Soldato
- Joined
- 12 May 2011
- Posts
- 6,274
- Location
- Southampton
What game sold you that your shiny new console was "next gen"? For me there were two games
Test Drive Unlimited. Especially a trailer I saw showing the a Aston Martin DB4(or 5 or 6 I can't remember) interior view, opening windows, looking around, looking at your avatar changing gear whilst driving around... and then being able to drive over the entirety of Hawaii! A drive to the otherside of the map taking 30 minutes! Yeah the physics were odd and bikes were basically a waste of time but for me it was such a big leap for open world driving. I didn't even do any multiplayer on it (it meant routing a LAN cable half way around the house).
Then a year later GTA IV made everything else look and feel like it was obsolete. The atmosphere, graphics, density of stuff, driving physics, grown-up story, explosions... If you run GTA IV (especially The Ballad of Gay Tony which uses a better colour pallet compared to the very 2008 brown-on-brown of the original GTA IV) at 4K on PC today it still look good. Saints Row 2 came out around the same time, and whilst it was pretty fun and did actually offer a little more depth than you probably expected in the story and cutscenes, everyone has all but forgotten saints row 2 (Until SR2022 came out and everyone remembered SR2 was great).
I can't really think of anything from the PS4 or PS5 era that made me think "wow this is a huge leap". Driveclub at a push? We've also moved to a kind of "swansong" model where TLOU, GTA V, RDR2, TLOU2 all pushed current gen to its limit and then the next gen version is just the same game with a bit more.
Test Drive Unlimited. Especially a trailer I saw showing the a Aston Martin DB4(or 5 or 6 I can't remember) interior view, opening windows, looking around, looking at your avatar changing gear whilst driving around... and then being able to drive over the entirety of Hawaii! A drive to the otherside of the map taking 30 minutes! Yeah the physics were odd and bikes were basically a waste of time but for me it was such a big leap for open world driving. I didn't even do any multiplayer on it (it meant routing a LAN cable half way around the house).
Then a year later GTA IV made everything else look and feel like it was obsolete. The atmosphere, graphics, density of stuff, driving physics, grown-up story, explosions... If you run GTA IV (especially The Ballad of Gay Tony which uses a better colour pallet compared to the very 2008 brown-on-brown of the original GTA IV) at 4K on PC today it still look good. Saints Row 2 came out around the same time, and whilst it was pretty fun and did actually offer a little more depth than you probably expected in the story and cutscenes, everyone has all but forgotten saints row 2 (Until SR2022 came out and everyone remembered SR2 was great).
I can't really think of anything from the PS4 or PS5 era that made me think "wow this is a huge leap". Driveclub at a push? We've also moved to a kind of "swansong" model where TLOU, GTA V, RDR2, TLOU2 all pushed current gen to its limit and then the next gen version is just the same game with a bit more.