Things are looking healthy in 2016, too – especially if you like huge sequels. On Wii U, we’ve seen the gorgeous platformer construction kit Super Mario Maker and the super cute Yoshi’s Woolly World – there’s also a nice version of Skylanders Super Chargers which adds Donkey Kong and Bowser to the cast.
As for exclusives, Xbox One is getting Halo 5: Guardians, while PS4 owners will need to wait a little longer for promising biggies like space exploration sim No Man’s Sky and rollicking action adventure Uncharted 4: Thief’s End. Coming up there’s the vast apocalyptic adventure Fallout 4, anarchic sandbox stunt ’em up Just Cause 3, Call of Duty: Black Ops III, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, Rise of the Tomb Raider and the long-awaited online shooter Star Wars Battlefront.
So far this quarter, we’ve already had Metal Gear Solid 5: Phantom Pain, two great football sims ( Pro Evolution Soccer and Fifa 16), Forza Motorsport 6 (on Xbox One) and the game-changing Destiny: Taken King.
No Man’s Sky simulates an entire galaxy providing players with a multiplayer exploration game like no other. This is a pretty good Christmas for new releases – and more are on the way If none of the new or forthcoming releases interest you and you’re not a big online gamer, you could hang on for another year. Indeed, a lot of well-reviewed Xbox One and PS4 titles – including GTA V, Last of Us, Dishonored and Tomb Raider are merely graphically enhanced versions of last-gen titles. They don’t look as good and are missing some of the more sophisticated features, but you’re still getting roughly the same game experience. It’s not a vast library that’s for sure, but you’ll get many hours of pleasure out of all of these – and you can’t play them anywhere else.Īlternative view: most of the big PS4 and Xbox One releases are also available on the PS3 and Xbox 360.
There are also choices for older gamers including Bayonetta 2 and a great update of cult action role-player Darkstalkers II. Nintendo’s latest machine was slow to start but now it has a beautiful collection of family-friendly titles like Mario Kart 8, Splatoon, Super Mario 3D World, Super Smash Bros, Super Mario Maker and Pikmin 3. So it’s not all shooting serious looking men in the face with licensed firearms. There are also strong second tier offerings like Dragon Age: Inquisition, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, Far Cry 4, Until Dawn (PS4 only), Forza Horizon 2 (only on Xbox One) and Destiny.īoth machines also support a large vibrant indie community producing beautiful offbeat titles like Shovel Knight, Guacamelee, Ori and the Blind Forest, N++, Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, Resogun and Lovers in a Dangerous Space Time. Xbox One and PS4 have several bona-fide classics including Witcher 3, Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, Batman: Arkham Knight and Bloodborne (a PS4 exclusive). Two years after launch, however, things are really picking up for the current generation. Developers are still getting to grips with the hardware, while the manufacturers are busy making desperate tweaks to the user interface and operating systems. The first year of a console’s life is usually pretty low on truly excellent titles. With its vast, detailed environment and seemingly endless narrative, Witcher 3 typifies current-gen gaming.
We’re also seeing interesting experiments with online multiplayer gaming, including hugely ambitious projects like No Man’s Sky on PS4 and Elite: Dangerous on Xbox One.
Coming up, Uncharted 4 is set to really push PS4 in its use of physics and graphical shaders, while on Xbox One, Quantum Break is promising state-of-the-art rendering tech and Crackdown 3 is using cloud computing to create 100% destructible cities. Right now, we’re getting the first wave of big titles – Witcher 3, Star Wars: Battlefront, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate – that are leaving the last-gen machines behind. This means less constraints on your imagination – I certainly expect to see leaps in artificial intelligence, physics and graphical realism”.
“It’s even longer before developers fully learn how to exploit the hardware.
“It takes a while before the software development kits – the applications that developers use to make games – really come into maturity,” says independent developer Byron Atkinson-Jones. This, he said, would hugely increase the depth and accuracy of game worlds. Just after the launch of PlayStation 4, the machine’s designer Mark Cerny said it would be three years before we saw studios starting to truly exploit the capabilities of the hardware – for example, using the graphics processor for other tasks such as collision detection and physics to boost performance. Developers are getting to grips with the hardware Here are five reasons why the answer may quite possibly be yes.