While I give Sony a hard time about various decisions made surrounding the PS5, you can’t deny that they still know how to put on a show.
Yesterday’s Sony PS5 Showcase was the E3 show we never got, full of massive reveals and surprises, and it was hard to come away from it unexcited. Among the biggest features:
- Knights of the Old Republic Remake
- Marvel’s Wolverine
- Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
- God of War Ragnarok
And we still have already-announced big games like Horizon Forbidden West coming before then. The most notable absence, I suppose, was Naughty Dog not showing off anything besides a kind of unnecessary Uncharted 4/Lost Legacy remaster, but considering The Last of Us Part 2 won several hundred GOTY awards a year ago, I suppose we can wait a bit longer to see what they’re doing next.
What this showcase really reinforced to me is what an uphill climb Microsoft has to catch Sony in the first party department. We know that they’re at least trying really hard now, staffing up in a major way to produce a ton of exclusive games in the future, and yet we’re so early in this process, it’s hard to know how this will play out.
Spider-Man 2
Insomniac
Sony has a built-in advantage that at this point, they have earned player trust time and time again with their first party studios. I don’t necessarily need to see oodles of gameplay from Spider-Man, Wolverine, God of War or Horizon to get excited because I have played the originals or other games from those teams, and I know the bar of quality they set.
Yes, at times this has backfired, if you want to bring up Cyberpunk 2077 breaking everyone’s CDPR trust after The Witcher 3 was so beloved, but obviously that’s not a Sony studio, and we just have not seen them miss at anywhere close to that level, if at all.
Microsoft is still in the “proving” stage. Take games like Fable and Perfect Dark, for instance. Microsoft is bringing back old brands from the original Xbox era and N64 respectively, but it’s been so long the quality of those originals should have no bearing on the new ones, because they’re entirely different teams. All we have is the name. Perfect Dark is being made by a recently assembled super-studio we haven’t seen anything from yet. Fable is from a Forza team, but it requires them to dramatically shift gears.
Fable
Playground
Even the “classics” seem somewhat unsteady. Halo Infinite has shown off stellar multiplayer, but the state of its campaign at launch remains to be seen, and it’s already cutting some features like co-op, which is worrying fans. For me, the only comparable situation to all the trust placed in these Sony games may be Bethesda’s Starfield, as even though that’s a new IP, Bethesda does still have that level of confidence in place. I think Fallout 76 dinged them a bit, but they fixed up that game, and Starfield, as their next big “thing,” should make people think we perhaps have a base Fallout or Elder Scrolls style IP on our hands.
As Google and Amazon have proven, spending a ton of money on developers is not necessarily enough to produce amazing games. I hope Microsoft can get there, and they do produce a state to rival Sony. But that’s far from a guarantee, and this is something Sony took two decades to build. What will the ramp-up period for Microsoft be?
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series, and The Earthborn Trilogy, which is also on audiobook.