A reader takes a glass half full look at the year just gone, and argues that the Xbox One and PS4 haven’t been a total disappointment.
Just a quick heads up, I’ve never written anything like this before so I apologise for bad pacing, structure, etc.
There’s been a lot of negativity aimed at the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One throughout last year, due to the small number of big budget games and the supposed lack of games in general. I never like looking at the worst side of things, and as I recently purchased my first next gen console I thought I’d write in about the genuinely good stuff about them.
I know a lot of people would criticise that and say I should have gotten a Wii U instead, but unfortunately I’ve never gotten on with the Nintendo games I’ve played. Which has always saddened me, as all my friends seem to have a great time playing them but I never seem to have the same level of enjoyment.
Anyway, since buying my new console I’ve had an absolutely great time with it. Setting up the console was a quick process that didn’t have me waiting there for more than 10 minutes, and after that I jumped into my first game which was Far Cry 4. Straight away I was able to connect the bundle’s microphone and talk to my friends online. Having owned a PlayStation 3 last gen everyone I knew was on Xbox 360, so I always found it a lonely experience. Now though I just love the fact that I can talk to any of them clearly and with ease.
The speed of the console has also been a factor that I’ve never really appreciated until now, being able to instantly jump back to the home screen and check messages, go to the store, start downloading content – all with the game still running in the background and without lag is truly brilliant. I never imagined being able to multi-task small stuff like this whilst running a game in the background. I would sometimes, on PlayStation 3, have the urge to check the store if a new game had come out or do some other small, trivial task but it would almost always require me to stop playing the game and quit it; which just wasted a lot of time.
I know a lot of people complain about patches, and there was one for Far Cry 4 that automatically started downloading when I put in the disc. But I didn’t sit there starting at the progress bar, I continued on and started the game. I didn’t need to wait for the patch to download, I was able to start the game straight away and start playing. And after a few minutes of playing I was notified that the patch had finished in the background and was ready to install.
It’s small stuff like this that really makes me grateful for how the console makers have really thought about the gamer first. I mean, there were plenty of patches for games on PlayStation 3/Xbox 360 but if you chose to skip those and continue playing without it then you’d be signed out and restricted from all online activities until you downloaded the patch.
With the new ones though I can just have it download in the background and still remain signed-in, but with just the multiplayer portion of the game locked off. I know a lot of people hate the general idea of patches but I just accept it as a compromise for how complicated and intricate game development is these days. I’m not behind releasing games such as Assassin’s Creed Unity and Battlefield 4 in their initial state, which was obviously rushed; but games like Far Cry 4 and GTA V, which work perfectly fine, require a patch to amend one or two small bugs but nothing game-breaking.
That sort of stuff I’m happy to contend with as I know the pay-off is worth it in the end. I didn’t mean to make this letter a rant about patches, I genuinely do think there is a lot of fun to be had with these consoles but anyone who doesn’t own one would think they are just depressing machines rife with problems just from the general attitude towards them since their release.
It’s always rocky in the first year for any console and I’d say look to the PlayStation 3 as an example; the first year and even the second were pretty dire and a lot of people had written the console off as a failure without any merits. But look at it in the past few years, it’s manage to produce top tier games consistently justifying it’s existence. Titles such as Demon’s Souls, the Uncharted trilogy, The Last Of Us, LittleBigPlanet, inFamous, Journey, God Of War, Ratchet & Clank, Resistance, WipEout, PixelJunk, Valkyria Chronicles, Ni No Kuni, Puppeteer, etc.
Though not without their faults have all proven that it was a system worth investing in and with lasting value. The same can be applied to the new consoles, even though we have had some great multiplatform titles so far, that are worth playing on the new consoles as opposed to the old ones.
Examples of this can be seen with Middle-Earth: Shadow Of Mordor’s Nemesis System, which does not have near enough the same amount of depth and variety as the current gen versions. What’s more the game runs a lot worse on a technical level; this can also be applied to the recent Dragon Age: Inquisition and Far Cry 4 as well as other cross-gen titles released this year. They’re not all night and day different like Shadow Of Mordor of course, but there are enough titles with noticeable differences in order to validate buying them on the new consoles.
Looking back this year there seems to be lots of hidden gems and surprises that do make up the sheer number of delays we’ve had; titles such as Dragon Age: Inquisition, Wolfenstein: The New Order, Tales From The Borderlands, Sunset Overdrive, Forza Horizon 2, Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes, Titanfall, inFamous: Second Son, Towerfall, Trials Fusion, Child Of Light, Valiant Hearts, The Binding Of Isaac: Rebirth, Plants Vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare, Oddworld: New ‘N’ Tasty, Diablo III, Shadow Of Mordor, Alien Isolation, etc.
It just seems like with the majority of planned triple-A releases being delayed from this year, and the disappointment from the highly anticipated ones, it’s led a lot of titles just being easily dismissed and a lot of the distaste being shifted towards the new consoles. I’m not saying they’re entirely perfect, they do have their fair share of problems but nothing major that should have people feeling sorry for anyone that owns one.
These titles won’t appeal to everyone but there is, without a doubt, something for everyone which should make their purchase a happy decision. I apologise for turning this into a bit of a rant but it had just become a staple lately for there to almost always be some negative news concerning the new machines and their software.
In conclusion, I’d like to wish many happy hours of gaming to everyone and hope everyone finds plenty of reasons to continue gaming in this day and age, and fewer to make them turn away. If anyone would be kind enough to add me I’d love to have a few GC players to play online with.
By reader moham-24 (PSN ID) Add me!
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