whatbrentsay

...our belief [is] PlayStation 5 marks the biggest generational transition our industry has yet seen.
– Jim Ryan, President and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment

That's a bold thing to say before throwing an hour plus montage of game footage and developer statements at your viewers. I tend to instantly roll my eyes when executives make claims like that but after the event ended I was more inclined to believe Sony knew they had some hot shit.

I won't bury the lede here: I was impressed with the entire presentation and most of the games shown within. We got a lot of footage that wasn't gameplay but there was more than enough of it to allow reality to set in. The 25 titles they presented ran the gamut, too—from hyper realistic to heavily stylized and cartoonish. If you're a gamer and you walked away without at least one of those games being of interest to you, I want to know what you play.

Overall, what struck me most is just how uniformly good these titles look. There are no low res textures or low poly geometry hiding in the backgrounds. The details are there at the macro and micro levels, and that across-the-board bump makes everything on screen feel cohesive in a way that's hard to explain. Console games look great now but they're balanced on a knife's edge of deception in order to hit the resolutions and frame rates gamers demand. Seeing PS5 gameplay felt like peering into a reality where developers no longer have to make the same sacrifices.

The star of the show was—hands down—the universally impressive lighting. Ray tracing is awesome; we get it and we're sold. That cohesive feeling I mentioned is in large part due to that improved lighting. The shift from an array of lighting tricks to a world where everything in a scene is lit naturally unifies all the objects on screen in a way that wasn't possible before. It's a subtle thing but these are the kind of details that matter if graphics are meant to continually improve.

Pictures aren't going to do this console generation as much justice as seeing the games in motion. Gamers have seen lifelike lighting in pre-rendered scenes or in high quality animated films already. That level of fidelity isn't novel. What is, however, is that it can be in real time while being fully interactive to the player. When gamers get their hands on these titles and move through more realistically rendered spaces, the hype train is going to fly off the tracks.

It was a bit harder for Sony to demonstrate how impactful the I/O speed improvements are with PS5's SSD and custom memory controller. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart gave us what looked like a taste--its heroes falling through dimensional portals, into apparently different worlds, with incredibly brief delays. Some of the huge vistas and views we saw across titles also hint at how shorter loading will impact these experiences. Draw distances can be much further if developers no longer have to worry that the player will rotate the camera and see low poly geometry and textures first pop in and then get replaced by higher quality assets a moment or two later. I suspect Sony's got more up their sleeve to reveal here. When we get more intimate gameplay footage, we'll start to see more specific examples of just how big a deal this is.

I've got to at least say something about the hardware, right? I dislike it. I don't like the slim one. I don't like the thicc boy. I don't even like the controller. To me, the aesthetic looks like what you get when you ask someone to imagine something very futuristic. It's overly flashy and too determined to make a statement for my taste. It's certainly not going to fit into most living rooms today and I'm positive my living room is not going to look more like a PS5 in 10 years. I commend Sony for going bananas with the hardware though. It must have been a lot of fun for those designers to come up with and even more rewarding when they got the go ahead to actually do it. I won't have a choice at launch but "does it come in black?" is all I could think about.

There's still more to see—the PS5's new UI, hands-on previews of the entire launch lineup, pricing details, exact release date, etc.—but Sony's off to a start that feels reminiscent of last gen. They're honoring the traditional next-gen leap, letting the games speak for themselves, and not distracting from that vision with peripheral features or services. I switched consoles at the start of last gen but it's already looking like Sony's going to lock me up for another.