As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to balk at choice; don’t get me wrong, I like to have a few drinks to choose from at a bar or be able to decide how I like my steak cooked. But increasingly, there’s almost too much choice in this world. Heck, just choosing what to watch is a quagmire of streaming platforms to pick, let alone selecting a show or movie.
However, the choice I hate most is the need to choose between performance or graphics on the current-generation gaming consoles. This is really a more recent phenomenon in console gaming, ushered in by the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X that arrived mid-way through the last generation, and one that I think diminished the joy at the heart of console gaming.
This dichotomy of choice was hammered home with some time I got to spend with the PS5 Pro.
PS5 Pro cut my gaming woe
As someone lucky enough to have a PS5 at launch, I’ve not fully bought into this mid-generation refresh.
I appreciate the extra power, storage, and design tweaks the console offers but I don’t think it offered enough for me to consider an upgrade; the uptick in graphics fidelity on already great-looking PS5 games feels like a case study in diminishing returns. And super-high frame rates don’t matter to me all that much on consoles; it’s nice to have but when I’m flopped on a sofa, I don’t need to have the snappiest gaming response.
Where the PS5 Pro did shine for me was the fact that in a lot of titles, it – and the magic of Sony’s PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) tech – let me have both a 60 frames per second (fps) frame rate and the best graphics settings. Or in the case of Horizon Forbidden West a sensible hybrid of the two that balanced performance with fidelity.
When looking at The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered, I could simply pick the PS5 Pro mode and get to playing. Outside of professional tech journalist curiosity, there was no need for me to flirt with the other graphics modes. This was great as it nixed the need to try different modes and agonize over which is best – I hate losing out on a graphical showcase but then some games really do need a smooth 60fps to feel playable; I’m looking at you Elden Ring.
Ultimately, with console gaming I just want to play a game in the fashion the developer intended it – if that means 30fps but with ray-traced lighting so be it, if it means 60fps with some fuzzy shadows, I’m equally happy. I don’t want to choose, I just want to play; tweaking and fine-tuning graphics is best left for PC gaming, which I feel is a wholly different experience.
Crushing choice paralysis
With my PS5, and indeed my Xbox Series X, each time I try a new game, I spend a good bit of time not immersing myself in the action but trying to decide which graphics mode was best, squinting hard at my LG C1 OLED – LG C-series OLEDs make some of best gaming TVs so check them out – to try and see whether a drop in model texture or slight lighting changes was worth halving my frame rate.
The PS5 Pro acted as a medium to remove this choice. I could simply turn on the console and get to gaming, without all the graphics mode shenanigans; that’s the way console gaming should be.
But the downside to all of this is it’s got me thinking that the PS5 Pro should have been the PlayStation Sony released in the first place.
Make console generations great again
Now that might seem like an absurd comment as it would mean basically waiting an extra four years for a new PlayStation and extending the life of the PS4 past the decade mark. But given the PS5 launched amid the COVID-19 pandemic and all that came with it in terms of console shortages and game development being disrupted, I’d argue that we could have waited longer for a new console generation.
Furthermore, I’m keen to see new consoles that offer a real generational leap, something I feel the PS5 and Xbox Series X didn’t quite provide. I love the loading speeds of SSD storage and some of the things the DualSense controller can do are great.
Yet, I’ve not really seen many games that have felt truly next-gen, not just in terms of visual clout but also smart systems. And I feel this was crystallized with the number of games that launched as cross-generation titles in the first two years of this console generation.
True 4K 60fps gaming still feels like a stretch for this console generation – especially natively – and understandably so given the sheer pixel-pushing demands of 4K. It’s only with the PS5 Pro and advanced upscaling techniques that we can get close to that console gaming nirvana.
My solution to this is one that happened with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 generation, especially with the latter. That generation lasted eight years, offering a big jump in graphics and capabilities from the previous generation and a move towards Full HD gaming. At the time this was seen as a long generation, with no mid-gen ‘Pro’ models. What we got, as a result, was developers really pushing the machines to their limit in a fashion that felt rather exciting at the time.
Case in point, 2012’s Halo 4 looked almost like a new-generation game on the Xbox 360, with it really pushing what the console could do at the end of its life.
The PS3, the younger machine of that generation, was also pushed to the max by the time The Last of Us arrived in June 2013, a mere handful of months before the PS4 was revealed. Naughty Dog’s pivot into a post-apocalyptic setting looked, and still looks, great on the PS3 and really showcased what developers could do as their knowledge of the console architecture matured.
Now I feel we’re in a situation where mid-gen refreshes somewhat stymie the idea and ambition of pushing hardware to the max, and also make the leap to another generation feel less impactful; for a gamer of my vintage, this feels underwhelming.
My hope is that this current console generation won’t come to a close until we have the hardware to really bring in a big jump in visual fidelity and performance at a palatable price. And if that means pushing the PS5 and PS5 Pro until their fans sound like a jet engine, so be it.
Of course, (glances sideways) that’s not going to stop us from speculating on what we’d like to see from the PS6…
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