My Experience with PS4 and Xbox One Two years Later.

By Sam Coles:

The PS4 and Xbox One have been out on the market for three years now with varying degrees of success. I have had my Xbox One and PS4 for two years now and what started off as a magical adventure because it was a brand new console has turned into a stale experience due to the lack of originality, disappointing games and just bad business practises. Now hear me out there are couple of games that have really impressed me this generation the past few years, but most of the games are either remasters or uninspired open world games.

I got my PS4 and Xbox One during November of 2014 and I was super excited, my PS4 came with Shadow of Mordor and Watch Dogs which I enjoyed both games despite what people thought of Watch Dogs, I got Halo The Master Chief Collection and Dragon Age Inquisition. I really enjoyed these games and I was looking forward to see what these consoles had to offer, the main reason I wanted these consoles was to play The Witcher 3 and Metal Gear Solid V, The Witcher 3 was a fantastic continuation of the series, but MGS V was not very good as it was an open world game when it did not need to be one.

Things were looking good so far with these consoles and I was really enjoying them, but it started around late 2015 when I was getting a tad fed up because we had the trend of the remasters starting to crop up. Now before you start to have a go and say remasters are good I agree they are, when they are games that are not widely available and are based on really old games that are not HD. The problem I have is that they are “remastering” games from 2-5 years ago and claiming they are HD remasters when those games are already HD and they don’t need the treatment as they still look good on a high definition television.

The next issue that has made go back and play games on the 7^th gen and below for pleasure are unfinished games. A lot of games are being released in unfinished states whether it is features cut out and being sold later to the fact that they do not work on release The Master Chief Collection and Battlefield 4 are prime examples where it took the developers nearly a year to fix. It boggles my mind with some day one patches especially singleplayer games, a singleplayer game should not have a massive day one patch of 6-9GB+ as they do not have online features. It’s always a red flag when a singleplayer game has a large day one patch an example of this recently was Dishonored 2 and Mafia 3 they had 6GB patches and they are purely one player and they still performed like an arthritic leper. I just wish developers would take their time with their games, say what you want about the Call of Duty series but at least when their games release they work day one and the patch on day one is a few mega bites and not giga bites.

Another aspect that has started to annoy is that every game seems to be open world and don’t get me wrong I like a good open world game when they’re supposed to be open world. However we’re getting games from established franchise having open worlds now for example Metal Gear Solid V didn’t need to be open world because the sandbox itself was boring and there was nothing going on in that world. The same goes for other franchises like Ghost Recon which had open ended levels in the other games but they were very focused on what you’re objective is. I miss games that have a focused direction rather than these open worlds that are a mess and focus tends to get muddled, an open world where you can truly do anything lacks focus as there is not an overarching objective. I’m not saying we should have strictly linear games but we should have more games that have a directed focus rather than a boring open world.

Now we’re in the middle of the generation and Sony and Microsoft have decided to make these pointless mid generation consoles because the consoles came out under powered, the PS4 and Xbox One should have been the specs of the Scorpio and Pro when they came out in 2013. These upgradable consoles just remind me of the Sega 32x and Mega CD as they are add ons to prolong the life of the console, the PS4 pro doesn’t have any notable difference and if you own a PS4 don’t bother getting one and the Scorpio hasn’t been released yet. What is the point of these consoles? Sony and Microsoft why didn’t you wait a couple of years and release the PS5 or whatever the next Xbox is going to be called instead of these half-arsed consoles. Stop trying to emulate gaming PC’s you’re missing the point of what consoles are supposed to be, they’re meant to be fix pieces of hardware for 5 years minimum for the mass consumer.

I don’t hate this generation completely but mostly it has been annoying and aggravating with some the baffling practises and the disappointing and lacklustre games, there have been some good games like The Witcher 3 and of course the resurrection of the Doom series. Let’s see how things play out for the rest of the generation.