What a crazy year it’s been for PlayStation and more importantly, Sony. Riding a wave of incredible good-will that began at their E3 2013 press conference, the 4th iteration of the PlayStation launched on November 15th, 2013 and was an immediate success. Having sold over 1 million units within its first 24 hours in North America alone, the current generation began with a bang. Since then, the success of he PS4 has been unrivaled by even it’s own platforms. As of the time of this writing, the PS4 has sold 13.5 million units world-wide and is ahead of both the WiiU and its more direct competitor, Xbox One by a margin of at least 2:1 making it the fastest selling console of all time. To say it will likely top 15 million by the end of the year is a pretty safe bet.
So yes, the PS4 is a popular item and has far exceeded everyone’s expectations in terms of sales. But what about the console itself, and more importantly, the games. How does Sony’s juggernaut fare in the areas that matters most? The truth is, there has been a lot of good, some incredibly bad, and a few head-scratching omissions, even now, a year into the console’s life cycle.
Let’s first begin with the good; the games. While the launch exclusives weren’t anywhere near Game of the Year contenders, they were pretty darn good. My personal favorite exclusive launch title was Killzone: Shadow Fall. And surprisingly maligned game that I found to be pretty refreshing in the context of the series and as a shooter overall. It had a lot of variety in terms of gameplay and level design, and a pretty fun and unique stealth mission for an ending. Knack wasn’t too bad either. Was it a classic? No, but I definitely enjoyed my time with the game far more than I thought I would. Then there is Resogun. Oh, Resogun. You overrated annoying piece of a game, you. Yes, I hated Resogun and I understand that I am in the minority on this one, but I am perfectly OK with that.
Divisive as it may be, I enjoyed the hell out of Killzone: Shadow Fall.
But outside of the slim pickings for exclusives, the PS4 launched with 15 retail titles, which is more than any previous launch that I can remember, and certainly more than what launched with PlayStation 3, 7 years earlier. There was pretty much something for everyone to get with their console and enjoy.
4 months after launch the PS4’s first true AAA heavy hitter finally arrived, Infamous: Second Son. It was a jaw-droppingly gorgeous, open-world game, that really showed off the potentional of Sony’s new gaming platform. It’s a showpiece game where you can sit someone down and say “check this out.” While I personally found the game to be fun overall, I couldn’t help be slightly disappointed that the open world of Seattle, while pretty, was also pretty empty and devoid of anything that could be construed as “life” in its citizens. After that though, we didn’t see another huge AAA exclusive until the Summer with The Last of Us Remastered. Every bit as incredible as it was on PS3, made even better by a resolution bump to 1080p and 60fps, Naughty Dog took an already fantastic game and managed to make it better. But, it’s still a remaster of a game I played 13 months prior.
Going into the Holiday, the Sony exclusive line up is shockingly and almost alarmingly thin. With only Drive Club and LittleBigPlanet 3 holding down the fort, it seems that Sony is really relying on third party support to get them through the Holiday. Which is actually pretty OK because there have already been some great third party games at retail: Wolfenstein: The New Order and The Evil Within being two standouts available for the platform, not to mention another NBA 2K game, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, and Grand Theft Auto V making its current gen debut.
While it isn’t an exclusive, Sony bet big on Destiny by partnering with Activision and really pushing the mindshare into Sony’s camp by employing aggressive marketing that really drove home the significance of Bungie’s first new IP in over 14 years and PS4. So effective was the marketing that Destiny helped Sony have their best month since launch in North America, selling over 500,000 units in September.
Then there is the fact that most of the third party, multiplatform games, look and run better on PS4. The entire year has been rife with PS4 vs Xbox One fans duking it out every time the resolution and framerate of a new title was mentioned. While not a guarantee, it is a safe assumption that the PS4 will get the better version of any particular game, with rare exception and even then it’s usually parity. Sony definitely did the right thing coming into this gen by focusing on hardware that is easy to develop for, as opposed to proprietary chips.
The Swapper is the best game I’ve played this year so far.
I know I’ve gone on about AAA games, but lets not forget about indies. This year Sony also made a major play for indie games, finally allowing indie developers to self-publish on the platform, and quite often, offering brand new, day one indie titles as part of the Instant Game Collection with PS Plus. And I would be lying if I didn’t say that The Swapper has been the best game I’ve played this year.
Speaking of PS +, we all know that it’s now required for online. As someone who has been paying for Xbox Live for the better part of 7 years, I never had a problem with this. If Microsoft can justify the cost with a solid, dependable, infrastructure then so can Sony, right? Well, not so much. Usually it’s great, I had no major issues with PSN during my tenure with Destiny, save for a couple of DOS attacks. And honestly, it remains pretty stable for me. So while my personal experience with the platform and PSN, I can’t ignore that many people have experienced major issues with Drive Club, which still hasn’t been fully fixed and the PS+ version of the game still hasn’t materialized.
The real value of PS+ is the Instant Games Collection, where each month Sony comps a game to subscribers. It’s a great service for that concept alone, however, the true value of it will vary from consumer to consumer. I’m not a huge fan of indie games, especially those with a retro aesthetic, so while it’s neat that I have a ton of games waiting to be played, I’m probably not going to play a lot of them.
The last area for me is the updates to the system itself and where I have my biggest gripe with the system. I love that we live in a age where the box we buy can be updated and improved upon through firmware. The PS3 at the end of the cycle was considerably different than the one we had at the beginning. It was the ultimate media hub for me. I watched all of my digital movies on it, either by streaming from my Mac to the console, or through use of an external harddrive. Did I say, “was?” I meant to say “it IS the ultimate media hub for me.” And therein lies my biggest issue with the PS4. I still have my PS3 hooked up on my cluttered media center because for some reason my PS4 can’t do the two things my PS3 can do in regard to media capabilities. There is still no DLNA support for streaming to the console and no support for external media to watch your digital media. I’m of the mind that the next iteration of a piece of tech should start where the last one left off and then expand upon what is already a robust experience. That it still can’t do what my PS3 can do, easily, is kind of a bummer.
This was from the February reveal of the PS4, and it’s still not an available feature on the console, while it was an out of the box feature on Vita.
Then there is the fact that we still don’t have the Suspend and Resume feature, which would allow players to put the console into a low power state while playing a game but would allow the player to resume right where they left off in the game. As someone who has spent tons of time waiting to hit a check or savepoint in games before exiting and shutting down the console, and has outright avoiding playing at times because I knew I didn’t have time to wait for the game to boot up, load a save, then play for 30 minutes while not being sure I would make any progress, this feature is one of my most anticipated. And it’s still not here. What makes it sting a bit more is that this feature exists on the Vita and it’s every bit as glorious as I expected. It makes my commute to work much more tolerable because I can just sit down on the train, press the power button, swipe the screen and be back where I was. The only anxiety I feel is making sure the battery doesn’t drain in between sessions. So yes, Sony, please make this feature a priority for your next update.
That said, what updates we have received have been pretty stellar. ShareFactory, automatic preloading for digital games, enhanced voice commands, a cleaner UI, YouTube support, themes, and whole heap of others, but the biggest of all is probably SharePlay, which turns your console into a “virtual couch” which will allow players to “pass” the controller to a friend via online, allowing them to play the game for an hour. When the hour is up, simply start a new session and resume. While this isn’t a feature I plan on using much, if at all, it’s definitely a true “next gen” feature. However, at the time of this writing there are several games for which this feature doesn’t work and has been disabled on a publisher/developer level, which makes sense because why would a publisher want 2 people playing a game when only one of them paid for it? I can’t imagine a world in which this would be OK (you’ll be able to read more of my thoughts on that next week).
So how has PS4 done in its first year? There are a ton of games to play for players of all tastes, but in the AAA department, Sony’s first party offerings are relatively few. The updates to the system have been plentiful and some even awesome, but it’s still missing what should be basic functions these days. At the end of the day, however, these are minor quibbles in the long run as these boxes are meant to last for the better part of a decade, but this is the first year and based on that, I say it’s been a very good year, if not necessarily a great one.
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