There have been a few things that have changed in the way I approach games this year. The first is that instead of being the guy who never “finishes” games, I appear to be on this path of being laser focused on getting that win and moving on to the next game. I have no clue what clicked in my brain that has put me in this mode but I am riding it for as long as it lasts. Generally speaking I have been easily distracted by whatever happens to be going on in the MMO Zeitgeist. Maybe it was the abject failure of New World, a game I deeply cared about… or maybe it was my grind of all of my classes to level 80 in FFXIV… but whatever the case I seem to have been shaken out of my MMO focused mindset and spending a lot more time playing single player narrative games.
Just since Christmas I have finished the following:
- Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade – PC
- Witcher 3 (third playthrough) – PC
- God of War – PC
- Guardians of the Galaxy – PC
- Control – PC
- Alan Wake Remastered – PC
- Quantum Break – PC
- Wolfenstein II: New Colossus – PC
The other thing that has changed significantly is that I have altered my approach to console gaming. I have never had my consoles hooked up in the living room on our main television. This is just a thing that has never really happened and they have always been upstairs in my office on my main gaming display. I get that I am basically doing the opposite thing that the majority of players around the world do, but it fit my access patterns for years. However with the pandemic I switched to working from home, and my “office” upstairs has now become my workplace, and at the end of the day I need a change of scenery which means moving downstairs and either remoting back into my computer from the couch over parsec or playing one of my two next gen consoles. With this shift in gameplay has brought back the challenge it is of getting screenshots off my consoles in a reasonable manner. What I actually want… is the ability to type in a UNC path like \\playstation5\screenshots and be able to download things directly. However that is very unlikely to happen so instead we have a number of hoops to jump through.
Microsoft honestly is the clear winner here because they give me a way to download screenshots directly to my PC. Granted it is not through the current Xbox app and is instead a feature that only seems to exist in the outdated “Xbox Console Companion” app, which might be sunset at any moment for all I know. However for the time being I have able to go to Captures and then choose “On Xbox Live” and click on a screenshot and hit download. A few hoops but it gives me quick access to full quality screenshots on this machine that I actually write my blog from. Then I can do the various things that I do every day to reduce the file size and prepare them for being posted. I still would prefer a network share, but this is probably the closest I am ever going to get to that.
For Nintendo Switch and Sony PlayStation I employ my screenshots twitter account that I set up way back when Rift was a new thing and had added twitter integration. You can tell this because I never changed the Avatar from the Defiant faction symbol. Anyways in both systems I am allowed to attach up to four screenshots to a single tweet, and while it takes a bit… I can offload a number of screenshots rather quickly. Thanks to the miracle of PlayStation remote play, I can even connect to my PS5 and do this in the morning and grab only the screenshots I am going to actually use. Then I have to click through the tweets and save the images off… process them… and I am up and running albeit again through a number of hoops to get there.
Yesterday my good friend Nimgimli tipped me off to a function finally arriving in the United States PlayStation App. For awhile now there has been a function that has been beta tested in Canada and Australia where you can directly upload screenshots from your console to the PlayStation mobile app. From there they will stay under the Captures tab for 14 days allowing you access to them from your phone. This morning when I connected into my PS5 to grab screenshots I noticed that over night I had received this update and now had the ability to enable auto-uploads.
Sure enough on my phone I also have an equivalent captures tab, and I am guessing when I take a screenshot it will now be piped over to my phone. Nothing I had taken prior to this happening has shown up yet, so I might need to spend some time fiddling with this to get everything working. I do know that I had to change my primary console in the app, because when I first set this up on my phone I did not have my PS5. The challenge here however is that this still does not do what I really want. This will in theory give me better access to screenshots from my phone. However it would still make me jump through a bunch of hoops to get them over to my PC. In theory I would either need to hook my phone up to USB and transfer them that way, or wait for them to synchronize over to google photos… and once again download them from another website.
I get that I am very likely an edge case here… but I will never understand why video game consoles make it so cumbersome to get screenshots from the console in bulk. I think what frustrates me the most about the entire experience is that a protocol exists for this purpose already. DLNA or Digital Living Network Alliance protocol exists to provide an interoperability layer between disparate media platforms. I can already consume content ON my PS5 via DLNA being served up by my Plex Server on network, but similarly I have no clue why I can’t access media hosted on the PS5 by the same protocol by other devices on the same network. This friends is why walled gardens suck, because you can get most of the way to things working like you want them to work… but not all t he way.
If I can get the mobile app working as expected I will give it a shot, but I am still uncertain if it actually does anything to improve my workflow. Huge kudos to Nimgimli for pointing it out and that will at least give me a shot to test it.