The 9th Gen at 6 months: Backwards compatibility and SSD are the best features. The Dualsense has potential.

Today it is 6 months since the launch of the PS5, with the Series S/X having launched 2 days earlier. It is telling that most of the discussion remains focused on how hard these consoles are to get and how long it's going to be before you can just walk into a store and buy them. There's enormous demand for 9th gen consoles but what there isn't is a compelling reason to own them beyond wanting slightly better graphics and faster loading times.

I'm lucky enough to have snagged a launch Series X and a PS5 in January, both bought from retailers at MSRP (though my PS5 came in a bundle, which only included stuff I wanted to get anyway.) I've played a lot on both of them and have played a lot of 9th gen games. I've also been playing a bunch of 8th gen games, including on 8th gen systems themselves. Most recently I've been making my way through Assassins Creed Syndicate, which doesn't work properly on the PS5 (there's some incredibly distracting flickering with the shadows) so I've been on PS4 for that, and my Xbox One is hooked up to my treadmill so I use that on a regular basis too.

The 9th gen upgrade really hasn't added much to gaming yet, even in terms of graphics. Do games look nicer on the Series X and PS5? Some certainly do. But despite having had a 9th gen system for half a year I'm still impressed by a lot of 8th gen games, even earlier 8th gen games. Assassin's Creed Unity looks fantastic even now, and that was a 2014 release. It's helped a bit because I played it on Series X, where it has an FPS boost and maintains its image quality, but it's still a very pretty game, and I played it the same time I was messing around with Returnal, one of the few 9th gen exclusives. Meanwhile a lot of games that have 9th gen versions look worse than the best 8th gen games because of their art design or budgets. Maneater and Bugsnax were two early PS5 only PS+ games and while I enjoyed both of them they didn't really benefit from the increase in power. Watch Dogs: Legion has some 9th gen bells and whistles like ray tracing, but I think Syndicate's version of London is much better looking and more interesting to traverse because of how it's designed, even if it's inferior from a technical perspective. Then there are games where the PS5/Series X versions are just kind of silly, like Crimsonland. There are a ton of these 2D games with basic graphics that are enhanced presumably just as a way to sell a few versions or because the developers used them as training projects to learn the new hardware. Some have 120 FPS modes, or finally got a bump up to 4K (even if the assets don't actually make that a worthwhile change) but for the most part they don't gain anything from the transition.

Even something like Returnal, which is technically impressive enough that it clearly couldn't run on a PS4 pro, doesn't gain that much from being on PS5. Yes the graphics are slightly shinier, but I think we've reached the point of diminishing returns where that doesn't really matter. The truth is that only big budget projects could ever take full advantage of the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X anyway, and those projects are fewer and further between, so the vast majority of games look pretty much the same on the new systems and mostly gain a resolution boost or a better frame rate. I don't want to minimize those things, but you have to be pretty finnicky to think that playing a game in 4K is mindblowing vs. the same game in 1080P. It makes a difference but it's not a big one.

What does make a big difference are the load times. Forza Horizon 4 looks significantly better on the Series X than the Xbox One X because of its long draw distances and expensive assets that had already been made for the PC version. But while the nicer graphics are cool, the biggest difference is that it loads like a dream on the Series X. Having an SSD cuts the load to a tiny fraction of what it was on the One X and significantly improves the game, since warping around the map to visit various events takes only a handful of seconds instead of a full minute or more. My biggest issue with playing Syndicate on the PS4 has been the load times, which feel positively archaic after getting used to the Series X and the PS5. This is the killer app for these systems right now, and it honestly is hard to go back. Playing the same game on One X vs. Series X where they both have native versions I honestly don't care about the graphical upgrades but the load times are a massive improvement.

The SSDs come at a cost though. Managing data for these systems, especially the PS5, is a nightmare. I can't even keep all the games I want to be available to me at a moment's notice, like Tony Hawk and Hitman 3 on the system unless I only have a few other games going at the same time. External storage helps and eventually I'll upgrade the internal, but for now it's a serious problem and it's only going to get worse.

The truth is that unless you only play a few games a year and only current releases, the vast majority of your time is going to be spent on 8th gen games at this point. There's just not that much out there for 9th gen yet. The fact that the 9th gen consoles enhance those older games, with better frame rates, better loading times, and sometimes even resolution bumps, is their strongest feature. They take your prior library and they make it play better...for the most part (Syndicate is an example of where they don't.) This is especially true with Xbox, which is fully compatible with every non-Kinect game and does some truly impressive stuff with its FPS program and other enhancements, but PS5 is no slouch there either. Taking every game you own already and making it a little bit, or in some cases a lot, better is the biggest reason to own these boxes beyond the load times.

The other big potential killer app here is the Dualsense. But right now it's just potential rather than something that actually matters. Yes, it's very cool in Astro's Playroom...and only Astro's Playroom. Other games try to take advantage of it, but having slightly more trigger tension or variations in rumble doesn't really mean much. In Miles Morales I honestly can't say that making the triggers a bit stiff for web swinging mattered to me, and while the rumble was nice it wasn't anything like Astro's truly impressive surface differentiators. In Returnal the rumble is better and I guess using the half stop on the left trigger is a good implementation, Whether you fully pull in the trigger or only half pull it in is the difference between using your special shot or just aiming down sights, and having a tactical feel for the difference is useful, but there are lots of games that use the analog functions of the analog triggers without those stops and they work fine. It's a nice little bonus but not a game changer and not significant. I think Returnal on the Dualshock 4 would be basically just as good as the Dualsense. Meanwhile I haven't found any 3rd party games that do anything substantial with the rumble or triggers. Bugsnax uses the haptics to simulate walking and it's more distracting than anything else. Maneater stiffened the triggers up in a mashy game and it hurt my hand so bad I had to stop playing PS5 for a month. Everyone is coming to grips on how to use this thing but nobody has figured it out yet except for Team Asobi.

It's worth noting here that while the change from 7th gen to 8th gen led to a whole bunch of new features on the OS side, like the ability to suspend games and much better integration of video streaming and apps, the change over from 8th to 9th has not done nearly as much. Xbox added Quick Resume, which is just multi-game suspension, and it'd be neat if it worked, which it often doesn't. So yay? PlayStation redid the whole interface, making it worse for those of us who have PS4 muscle memory, and added activity cards that warp you right to a specific level or area of the game and integrated video guides, which are cool in concept but often aren't well implemented. I wonder if we'll see those take off or just become abandoned features. So far they don't do much. The biggest difference between 7th and 8th gens was arguably in user interface, but that jump just doesn't exist here.

I'm still happy to have 9th gen consoles and I'm excited about the future, but right now the demand is out of whack with what they actually offer. People who are paying thousands of dollars for scalped versions out of FOMO should keep their money because you're not actually missing anything by not having one. The Switch has had the strongest release schedule this year, but on the 'main' consoles the best experiences have been available for PS4 and Xbox One as well as PS5 and Series X, and that looks to continue for the rest of the year, especially due to the supply constraints (since publishers want to put their games where the buyers are.) This is the smallest step forward of any console generation so far, and it's probably going to be the slowest transition. I think we've finally reached the point where the capacity of the hardware has outstripped what the vast majority of developers can actually offer.

6 months in, these systems are nice to have, but far from essential. They boost your old games, which is cool and makes them worth the investment if you play a lot of games, but they don't give you anything mind blowing you can't get elsewhere, at least not yet. We'll see what things look like over the next few years as hopefully life returns to normal and the install bases get up and running, but right now as much as Sony says it believes in generations, this feels much more like the 8th gen half-steps than the boost from 7th to 8th gen.