Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X

About time from a thread on these right

currently live: PS5 - the future of gaming show
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuLci-lSeCo&feature=emb_logo

i'm guessing that anything with "project" in front of its name is a tech demo that will never be released as a game

1 more try
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuLci-lSeCo

quite underwhelming so far

feed gone

xp strong disagree, this is one of the most impressive console launch/line ups I've ever seen

the one where you're the cat in robot blade runner world? the avatar/spirited away looking one... the lbw4 trailer with the go team music!

I'm just here for Spider-Man: Miles Morales

SOLAR ASH looks like Journey?

new hitman looks class

ok this fake animal crossing looks bad lol. but most everything else looking pretty good I thought!

oh! the trailer had a dark twist ending...

PS.. is it 5? I think we're on 5 now. PS5

OMG HZD2!!!

we knew that was coming tho

I mean yes, I knew they had a sequel planned, but I did not expect it to be part of the presentation and be a launch title.

i doubt its a launch title unless they announced it as such and i missed it

2021 at earliest I'd think.

The one game (Pragmata?) had a 2022 date

this was my favorite trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-v1BxSETvI
weenie hands

"talkin bout Bugsnax!"

Was that the Morty voice actor?

Doesn't sound like him to me. Was that the Yakko voice actor in the Hitman III trailer?

That Bugsnax song is a jam

I love it when songs sound like they're in another language but it turns out to be english.

Unless they announce some kinda Game Pass equivalent I'm not buying a new system for a good long while

https://www.engadget.com/control-ps5-xbox-series-x-154810298.html

This was inevitable. Probably won't be available for launch (DLC isn't even completely out yet) but I'm sure when it arrives in a "Bureau Director's Edition" of some sort it'll have the DLC and look gobstobbingly amazing with ray-tracing and hopefully a smoother frame rate.

Control is one of a very few acclaimed PS4 games I want to play but haven't bought to add to my vast backlog just yet, not least because I've heard questionable things about how it plays on non-pro PS4 (though of course other people say it's fine). But if it's being better optimized for PS5, and the changes/improvements/additions turn out to be significant, I guess that means it's going to have to wait a few years for me, unless there is a PS4 fire sale that drops it below, like, $10.

can I not just buy a cheap digital copy of control... and it will play better on PS5?

they haven't given details, but the hope is that they'll actually bump up the graphics and such to use the power of the new consoles
i'm saying this is one of the remasters that will actually be worth supporting? i hope

digital foundry put up an article on backwards compatibility on the series x:
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-xbox-series-x-back-compat-is-transformative

PS5 BC in boost mode should give similar results

"Should" as in "they need to match it to stay competitive" or "is reasonably expected to"?

Reasonably expected. It feels like these new consoles are more massive spec bumps than architectural leaps

That said I'm a little jealous when I see PC footage of games like Avengers which don't even come close to a steady 30fps on the stock PS4. Slightly makes me want to upgrade. Or spend $1k+ and get a gaming/streaming PC. If I do upgrade to PS5, (to be charitable) unoptimized multi-platform games like Avengers and Control will be my first tests.

i assume PS5 BC will just run the game with the PS4 Pro graphics/resolution settings unless the dev tests and patches in a new performance profile

> "Should" as in "they need to match it to stay competitive" or "is reasonably expected to"?

the latter, it's hardware compatiblity

> i assume PS5 BC will just run the game with the PS4 Pro graphics/resolution settings unless the dev tests and patches in a new performance profile

that's what the legacy modes are for and no patches should be needed there except for the rare pathological case

boost mode should work like series x: games with unlocked framerates run better, games with dynamic resolution spend more time in higher res or lock to the max, etc.
this is where issues are likely to appear and patches might be needed to fix problems, for example, some games like dark souls 2 tie game code to framerate so the 60fps ps4 port initially had a bug where weapon durability wore down 2x faster

We can't believe we have to say this, but please do not blow vape smoke into your Xbox Series X.

— Xbox (@Xbox) November 11, 2020

Not hearing a no from Sony, though.

Brag if you snagged one today so I can seethe in jealousy

theres no games yet

but bugsknacks

thats on ps4 and pc

I miraculously scored a PS5 thru Best Buy online the other week. Picked it up tonight. It’s huge and absurd, but honestly sitting here looking at it with its lights on in the semi-dark I’m coming around to it aesthetically.

It’s a lot of things, but I like how it gives me Hopper’s Nighthawks vibes most of all.

Demon’s Souls remake is incredible so far, I’ll save that for another thread.

i don't think i've ever felt as much desire for violent retribution as i do for the painful death of scalpers at the moment

The late teens looking kid who processed my order in the pick up area asked me “Is this your first one?”

Apparently a good amount of people have rolled through openly bragging about how this is the 3rd, 4th, 5th one they’ve snagged. Fuck those assholes for real.

real q - why is this such a big deal rn? surely there are very few exclusives and few TVs that can even show off the improved gfx?

It honestly shouldn’t be a big thing right now. Unless you’re a Souls dork and are really excited for that Demon’s Souls remake. Which is me. And maybe 10% of the market.

People freak for a hyped product regardless of its immediate usefulness, particularly if it’s rare and status-y.

I never got a PS4, I want a new gen machine to catch up on stuff I've wanted to play for ages and maybe new stuff over the next few years, shd've known capitalism never comes thru when you want it to

I was also stoked on grabbing the PS5 because I have a grip of PS4 games on disc that I never completed because my optical drive shit the bed. Being able to play PS4 games on the PS5 (with graphical/performance upgrades!) is a big sell.

Reports seem to indicate the PS5 won’t be terribly hard to come by in a couple of months. Production’s ramped up hard.

Demon's Souls and Spider-Man MM is way better than most launch lineups I can think of tbh, and I hear the platformer that comes preinstalled is really fun

Also being able to play Hitman 3 with fancy graphics and no Epic games compatibility headache would be a draw for me

this is why you shouldn't buy games before you're ready to play them. the price can always go a bit lower

That's a good rule of thumb, and would keep my backlog in check. But I figure most games are never less than $10, new, and if/even when they drop lower, $10 or less is still a pretty low price to pay for basically anything. My personal impulse cutoff for games is $20, which is the lowest "Death Stranding: DC" has ever been in two years, which is why I figured, hey, why not?

don't be me, who bought the PS4 version of Death Stranding (original) for $30 thinking it was a bargain and never played it

Ha. Today I bought the PS4 version of Cyberpunk 2077 because it's got a free PS5 upgrade, and when the DLC comes out in September, supposedly a huge hunk of changes and improvements will be sent out for free to all versions. Who knows if I will ever play it.

(Answer: probably not.)

Should say I paid $5.

I have completed Death Stranding nearly twice on two different platforms, and finished Cyberpunk multiple times. So I'm helping the thread keep the balance.

Don't sleep on Death Strnading, it's fantastic. Slow to start, but that's part of it.

massive leaks coming out from the Xbox Activision case, someone fucked up the redaction i guess

xbox is becoming xcylinder

https://imgur.com/a/pHi74Dq

In which I learn (on page 2) that a next (current) gen Red Dead Redemption 2 is still on the table and also (on page 1) that there is a Microsoft employee named Matt Booty.

I take it back, this 2022 doc references Q2 FY2023, which was I guess something like July to September 2022. They're currently up to Q2 FY2024, so anything mentioned here is old news. Except for Matt Booty.

microsoft hard at work trying to suck even more than sony, i see

https://twitter.comy/brookgamingfans/status/1715337068401021284

let's try that again

Xbox console-related product Issue Update pic.twitter.com/QK0N41LmHW

— Brook Gaming (@brookgamingfans) October 20, 2023

i just ordered a Pi55 Slim directly off the Sony website. they claim it will be shipped to me in a few days. why yes that smug energy is coming directly from this post, why do you ask

Hot tip, if you buy two of them and stack them, it doubles the storage, and you can play two games at once. I call it the PS Phat, you should try it.

Make sure you get the one with the disc drive, feels like they're subtly trying to phase those out

Yeah I got the one with the drive. Otherwise I’d have no way to play my Cheers box set!

hah, nice.

Josh technically that's called the PS10.

Yeah, but on the street it's the PS Phat, or the Phat Stack. Everyone knows that.

Can't even remember the last time I put a disc in my PS5... glad I spent $100 to have a drive I don't use lol

Yeah I still haven't ever put a game in mine. Thought it'd be good to have a 4k BR drive though, and it sort of is, except it's so insanely loud when it spins up that I end up having to switch to headphones to stop the machine drowning out all the dialogue.

I use my drive for Blurays and it's not noisy at all except for a moment on start up

I got Spider-Man: Miles Morales on disk and it pretty much lives in my drive

As someone who only plays one game at a time, I use the disk drive all the time, depending on what I am playing. Alan Wake Remastered I just played on disc, Wolfenstein 2 I am playing digitally.

yeah, I'd read about the disc drive being noisy before buying my ps5 and was concerned but honestly it has been totally fine and not an issue.

I have however noticed recently that for some reason it can't play certain DVDs, I just get some error code and a message that it can't play that disc (DVD plays fine on a stand-alone DVD player). Not sure what's going on there.

I still mostly buy on disc (or disk? disk makes me think of a floppy disk) though. It's fun to still be able to give or lend a game to a friend once you're done with it.

I've found it fine for regular BR discs but it's specifically the 4k discs that send it into overdrive (do 4k discs spin faster than normal blurays? I mean I can imagine why they might need to but I've got no idea). It's not always loud straight away either, sometimes it'll be an hour into a film before it starts ramping up. Totally possible I've just got a duff one.

My PS5 plays 4K films pretty much silently after the initial spin up. The XBox X is much louder for that purpose.
I rarely buy any games on disc or otherwise unless deeply discounted.

I do appreciate being able to play lots of XBox 360 and some XBox games on disc on the series X as I have a good few of those.
The PS5 only seems to support PS4 & PS5 games on disc though.

I mostly rely on my gamepass or ps plus subscription for new things to play.
My backlog of games-to-play owned for older platforms and the PC is inhumanly long at this point.

PlayStation State of Play was pretty good this year

Romeo is a Dead Man, a suda51 game
Bloodstained 2
Digimon Cyber Sleuth sequel
Bennett Foddy's Baby Steps
Hirogami, an origami-based 3D platformer
Nioh 3
Sea of Remnants, looks like a pirate RPG?
Sword of the Sea, a skateboarding game from the Journey team
Marvel Tokon, a 4x4 fighting game from Arcsys

also Silent Hill f, which looks disappointing to be honest
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bYaEtALe00

the arcsys marvel game looks great. was just lamenting that there's no cool fighting games on the horizon at a time when i'm kind of itching to get back in with something new (the riot games one is not cool sorry)
new suda51 and bloodstained are cool

pirate game is sadly a f2p gacha game. thought for a moment that we already had our next expedition 33

Yeah I was like "Oh cool a Silent Hill game", but it doesn't look like there's anything particularly new or exciting going on really. Let alone scary

Well that gacha news is disappointing. And the trailer looked interesting.

The Baby Steps trailer, lol

i'm still working with a ps4 and a switch for my gaming. i keep thinking i should upgrade to the next generation, but not sure if i should go ps5, switch 2, or steam deck. i don't play a ton of the aaa console games but there are occasionally some that i would like to play (like the recent indiana jones game). i have never really used steam much but it is appealing to have access to more old games and indie games that don't make the transition to the consoles. switch 2 kinda seems like its own thing and is the one i'm more likely to wait on until there are games i'm excited to play on it (right now it's pretty much just donkey kong, i like mario kart fine but it's not really an incentive).
i do have a new macbook that i bought specifically for making music. i could put steam on it but i kinda want to keep it just a music computer and not clog it up with other applications.

Been kinda interested in Nvidia Geforce Now lately. I have an old PC that can't play most fancy games, but through Geforce Now you can stream games in your various libraries without relying on your computer's hardware specs, with the limitation then being internet connection and latency. So probably not a great choice for a game with a parry system, but likely just fine for many games.

I think if you have kids wanting to play games and they're younger or more into the Nintendo/family stuff, the Switch 2 is probably a good pick. It's getting more indie/cross-platform stuff overall now, and does well enough if you don't need the best graphics performance, has a portability others don't, etc.

I think if I was buying a console for AAA stuff right now I'd be tempted by the PS5 Pro but be very, very interested in the Steam Machine and wondering if it's going to make it to market in the first half of the year.

PC gaming is going to have a rough couple years if memory prices continue the current trend. I think everyone's going to have to lean on whatever hardware people already have because nobody's going to want to upgrade. Console prices haven't dropped due to a handful of market and profit issues, and I don't expect them to with this additional wrinkle in play.

I wasn't a PC gamer before I got my Deck but it's 100% converted me to it. It's starting to show its age, as some high-performance games don't run great on it (e.g. I checked out Expedition 33 on the Deck but ended up playing it on PS5). Steam also has surprisingly permissive refund policies which I used the hell out of in their last winter sale, and they have an actually useful wishlist feature (you'll get alerted whenever something on you WL goes on sale).

I have a Macbook also, but even in this day and age not every game on Steam can support Mac (and some high-profile games like Street Fighter 6 are PC-only). And even if it does, Mac users might not get the same priority treatment (e.g. for a long while, updates to Baldur's Gate 3 on Mac came out months after the PC updates were released).

PS6 was supposed to come out next year but may be pushed back due to the current situation if they can't get it down to a palatable price point. don't think this is worth waiting for unless you're a AAA graphics freak.
PS5 is fine and will be good thru at least 2030, but its definitely on the backside of its lifespan. best option if you're gonna be playing a decent amount of AAA games for sure.
PS5 Pro is kind of a scam, only a few games are noticeably sharper on it, 95% of stuff you won't be able to tell the difference at normal tv viewing distance. get a regular or wait for the PS6.

Switch 2 will be good for a long while and has "mario" on it. but of course the downside is it's a closed ecosystem compared to the deck and some of the small-time indie games won't make it there. I wouldn't expect any AAA game that skips switch 2 to run passably on the deck though, they are similar in power.

Steam Deck is good though it's like 20% weaker than you'd like. in a few years when they inevitably make a Steam Deck 2, that's probably going to be the ultimate endgame device for single-player enthusiast gamers. this isn't an argument against getting one now though, actually the opposite since your steam library will carry forward.

Xbox is on the way out as a dedicated console line. avoid

in your situation i would say it boils down to PS5 if you more want something for TV + recent AAA games and steam deck if you more want something for handheld + indie and older games. switch 2 is not that compelling yet if you have a switch 1, you can wait another few years for more 2-only games to come out

i know thats all pretty obvious but basically i think the Future of Gaming is enough in flux especialyl right now that you just go with whatever best fits your current needs. the only exciting future thing is completely theoretical and not an announced product

and also that personally i find playing full 3D games on a handheld to be a kinda bad experience, something worth considering re steam deck, but youve probably tried this with the switch already and know where you stand on it

It's definitely at a weird spot where the two main differentiators in the past were game lineup and specific hardware features. Nintendo's really the only company still leaning into both. Both Xbox and Playstation games have some level of exclusivity, but Microsoft pretty much gave up on that entirely with their "everything can be an Xbox" commercials. Sony's still holding on to some exclusives, but they generally hit PC at some later date, with some simultaneous releases. The console-exclusive feature market's dead on Xbox, as far as I can tell, and Sony's are mostly based on controller features and audio gimmicks but few games lean on those because nothing's exclusive now -- and if you plug your PS5 controller into your PC, the adaptive triggers and other features work on supported games.

we definitely lost something cool with the end of differentiation but i guess some people get really mad when they can only play 3,000 of the 4,000 existing games on one device rather than 3,900. everything's about fomo now

I was about to say it’s overall a better deal for developers, then I remembered that Microsoft ate half the AAA studios

We’re a long way from the days where releasing a game on different consoles meant nearly rewriting it from scratch, though. The SNES/Genesis days were harsh. The last console that tried anything really proprietary was probably the PS3, and Sony had to really work hard to write a more generic software layer on top of what was a pretty impressive technical architecture to rectify that.

I regret buying my Playstation 5 a bit; I hadn't owned a console since PS2 since I have a good gaming PC but there were exclusive games I wanted to play, like the Final Fantasy remake and the Last of Us. But those all ended coming out on PC anyway, so I ended up playing them there since I love installing mods. Plus, I usually wait for sales anyway, so don't feel the need to play anything immediately upon release. I probably get more use out of it as a Blu-ray player, honestly.

I have a friend who bought a dock and a couple of controllers for his Steam Deck which he connected to his tv, basically turning the Steam Deck into a handheld/tv console similar to the Switch. He's pretty happy with it so far, much cheaper than buying a new console (which he was also considering) since he already had the Steam Deck.

Agreed about Switch 2 - I got it and it's a very nice machine, but not a huge improvement over Switch 1 besides more subtle things (snappier OS performance, the joy-cons are better). For me it's more an obvious investment in the future library (and my existing gigantic backlog of Switch games will run nicer as well) and it's hard to deny the pleasures of a Mario Kart. You can wait on that one, maybe until the next Mario or Zelda is out.

The backwards compatibility of both systems is a huge plus; especially with Sony my online library of purchases is almost 20 years old. Not as big as Steam, but still huge. Too bad PS5 never got the rumored PS3 compatibility/emulation included, as I have a ton of games from that era on my account. Thankfully, Nintendo's finally got on board with this.

I'd love to get a Steam Deck, but am hesitant for the reasons mentioned above -- new one coming out within a couple years, probably, and it's already underpowered so future ability to play games is a big question mark (though thankfully developers seem to be optimizing modes for it specifically). Still, it's tempting since my desktop is an 11-year old iMac.

I wouldn’t make any console buying decisions right now (especially if steam deck is an option you’re considering), because the Steam Machine is due soon. And there’s a fair chance the price is going to end up high enough that it won’t realistically sit alongside these other options, but if they manage to get it out at £500ish it might be the answer (I’m expecting it’ll be more like £800, although some supposed leaks are already saying £1,000+).

I’ve got all four at the moment though, ps5, series x, steam deck, switch 2. And I reckon over the last six months or so, steam deck is the one I’ve used most, followed by Xbox (because I’m trying to get as much value out of my pre-paid gamepass period before it runs out and I refuse to renew it at the new price), then switch 2. Hardly touched the ps5 this year.

I'll add that in addition to the Xbox outlook generally being grim, there's still the ongoing BDS boycott of MS products -- specifically of its XBox products, which includes hardware, subscription services, and game studios -- for the company's continued role in the genocide in Gaza.