Last time, I talked about the hardware and services that the PS4 promises to provide us. My feelings were mixed, but I liked a lot of what they showed. However, the features of the console itself were not the subject of the majority of the briefing, the games were. Again, I don’t wish to seem needlessly cynical here, but this is where most of my issues with the event are. In the moment, a fair bit of what was shown on screen was pretty exciting, but the more I think about it, the more worried I am by the implications of what Sony presented.

A new console is in many ways a new beginning, it’s a window in which companies have the opportunity to express great creativity, and take advantage of the new tools they’re being provided to create something different, it’s the literal starting point of a new wave of games. It’s times like these where developers should have the chance to bring a console new IPs, experimental games, and fresh takes on old IPs. At Sony’s presentation, I just don’t think we saw a whole lot of this, and even when we did, a lot of the presentation was more concerned with trailers than talking about actual gameplay. You’d think at a video game conference people would be more worried about the actual game part.

The New

Let’s start by taking a look at games that weren’t part of existing franchises. There was Knack, which seems like it could have a lot of potential, but we have very little idea what it is outside of the basic story. There’s Drive Club, a racing game with progression mechanics where the presentation basically consisted of “the graphics on the cars look real nice”. The Witness is shaping up very nicely, and I’ll give more credit to that one than most, but I still don’t feel like I know what it is as a game. Then there was Destiny which I’m very excited for, but again, the information on it is still very vague, and all Bungie could really bring to the conference was slightly more in-engine footage.

Even when it seemed like there was going to be a new announcement, it just didn’t happen. The big speech about the government infringing on the rights of citizens and real-world threats just turned out to be pre-amble for a CGI trailer for Infamous, which far from being about politically controversial behaviour, was about a guy shooting fireballs. Square Enix’s reveal of a “New IP” was actually a trailer for a game which we know nothing about, set in the Dragon’s Dogma universe, and it was felt necessary to have a big hype speech from Blizzard to announce what turned out to be a Diablo III port. It wasn’t just the games that were worrying either, but the tech demos.

Tech Demos

When David Cage took to the stage and began talking about the evolution of movies into a powerful storytelling medium, I was genuinely engrossed, but I just don’t buy his line that the thing holding us back from seeing characters that are human and relatable in games is that they don’t have 30,000 polygons. Visually, Quantic Dream’s demo looked amazing, which only makes me wonder why it was framed as a narrative thing, rather than a graphical thing. There is also the unfortunate matter that in the past Quantic's presentations haven't necessarily been reflective of the final product.

Media Molecule’s demonstration of Playstation Move sculptures was impressive, but I still doubt the Move controller is that easy to use for that kind of task. Their subsequent demo was essentially just a demonstration of Wii Music, a game released in 2008, while their dancing characters, which were somewhat charming, were essentially being controlled by nothing more than players moving the Move back and forth.

A New Beginning?

Guys, again, I’m not trying to be pessimistic here, but we need to be realistic, otherwise we’re just setting ourselves up for greater disappointment in the long term. We need to think, “What games did Sony show that we know enough about to make some kind of judgement on, that looked like they were actually doing something worthy of a new console?”. Sony’s promises were that they were revolutionising gaming, that they were bringing something truly new to the table, that they were giving all new tools to developers, and that they were building something worthy of the Playstation legacy. If this is true, why aren’t we seeing something more than first-person shooter #439, a prettier Forza, an RPG with swords in it, another Infamous, and so on?

This Sony presentation scares me, because in it I see a large part of what continually worries me about the games industry as a whole. I’m not one of these people who thought that the games industry was all sunshine, sparkles, and originality 20 years ago, then everything changed, or that Sony is alone in these problems, but what I worry is that Sony’s conference reflected an increasing unease with the act of presenting new ideas. That as the stakes rise and investments in development projects get larger, that there are fewer games taking real risks, and that instead companies are opting to recreate a lot of what currently exists, with a few common features and nicer graphics bolted on. This doesn’t feel like stagnation, but it certainly doesn’t feel like a revolution, or the birth of something new.

You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned Watch_Dogs yet, but that’s kind of the point. Sure, not everything can be as amazing as Watch_Dogs was, that demo was phenomenal, but if Sony recognise how amazing it was, why weren’t there more people there to do what Watch_Dogs did? The demo of that game wasn’t just impressive because of the graphics, it wasn’t amazing because it was part of a big existing franchise, and it wasn’t even enthralling because of the way it used the features of the Playstation 4. The Watch_Dogs demo was as good as it was because it actually managed to show a game that had an original and exciting world, and original and exciting gameplay. It wasn’t Ubisoft showing a trailer for a game, or talking about the technology behind the game, it was them showing the actual game, an original game, with a focus on the gameplay. How many other times did that happen at that conference?

I understand that this is all pre-E3 and that there will be much more to come, but it can’t be ignored that this is the event that Sony created to represent the Playstation 4, to put in peoples’ heads an idea of what this console will be, and if this is how they choose to represent their games library, that’s worrying. It’s often mentioned when people criticise the games libraries of new consoles, that consoles rarely have fantastic launch line-ups in general, and this is true, but surely that’s something to criticise in itself, and this isn’t just an issue of quality, but perhaps worse, an issue of originality.

Duder, It’s Over

I only judge what they showed so harshly because I know Sony can do spectacular things, there are some amazing features in that console itself, and I want to see the same quality in its games library. Hopefully we’ll see even better from them later this year. As a side note, I see people saying that Microsoft will have to put in a lot of effort to outclass Sony, and while I agree, I think we’re going to see something more special from Microsoft than just a better or worse PS4.

As more features and services become viable on consoles, the console manufacturers have not just the ability to try and outdo each other, but also provide something different than their competition. In many ways I think the optimal thing for the next generation would be if our consoles provided us the widest range of services and features available, both being brilliant in their own ways. Thanks for reading.