This post has not been edited by the GamesBeat staff. Opinions by GamesBeat community writers do not necessarily reflect those of the staff.
The
I look at my PlayStation 4 with a measure of perplexed disdain. In February, I was as excited as anyone to see Mark Cerny outline the future of PlayStation and the new focus that Sony had as a video game company. Then came the DRM scare and the unbelievably exciting E3 press conference where Jack Tretton promised that I could trade my games with my friends without having to connect online, followed soon after by Andy House announcing the $399 price point. I’ll admit to drinking the Kool-Aid and feeling the “hype” of the next generation and the PlayStation 4.
Well, now that I have the machine in my hands, I’ve come to realize that it is the games that matter. I look at three big games that I have in my hands and realized that as much as gaming has changed, it has very much stayed the same.
The console may be new, but the games remain the same. I am still the faceless, generic soldier pointing my cursor at AI targets and pulling the trigger. Except now I’m doing it on a DualShock 4 instead of an Xbox 360 controller. I won’t beat a dead horse, but we’ve all seen the reviews of each of those games and how their single player campaigns are anything but new or indicative of the possibilities of the “next generation”.
I don’t really blame game publishers for wanting to play it safe, especially in light of the seeming instability of having two major consoles launch within a week of each other, but I can’t help but be a little disappointed that the most interesting experience I will have in recent months is with the quaint, and perhaps unfairly maligned, Beyond Two Souls. Sure, both the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 will push more pixels and deliver better looking graphics, but all of that technology has gone into polishing up the same old games that I’ve already played and not into making new experiences that will surprise me.
At the PlayStation All Access event, Shuhei Yoshida announced that all of their internal studios are working on games for the PlayStation 4. It’s my hope that as the details of these games are made public, the promise of the PlayStation 4 will be fulfilled and I’ll have games to play that are truly “next generation”. As it stands, I will have to make do with pulling the left trigger to aim and the right trigger to shoot.