Going back to basics: leaving PC gaming for consoles
Backwards compatibility is one of the greatest features of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series line, letting players go back and experience an entire enhanced backlog of games while waiting for the heavy-hitting “next-gen” games to release, or while waiting for Cyberpunk 2077 to be in a playable state. Add to the fact that many of the games from the PlayStation 4’s library consisted of touched-up PlayStation 3 remasters in the form of Heavy Rain Remastered, Dishonored: Definitive Edition, The Yakuza Collection--every “trilogy”, “collection”, “legendary/definitive/ultimate/special” edition, and so many, many more; you could easily have a hundred PS4 games, none of them originating from that system’s own generation.
While I still hold an appreciation for PC gaming, the simple nature of consoles has won me back over. Yes, you can’t mod your games as freely, you can’t...try out all those fun demos from Codex, and the fidelity won’t come close to the best of what PCs are capable of right now--especially in the future--but at the same time, you also don’t have to do any fiddling with settings, there’s no worrying about the quality of a PC port, and most importantly, a PS5 doesn’t multitask; it has one purpose: games, and I find myself not getting distracted by things that might normally pull me out of an experience on my PC, like untimely Windows Update restarts, random BSODs, or compatibility issues after said updates. Perhaps it’s just part of my ongoing bad run of luck with PC gaming, but it took an entire hour of messing with settings, watching a game crash repeatedly, and desperately scouring the Steam forums with a friend after Detroit: Become Human stopped working, thanks to an Nvidia GeForce Experience update for Cyberpunk 2077 rendering the former unstable and unable to be played without rolling back to a random sketchy upload of a driver from over six months ago. That’s not something that would ever happen on a console.
This generation, Microsoft and Sony seem to have understood what might pique the interest of PC gamers: giving players that same option between graphics and performance, in a simple box that doesn’t ask much of its user; just download a game or slide a disc in, and It Just Works (TM). Of course, not everyone is going to see things that way, and that’s fine. After all, the PC platform is all about giving users the freedom of choice, and now, excitingly, PlayStation and Xbox users are able to get a taste of that glorious freedom, too.
