PlayStation 5: A Truly Modern Experience
My entire life has been structured in video game release schedules. When Final Fantasy VIII released back in 1999, I took the day off from school so I could play it. When Dreamcast launched, my brothers and I had a garage sale to raise money for the new console. I stood in line in the freezing November pre-dawn in 2013 to get a PlayStation 4 from Best Buy. You see where this is going.
I love video games and I have always been willing to go the extra mile to be current with the industry. Part of this desire, I think, stems from my dreams of being a video game journalist; a goal that never quite game to fruition. But I always want to get new games when they come out and I always want to get the new consoles when they come out. Enter the PlayStation 5.
Putting aside the preorder headaches and woes (I was lucky and preordered mine from Target the night they went live), this has been the most streamlined and modern feeling console launch in my lifetime. Gone are the waiting in lines, the dolling out of tickets for stock allocation, the dwindling hopes that you might not be front enough in the line to get your coveted prize. You don’t even need to leave your house. My PS5 arrived, earlier than predicted, from a FedEx truck and was placed softly on my doorstep.
I opened the box and carefully removed my new hardware. A few days before, I ran a new HDMI 2.1 cable through the wall to my TV, disconnected the PS4 and cleared a space for the hulking behemoth that is the PS5.
The first step was attaching the stand; easy enough. I have to go horizontal since there is not enough vertical clearance between my TV stand and my TV. The cables were there and ready; one, two, three; power, video and internet.
The console booted up as expected. Plugged in the Dual Sense with a wire. Seamless synching. The new PS App on my phone scanned the QR code the PS5 displayed on my TV and without a second thought, and no typing in numbers and letters, I was signed in to my PlayStation account on my new console.
I have Google Fiber internet so I am getting about 500MBPS. I navigated to the PS5 games library and there were all 400+ of my purchased games, organized by most recent. The first three were the new PS5 games I had preordered on the PS App weeks before. Click. Download. Click. Download. Within minutes, I had three new PS5 games on my console. I also downloaded Avengers (PS4) and simply navigated to the PS5 Could Save Data section and downloaded my Avengers save data from the cloud. No USB drives, no mess console-to-console data transfers (I’m looking at you 3DS); everything was like butter. Simple and smooth.
This first-hour experience was wholly unique. Everything just worked. This is why the PS5 feels like a modern console. Yes, the graphics are amazing and the Solid State Drive zips and the 3D audio sounds great and the crazy controller haptics make my hands feel like they are in the game and the 4K Blu-Ray player makes The Matrix look sweet…but the fact that everything just worked and is all seamlessly integrated with The Cloud made me pause. For the first time I have a sense of carelessness about this new console; usually I feel worried and anxious that something will get messed up, something will get lost or something will go wrong. To me, this experience represents how modern technology should work FOR us; to make life a little less complicated and a little less worrisome.
Kudos Sony.
The PS5 is great and truly feels like a modern video game experience.
