Sony’s recent State of Play showed off Marvel’s Wolverine and God Of War Laufey on PS5, but one reader feels these new games are suffering from an old problem.
I watched the State of Play on Tuesday and I was glad to see that afterwards a lot of people seemed to share my same sense of vague disappointment. Everything looked good, especially the Sony-made stuff, but at the same time none of it seemed all that interesting. Wolverine and God Of War Laufey just seem so… predictable. Even if that means being predictably good looking and probably very good to play.
You could say they look predictable because God Of War is part of a long-running series and Wolverine is too, in that they’ve obviously just swapped the locations and powers with the Spider-Man games.
I’m sure there’s more to it than that, and I’m sure they’re good games, but that’s kind of the point. They’re good but their predictable and overfamiliar, even though they’re not really meant to be. I think the problem is that they’re still following the Sony formula, which is a concept I haven’t thought about in years.
To recap, the phrase ‘Sony formula’ started to get used in the PlayStation 4 era, once people began to realise that, as good as they were, all their first party games were actually very similar. There was the whole ‘sad dad’ cliché for the main characters but more importantly the fact that they were single-player open world, narrative games with similar graphical styles and usually similar combat and stealth.
At first it didn’t matter, it was just a funny thing to point out, but when it kept happening people started to get a little tired of it, and then the PlayStation 5 got released. At that point Sony solved the problem by just not making that many games anymore. I’m not going to get into that well-worn complaint but one of the side effects, that I don’t see people really talking about, is that it’s meant the whole Sony formula issue has been forgotten.
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But by having two big games out at once (that shouldn’t seem like a lot but it is, compared to the last five years) you realise that the issue never got dealt with and that Sony first party games are still all kind of the same. There seems to be a new obsession with Devil May Cry style combat, since that’s apparently what Laufey and Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet are like, but otherwise it all looks very familiar.
Everyone’s been talking about how Wolverine seems to be borrowing a lot from Uncharted, with the stealth and the motorbike chase and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that that’s also a Sony first party game. Everything is from the same playbook and nothing new is being added.
If Sony ever did go back to making games at the same rate as before, or at least a lot faster than up till now, it’s going to bring the Sony formula problem right back to the surface again and I think it’s obvious there’s no answer for it.
There’s been a lot of talk about the PlayStation 6 probably not doing anything different in terms of graphics but I think the other problem is that it’s not going to do anything new in terms of gameplay either, which is just as big a problem. It feels that nothing much has changed in game design for a long time, not just for Sony but for anyone. Which is worse when you have to wait more than six years for a new game and then find out it was pretty much the same as the old game.
I’m not saying I definitely won’t get either game because of this – I’m definitely interested in God Of War Laufey – but I think we’ve forgotten that there are issues with Sony’s first party games that never got resolved and are probably going to leak into the next generation as well.
No matter how good they are, Sony needs to learn to make more than just one game dressed up to look like many, and I don’t think either of these two new ones are going to change that.
By reader Stiffler
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