Playstation 4 / Playstation 5

[JarylGaren]

so, full disclosure, I never had a Playstation 4, but one of my brothers got one!

But in hindsight, the Playstation 4 is probably the console I regret not getting the most, because as it turns out, Horizon Zero Dawn, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Persona 5 and Nier Automata are *VERY* good games that I only got to play way after the fact through ports, because I was admittedly a very obnoxious Nintendo defender at the time during the Wii U era (which in hindsight I don't get, because the Wii U was just misery in terms of support >_> but that might be a topic for the inevitable Wii U thread)

I also remember a couple memes surrounding the game Knack (which iirc was a launch game for the system), but from what I've seen, it seems like a fun and competent enough platformer, I wouldn't mind giving that one a shot eventually!

and of course, currently there's the whole thing with Bloodborne being stuck on the PS4. To my knowledge it didn't even get an update to take advantage of the PS5's power, which still strikes me as odd. Guess Sony also does really baffling decisions?

edit:

also, I hate how I'm kinda considering getting a PS4 Slim for Knack and the Crash Team Racing remake at some point literally a day after I sold my PS5 >_>

EDIT 2:

I guess you can also talk about the Playstation 5 here!




since imo the PS5 basically feels like two PS4s duct taped together, lmao

[Enbyeon]

I have my PS4 in my closet on the off-chance I ever want to play through Bloodborne again. The last thing I bought for it was Crash 4 and I get really upset about it, because the load times were ridiculous. The whole "PS4 Pro existing isn't gonna make games worse for base PS4 (the one I had)" made me angry enough to skip the PS5 until they release the PS5 Mega Pro Slim or whatever it is that's gonna be the baseline.

[JarylGaren]

oh yeah, right, I remember long loading times being a thing on the PS4. as well as the base PS4 getting the short end of the stick a bunch of times for some games compared to the PS4 Pro.

The last thing I bought for it was Crash 4 and I get really upset about it

to be honest, Crash 4 in its vanilla state has more problems than just long loading times >_>
the level design and difficulty just feel needlessly brutal

[Galuade]

Used PS4s and PS4 games are as cheap as they probably will ever be now, if you want to jump in late! I grabbed a slim to have a PS4 again after I sold my launch day console to a friend

[plumpan]

Alright all of my thoughts on the PS4 are negative so I'm going to put them in a spoiler tag. You've been warned.

Hidden text.

I had a PS4 on loan from a friend for the better part of a year, and while it had some REALLY fun games that I enjoyed, I thought it was awful as a games console.

It was loud, much louder than even even the earlier (albeit not launch) model 360s I have. I found the menus and general non-game parts of the console to be slow. On top of that, Sony's CDN was slow as hell, which sucks even more with modern consoles that refuse to launch games before you grab updates. Knowing I could have a game ready in 2-3 minutes based on my network speed but it taking 15+ because Sony didn't want to cough up a better CDN really stung. Especially when paying for PSN+. I also hated how it would get upset at me and take a year and a day to turn on if it wasn't shut down correctly.

It was nice that it had built in streaming, but the quality was pretty bad. In retrospect I think I'm less upset about that because have something barely acceptable built in was nice, but at the time it bothered me a lot more.

The number of console exclusives, given the ease of making PC ports for games of this era, aggravates me a lot more now than it did at the time.

I did really like the controllers, aside from the charge port (a common plague of the era), and there's plenty of good games on it. I do wish I had a way to play Everybody's Golf 2017 still. And I know some of the issues, mainly noise, got fixed in later versions (I think). But as a box that is supposed to make playing games easy and fast in exchange for paying more money, I feel like it was awful. Not that the xbone was any better, they can both be bad.

But hey at least Sony made it easy to keep getting hacked!

[JarylGaren]

so I ended up getting a PS5 again. because I'm a dumbass. And because I ultimately prefer gaming to be more plug 'n play, which on PC isn't really the case, be it on Windows or Linux. Recently I was kinda sitting back and thinking of my experiences with playing Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered and Monster Hunter Wilds on PC, and while I generally had a pretty good time, I also had to struggle with newer drivers making both games completely unplayable, since they'd just crash after playing for about 10 to 45 minutes. I could only solve that by downgrading my graphics drivers on Windows, and on Linux I had to use a specific launch command for Horizon ZDR in order for me to be able to finish it. So I ended up going "Hm, if I had just played these on PS5 from the start, I would've had a much smoother experience"

I specifically went for the PS5 Slim with a disc drive, because the PS5 Pro just seems way too expensive for not that much of an improvement. And it's even more expensive if you want to play disc games on it, since that'll cost you another "cool" €100 on top of the €700+ you already have to pay for the Pro, so no thanks. I'll stick with the normal version.

and to be honest, I still find myself playing more PS4 games than PS5 games, but that's probably just because a lot of devs still make PS4 games. xD Though that also meant that when I first got the PS5 back in 2023, I almost immediately could choose from a *very* big library of games on PSN, so I guess it's a good thing that it's backwards compatible and that PS4 games are still being made!

Also makes me wonder if I should just edit the topic title so it's about both the PS4 *and* the PS5, considering how the PS5 is essentially just two PS4s duct taped together.

and speaking of the PS5 in general, I like it, to be honest!
while it's still pricy (and that doesn't seem to improve any time soon, unfortunately >_>), I think it's easy to set up and just play your games. it's also pretty easy to put in an m.2 SSD to expand the console's storage, even though at first it does feel a bit scary to pry off those covers. xD loading times are also pretty swift compared to, say, the Switch, where with some games you'll have to wait for a while (*cough*Super Bomberman R2*cough* *cough*A Hat in Time*cough*)
when it comes to the level of noise the console makes, I feel it's generally pretty quiet. but also, I'm not sitting right next to it while I play, and I generally only hear the fans if I specifically try to listen for them.

what I'm not a fan of is the Dualsense's low battery life. I feel like it runs out of juice way too quickly, I feel like the Switch Pro Controller and the Xbox Series controller have it beat there.
Also, I'm not a fan that you are completely unable to use the Dualshock 4 with PS5 games, I think that's just a blatant "Hey, spend money for this new controller" ploy. Especially since I think you can basically turn off every new feature of the Dualsense to make it into a fancier Dualshock 4 anyways, but oh well.

[Zero Kirby]

I got a PSQuintuple and y'know what it's pretty great for playing PSQuadruple games

In all honestly it's definitely gotten the least amount of play out of the devices I have. Most of its exclusives eventually releasing on PC hasn't exactly helped in that regard. I'm really just seeing it as an upgrade to the PS4 that I had, which I did like quite a bit. Spider-Man, Uncharted 4 and Lost Legacy, Horizon: Zero Dawn, and before I had a really good PC I played stuff like Batman: Arkham Knight and Metal Gear Solid V on the PS4, so I liked it quite a bit.

But I'm really finding that PC is just a much more preferred option for me, thanks to mods letting me change things (like that annoying screen-flash from FFVII:Remake), letting me more easily get stable framerates, so on and so forth. But I like tweaking and messing with things, so

It kinda drives me nuts, because the PS5 is a pretty good piece of kit, genuinely. The DualSense especially is a fantastic controller, battery life notwithstanding. If developers were just using it to make PS4-quality titles that simply ran at better, more stable rates, that'd be more than enough to satisfy me because PS4-quality titles are really freakin' good. I mean seriously Uncharted 4 and Arkham Knight are still insanely great-looking titles today

[Eramn Lanif]

The PS4 is a cool console. I need to see what the state of jailbreaking and homebrew on it is. It'd be nice to have an excuse to hook it back up...

[JarylGaren]

I got a PSQuintuple and y'know what it's pretty great for playing PSQuadruple games

In all honestly it's definitely gotten the least amount of play out of the devices I have. Most of its exclusives eventually releasing on PC hasn't exactly helped in that regard. I'm really just seeing it as an upgrade to the PS4 that I had, which I did like quite a bit. Spider-Man, Uncharted 4 and Lost Legacy, Horizon: Zero Dawn, and before I had a really good PC I played stuff like Batman: Arkham Knight and Metal Gear Solid V on the PS4, so I liked it quite a bit.

But I'm really finding that PC is just a much more preferred option for me, thanks to mods letting me change things (like that annoying screen-flash from FFVII:Remake), letting me more easily get stable framerates, so on and so forth. But I like tweaking and messing with things, so

Yeah, that's fair.

to be honest, I did try genuinely for almost an entire year to switch over to PC gaming, but I ultimately decided to move back to console, because as fun as the tweaking and messing around was occasionally, I ultimately want my games to just work right out of the box.

And the majority of PC games only coming with the Xbox labels also bums me out, since I heavily dislike the Xbox labels. They fuck with my Nintendo muscle memory.

Meanwhile, I know where all the Playstation buttons are by heart, even though before the PS5 the last time I played on a Playstation system was the Vita back in 2015 or so xD

If developers were just using it to make PS4-quality titles that simply ran at better, more stable rates, that'd be more than enough to satisfy me because PS4-quality titles are really freakin' good. I mean seriously Uncharted 4 and Arkham Knight are still insanely great-looking titles today

Yeah, agreed.
I feel like the PS4-level graphics were already realistic enough and very good-looking.
And I'm still rocking a TV from fricking 2009(!), where its actual screen resolution is 1366 x 768, but it can still go up to 1080p, so stuff like 4K is pretty irrelevant for me. All I'd want is more games to have a stable 60 fps framerate.

The PS4 is a cool console. I need to see what the state of jailbreaking and homebrew on it is. It'd be nice to have an excuse to hook it back up...

Jailbreaking a console, especially once that's still (kinda) ongoing, always felt extremely scary to me, but I guess it would be a bit easier on PS4, considering how they just let you download the system software from their official webpage. Which is necessary if you wanna swap out the hard drive with another one (or even a fitting SSD).

speaking of which, I'm still honestly impressed that Sony even lets you do that. like "you want more storage? here you go, here's the system software file, just go ham, put another hard drive in, or maybe even an SSD, we don't give a shit, lmao"

I remember only being able to hook up an external hard drive to the Wii U if you wanted more storage, for instance, lmao.

[Eramn Lanif]

I'm very glad they do, because our PS3's internal HDD died and we had to replace it.

Getting a bigger drive also means you have more room for PS store games. Sony is probably happy with that too.