Mixed feelings but still excited overall.
+ The games. Well, some of them looked interesting. Kena and Horizon: The Forbidden West was fun to see. Kena had a nice cg-movie style to it and seemed to retain it even during gameplay. Looks cute and like a good time.
As for Horizon, it almost felt like I bought my PS4 in order to play Zero Dawn, or at least heavily justified the purchase with it. I enjoyed it (although outside of the pretty graphics and robots, it was "merely" a solid open world game with an interesting enough story). Zero Dawn did give me a little bit of that "next gen" feeling so I think this will be one of the games to deliver that this time around as well.
Pragmatica gave off massive Kojima vibes but ended up being from Capcom. Hard to judge from what's shown - it looked cool but it's possible it will be another escort-mission game with you having to protect the girl and cat. Really want to see some actual gameplay from this one.
Stray looked cute. But I mean, cats
= Gran Turismo looked good. Gran Turismo always looks good. But I always enjoy the actual feeling of playing Forza Horizon more. It basically looks like GT sport but now it's an actual classic GT game with a more traditional menu system. The track was an old one that had been updated as well.
I think replays are going to be gorgeous but I won't enjoy it.
++ The best is still yet to come. As always, launch titles are hardly indicative of the quality of games released further along the consoles life. Surely, we will be wowed properly later on. I hope
- Console design. It's not pretty. The way it was rendered and the seemingly glossy black plastic in the middle makes it look like a cheap 2000s scifi prop, or something you'd find lying around in one of the luxury dwellings in the movie Elysium.
Styling aside, I'm also slightly worried about cooling. Yes, there's more wents this time around but I belive that the Xbox series X's approach will lead to a better cooled and quieter experience.
I'm just worried that we will end up with another jet engine going full blast-design.
- Next gen feel was lacking. This was inevitable, we knew this. Purely looking at the hardware, Zen 2 is truly a generational leap coming from Jaguar and quick SSDs are amazing but, the games we saw looked familiar. Maybe they are running with increased graphical fidelity but many looked like they could work on this generation's systems, albeit with the usual caveats of lower rendering resolution with upscaling trickery and a "cinematic" framerate.
The games didn't look like any differerent from what we've seen before on consoles.
With the PS4 reveal, something like Killzone Shadowfall looked truly much better and greater compared to Xbox 360 and PS3 games but this time, this generation have truly been able to accomplish a lot with relatively little. Both a blessing and a curse.
Now the things we gain with better hardware are things that are hard to judge from an artefacty youtube stream like higher resolution and framerates. Things like massive worlds that can instantly load in thanks to the fast SSD is something you experience through playing, not seen from such brief teasers like these. The overall visual fidelity is really high, but it already was pretty high even on current consoles so the wow factor is lacking somewhat.