I learned several very interesting things from watching this week’s PlayStation Meeting, where the PS4 Pro was revealed. Mark Cerny, much like my old high school algebra 2 teacher, has a dangerously hypnotic voice. Mass Effect Andromeda ‘s Ryder, much like Shepard, will probably have a superior voice actor if you make her female. Horizon: Zero Dawn still looks super-duper-dope. Oh, and I’m perfectly happy with my launch PlayStation 4, thanks. I mean, I’m sure all those games they showed off at the PlayStation Meeting looked really great if you were sitting in the room, but that sure didn’t come across well to those of us who were watching the stream on our ordinary computer monitors… and that was just one of many reasons that Sony’s PlayStation Pro sales pitch fell flat.
We’re not exactly tech early adopters here at my house. I tend to get the latest consoles because it’s my job, but otherwise, our setup isn’t exactly someting out of a Wired magazine spread. After all, I live in a smallish apartment with my husband and a hyperactive Main Coon cat. We don’t tend to invest in any technology that would put us in debt to replace if it got knocked over by a sudden feline rampage. We’ve got a nice array of gaming PCs, consoles, and handhelds, but our Samsung Smart TV is so old that it doesn’t even spy on us. Every six months or so it informs us that it’s discontinuing some kind of service we’ve never used. And yet, we’re perfectly happy with the thing. It has a 1080p display and several good years left in it. That’s fairly typical even for gamer households, isn’t it?
When our TV dies, we’re probably going to get a 1080p TV with HDR. Have you checked out the difference yet? HDR is about better contrast and color accuracy, while 4K is about more pixels. A nice mid-range 1080p HDR TV looks way nicer than a similarly-priced low-end 4K TV without HDR. The worthwhile, high-end 4K TVs are still very much a niche market for people who just can’t live without millions of pixels, live someplace large enough for a giant TV, have the budget for one, and lack the children and pets that make such a purchase problematic.
So what would the PS4 Pro do for me? I’m certainly not in that niche market. By the time I get a 4K TV (I’m thinking sometime after 2020), we’re talking about an entirely new console generation. I don’t really care if the Pro does VR a bit better than my launch PS4, because I doubt we’re going to have a truly compelling VR library available to us for several more years. I don’t even need it for my hypothetical future HDR-capable TV, since I’ve just learned that my launch PS4 is being patched to support HDR. Thanks, Sony!
The biggest lesson I learned from the PlayStation meeting, though, is that I still can’t freaking wait to play Horizon: Zero Dawn . I mean, look at it! We already knew it had shades of Monster Hunter , Far Cry , and The Elder Scrolls . Now we’re seeing bits of Shadow of the Colossus , too! You climb that crazy long-necked robot dinosaur, Aloy! And look at the breathtaking use of color and motion in Aloy’s world! I don’t need no stinkin’ 4K TV to see how gorgeous this game is going to be. Horizon’s designers obviously know that making good use of graphical technology is important (best wind since The Witcher 3 !), but a strong graphical style is the best foundation you can have. Good design makes a game look great even for those of us without eight million pixels to our names.
So sorry, Sony. Looks like I learned all the wrong lessons from your meeting today. I learned that the average gamer doesn’t really need a PS4 Pro, and not even the melodic, nearly soporific vocal stylings of Mark Cerny are enough to convince me to shell out $1500 Canadian smackeroos for a Sony 4K TV. For me, Sony’s console is all about the games, and those are looking like they’re going to be perfectly awesome on my plain old ordinary PlayStation 4.