The PS5 and Xbox Series X/S thread

/Drops Xbox power brick behind cover

Incremental updates? Different specs? Different ways of playing depending on specs? Sounds like a PC with extra steps.

clears throat aggressively

Merry Christmas Dok 😀

Am I wrong?

Not at all.

The PS5 controller – they're calling it the "DualSense" – has been officially unveiled, and it looks… kinda horrendous.

Maybe it's the two-tone Pacific Rim armour look, but I'm not feeling it.

I actually kinda like it, though I hope like hell it comes in not-white. That's gonna look filthy in a couple of years.

It’s like a cross between the Dual Shock 4, the original PS3 banana controller, and a stormtrooper. It makes me fear for the design of the console itself.

I think it looks good. Although as long as it feel good, it could look like a cat's arse for all I care.

Hopefully the haptic feedback is more iPhone 7 than Joycon.

It sort of looks like it's wearing a sports bra.

Well thanks for that Felt, now I’m never going to unsee it.

I really like the look of it.

It looks like something out of a cheap tv show set 10 years in the future.

There's a big load of third-party Series X gameplay on its way tomorrow.

The narrative seems to be getting away from Sony at the moment. I've seen the same comment repeated over and over on numerous sites – Microsoft are doing a great job building excitement, and Sony have nothing to show.

It's a nonsense comment, but Sony need to be careful. The internet seems to be making its mind up, and it is Sony's turn to be ridiculed by the hivemind.

PS2 yay, Xbox lol
360 yay, PS3 lol
PS4 yay, Xbox lol
Xbox yay, PS5 lol

Tomorrow's showcase will be the same old shit we've seen already game-wise, just slightly shinier. Yawn.

Right now, absolutely nothing gives me any reason to upgrade from my PS4/XboneS/Switch combo. Going to take something drastic to change my mind.

Narrator: mart bought all the next generation consoles within the year

Sea of Thieves Remastered, day one.

There's a big load of third-party Series X gameplay on its way tomorrow.

If you haven't watched this yet, save yourself the hassle.

Yeah, it was surprisingly dull. Just full of cinematic pre-rendered videos, very little actual gameplay at all. And it looks like the Cyberpunk/Blade Runner setting is going to absolutely dominate over the next couple of years, it seemed like every other video was full of neon and rain.

The gameplay footage that was shown…. lordy. This gen is going to be a hard sell.

Not a single thing in that pile that couldn't have been current gen. Except maybe the awfully shiny, clearly not gameplay Swordy Shoot Jump game. VTM: Bloodlines 2 looked really current gen, like early stage (not knocking the game itself, looks fun, but it's been in development for soooooo long that it's to be expected).

The constant begging and reminders for Valhalla were so desperate too. Stay tuned for Assassin's Creed Valhalla PLEASE STAY TUNED PLEASE DON'T GO PLEASE DON'T.

Also: buy on Xbox One and get it free on Xbox Series! Er… great? So I'll have games I'm already done with by the time I do eventually upgrade? I think I'm good with what I have now, thanks.

Also also:

Tomorrow's showcase will be the same old shit we've seen already game-wise, just slightly shinier. Yawn.

Fuckin' Nostradamus mate.

This sounds very similar to the build up to the PS4. I bought one for No Man's Sky and I'm struggling to remember anything else I've played on it.

I guess I could have bought Horizon and played that? Assassin's Creed Odyssey maybe. Correct me if I'm wrong but "same as the last generation but shinier and less interesting just seems to be the way to things for now.

Well I'm already bought into PS5, FFXIV is already confirmed for it (I'm sure I read that) and the next Persona will be on it

I did notice one positive. For some reason the live stream was 30fps, but when I rewatched the trailer for the only interesting game (the 1930s island adventure thing) it was running at a smooth 60fps.

If they can hit 60fps with most games, that would be reason alone for me to upgrade.

Here it is, give this a watch, but make sure you set the framerate to 60fps in the settings. No way you'd get something this pretty right now, even on the One X.

I'm sure 4K/60fps versions of games will be the big thing initially, along with fancier lighting. My main hope with the next gen is that with both parties going big on backward compatibility, and MS at least being keen on enhancing games as part of that process, that we'll see fewer "remasters" of relatively recent games just to give them that bump in frame rate and resolution.

Just putting this slide here now, so we can all look back in a few years and point out the blatant framerate lie.

Given some devs still struggle achieving 30 on current tech, there's some japes right there.

Quite liked the showcase. The Assassins Creed thing was pretty underwhelming but I was honestly really surprised by the amount of new IP that they chose to lead off with. Some of them looked pretty promising and I can't wait for them to come to PC, day and date with the console release, with full raytracing, actual 4k support and 144 hz framerates.

Anyway, hope you're having fun :)

I've been around long enough to be intensely skeptical of the entire thing, but there's part of my excitable, hype-sensitive animal brain that's kind of blown away by this Unreal Engine 5 demo, allegedly running live on a PS5 dev kit.

This next generation is going to literally work artists to death.

…wow. That's a lot.

And as far as working artists to death, it sounds like there's actually less work here - as it stands, artists are doing that high-poly version anyway, then use it to generate normal maps, LoDs, and all the other optimisation stuff that's required to get it to run. With this, they can just go nuts.

Anyway, there's never going to be an actual game where they're going to push everything to this degree. The only studio that might would be Naughty Dog, and they build their own engine.

I mean, if you can just make something in zbrush, jam it into the engine and it'll downrez stuff until it runs then… that's significantly less work than at the moment.

I think that’s the argument for ray tracing too, isn’t it? Requires a lot of power to run but actually saves devs having to fake lighting in all the clever, time-consuming ways they do it at the moment.

I wonder what load times look like for these kinds of multi-billion-polygon environments.

I think that's going to be one of two real barriers to actual games looking like this - I'd have thought the load time in that volume of data is likely to be significant, even with an SSD, but additionally, the amount of storage required for those assets must be colossal; how much are you going to realistically fit on a BluRay?

how much are you going to realistically fit on a BluRay?

This is part of what makes me think there'll be a shift towards procedural assets. That said, I know games tend to use a lot of asset duplication on discs, where the same data is stored in multiple places so that seek times can be reduced; if they're optimising for installation on an SSD instead, then that strategy might not be necessary.

So the big reveal is coming next Thursday, then. 1pm Pacific, which Google tells me is 9pm here in the UK.

Anyone got any predictions, or things they'd like to see? I'd really like a new inFamous (unlikely as it is with Ghost of Tsushima taking up most of Sucker Punch's energy), but I expect we'll see a marginally shinier Gran Turismo, maybe a Naughty Dog tech demo? The Horizon Zero Dawn sequel?

A handful of third-party stuff, for sure; is Final Fantasy VII Remake chapter II just wishful thinking?

If they show FFVII I'll burst one of my internal organs from me going so tense

EDIT - It's the Kidney that's a bit shit right? That's why we have two?

Dad of War 2.

I still need to finish Dad of War 1.

Remove the combat from last game and I'll buy

Dad of War was a hell of a lot better than I expected it to be. I’d prefer another one of those over Charming Mass Murdering Psychopath 5.

That's the ugliest fucking box I've ever seen.

Precisely two things in the showcase interested me: Hitman III and Horizon Forbidden West. And they didn't even say anything meaningful about either of them.

It’s an absolute monstrosity. A stormtrooper’s unzipped schoolbag.

Hitman 3 will be out on everything, I’m relaxed about that one.

I think it looks quite nice. :(

I can't really shit on the conference itself, but I'm not super pumped about anything.

The digital-only version looks marginally better, mainly because it doesn't have that unsightly lump of the disc drive bulging out the bottom.

Precisely two things in the showcase interested me:

This was an accidental lie: I forgot about Little Devil Inside.

A lot of it looked fairly dull. Why bother trotting out NBA and Gran Turismo? The first timeloop game looked interesting until it turned out to be a third-person shooter.

I'd play a new Ratchet, though. Hitman III piqued my interest, but I'll have to actually finish the second one first. Little Devil Inside looks cute, but I'd be a little concerned it'll outstay its welcome. Deathloop seems fun, but again it'll depend on how padded it is. Village had my curiosity until it was restyled as VII.I.AGE for Residential Evil 8, which I was genuinely pleasantly surprised by, but Chris Redfield's shoulders and casual murder were pretty off-putting. Pragmata looks like a cross between Vanquish and a CGI anime called Freedom, which has me interested to see more. Hopefully Horizon 2 will rein in some of the tedious excesses that put me off the first one.

Agree with the disbelief about the shape of the thing, though. Will it even sit flat? Bloody thing won't fit in my TV cabinet upright, and I'd be loathe to stand it on the floor or on top of the cabinet, lest an inattentive five year old (or, let's be honest, 37 year old) knock it over.

It does lie flat, yeah, there were (very brief) shots of it horizontal in the presentation.

It didn't look much better.

I was impressed by the event. Come on guys, it was much better than the usual line up of games we get on one of these things.
My negative take was how many of the games were cartoony games, so nothing was shown that was trying for hyper realism to really show of the graphics.
Spiderman 2 Miles Morales was a great announcement. The new Resi looks terrifying. Rachett & Clank had that world swapping mechanic which no way could be done on this gen. Some interesting looking new IPs.
I like the box, not another square lump of plastic.
Still no release date or price yet though.

Hitman 3!!!