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When you get a few years into a new console generation, you start to exaggerate how bad the last generation was. Those load times lasted forever! Those graphics were barely presentable! The DualShock 4 was as flimsy as crepe paper!
You get used to the new bells and whistles, and you forget what it was actually like to live without them. But, after a few weeks playing myPS4again for the first time since 2020, I gotta say, it’s still a perfectly fine gaming machine.
The PS4 Stands Strong
I didn’t believe back in March, when the issues with myPS5started to rear their ugly head. When I needed to send my PS5 in for repair, I brought out my PS4 primarily so I would still have access to a Blu-ray player in the interim. But, on a whim, I startedJudgmenton PS4, to see if I could wrap up Yagami’s story before my PS5 got back. The newer console ended up arriving less than a week later, so my PS4 is still living next to my PS5, two generations of consoles side by side under my TV.
I expected that the load times would make playing Judgment painfully slow. In reality, they’re mostly fine, and I think there are a few factors that may contribute to this. For one, I still frequently play a last-gen console, mostly because it also happens to be a current-gen console: theSwitch. Because of the disastrous performance of theWii U,Nintendobroke away from the cycle it had shared withSonyandMicrosoft, beginning its new generation in 2017 when the PS4 andXbox Onewere still three years away from retirement. That gun-jumping, combined with Nintendo’s predilection for underpowered hardware at a lower price point resulted in the company’s most up-to-date software currently only being available on tech that would last have been impressive in 2013. Longer load times andworse graphicsare not solely the PS4’s domain.
I’ve also played a ton ofBaldur’s Gate 3. That game looks much better than anything available on the Switch, but every play session begins with a load screen that lasts roughly as long as theCambrian Explosion. Fast travel within a region is nearly instantaneous but, if you want to head from Baldur’s Gate back to the Druid’s Grove, expect more load screens.
The New Generation Isn’t Quite Here
Between still regularly playing a system that hybridizes generations as much as it does console and handheld play, and a game I’ve sunk hundreds of hours into that loads like a last-gen game, I was ready for the PS4. It almost felt, weirdly, like an improvement in some ways. I had been playingYakuza Kiwamion PS5, which is a remake of a PS2 game and looks and feels like it. So when I switched to Judgment, I was surprised that Yagami could run into buildings without any load screens and was impressed by the quality of the lighting and look of the Kamurocho streets. The fighting was faster and more fluid, too. In fact, I’m less eager to return to Kiwami on PS5 after experiencing how Judgment plays on PS4.
It was a real wake-up call moment — despite the fact that I went througha similar revelation last year with my Xbox One. Console power isn’t everything, and the PS4 still has some life in it.
