotional experience again. You know the one. That feeling of everything changing forever. Or, at the least, a run of exclusives that definitively cuts ties to the last gen and gets everyone talking about the possibilities; maybe a game that points the way to the future.
With the PS3, we saw the likes of MGS4 and Uncharted drop within its first year or so. But that generation saw transformative cross-platform games in the likes of BioShock and Modern Warfare. But the PS3 had hype that Sony couldn’t quite deliver. All that talk about the powers of the CELL processor was way too much and it took a while for the PS3 to find its footing. It didn’t help that the PS3’s hardware was overly complex and uninviting for third-party developers, meaning the PS3 version of a game was almost always inferior to the Xbox 360’s. Without the narrative and technical excellence of Naughty Dog, in the Uncharted sequels and The Last of Us, I’m not sure the PS3 would have held up. But those games do exist and The Last of Us created hype like few games have, even if it came at the very end of the console’s lifespan. The PS3 delivered on the hype right before the curtain call came.
Now that we’ve seen tentpole releases in the form of Horizon Forbidden West and Gran Turismo 7 on the PS5, I can’t help but be a little disappointed. Sure, Elden Ring has stolen HFW’s thunder, but it’s more than that. Let me just announce that I am a graphics nerd and I devour Digital Foundry’s videos on graphics performance. It’s a key part of why I love PlayStation and why I haven’t owned a Nintendo console since the SNES. I know I’m supposed to be an objective critic and favour art style over raw graphics performance but I can’t help but be a fan and a tech geek. And nothing on the PS5 has truly impressed yet.
The PS4 and PS4 Pro look like they’re doing a very good impression of a PS5. Watching those comparison videos between the PS4 and PS5 versions of Horizon Forbidden West and GT7, which should be key showcases for the new-gen console, and the differences are small overall. We’re talking a few bits more of foliage, some better reflections in replays, and clearer rocks in the distance. None of it compares to the ‘wow factor’ of seeing a tanker swaying in a storm or Yuna dancing on water or the flames on the black water before the descent to Rapture.
Have we approached the point of diminishing returns such that the PS5 is just a faster-loading and better 4K outputter than the PS4 Pro? Maybe I’m being harsh. We are still quite early in the console’s lifecycle and games nowadays just take up so many resources and time to produce. We don’t know what Naughty Dog has up its sleeve or what titles three or four years down the line will herald.
But beyond simple graphical performance, I’d love to see something transformative again. It’s just nearly impossible to imagine it. The previous gens saw paradigm shifts with open-world games and soaring narrative ambition that was executed with aplomb. Now we just seem to have sequels going bigger but not necessarily better. One yearns for something new, something exclusive. The PS5 is equipped to do this. Astro’s Playroom remains one of the highlights of what the PS5 is capable of, with its 3D Audio and the abilities of the DualSense, but it was a pack-in launch game.
Maybe it’s nostalgia, which can be a corrosive emotion. And I suspect that nothing will ever recapture the magic and astonishment of loading up Tekken Tag Tournament and SSX on the PS2 in my first month of owning one. The PS3 didn’t reach such heights early on, but it held up eventually. But in the early years of the PS4 we can already see that remasters are the ones that are generating the hype: Black Flag and GTA5, with their improvements across the board. I can’t be the only one to feel a little depressed to think that people will be excited about GTA5 on the PS6? Skyrim in 32K for the PS7? Red Dead Redemption 2, finally revamped, for the PS8?
This is a message to Sony. Please show me something original and ground-breaking again, on PlayStation. The PS5 is waiting to take off. I can even occasionally hear its fans telling me this.
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