Written by Blackamura
2020 is looking to be one of the best years ever for gaming. Final Fantasy VII Remake has had the best launch of any Final Fantasy game, Animal Crossing has set all sorts of records for gaming and The Last of Us Part II, Ghost of Tsushima and Cyberpunk 2077 are still to come.
It's crazy to believe that on top of these great games, we are getting the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X at the end of the year.
As a loyal Sony fanboy, the PS5 is a no-brainer for me as my next big gaming purchase and here are just 5 reasons why there is so much excitement over the 5th generation Sony console:
1. Exclusive sequels
We have been so blessed this generation with some absolute all-time great PS4 exclusives including Marvel’s Spider-Man, Horizon Zero Dawn and God of War. If you haven’t played these games, I implore you to give them a try and if you have played them, you know these games will have sequels.
The battle lines are being drawn with Xbox Game Studios and PlayStation Studios acquiring individual studios for their collections and I am filled with joy and anticipation over the games being worked on by Santa Monica, Insomniac and Naughty Dog; just to name a few of the studios under the PS banner.
Will we be able to fight Thor in God of War 2? Will we see Venom or Carnage in Spider-Man 2? I’m hoping these questions and more will be answered (with a yes) in the lifespan of the PS5.
2. Backwards compatibility
When a sequel to a game I really liked is about to come out, I will go back and play the previous game just before the sequel’s release. For example, if Horizon Zero Dawn (HZD) 2 is announced, I would like to play my PS4 copy of HZD on my PS5 to get myself hyped. This may sound selfish, arrogant or even ignorant of me but ever since the PS2, I expect every console to be backwards compatible with at least the previous generation and if a console does not have that capability, it’s an inconvenience.
The PS4 is quickly approaching the Game Boy’s lifetime sales and will likely become the third best-selling games console ever. Sony got many things right with their fourth generation home console, but one thing I think they could have done to produce an even greater console was give backwards compatibility with PS3 games.
The PS5 will allow you to play many (if not all) of the PS4’s games, correcting a mistake made by the PS4 in my opinion.
This does two things for me right away in favour of the PS5;
One - I will be able to play all my favourite PS4 games such as Final Fantasy VII Remake on the brand new console.
Two - I don’t have to buy a game I owned on the previous generation’s console again. I had to buy the Remastered God of War III game to enjoy it on the PS4, which is simply a waste of my money.
Dragon Ball Z Budokai HD Collection and inFamous are examples of games that have collected dust, as I no longer have a PS3 nor were these games remade for me to enjoy on the PS4 (which I would have bought despite me ‘wasting more of my own money’). I am so glad that I won’t have to miss out on playing my favourite PS4 games and my money can go towards new games for the PS5 such as Godfall, and not towards games I already bought on the previous generation’s console.
3. The DualSense
During PlayStation’s “The Future of Gaming” showcase in June, we finally saw the PS5 console design. Yeah, the less said about that, the better. However, we have known about the design and the name of the PS5 controller for quite some time; the DualSense.
While this did not strike a positive chord with every PlayStation gamer, it did with me.
I am a big fan of the shape, it looks like it has taken notes from the Switch Pro Controller (which in turn, took notes from the Xbox controller) and it’s no secret - I think the Xbox/Switch Pro controller are the best controllers ever.
Say all you want about the Xbox or their games, you cannot deny that their controllers feel amazing in your hands and I am confident that I am going to love holding this PS5 pad.
Another aspect of the controller people did not like was the black/white colour scheme but this is something that I really liked! I just think the colours worked together, I wonder if we’ll get an all-black DualSense or if all variations will be two-toned.
There is more to my fascination with the DualSense than just the look and feel though; Sony are taking a little bit of a risk with how they are planning to tackle how we play games and I am excited to see where they go with this.
Sony have banged on and on about ‘haptic feedback’ and how this will go further than just vibration or rumble, so you will be able to feel and register sensations such as rain falling, walking on grass and driving through mud.
I have never been a fan of the triggers on the PS3 and PS4 controllers however, and the ‘adaptive triggers’ on the PS5 is one thing I am not looking forward to at all.
4. Create
As I stated earlier, my fascination with the DualSense goes further than just the design and feel.
The DualShock 4 brought something new to the game by giving gamers a “Share” button.
Was it ground-breaking? No. Was it amazing? Not even. Most streamers will use a capture card such as an Elgato device in their streaming set-up, but the PS4 was able to get you directly streaming on Twitch and YouTube. This allowed many gamers to explore and learn about a completely new side of gaming.
Now do I think the “Create” button is going to be ground-breaking? Nope. But I do believe that Sony is willing to give gamers more freedom and power to explore the world of streaming.
We don’t know too much about just what exactly the Create button will do or what the creative capabilities will be but I am intrigued in finding out at the end of the year.
5. Power
Back in March, Sony hosted a very informative conference where PS5 Lead System Architect Mark Cerny stated the goal of the PS5 is to be ‘100 times faster than the PS4’ and eliminate loading times. This will mainly be due to the Solid State Drive (SSD) which is a mass storage device, the PS5 will have a 825GB SSD which will transfer at a swift rate of 5.5GHz per second.
Furthermore, the SSD can be expanded (similar to Hard Drive Disks (HDDs) with the PS4) so while the PS5 can become full, that shouldn’t be a difficult problem to solve; especially with the price of Drives dropping over time.
The PS5 will have a Central Processing Unit (CPU) consisting of eight Zen 2 cores operating at 3.5GHz and a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) of a custom RDNA 2 card from AMD, outputting 10.28 TeraFLOPs at 2.23GHz.
For comparison, here is how the PS5’s specs compare to the PS4’s:
And if you’d like a visual representation of what the above PS5 specs look like, check out the demo of the Unreal Engine 5 on a PS5 that shocked and impressed the likes of Santa Monica’s Cory Barlog and Naughty Dog’s Asher Einhorn here.
I had goosebumps as I watched the demo and then got excited imagining the possibility of how visually magnificent games on the next gen will be.
What are you most looking forward to with the next-gen consoles? Do you have any more reasons why we should all be excited? Are you going to get the PS5, the Series X or both? Let us know!
