I feel like we’ve been waiting on the promise of “next-gen” gaming for a while now. When the PS5 and Xbox Series X launched in 2020, they promised a lot of things with their upgraded hardware, but for the most part, there wasn’t anything that they were doing at the time that felt entirely impossible for the PS4 and Xbox One to achieve. It didn’t help that most games launching on the new consoles were also launching on the older ones.
Obviously, with supply chain issues and the pandemic, there were a lot of reasons why the launch of the PS5 and Series X was tough, both from a consumer and developer perspective. That said, there hasn’t been much of a good reason to actually own a new console up until now.
It feels like I’ve read a handful of reviews since 2020 for games that say “THIS is the first true Xbox Series X game,” or “‘Game’ finally makes good on the promise of the PS5,” but those types of games have felt like the exception and not the rule when it comes to “next-gen” titles. Now, it actually feels like we’ve gotten to the point where we are firmly in the “next-gen” era of gaming three years into the consoles’ life cycles.
What really sold me on it all is the one-two punch that was the launch of Spider-Man 2 and Alan Wake 2 over the past two weeks. These are two games that exclusively run on PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC (although I’m not talking about PCs here at all, that’s a conversation for another time.) While there have been plenty of other games to launch exclusively on the hardware, most of those games don’t actually make use of what sets the consoles apart from their predecessors.
For example, there’s not much that Gotham Knights was doing that wouldn’t have worked on the PlayStation 4 which it wasn’t released on, but if you tried to run Alan Wake 2 on an Xbox One, I think it would just explode. The first thing that a lot of people notice when playing these “next-gen” games is the graphical fidelity. How games look matters a lot to people and while I tend to prefer a game with strong art direction and style over something that simply looks realistic, new gaming hardware is making it possible for games to take that next step towards realism.
The big thing with the PS5 and Xbox Series X is ray tracing which allows developers to include realistic light reflections that add a level of detail and realism to the experience that hasn’t been possible on older hardware. Ray-tracing is, in my opinion, a small detail, one that I don’t really notice unless I’m looking specifically for it, but, like good video editing, it’s doing its job properly if you don’t notice it. Ray-tracing is a detail that ties the entire experience together, offering more realistic environments and there isn’t a better showcase of the PS5’s ray-tracing capabilities, in my opinion, than Spider-Man 2.
The reflections in this game are out of this world. When playing on graphical fidelity mode, you can see these realistic reflections on basically everything from the more obvious things like cars and windows to the more minute details like the eyepieces on Spider-Man’s costumes. No surface in the game is without a reflection of some kind, just like in real life, and it makes Spider-Man 2 feel like a significant step forward in capturing realism in games. It’s something that simply isn’t possible on older hardware and Alan Wake 2 offers similarly stunning visuals.
Although its reflections aren’t as complex as the ones in Spider-Man 2, Alan Wake still captures some of the most lifelike environments I’ve ever seen in a game. Just look at how good this looks. The textures here are so numerous and detailed that porting it to other hardware would require many things to be removed or at the very least lowered in quality, stripping the game of its visual identity.
Here’s the thing though: we’ve seen good-looking games before. It’s my opinion that no game has better captured the faces and movements of human beings than The Last of Us Part 2 which came out in 2020. Graphics are great, but honestly, I don’t really care about them all that much since games have looked great for a long time. Instead, the things that really make games like Alan Wake 2 or Spider-Man 2 feel “next-gen” are how they use the hardware for things other than graphical fidelity.
When the review embargo for Spider-Man 2 lifted and journalists were able to show their footage, this clip broke my brain. There are two reasons why I find the loading in Spider-Man 2 to be so impressive. The first is obvious: it’s fast. Real fast. And, actually, faster than you even think because you have to hold the confirm button for a few seconds before committing to fast traveling. You can bail out at just about any time while confirming which means that the game isn’t hiding its load time while you confirm, it’s doing it all in the blink of an eye as the camera sweeps up above New York and settles down at your desired travel point.
I can’t think of a game that’s loaded that quickly before. The previous champ in my memory was Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, also by Insomniac, but it didn’t feature load times quite like what’s in Spider-Man 2. What’s great is that the fast loading isn’t just relegated to fast travel, but when reloading saves or starting up the game you can expect similarly quick load times, which was convenient for me because I actually experienced a lot of crashes and soft locks in Spider-Man 2. It was hard for me to stay mad, though since I could get right back into the action in less than five seconds.
The other thing about the game’s fast loading that’s so impressive is that you aren’t fast-traveling to set, specific points of interest like in countless other open-world games. Instead, you’re jumping to pretty much wherever you want in the city which I honestly can’t get my head around. I’m not a game dev by literally any means, but I have no idea how Insomniac did this. My only guess is that there are set loading locations across the entire map on, like, every cross-street and your cursor moves to the nearest one when you want to fast travel, but other than that I have no clue.
While the loading is great for anyone who wants to fast travel, it impacts what Insomniac is able to do with the set pieces in the game itself as well. Most, if not all, cutscenes in Spider-Man 2 are in-engine and not pre-rendered which means that the game is rendering all of the scenes in real-time. It makes this moment from the start of the game where Sandman throws Miles across the city so impressive since you know that the game itself is rendering it all and you’re not just watching an animated cutscene. It means that the story is able to feature these awe-inspiring set pieces and moments thanks specifically to the hardware featured in the PS5.
While no one is getting thrown across the city in Alan Wake 2 (at least not for where I am in the game–I haven’t beaten it quite yet,) it similarly features some impressive loading with agent Anderson’s Mind Place and Alan’s Writer’s Room. These locations are essentially the same in terms of what I’m talking about, so I’ll be using their names interchangeably. Essentially, you can load into a physical representation of Saga or Alan’s mind’s eye at any point in the game to review the facts of Saga’s investigation, the ideas Alan uses to write himself out of the Dark Place, and more.
What’s so cool about it, however, is that you teleport to the location instantly with the touch of a button. There is no loading, no hitching, you’re just there, ready to pour over maps, tape up some clues, or level up. How quickly the Mind Place loads is extremely cool, especially in the first few hours of the game, but something else that’s impressive about it is that it doesn’t pause your game. If you enter it when enemies are around, they’ll attack and possibly even kill you which means that Alan Wake 2 is likely rendering two highly detailed areas on top of one another at the same time with your character existing in both simultaneously.
You have to admit: that’s cool. I’ve never seen anything quite like that in a game before. There have been a handful of titles that have used similar ideas like the “Effect and Cause” level in Titanfall 2 or the dual world of The Medium, but Alan Wake 2 successfully builds a major part of its gameplay loop using that mechanic in a way that also adds to its story and themes. Both Alan Wake games place a large emphasis on the power of the mind and how perception doesn’t just shape reality, it is reality.
I can’t think of a better representation of a person getting lost inside their own thoughts than physically being transported to a room of their own design. When you’re lost in your thoughts, the world doesn’t stop moving around you and you can easily miss what someone’s saying if you start to drift while they’re talking. If you go to the Mind Place mid-conversation in Alan Wake 2, the conversation doesn’t stop and you’ll miss stuff, just like in real life.
What I think I noticed most strikingly about both Spider-Man 2 and Alan Wake 2 is how they make use of the PS5 and Xbox Series X’s hardware to create interesting mechanics, breathtaking visuals, and enhanced storytelling. These are things that are only achievable on hardware of this level and wouldn’t work as well if the developers were still limited to the power of the PS4 and Xbox One.
What I think I noticed most strikingly about both Spider-Man 2 and Alan Wake 2 is how they make use of the PS5 and Xbox Series X’s hardware to create interesting mechanics, breathtaking visuals, and enhanced storytelling.
Previous exclusives have used some of the features available with the new hardware but for the most part, a lot of them simply felt like PlayStation 4 or Xbox One games with higher resolution textures and frame rates. There’s nothing wrong with that, the Demon’s Souls remake for example is a great game, but it doesn’t push the boundaries of what can be achieved with the hardware.
That said, 2023 feels like the year when gaming has finally started pushing itself to innovate using the latest hardware. Obviously, not all games are going to be Alan Wake 2 or Spider-Man 2, but we’re starting to see plenty of hardware innovations in other games as well like Cocoon and Lords of the Fallen. Both of those games launched on previous hardware, so they aren’t fully leaning into the power that comes with the PS5 and Series X, but the ideas of that innovation are there.
I’m just hoping that we get even more innovative storytelling and gameplay mechanics moving forward and it looks like this is finally the year to make that happen and realize the true vision of “next-gen” gaming. It’s just a shame that it’s taken three years to get to this point as both Sony and Microsoft work on their new console redesigns. Maybe now they’ll be able to convince more people to buy these things, not that they’re having much trouble now. It was hard to convince people they needed a PS5 in 2020 when literally everything that was launching on it was available on PS4. “Except for Demon’s Souls!” I hear you typing. It’s a PS3 game.