quinsanc hibernia freedom
Chanelle Glugla
In this pandemic ravaged year, I've not been able to go to E3 or Gamescom or EGX and try them, so it's been impossible to understand why these new machines were necessary. Sure, the traditional seven-year period was up, but in a generation where games have taken so long to make, did we have to stop at seven? We've had one solitary Rockstar game, and even more prolific studios like Naughty Dog have delivered just a couple of major releases. I thought I'd have played at least one new Ken Levine game on my Xbox One.
I had a recent discussion with a fellow journalist who called 2020 a "great swan song for PS4," referring to major, excellent games like Dreams, Final Fantasy 7, The Last of Us Part 2 and Ghost of Tsushima (with more to follow). But this year didn't feel like a swan song to me. It felt more like a peak. The PS4 was firing past 100 million users, more people were engaged than ever, the games were (and are) still coming... I couldn't understand why now is the time to trade the machine in, or relegate it to the other TV so it can enjoy its retirement as the Netflix delivery system.
And the rhetoric around the launches did little to overcome my scepticism. Xbox was being open with the fact that its 'Series' devices were effectively upgrades to what it's been delivering for a while. Meanwhile, Sony was touting instant loading, 3D audio and haptic feedback, as if these things were revolutions. My Nintendo Switch has fancy rumble tech that nobody uses and games that load pretty much straight away. My parents have a surround sound system. This doesn't seem worthy of a whole new generation.
So now that I've spent a good week with PS5, what's the verdict? The game that I've spent most of my time on is Spider-Man: Miles Morales from Insomniac Games, an excellent follow-up to the equally fantastic Spider-Man on PS4. Built in two years, it's unsurprisingly shorter and very similar to the game that came before in terms of the core experience, but it makes use of all the PS5's new immersive toys -- the audio, the visuals, the fancy rumble technology. In doing so, I can see what the PS5 really brings. It's not revolutionary, but it is another big step along a journey that Sony has been on for some time.
We talk about PS4's 100 million install base as the marker of its success, but there's another one: the performance of its first-party games. Uncharted, The Last of Us, Spider-Man, Horizon: Zero Dawn, God of War, Bloodborne... not only have they all been critically acclaimed masterpieces, but they've sold in numbers that PlayStation's internal teams have never achieved before. Many of them have exceeded ten million sales worldwide.
They're also in contrast to industry trends. As the rest of the business goes all-in with online multiplayer and games-as-a-service, Sony has spent the generation building largely single-player, narrative-driven, blockbuster experiences -- and it has made it work. The firm has really embraced this cinematic identity, the new PlayStation Studios opening sting looking exactly like the sort-of thing you'd get at the start of a movie. In fact, the branding is almost identical to the one used by PlayStation Originals -- the former name of PlayStation Productions -- before the largely forgotten Ratchet & Clank film.
If Xbox and Game Pass is the "Netflix of gaming" then PlayStation is cinema. Xbox wants you to pay $10 every month to play loads of different things of all shapes and sizes. PlayStation wants you to spend $70 on that single, special, blockbuster experience.
It makes sense as to why indie developers, who had a starring role at the birth of PS4, have been slightly overlooked during the promotional campaign for PS5. The PS5 story has been about God of War and Final Fantasy and Horizon and Resident Evil and Spider-Man and Hitman. Big, high-quality, AAA gaming experiences that you play on your own, with a fancy headset and controller.
Last year I spoke to someone at Remedy who speculated that their new narrative-driven, single-player game Control might do a bit better on PlayStation because "it feels like a PlayStation sort-of game." Indeed, it does, just as a service-based multiplayer game feels well suited to Xbox, which has made good business out of Forza Horizon, State of Decay and Sea of Thieves. Or just as nostalgic, family games fit well with Nintendo Switch, what with Mario and Pokmon and Animal Crossing.
With that in mind, it makes sense that Xbox Series X feels more like an extension of its predecessor, and why PS5 is full of bits of tech designed to make their games feel more immersive. Spider-Man: Miles Morales is like the game that came before on the previous console, but the extra technical touches enable it to take a bigger step towards becoming, effectively, an interactive Marvel movie. About 20% into that game there's an epic scene on a bridge that is thrilling to experience for the first time, from the story, the direction, the audio, the way it looked, and how it felt in my hands.
It's not just the technology. The boot-up sound, the UI... even the aesthetic of the console (like it or loathe it) with the lights that bounce off the white fins, looks like the outside of my local Cineworld. It feels premium.
Over the last five years, PlayStation has established this identity as the purveyor of huge, expensive blockbuster games, and PS5 is the console manifestation of that. For studios making those sorts of experiences, and gamers who enjoy those products, this machine is purpose built for them.
For I am only human, and the convenience of streaming services has most certainly turned my head. All that content at the touch of a button and for a relatively low, sign-up-and-try-and-forget-about-it monthly fee.
The devil is in the detail. Aside from the whole argument for the value of physical media over streaming - which, in the case of vinyl, I'm very much on board with - 4K Blu-ray discs have still clung on in my mind as the superior choice when it comes to performance. For not all 4K pictures, nor all next-gen audio formats, are equal.
See, 4K Blu-ray discs run at up to 128Mbps. This is the amount of data sent to your screen every second. By contrast, streaming services tend to top out at around 17Mbps. And this will drop further depending on the speed of your internet connection and demand on the wider network. So 4K on disc should be better than 4K via your favourite streaming service.
What about sound? It's a closer call but there's still an edge for Ultra HD Blu-ray. Yes, you can get Dolby Atmos pretty much everywhere, but streaming services deliver it in the compressed Dolby Digital+ format while discs generally carry it in full-fat Dolby TrueHD. As for DTS:X, you need to be watching on a disc. And of the two next-gen audio formats, DTS:X is a bit more flexible. It works with standard surround sound set-ups and doesn't require extra overhead speakers the way Atmos generally does. You can also manually adjust sound objects, meaning you can crank up the volume of voices on a soundtrack making it easier to hear dialogue (a common gripe).
Ultimately, my old Blu-ray player should still deliver a better picture and sound performance than the same thing via a streaming service. Hurrah. I knew I should have been buying more 4K Blu-rays. So now, having finally decided to soak up those extra megabits, why was I left disappointed?
Alright, if you don't have the latest TV, you're watching on a smaller screen or you don't have much of a sound system, you may not notice these differences, but for those of us eager to be getting our TV and films "as the director intended", we don't want to miss out on so much as a smidgeon of AV information.
We've been here before of course, when low-quality MP3 downloads and then streams replaced CDs, despite being far inferior sonically. The good news is that we did eventually get lossless and high-resolution audio from streaming services. The quality did catch up with the convenience. And it's fair to say the gap between Netflix and 4K Blu-ray is already much (much) closer than MP3 and CD.
So we could all keep (or start) buying more 4K Blu-rays. I know plenty of people who do, whether for the reasons above or because they love physical media (and steelbooks). But for those who have left discs behind and have no desire to go back, there is hope.
Both Apple TV+ and Disney+ now boast up to 40Mbps and 30Mbps top data speeds respectively, though your experience will depend on your devices and network. Sony's Bravia Core service, meanwhile, offers genuine 4K Blu-ray-baiting data rates but is exclusive to Sony's flagship TVs. Bravia Core does point to the future of streaming, though, and of course the beauty of software is that it can be upgraded and improve over time.
When you launch Netflix on XB1, it shows your most recently watched show on the top left-hand side of the screen. Clicking on this tab will resume the most recent episode you watched, but as far as I can tell there is absolutely NO WAY to get back to the screen where you can choose a different episode to watch.
While hammering buttons at one point, I hit B and it did take me to that screen, but that only happened once. Every time I hit B during an episode now, it just takes me back to the launch screen with the most recently watched episode in the top left again.
The only way I've found to consistently pick a different episode to watch is to scroll through my list of saved shows and click on the show from there. That's a royal pain in the ass when you have as many shows saved on your list as me.
It's almost a non-issue considering shows look better on my 360 and PS4 than they do on the XB1 on Netflix. The XB1 over darkens the picture for some odd reason. But occassionally I can't be arsed to switch consoles after I've been playing a game on the XB1 and want to watch an episode of The 4400 or something...
I think to change episode, you have to actually find the show either through the search function, or via one of the other tabs. From my experience this is the only way, and you cannot change episode if you resume from the "Recently Watched" section. I had the same problem whereby it skipped an episode of Sons of Anarchy, and then wouldn't let me choose another unless I found SoA via search. Hopefully that makes sense.
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