Playing on console has always been synonymous with enjoying a series of advantages that, over time, have been evolving in a very clear way and not always for the better. Let’s be honest, playing on console today does not offer the same experience as in the nineties, and I’m not referring to the details that have marked the different technological advances, but to the base experience in general.
It is an indisputable reality. In many aspects, the evolution that the world of video consoles has experienced has been positive, that is not possible to deny either, but in many other things it has been the opposite. I know very well what I am talking about, after all, my first console was an Atari 2600, and since then I have had many consoles until I reached the PS4. I haven’t bought a PS5 yet because of the market situation, and because I’m not in any hurry, really.
My experience in the world of consoles accumulates more than 30 yearsAnd it doesn’t stop growing. You know, time well spent is knowledge, and this ends up becoming wisdom if it is used properly, and if it is contextualized in an appropriate and impartial way.
Playing on console in the eighties or nineties has nothing to do with doing it today, it’s that simple, and this has good things and bad things. It is clear that playing on console still has some advantages, but a part of the original advantages offered by these platforms have “fallen by the wayside” as a consequence of the evolution they have experienced, and they no longer make any sense no matter how much some insist on repeating them ad nauseam.
In this article, I am going to share with you five advantages of playing on consoles that today, due to this evolution, have completely disappeared, and therefore you must forget no matter how much some still insist on trying to bring them out by pulling shoehorns, or completely wrong interpretations.
1.-When you play on console you don’t worry about the hardware
This is a lie. A few years ago this was true because, in the end, consoles used specialized components that weren’t available in the PC world, games didn’t require a hard drive installation, and there were no cross-generational refreshes that made us feel like our console was outdated.
Specialized hardware allowed those consoles age much better, and gave developers a foundation to work on at a deeper level. Yes, in certain cases this was counterproductive at the beginning, think for example of how complicated it was to develop games initially for PS2 and PS3, but also think of the game that both consoles gave during their entire useful life. In fact, the most technically advanced PS3 games came at the end of their life cycle (The Last of Us was released in 2013).
But this is not all, in many cases play on console it also equated to having very powerful hardware, similar to the high-end within each equivalent PC generation, and in some cases its performance was truly impressive in its first years of life. PS3, for example, arrived in 2006 and had a GPU similar to the GeForce 7900 GT (it was cut in ROPs and memory bus). Said graphics card was high-end in 2006.
Also think about Xbox 360, which mounted a GPU so advanced that used a unified shader architecture in 2005. Aren’t you surprised? Well, think that the unified shader architecture did not debut in the world of general consumer graphics cards until 2007when the launch of the GeForce 8000 series took place. Now, the consoles use an adapted hardware that starts from the same base that we can find in PC, and also the use of APUs that integrate CPU and GPU in a package has also introduced limitations important.
On the other hand, the jump to the installation of games on internal storage units with a limited capacity and the intergenerational renewals, PS4 Pro and Xbox One X, have made the user who decides to play on console feel the same as the one who plays on pc, that your system has become “old”, or that you need a hard drive upgrade to be able to continue installing games, or an SSD to load faster.
2.-The games will always work well on console
Control at 17 FPS on PS4. Image courtesy of Digital Foundry.
It is not true. The truth is that, strictly speaking, it has never beensince in the 32 and 64 bit era many 3D games had FPS drops so big that they became slideshows, others had major bugs, and some had to be fully ported to specific graphics engines because they didn’t reach the level of its PC namesake.
I think the correct thing would be to say that when you play on console you have the advantage that your games will always work, but you don’t have to do it right. I can put many recent examples, such as the well-known Cyberpunk 2077, which is not going well on PS4 and Xbox One; Days Gone, which in its PS4 version has very large FPS drops and “scratches”, as well as insufferable loading times; and also Bloodborne, which also has significant performance drops and dizzying stuttering, and it’s one of my favorite games.
To keep saying, or believing, that playing on a console is a guarantee that the games will always work well for you is a chimera that makes no sense. In fact, Over time, just the opposite will happen.games will tend to run worse because the hardware on this one will be older and it will fall short on power.
developers will continue to start from it as a minimum base, and this will work “the miracle” of making it work on old hardware, but the experience you will enjoy can be terribly bad. Yes, games that might not boot on an equivalent PC will work on your console, but with poor graphics quality and fluidity that won’t always be acceptable.
3.-Playing on console is much more comfortable than playing on PC
Consoles have gotten a lot closer to PC, for better and for worse.
This is a half truth, but so half that has lost much of its original value and that is why it deserves to be on this list. Before, playing with a console was really simple and comfortable, and it had nothing to do with playing on PC. I perfectly remember that, to move certain titles on my first PC, I had to install and run them from MS-DOS, on others I had to fiddle with different settings because the sound could cause problems, especially on older ones, and the drivers could be an ordeal.
That reality has remained in the PC world, although The truth is that it has been greatly simplified. Today keeping a computer up to date is something that any user with a bit of experience can do, since drivers and updates can be done automatically and do not usually give serious errors, and also the installation and execution of games has been reduced to a few clicks.
It is very curious, because while the experience of playing on PC has been simplified and facilitated, on consoles the opposite has happened. Before, when I got home from a hard day at school, I’d open the lid of my Master System II, pop in Streets of Rage, turn on the TV and console, and play. Today, if I want to play a PS4 game for a while I have to install and update it, and I may find myself with a mandatory system update on the console that will waste my time. As if that weren’t enough, if I don’t have space on the hard drive, I’ll have to work my head out to choose what I delete and what I don’t.
It is true that, in the end, a console It is a machine specialized in video games.but its evolution has led it to become a multimedia center capable of doing more and more things, which in the end has fully involved it in a process of “partial transformation on PC” which, obviously, has affected the user experience. This experience is increasingly similar to that of a PC, with all that this entails.
4.-The optimization works miracles when playing on console
Yes, playing on console gives you that advantage that the games are going to work for you, but this does not mean that they are going to work well for you, and you should not blind yourself to the miracle of optimization either, since in many cases it is a simple adjustment or reduction of graphic quality to speed up a bit of fluidity, something that simply does not transfer to the PC.
The developers start from the base of the consoles to try to refine the performance to the maximum, this is true, but the hardware is what it is, and in the end miracles do not exist. When a demanding game runs on a PS4 or Xbox One, it usually does so by pulling dynamic or rescaled resolutionand from a graphical configuration with settings lower than PC low mode. It is also normal to find performance that can drop below 25 FPS.
That’s not optimization, it’s shoehorning a game into a platform that isn’t really capable of running it in a truly acceptable way. Think back to Days Gone or Cyberpunk 2077, but we can also go to the recent Elden Ring, which runs at 900p on Xbox One, is set to low quality and still drops to 20 FPS. On PS4 things get better, but the experience can only be considered “passable”, the exact words of Thomas Morgan of Digital Foundry.
Playing on console has in its favor that it will always be, while it is within its useful life cycle, the base platform from which developments will start, and that developers will always try to adjust to the hardware of the less powerful platform, but this This is not to say that optimization will be a permanent miracle. Cyberpunk 2077 was the biggest dose of reality in recent historybut we have seen many other examples of the hardware being what it is in the end, such as the terrible version of Resident Evil 4 for PS2 or the Splinter Cell for said console.
5.-Exclusive games make playing on console more attractive
This is not like that. Three years ago I myself considered it to be an important advantage, but with the changes in strategy that Sony and Microsoft have executed, more and more console exclusives are coming to PC, a reality that will go more and more. On the other hand, it should also be noted that there are PS5 exclusives that will come to PC but not Xbox Series XS, and Xbox Series XS exclusives that will come to PC but not PS5. This means that, in the end, the PC ends up being the great beneficiary.
As those of you who read us daily will remember, at the time I bought a PS4 to be able to play Bloodborne, but that was not the first time that an exclusive led me to buy a specific console. At the time I also chose the NES because I fell in love with Double Dragon II and Ninja Gaiden, and the same thing happened to me with Master System II by Sonic and his adaptation of Ninja Gaiden.
Days Gone on PC with maximum quality
Console-selling exclusives have always been there but their importance is being drastically reduced, and eventually we will reach a point where they will end up being mere temporary exclusives. In this sense, we must understand that both Sony and Microsoft face high development costsand that releasing games on multiple platforms is the best way to recover those investments.
If we stick to a console vs. console approach, exclusives will still play a big role, because Sony isn’t going to release their exclusive franchises on Xbox and Microsoft isn’t going to release theirs on PlayStation, but both are taking them to the PCand this is the key to everything, that the strength of these exclusives is diluted when the PC enters the equation.
