rednose1 said:
Title may be a bit misleading, so let me clarify: I am not being pessimistic against Sony. I thoroughly enjoyed the news coming out of E3. Watching Xbone explode, fist pumping after reading Sony news, laughed at the instructional video on sharing PS4 game, the whole she-bang.
After I calmed down a bit though, I realized, all Sony did was not screw up. All the current consoles had everything the PS4 is promising (though publishers recently played with DRM and always online nonsense.)
Again, I'm not hating on Sony (at least, I don't think I am) and there is no way I'll be buying an Xbone. If anything, I wanna know why we piss ourselves like excited puppies at the news Sony isn't gonna screw us over. Have we really come to the point where no bad news is the same as great news?
Well, the answer is simple in concept but a bit difficult to explain.
But to start with a reminder that never screwing up is the same thing as doing everything right. It is true they didn't "push gaming into the future" with some new and revolutionary idea. But lets be honest with ourselves. We did not want that.
The last generation of gaming has been a very trying one for gaming enthusiasts. The industry has been heading down a self destructive path of homogenization. Games have become less and less interesting over the last generation and all games are coming closer and closer to being re skins of COD. Our favorite past time has been watered down in a dozens of ways into a grey passionless mess. Even worse were the constant claims and lies of revolution and innovation, forcing us to deal with poorly conceived and gimmicky "features" we never wanted if we want to play the games we all love so much. And that is without even touching on the constantly worsening anti consumer policies and practices.
Through all this we have been vocal, which is where so much of our frustration came from. We were telling everyone what we wanted. We were practically shouting it from the rooftops but no one seemed to be listening. It was coming to a tipping point. I myself had written off console gaming save only Nintendo first party titles. I was looking forward to E3 primarily for more material to blast Sony and Microsoft with.
But, it turns out, Sony at least listened to what we had to say. We said that we didn't care about gimmicky features. They listened. We said that we wanted variety in our gaming. They listened.
In the end, all we wanted was for someone to offer us a system that would allow us to play a variety of great games. Sony listened to us and gave us exactly what we wanted. In my opinion, that is more than enough reason to get excited.
P.S. To be clear, a truly revolutionary idea that actually pushed gaming forward as a medium would have been very welcome. But that really was never in the cards. It is better that they owned up to that fact and double downed on making good games instead of trying to convince us that lead is gold.
