For as long as I've been gaming there have been consoles and the rule of thumb has always been that two opposing companies duke it out for dominance. Once Sonic and Mario had extracted their pound of pixel flesh from each other in the 1990s, it was Sega who gave up the fight. Out of the current two contenders, Sony was the first to the mat with the original Playstation back in 1994. Playing the original Resident Evil and Final Fantasy 7 were some of the highlights for me. The Xbox landed a little later in 2001, stole Halo from PC gamers (still bitter) and the stage was set. Many times throughout this era, the death of PC gaming was greatly exaggerated.
A few years ago it was announced that Microsoft was going to buy Activision Blizzard and in doing so, it seemed they would win the current generation in one fell swoop. This was gaining control of juggernauts like Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and so many more. The deal went through (after months of shenanigans) and then the strangest thing happened: Microsoft just started to implode from the inside out. Games like Redfall and the latest Halo landing with a terrible reception didn't help. The much-hyped Starfield was also seen as a huge letdown, with bland gameplay in a sea of procedurally generated monotony. Then we started to see Phil Spencer seemingly getting overruled by the Microsoft mothership on some big promises he made. It now seems that ‘exclusive’ Xbox games will actually be seeing daylight on the PlayStation ecosystem. So Sony won right? Not necessarily.
I have owned every Playstation and look back at each generation fondly. The day I scurried home with my launch day PS5 and started up Spider-Man I was in awe of what I was seeing on our new 4K OLED. What followed was an extravaganza of amazing single-player games from Ratchet and Clank, The Last of Us 2 and Forbidden West. However, over the last twelve months there has been little in the way of big games and to be honest, the next year is looking very lean. This combined with many Playstation games now arriving on PC and there has been very little reason to turn on my increasingly dusty PS5. This is why the unveiling of the PS5 ‘pro’ was extremely vexing, as I don't feel like we've had anywhere near the mileage out of our base PS5 systems. The discless direction they seem to be taking is another nail in the coffin of physical media, a change we will heavily regret accepting in generations to come. In the last few weeks, Sony has also been reeling from the utter failure that is Concord, a new (and now defunct) live service shooter. Jim Ryan, it seems, saw the way the wind was blowing and jumped ship while he still had that golden parachute.
All of this doesn't really affect me that much right? After all, I'm predominantly a PC gamer and we now have all these stellar PS ports to enjoy. Well, Sony apparently couldn't leave that alone either. After testing the water with Helldivers 2, Sony now seems hellbent on alienating as many PC gamers as possible with a mandatory PSN login. I was proud to see the Helldivers community fight back, ending with Sony backing down and stating they were listening: but we all knew they were just licking their wounds for the next fight. Moving forward all Sony titles coming to PC will be burdened with a requirement to sign into the PSN. It's not just that Sony is burning through all the goodwill they had earned with PC gamers, this DRM means over a hundred countries now can't even access these games on PC. It also legitimises the act of downloading pirated games. This could have been such an amazing way to let those non-PSN countries enjoy this truly stunning catalogue of games. It begs the question, what the hell is Sony playing at?
With a good few ‘live service’ games now being thankfully mothballed (notably The Last of Us and Spider-Man), we still seem to be getting a live service Horizon game: literally nobody wants this. Let's hope common sense is now spreading through the higher-ups at Sony and we will soon hear about a new focus on the third (single-player) Horizon game. Another source of tension this month has been the announcement that Horizon Zero Dawn is getting a remaster. It is true, playing this on PC still looks fantastic and I can see why many reacted the way they did. However, after seeing the trailer it is clear this is more than a cheap pass with the texture brush.
Straight away you can see so much more foliage and detail in the environments, including moss-covered monuments and relics. As a huge fan of both games, I am now thrilled to see there will be much more parity between the two. The puppet look from the previous dialogue scenes is gone as they have been completely recaptured using the gorgeous visuals from Forbidden West: this alone must have taken hundreds of hours. It is also great to see the hell-spawn that is Aloy Junior, replaced by a human-looking child. If you already own the game, the price to upgrade is a very reasonable ten quid so I will be checking this out on the 31st of October and in all likelihood doing a full play-through.
In the last few months, I've reviewed some fantastic games such as Star Trucker and Space Marine 2. In regards to the latter, it has been awesome to finally see a game realise the epic battles I always imagined when playing the tabletop version. However, the real stand-out for me has been replaying God of War Ragnarok on PC. This is a great port of an absolutely beautiful game and playing at 144fps is lush. It is a crying shame that Sony has hamstrung the release with the aforementioned PSN requirement. Just as I was about to publish, we saw that Rockstar has finally announced that Red Dead Redemption is coming to PC: only took fourteen years. Given this news, I may review this first and then move on to Horizon later in November. With the nights now drawing in and Halloween getting closer, it is now time to embark on my yearly Last of Us run. I suspect next year I'll be able to complete this tradition with both games on PC! That's all for now folks, stay safe and see you next time.
