Excited as I was to finally see a next-generation console, much of the PlayStation 4 software we saw last week struck me as underwhelming. It was pretty, certainly, and I’m all for beautiful games; I paid a great deal to upgrade my PC in 2011 so that Battlefield 3 would look its finest, and it irks me that Far Cry 3 and Crysis 3 each stresses my computer to the point that I can’t see every last bit of visual goodness they have to offer and maintain a decent framerate. Still, gorgeous graphics are not all I want out of new games, and yet it would seem as if the PS4’s hardware is being extolled purely for its ability to accommodate even nicer-looking visuals.
That belief is representative of the majority of what Sony had on show last week. While the capabilities of the hardware to push more pixels was invariably going to be a major part of the event, with the way things went you could be left thinking the future of games entails little more than better-looking games that boot up faster than ever. That’s all well and good — I am legitimately excited for auto-downloads, suspend modes, and all manners of hurdles between player and game being removed — but the hurdles Sony and Microsoft should be doing their damndest to remove lay between independent developers and next-generation consoles.
