A reader worries that rather than being a celebration of 30 years of PlayStation, new game Astro Bot will only underline current problems with the PS5.
Like many PlayStation 5 owners I’m looking forward to Astro Bot when it’s released this September, which apart from Concord is Sony’s only major first party game exclusive in the second half of this year. That in itself is a terrible situation, which Sony has neither explained or apologised for, but I loved the freebie Astro’s Playroom and so I’m really looking forward to the cute little robo getting his own full price game.
If you’re not familiar with either game, one of the main appeals is that it’s filled with lots of different Minions style robots, many of which are dressed up like famous PlayStation exclusive characters. In Playroom this mean that as you were running around you would go past characters dressed as Ellie and Joel from The Last Of Us or Kratos from God Of War, as well as a lot more obscure references.
It was great, the whole of Playroom is a love letter to PlayStation history, and judging by screenshots and videos the full game seems to feature the same sort of thing. Which seemed great until I thought about it and realised that by having all these reminders of 30 years of PlayStation, you’re just underlining what a terrible state everything is in now.
In the full game you’ll be able to have all these obscure references to early PS1 games like Ape Escape, PlayStation 2 games like Forbidden Siren, forgotten PlayStation 3 titles like Puppeteer, and PlayStation 4 oddities like Knack 2. But what will you have for the PlayStation 5? There’s plenty of choices from the first couple of years but from more recently? There’s almost nothing. I’m not even sure if their Spider-Man licence extends to allowing a cameo.
A lot of fans have pointed out that the prominent use of a Bloodborne Astro Bot is taunting them, because Sony refuses to so much as release a patch for it, let alone a remaster or, crazy I know, a sequel. But if you think about it the whole game is just waving the fact in your face, that Sony hasn’t been releasing anything new for years now.
It is actually the 30th anniversary of PlayStation this December (it came out in Japan in 1994 but nowhere else until 1995) but what kind of celebration are we going to have? I’m sure Astro Bot will be part of it, and Sony will try and sell some expensive custom consoles or something, but once you look past all that the situation is dire.
Sure, it’s worse for Xbox, and Sony is easily beating them, but this generation peaked a lot earlier than I thought in terms of the amount of time that’s gone by and the lack of new releases in that time.
Sony has so many developers that haven’t said what they’re working on and the only reason I can think of as to what they’re suddenly being secretive, is because they’re all live service games that they know nobody wants. What an anniversary celebration that would be: a dozen new live service duds like Concord.
So yeah, I’m looking forward to Astro Bot but I’m also expecting it to be an extremely bittersweet pleasure. Instead of a fun celebration of everything that’s been great about PlayStation in the last three decades it’s going to end up feeling more like a wake.
Of course, Sony could avoid that by announcing a bunch of new games at the next State of Play, but how many times have we thought they were going to do that and they didn’t?
By reader Sonta
The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.
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