(note: I am challenging myself to write every day for 30 days. What follows may not necessarily be interesting or even coherent. Parental discretion is advised.)
I’ve a confession to make, I’ve been a gamer since I was four-years old and over the decades have been playing with these electronic distraction devices known as video game consoles through thick and thin.
As one gets older, games seem to become more and more childish, that is why I tend to stick to a niche of titles that are easy to pick up and put down without worrying about lost saves or advancing the story. Stuff that is reliably fun and involves playing against other people.
Yeah, I don’t do story-based single-player titles anymore. Most of them are bland, with rare exceptions such as Red Dead Redemption and the Grand Theft Auto series which do a great job of rolling graphics, gameplay, story, acting and music all into this digital hodgepodge of awesomeness.
With Microsoft and Sony having announced the release of new consoles in 2020 after… well, seven long years, I find that I’m not nearly as excited for a new generation as I used to be. So we’ll be seeing non-existent loading times, great, but I bet it’ll come with a catch. Like, 1TB storage, which hardly cuts it when games are usually around the 100GB+ mark.
And those constant updates. The latest Call of Duty wouldn’t let me start the game even for single-player until it was updated. What was the size of the update? Oh, just a paltry 100GB which takes hours to download and has my internet provider telling me that I’m about to hit my data limit for the month. I spent more time downloading these updates than actually playing the game. Not kidding.
The new systems are interesting, though. Loading times are supposed to be gone and we have a resolution/frame-rate bump in the works, which should be nice, but really… I’m not as wow’d by games like I used to be.
I still play Star Wars Battlefront from 2015. It looks fantastic, lasers have that satisfying pew-pew sound and I’m pretty great at whooping Rebel scum in multiplayer. Really, there’s not much else that engages me like that game does.
Street Fighter V was a Playstation exclusive, so I couldn’t get into playing that. Nor do I enjoy playing any of EA Sports hockey titles like I used to. All those micro-transactions… and those roster-updates with hardly anything new added to the game each year made me give up on the series altogether.
But one thing that I am interested in with the new systems is that they’re bringing backwards compatibility back again. That means I can still play Battlefront for another five years or more. God help me.
The more I think about it, the less incentive I am finding to upgrade. It’s going to take a new Grand Theft Auto or something spectacular for me to get on board. 8k/60fps, raytracing, whatever helps beef up that bad boy enough to want to spend $500+ on a new system to play it on.
Looking over the specs of each system, there is no obvious technical advantage for either of them. Both consoles are using the same AMD Zen 2 processor with the same 16GB of ram and have SSD drives to cut loading times with.
I don’t care about any of the exclusives either. Halo? meh. Last of Us 2? Well… fun game, but not a system seller in my mind. Uncharted? Nah. Gears of War? Used to love that series, but the latest one makes it a pass for me.
The excitement is gone. Gaming has become so commercialized and reduced to micro-transactions these past few years that its rare to find standalone titles that don’t have an empty hat being passed around for extra bucks after paying $80 for what should be a full and complete game.
The industry has been a disappointing assembly line of formulaic and unimaginative games for at least the last… five years or so. I mean look at this:
Gambling in a sports game. Forget about making three-pointers, doing sweet dunks and playing as your favorite NBA legend — you’ve got to unlock those classic players by opening up loot boxes and pulling the handle on VLTs. Want to win online? Your stats aren’t worth playing with if you don’t level up the players, which all has to do with hoping you get three icons in a row on the slots. Ridiculous. No skill required. Just throw money at the screen and the game will make it easy for you to win. It’s the times we live in, folks.
I thought about posting the NHL trailer on here but forget that. More of the same. I’ll spare you the injustice of it all.
The reason why I haven’t been interested in upgrading to Star Wars Battlefront II? Same as with the sports games, micro-transactions all up in your orifice. Although I did buy it for five bucks, it didn’t offer any of the intensity and graphics/sound like the previous game did. The Darth Vader voice in BFII sounded like they pulled a guy off the street into the studio to record an impersonation of Vader’s lines. Disappointing.
But yeah… new systems are coming out and that means more of the same. The industry is not going to change. There will still be ads on your console menus, micro-transactions, bugs, constant updates and lies. LIES are still to be expected.
Like this one from Todd Howard developer of Fallout ‘76.
“Sixteen times the details!” so goes the meme, where Todd promised Fallout ’76 would put a Nuka Cola bottle inside of every man’s pants. Didn’t happen. They even rolled out a subscription model where you have to pay yearly if you want to play Fallout ’76 online. God, Bethesda sucks. I’m afraid of what the next game in the Elder Scrolls is going to look like. They’ll probably hype it up by saying it’s going to have twenty times the details.
Controllers for both systems are largely unchanged and I’ve already decided that I can’t do the Playstation 5. That controller just isn’t comfortable. It also doesn’t help that you can’t swap batteries out from them once they’re dead. Got to plug it into the console for that.
And as I said earlier, specs for both systems are pretty much the same.
I think what is going to happen is that at launch, we’ll be seeing below-average sales. It is going to be a struggle to convince gamers to plop down $500 just to play a slightly better looking version of NBA2k20 or Madden. Even die-hards won’t have much incentive to upgrade because PC gaming is where they’re hanging out at these days:
Depressing.
But, Xbox Series X. You’re going to be mine.
Soon as you give me something worth caring about.
Like this:
