Topic: Early Adopter or Latecomer?

Growing up as a child I don't recall ever having a console early in its life. I had consoles before but the first console I bought was a N64 then a PS1 both a couple years after they had launched. I got a PS3 quite early as I discovered the wonders of having a credit card. Remember getting the console with Zone of the Enders (which came with a demo for MGS2) and some motorbike racing game. I think I had that console the longest as I didn't get a a 360 until a couple of years into its life. I got a PS4 the February after it launched as I quickly got bored so MS banging on about the holy trinity of Halo, Gears and Forza all the time and the bad press the XBO was getting at the time. Bought a Switch last October as a 40th birthday present to myself.
Although I have more disposable income than I've ever had I can't see myself ever getting a console a launch as I like to wait a few months to survey what console suits me best.

@BAMozzy You would think that but look at the "enhanced" PS2 Classics on PS4. Sure its 1080p...with worse frame rates.

@YummyHappyPills But are those streamed? They are certainly NOT examples of backwards compatibility as such either - its not like you can put in a PS2 disc and play these is it. There is always a risk with 'enhanced' games that they are over ambitious in the 'enhancement' that then affects the frame rate. Look at the PS4 Pro games that are 'enhanced' visually but also have unstable (maybe worse) frame rates. A classic example was Last of Us remaster that played at 1080/60 on the PS4 but 4k/30 or 1800p with an unlocked frame rate which barely hit 60fps (if at all). It was patched eventually but if you had a Pro, you couldn't play the game at 60fps but could on the base PS4. Its still significantly better looking as the visuals have been enhanced.

With Enhanced games though, as they are being manually adjusted (someone changing the settings), you do rely on them to ensure that any improvements to the visual settings are not too much that they impact on the frame rate. The games that are 'boosted' by the extra resources though don''t perform worse and 'can' still deliver an increased resolution. As more games use dynamic scaling, the increased resources will reduce the need to scale the image down and thus you get a higher, more consistent resolution. Chances are, you also get a higher average frame rate too.

I don't play those PS2 classics but it sounds to me as though they are not optimised for the PS4 and whoever 'enhanced' them just increased the resolution regardless of any frame rate consequence.

@BAMozzy I also recently streamed some Ratchet and Clank 3 on the PS3 Trilogy. Models were misaligned, weapons used ammo but never fired, the camera soazzed out inside of Ratchet after a teleporter, and when zooming in with the Fluz Rifle the camera went inside Ratchet and left the screen peach coloured obscuring everythibg for a few seconds.

Honestly if ya gonna play any Sony games, do it on original hardware XD

Only consoles I've bought launch day have been the PS4 and the Switch. Got the ps1, 2,and 3 a couple years down the line and same with the NES and SNES. Got an OG xbox for Christmas one year but sold it after a couple months and I think that was a year or 2 after it had been released.

@YummyHappyPills Maybe that's just Sony then as the games on BC on XB1 play just as well, if not better. There are a few 'enhanced' games too which both look and play better. If you have an XB1X, then you get the 'best' experience - better than the old console could deliver. In fact the ONLY way to play Bayonetta without any frame rate drops on console at all is on the X - not even the Switch version plays as well. Coupled with faster load times and baked in 12x Anisotropic Filtering (something all games benefit from), the ONLY reason to keep a 360 is for those games you may own but haven't yet been made Backwards Compatible.

To a degree, the 'iterative' hardware are backwards compatible to the base hardware and more akin to the way it may work in the 'next' generation. Sony built the PS2 into the original PS3 to get BC but with the smaller and cheaper Slim models, this was something that was removed. However with the fact that Sony have now gone for a far more universal design and architecture, BC may be much more simple to implement - without the need for emulators for example. BC may work like running a game on 'boost' mode for example without any developer input - except of course that the 'boost' would be a LOT more significant and 'boost' Pro supported games too.

@BAMozzy Whats funny is the PS3 had built in PS1 disc support. My copies of the Spyro games on PS3 rhn fine...but the downloaded emulated versions dont. Work that out.

And yeah its something pretty much exclusive to Sony in terms of cocking up. MS does it just fine WITH enhancements and so did VC on Wii U where GBA and DS games had extra visuals features like screen smoothing. Sure some VC things were off like brightness but it was never performance.

Makes me wonder what Sony is doing wrong. With them, if it isnt running off of native hardware, dont play it, and even then...make sure its the original intended hardware.

And yeah im sure in future BC will be easy. Xbox can do it because how much has Xbox changed outside of Kinect? Sony cant because lol some bad decisions and general incompetence in porting. Nintendo can, minus Wii U which they rightfully want to sell as new games (plus controller issues there) and some Wii stuff, again due to controllers.

As far as it stands, I dont buy a Sony system for the games that were and it leads me to delay buying PS systems now. Most franchises dont carry over between generations with Sony, usually moving on to something new each time the console changes, and BC isnt a thing/not worth it in any way, which makes buying one a lot harder, because those franchises you loved on PS4? Odds are they wont get new entries on PS5 so wait and see while they sell you on unproven things and ideas in a very expensive box.

@YummyHappyPills The thing with Sony and the PS3 was that the design was far too complex and 'different' from its predecessors. That's why they had to build in a PS2 (which also played PS1 games) and one of the reasons why it was so expensive. The Cell processor was very advanced but also complicated - part of the reason that games were very difficult to port well and why games took some time to get up to 'speed'. I know it wasn't helped by the very separate blocks of 256k RAM compared to the 512k RAM of the XB360. This meant that devs had to split their RAM needs up and a lot of games allocated more than 256k to graphics but that was the PS3's 'maximum' (they couldn't use both blocks for graphics). This made it virtually impossible for BC with the previous consoles and the major problem with BC on PS4. There are PC PS3 emulators and the 'specs' needed don't seem that high compared to a PS4 so that is one possibility but not every game seems to work as intended. Emulation is how MS are running 360 games but again, it seems not every game will be added here either.

The PS5 though is expected to have the same core architecture and set up. As boost mode proves, these games 'could' run on the same 'architecture' but with more resources to actually make a more noticeable difference. Boost mode on the Pro is, at best, a 30% boost (assuming that both CPU and GPU bottlenecks are causing slow down) so a game at 40fps is still not going to hit 60fps (30% of 40 is an additional 12fps meaning the game would run at 52fps) - especially not if the game also utilises dynamic scaling. The X on the other hand has around the same boost to its GPU as the full Pro does to the PS4 - over 2x. Coupled with a BIG boost to RAM - both in terms of speed and quantity (a lot may end up as just a Cache), the difference is far more pronounced with its 'boost' mode equivalent.

Whilst I don't see the PS5 being BC with PS3 games - not unless they either build it in at a hardware level (not cheap) or go for a software (emulation) option, I can see it being much more likely for PS4 games. Its more likely though that whether its possible or not, it will depend on Sony's plans - whether it would affect PSNow subscription or whether that becomes more like Game Pass, whether or not they would lose revenue/options from 'remastering' games - after all, 2 of the biggest selling PS4 Exclusives are both remasters - Last of Us (2nd best selling exclusive) and Nathan Drake Collection (3rd). Would people by a PS5 version of Last of Us 2 if their PS4 version plays perfectly well on it - especially if it could be enhanced to run at the level a PS5 version would? Maybe a GotY release with the patch built in could be an option but it could still affect there options and plans. Sony may well prefer to lock BC off - even if the hardware itself is more than capable because it doesn't fit in with their plans.

@BAMozzy Im well aware of the PS3s unique CELL controller with 7 PPC cores for processing, two pools of nontransferrable RAM at 256k each that ran at different speeds from each other widening the bottleneck.

I have taken these things apart for parts and boy...its a mess.

I'm usually a year or two down the line. Not through choice, I'd be there on day one if I could afford it, but I tend to save/budget a bit for a while.

When I was younger, I got the Sega Saturn fairly early. I saved up money and even asked for cash instead of presents for Christmas! As a result, when the Playstation took off, I felt like I was outside the party, looking in through the window. Don't regret it though - some of my favourite games were on the Saturn (before it died a tragic, premature death)

Different factors have always impacted my console purchases. I've always been a latecomer.

It took a couple of Star Wars games being exclusive to the PSone to get me started in 1999; I only upgraded to a PS2 when a certain spy made the leap with 2001's James Bond 007 in... Agent Under Fire. I was focused on franchises and wasn't really a gamer. I saw my consoles as a way to act out films and television shows I enjoyed... well, and Sonic, but only because I'd grown up in a MegaDrive house (and even then, I was more interested in the comics than the games).

Then university happened and I was just as broke as every other student, so I held my PS2 together with parcel tape and spent a couple years using bargain bins to catch up with a huge backlog of games that I'd skipped over. My friends had other consoles (one even had a Dreamcast) and I became interested in the wider landscape of gaming, playing things that weren't tied to pre-existing franchises. I discovered Lara Croft and Solid Snake and, since I wasn't really aware of gaming news, found that I had plenty of stuff to play for a good few years. My wallet thanked me.

Finally got a PS3 in 2009, very late to the party but essentially unable to ignore the mountain of games I really wanted to play, having seen them on the store shelves (also, another friend went and got an Xbox360, which made me realise everything had moved on rather considerably). Copying my childhood, I started with the franchises I knew I'd love, so found copies of Batman: Arkham Asylum, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, 007 Quantum of Solace, Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. From there, everything just grew. With more freedom over how I spent my time, I was totally absorbed by the second half of the PS3 generation.

At this point, the PS Vita was announced and I thought it'd be a wonderful time to grab a cheap PSP and the dozen-or-so games I was curious about (I'd always seen handheld gaming as a lesser, inferior form of gaming, a viewpoint I'll happily admit was narrow-minded and born of ignorance). Because of that stack of handheld games, I had such a backlog on the Vita's first day that I decided to wait. A few months later, a friend sent me a copy of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune and said "I think you'll love this" and how very right they were; by the time I'd seen the credits roll on Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, I'd ordered a Vita and a copy of Uncharted: Golden Abyss (as well as Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed and Touch My Katamari).

I didn't get a PS4 at launch, simply because I had a huge gaming backlog by that point, but I did start buying copies of PS4 games before I had the console. When I finally cleared my PS3's to-do list, I already had Killzone: Shadow Fall, Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes and Wolfenstein: The New Order sitting on my shelf, and the console held the promise of Batman: Arkham Knight, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and Uncharted 4: A Thief's End.

Part of me thinks that I'll never be an early adopter. Especially when it comes to technology, I like to wait it out and ensure that there are no launch issues, bugs or problems. Not only that, but I'd need the perfect line-up of launch games to make me consider placing a pre-order, and yet I can only think of a small handful of launch games that I've loved enough to keep on my shelves. PSVR nearly had me going (at launch you could play Batman: Arkham VR, Rise of the Tomb Raider's Croft Manor DLC and Star Wars: Battlefront - X-Wing VR Mission, and they'd announced Star Trek: Bridge Crew, but when I realised they'd all total about five hours of gameplay I simply couldn't justify the cost).

My brother has always refused to own a current-generation console. He waits until the next iteration is released before going and finding a cheap deal somewhere, usually one of those eBay bundles with twenty games he's never even heard of, but that doesn't matter because he'll just play anything. When I showed him some footage of Horizon: Zero Dawn recently, he said that it was "all getting a bit much" and that he'd probably go dig out his old PSone at some point. Bless him.