I also just got a PS5—I was planning to get one later this year in advance of the two Final Fantasy games coming this year (we’ll see if FF7R2 actually makes it in the next 13 months), but I had already set aside the money, and I happened to see the disc version was available from Sony, and I know finding the edition you in stock want without some stupid bundle upsell isn’t a lock, so I went ahead and pulled the trigger. I confess, as someone who has had a PS4 for a few years, it’s about the least exciting (and somehow still most expensive) console purchase I’ve ever made. I don’t think I’ve ever waited 24 hours to set up a new piece of hardware before.
That said, I am enjoying the system. I’m a little dismayed that the internal storage is so small and you need a slightly fancy grade of SSD to upgrade it (and also that we live in an age where you’re all but expected to install internal components in a console), but it was very nice that I was able to pop my 2TB external HDD from my PS4 and run games off it with no fuss. And moving 40GB PS4 games I wanna play to the internal SSD is pretty snappy even from the HDD, so I’ll be fine for now.
It’s made me much more enthusiastic about the Sekiro playthrough I recently started on my PS4 (never finished it before, got stuck at the bottleneck boss a lot of people struggle with, but am clicking with the combat much better (though still not very well) this go-round). I can die or warp and be ready to go in about 3 seconds. It’s wild. That and the rest function actually allowing me to hop back in makes jumping back into the game real nice.
The only PS4 disc game I’ve upgraded to the PS5 version so far is Elden Ring, which does look pretty snazzy, though not mind-blowingly so, but again, the speed of loading really is kind of a game-changer. Existential anxiety can start to set in when you’re waiting the better part of minute between marathon runs at a hard boss. Makes returning to Elden Ring for a fresh playthrough sound more appealing. I didn’t realize quite how much I hated loading, honestly.
Astro’s Playroom is… cute. The exuberant love for the PlayStation brand feels tacky and cringe and overblown, imo, but I never thought I’d see Sony be the one to produce the Super Mario Sunshine sequel. It’s pretty by-the-numbers mascot platforming, but it’s not like we’re awash in those these days, so it’s a neat little diversion I’ll forget exists within a year. It does show off some of the gimmicks of the DualSense in a handy little way.
I remain in the camp that thinks the things Sony has done with the DualShock 4 and DualSense have not been interesting/valuable/used enough to justify more or less locking out the existence of a third-party controller market (at a time when I can use my 8bitdo controllers on at least 3 machines in my home). It seems like the biggest feature is the very fine tuning of the haptics/rumble stuff, but I’ll be honest, y’all, the rumble stuff has never felt all that compelling to me in any console, and often reads kinda chintzy. I think it’s supposed to help immersion, but it helps break it more often than anything for me. If you want to (eventually) port your game to PC, as even Sony does in these 2020s, why would you make any of these gimmicky features essential to a game’s interface/mechanics?
But yeah, it’s cute enough. Controller feels good. A little better than the DualSense 4 did.
Anyway, this hasn’t been all that interesting a post, because other than smoothing out some of the experience of using my PS4 (which I like!), it’s not all the interesting to talk about yet—I’m playing mostly the exact same games I was a week ago.
I suppose, having already had a healthy PS4 library, I am pretty far from meauxdal’s experience, but I can imagine that if I were coming to this from a decade or more away from console gaming, this would be a really fun experience. It’s a good system! I’m still puzzled as to why it’s been in such high demand, as it feels like mostly incremental improvements over the PS4/Pro (with an amazing dearth of exclusives, despite having been out for over two years now), but it is a damn fine system.
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