Do I Regret my PS5?

In my fumbling around this morning for something to talk about, I remembered a tweet that I responded to yesterday from Charlotte McGrath of the larger FunHaus gaming ecosystem. Returnal is a game from Housemarque that seems to be blending a bunch of genres… namely the rogue-lite, bullet hell shooter and maybe a little dark souls mixed in for good measure since everything wants to be the dark souls of something. Generally speaking this is not the sort of game that would garner a ton of attention, other than the fact that it is one of a scant number of PlayStation 5 exclusive titles. This is sorta like the people who were all about Snipperclips when they had five games to play on their shiny new Switch.

I am going to admit there are times I regret the purchase of my PlayStation 5. While I did not get mine on launch day, I did manage to get a preorder that arrived five days later than expected. I have been able to count myself lucky among the folks who physically have a unit in hand… but unfortunately said console mostly sits there unused. There isn’t really a game that has made me want to play it over something I already have on my PC. I think that is the key difference for me as compared to a lot of folks that end up buying a console… it is the system of last choice. I got my PlayStation 5 because my PlayStation 4 was barely holding in there. I never went through the process of upgrading to a pro model and as such I had sorta been plotting the upgrade to PS5 since it was first announced.

I think the key difference between my experience with the PS5 and my experience when I first got my hands on the PS4 is we are in this weird moment that there really aren’t that many games on the platform that I don’t already have access to in other forms. Sony is known for being the console of exclusives but right now there is just nothing pushing me to really be playing the console. I got my PS4 with the Alpha for Destiny was announced and I managed to acquire a console and get into that alpha program with those being my very first experiences on the platform. Past that there were a number of games that were sitting there waiting on me like Infamous Second Son and Resogun that I just couldn’t experience somewhere else.

The truth is, most of the games that I am playing on my PlayStation 5 are all titles that I could be playing on my PlayStation 4. However given how much better those games play… said PS4 has mostly just been mothballed since November 17th. I did add an external hard drive so that I could play more PS4 games, but given that I went with an SSD based model I still get better performance out of those games than I did on the original console. I guess for that and that alone the upgrade was worth it for me personally, but if I had a PlayStation 4 Pro… I am not sure it would have been. I have not really done much with my console since getting it that I could not have continued doing on the older hardware.

I guess lets run down the exclusives that I am aware of on the platform so far.

• Astro’s Playroom – Pack in title, really great. Deserves more attention than it probably gets because it is Mario quality.
• Demon’s Souls – I actually played quite a bit of this game when the console was new, because it was essentially my justification for owning the big white tower.
• Destruction AllStars – was a free game through PlayStation Plus and I have it installed but have never even booted it up. eSports nonsense is not my jam.

Then you have some upcoming releases

• Returnal – Comes out today, and I already talked about it above. As per the original tweet I think this is a game a lot of folks will pick up only because they have nothing exclusive to play.
• Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart – this launches on June 11th and honestly is probably the reason why I bought my console if we are being completely honest. I wanted to own a PS5 by the time this game came out. I expected it to launch sooner… but it is what it is.

The challenge however is that if ANY of those games came out on the PC, I would buy them on that platform in a heartbeat. That is my platform of choice and unfortunately it is also the platform that is going through the most painful growing pains as it is nigh impossible to get a graphics card. Of the hotly sought out preorders of November, I feel like maybe I bet on the wrong horse. Had I put the same amount of effort into trying to lock down a RTX 3080 that I did into attempting to lock a PlayStation 5, I feel like I would ultimately be happier today. If there is any buyers remorse it is largely over that issue rather than the console itself. I know in June I will be thankful I have a PlayStation 5 because I love Ratchet and Clank, and will ultimately want to play Horizon Forbidden West on day one as well rather than waiting for the eventual PC launch.

I realize if we are being completely honest, we went through the same sluggish release schedule with the Nintendo Switch. As I stated earlier this console came out on March 3rd of 2017 and by March 31st I had managed to get my hands on one. The key difference however is that the Nintendo Switch had the massive juggernaut of Breath of the Wild to carry it forward. Sure that game was not exclusive to the platform… but no one actually owned a WiiU so it might as well have been exclusive? The same is not true with the PlayStation 4, which has sold around 116 million units to the roughly 13 million Wii U. It has been a little over 5 months since the launch of the PS5 and we have far less to show for it.

Nintendo had two things on their side, the first that they spaced out the big exclusive titles with Splatoon landing in July (roughly 3 months), and Super Mario Odyssey landing in October (roughly 6 months). The other thing is because of the relative lack of play of those Wii U titles, they could re-release a number of them for the new console and they would still feel fresh like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe landing around a month after the console release. The other big difference between these platforms is that the Nintendo Switch gave you new ways to play on the go, so it made sense to maybe rebuy some of your favorite third party games because the convertible nature of the platform.

The PlayStation 5 however is just a bigger and better version of the same thing you already had on your shelf. Reposting this picture as a reminder of just how damned massive it actually is. It doesn’t really allow anything to do something new that they were not already doing before. With the Nintendo Switch it became an interesting console that I often took to bed with me to play until I was falling asleep. The PS5 however is still operating in the same parameters that a dedicated console always has. Seeing as my preference will always lean towards mouse and keyboard on a PC, it serves the same role that consoles always do for me… allowing me to play games that I can’t get in any other way.

The other major change for me that happened this year is that I have been entirely remote. Seeing as I use consoles differently, that means they are all hooked up in my office so that I can easily capture video footage from them. I am finding it harder and harder to be upstairs at night seeing as it is my office all throughout the day. You might think… but Bel isn’t your gaming machine in your office? Sure it absolutely is, but I also have a laptop downstairs and am regularly playing remotely through Parsec streaming everything to that small screen in 1080p 60fps. Sure PlayStation technically has remote play, but they also have not really put the R&D work required to really make that optimized. There used to be a third party remote play client that was awesome… but Sony set out to crush its existence and kept making attempts to permanently break its ability to do interesting things. Essentially as it stands… the remote play experience is so much worse than the on box experience that it doesn’t really feel right to be streaming it.

So to answer the question posed in the topic of this post. Do I regret my PlayStation 5? Yeah a little bit, but not really for the reasons you might think. I regret that I took one of the market that could have gone into the hands of someone who would use it better. I regret not putting the same effort into trying to snag a 3080 and putting the money that I would have spent towards that goal instead. I don’t regret having the console however because eventually I will encounter a game that I really want to play that I can’t play through some other means. They are still hard to get so it isn’t like there is that reliable “I could have waited until X released” option. We had really bad ice storms in February… and it was only last week that I realized I had left my PS5 unplugged since then in an attempt to reduce power drain. That is a good illustration for how infrequently it gets used.