Sony recently revealed the Playstation Pro, their mid-cycle refresh for their flagship console. The PS4 Pro packs over 2x the graphical power of the original Playstation 4 and has numerous other hardware improvements (none of which are a 4K Blu-Ray drive, unfortunately) to help usher console gamers into the 4K future. As you can imagine, this news prompted a swarm of hot takes from the games press. “Who is this for?” asked Jeff Gerstmann, while others, most notably Kinda Funny Games’s Colin Moriarty, proclaimed it to be “an unforced error” by Sony. It’s easy to understand why some were a bit thrown off by this announcement. Sony’s presentation was catastrophically mishandled and frankly a bit boring — you could argue they shouldn’t have streamed it at all considering the two improvements they were advertising the most, 4K and HDR, cannot be adequately presented over a stream. But while the gripes about Sony’s messaging and their intent behind launching this console were understandable, one gripe struck me as odd — it was the idea that this box was useless because it couldn’t deliver new experiences.
As game budgets have risen and publishers have gotten more reserved about the kinds of experience they green-light, complaints have risen about the lack of new game experiences this generation. Show me a game from this generation that we couldn’t do last generation? On its face this looks like a fair critique but upon deeper inspection it reveals itself to be fraudulent. Interactive media is one of the younger art forms in existence. Even so, we are reaching a level of maturation in the games space, particularly for experiences built for the 16-button controller. If interactivity comprises the core of the game experience, and the nature of that experience is reliant on an input device that isn’t changing, how are the game experiences supposed to?
Complaints of gameplay stagnation are often tied to a belief that games spend too much time focusing on presentation, that the hardware isn’t being put to use the right way — that games were purer before and many games today emphasize graphics over gameplay. All of this is nonsense, video games’ equivalent of classic hip-hop heads slandering modern rap over a lack of “bars”. The reality is, if you want new experiences console makers are going to have to do a lot more than change the clock speed on a CPU.
There have been a handful of experiential revolutions due to hardware improvements alone. Think of things like the jump from mainframe games and DTL (diode-transistor logic) circuit experiences like the Magnavox Odyssey to the 8 and 16 bit era. Then there was the leap from 2D to 3D, which is largely viewed as the biggest leap to date. You can argue the last time processing power enhancements (alone) directly lead to new gaming experiences was in the PS2/Xbox era, which was brought us games like Grand Theft Auto III. But GTA III is far from the first open world game, so why is it often heralded as a title that redefined what games could be?
Massive improvements to established ideas are often viewed as genuine innovation. The scope of what you could do in prior open world games was so minuscule compared to what you could do in GTA III that it seemed like Rockstar had invented something — that their iteration was innovation. Part of the fun of new generations is seeing how developers utilize the new hardware power to put a spin on established paradigms — we are thrilled by the idea of seeing our favorite game franchises on the new machine because we understand the power of iteration.
Demanding that Sony halt technological progression until they come up with something new to do with the power they already have is absurd. The only reason we got radically new gameplay experiences last generation was due to the addition of new input devices that were built for a completely different design paradigm — motion control. The Wiimote, SIXAXIS, and Kinect paved the way for developers to create gameplay experiences that weren’t possible in the previous era. But if you exclude motion control from the equation, could you point to a single radically new gameplay experience built for the traditional controller? I’ll wait…
Levying this criticism at Sony after the PS4 Pro reveal is even more bizarre considering they are the only console maker delivering a new gameplay experience this generation with Playstation VR. The experience leap between 3D (read: traditional gaming) and virtual reality has been compared to the jump between 2D and 3D but that may be selling it short. The immersion that developers fight hard to achieve in traditional games is practically a given in VR. Games like Vanishing Realms on the HTC Vive do an incredible job at delivering a sense of presence — it’s remarkable how intuitive everything is, in spite of the fact that you’re using plastic wands for hands. The idea that developers are either a) Being handicapped by publishers that are afraid to do something new, or b) Aren’t smart enough to come up with anything new, reveals a misunderstanding of the creative process and how technology augments it.
There always seem to be a desire from some to separate gaming’s technology side (read: specs) from its artistic (read: gameplay), but these sides are inextricably tied to one another, and in a much closer way than any other art medium. More capable hardware leads to bigger worlds, denser worlds, better visualized worlds, characters that look, sound, and behave like real beings, more complex A.I and physics systems — the more power you have to work with, the greater the experience you can build.
You can discredit The Witcher 3 as another open-world game, the likes of which we’ve had since the PS2, but that would be highly reductionistic. The Witcher 3’s world is bigger than any last ten open-world game and diversity of character and A.I patterns helps it feel realer. CD Projekt Red utilizes the improved hardware to immerse gamers further in the worlds they create and gives them enough agency to make them never want to leave. These two sides of gaming aren’t warring with one another and because the medium is so supportive of independent developers (at least in comparison to the film industry) there’s a wide array of experiences to choose from. We have a long ways to go before we reach the limits of what interactive experiences can be and the only way we’ll ever discover them is by allowing technology to extend the reach of our creativity.
