Welcome to Critically Sane’s Question of the Week, where we do our best to answer an inquiry posed to us by the community. Have your own question? Tweet it to us @criticallysane or put it in the comments below! This week’s question comes to us from @Gigawattconduit
What are you looking forward to most from the next generation consoles?
The sense of console-ennui set in for me sometime late last year. So many of the games from last fall were so good, so worth playing. Yet, I found myself, so often, hopping on my PC to play the next genre-defining strategy game or viral indie hit, and using my consoles not as gaming centers but as netFLIX streaming devices. I could, of course, pinpoint the cause pretty easily. At some point, the consoles in late generation stopped innovating and continued iterating. It didn’t matter that Halo 4 was fantastic: I had Halo 3, ODST, and Reach already. Dishonored was great, except for the fact that Deus Ex launched a year earlier. Another NBA game, another Call of Duty, more Far Cry: all these games were great, but I had played something so close on the same system before. I was burned out.
More than anything, I look forward to the renewal of my sense of wonder. It has been so long since I have been awestruck the way I was in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It is often (and correctly) stated that the first slate of titles in a console generation are the weakest. Developers are still probing the depths of the systems, figuring out their strengths and weaknesses, and they haven’t mastered everything the video gaming box can do. But, it is equally true that the lack of mastery leads to experimentation. What is good hasn’t yet been defined, leaving developers to reach out into the abyss, to plunge into their creativity and deliver an experience the player has never felt before. Those early games, despite their warts, tend to define generations. Gears of War, Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Bioshock, Uncharted and others lead the charge in the last generation. They all had their warts, but all provided that backdrop, that sense of greatness that would force succeeding titles to bend themselves to the rules they had just created.
So what do I look forward to most? A new set of rules. Games to play untethered from my previously experience, without expectation. I want to see what consoles with untold power, with touchpads and voice controls and cloud computing can do. I want to see the genius of developers mapping out unknown territory, fighting over new ground without battlelines laid down. I want to see the AAA model laid bare, to see a system untouched by the Call of Duty disease go in new and awesome directions.
After a year of eye-gouging from Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft fanboys, I finally want to see what these damn boxes can do. Who’s with me?
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