PlayStation 5 Review: Next Gen Gaming!

[Music] so [Music] all right what's up mkbhd here playstation 5 time so we only really get truly new consoles every couple of years i don't know who decided that but unlike you know the pc world or smartphones where you get a new incremental update every year we really have to wait for a new console and so when we finally do get that new console we have big expectations for generational improvements so welcome to the full review of sony's new playstation 5. okay so we've all talked about this design it's huge it's an eye-catcher it feels very intentional to me honestly like it's supposed to feel like a new generation they have this black and white motif going on throughout the whole thing the controller and the official headphones and all the accessories even that controller dock looks like a mini ps5 which is crazy but yeah it really is actually kind of risky for them because clearly not everyone's home aesthetic can fit this look or work this in without sticking out and that's the risk they chose i happen to like the matte white sides actually the blue led glowing is pretty cool but i don't like as much the glossy black middle to me it looks like the cheapest part and also if you ever touch it that is fingerprint city but yeah hopefully you're not touching the console too much after the first time you set it up and speaking of setup if you remember that black plastic stand it came with from the unboxing video uh it's meant definitely to be used in both portrait and landscape or i guess vertical or horizontal modes but as you can see i'm not using the ps5 with it on the vertical mode and i don't think most people will now technically i'm just going to say you should use the stand at all times for ideal airflow and you know they build a whole swiveling hidden screw design in there so once you pick your orientation you can set it up on the stand and never have to deal with it again horizontally of course you need that stand for it to not wobble but personally i'm cool with it vertically with no stand it doesn't completely block the ventilation and it looks great we'll see if i regret that so do i think sony made the design this way so it would be a statement piece in whatever room you put it in next to your tv yes is that a bit of a risk yes but i think this crazy design has both a higher ceiling and a lower floor for how good it can look versus something safer like the xbox one meaning if you put in a room where it belongs and it looks like this new modern motif it's going to look amazing anyway all right enough about the design so once you're lucky enough to own a ps5 you'll notice the experience overall is a few things number one it's faster it's redesigned and it's definitely trying to be next gen it is a gaming console fundamentally so it's still doing all the same stuff but the ui is new you know it's got all kinds of little particles and lights and stuff in there looks great on a high resolution tv and even better in hdr and it's definitely fast just flying around the menus and the store and launching games is quick as you'd expect from a significantly faster ssd now in this gaming console world it's practically heresy to ever compare it to anything pcs but i think this is just worth thinking about for just a second if this if this playstation 5 was a gaming pc and it's not obviously it's not but if it was a gaming pc it would be actually extremely small number one it'll be pretty inexpensive at 500 bucks and it would have a pretty incredible promise of being relevant for the next like four straight years and potentially even getting better over time like it'll be really hard to find a gaming pc that's this small this cheap and this relevant for this long of a time now there's a lot of reasons why this doesn't hold up of course the main one being graphical prowess of a real pc but if you think about it that is a pretty impressive value proposition for a console but once you fire up that ps5 and actually start using it you'll slowly start to notice one by one this next-gen stuff adding up one of the big focuses was the improved specs and the new horsepower and the faster storage which should hopefully result in faster load times so it doesn't have that quick resume feature that the xbox series x has but it's pretty close and that's a direct result of the faster ssd and speaking of storage by the way i know it says 825 gigs on the box uh but after the os is installed you have somewhere near like 670 gigs just so you know and so when you start installing some of the big newer games like some of these files can be truly gigantic for me spider-man was about 40 gigs nba 2k a little less then there's some ps4 games but generally they're a little bit smaller need for speed was under 30. just something to keep an eye on the external ssd support is for saving backwards compatible games only not for playing them and then let's talk about the games so the playstation store shows pretty much all of the games from last generation ps4 are still compatible which is great and if you have some ps4 games you still want to play they should show up here and it should work basically exactly the same there have been some bugs reported but generally they're going to load and play the same and then you can even sort by that in the playstation store so if you only want to see ps5 only new titles you can see those that are coming soon or have already launched and then ultimately everyone as a gamer is different i consider myself a pretty casual gamer so i spend most of my time in nba 2k and driving games like dirt need for speed things like that and of course i played a lot of the new spider-man miles morales game which is the launch title for it and some others just tossed in for fun and then for other people there's other titles they've been waiting for there's demon souls i see gets a lot of hype there's assassin's creed there's all kinds of stuff like that and that catalog should be growing and improving over time so as we get into game play how are the games and does it feel like next gen gaming well the answer to that question it's different in different games let me explain basically overall we know of course console quality graphics have never really touched pc quality graphics but this time around you keep hearing about ray tracing and better reflections and shadows and high resolution and high frame rates basically what i found is no single one of these things by itself makes a huge difference but putting them all together this stuff adds up to feel different and that's not even talking about the controller which i'll get to in a minute so spider-man morales in my weeks of testing easily the prettiest game i've played for sure there's a reason this is the headlining launch title for the ps5 and this game seems to be the best demo of ray tracing with all the reflections and lighting and different textures all over the place as it takes place in a crowded new york city plus it's in winter so there's lots of particles again in the air with the snow and really just whether you're in a battle with enemies where the camera is super dynamic and moving around a lot or if you're just hanging out around new york city between missions which is extremely accurate by the way uh there there's just a ton to look around at now in this game something a note and i think this kind of defines the the console experience this time around at this level you choose in this game between high fidelity mode or high performance mode you can switch whenever you want so when you're in high fidelity mode ray tracing is on this is the best looking version of the game the textures and the details are at their highest quality but that's limited to 30 frames per second and so here if you look at pretty much any reflective surface like a window or some glass you can see there's some level of real reflections going on and that's what we're talking about when we say ray tracing that's an added level of realism but if you switch to performance mode and go to that same spot you'll notice two things one there's nothing at all in that glass it's just kind of fake reflections that move around as you move it doesn't really represent the real world behind it at all and two well this is obviously less graphically intensive so now you're running at 60fps instead of 30. so now everything is much smoother which for a lot of this game you might be into see the thing about ray tracing is there's different uh amounts of different levels of ray tracing and so on the ps5 i would describe it as a sort of partial ray tracing does that make sense like most windows and obvious large glass surfaces they do the reflections which is dope even this like a storefront window if you look closely you can still see it's doing a realistic reflection and shadow it's amazing but also some puddles and car windows are just doing lighting and shadows without the reflections and so not every single surface and every model and texture in the game is super high quality i think most people though won't be pixel peeping that much or caring about that as long as they're like slinging around through the city and glorious high resolution on a big tv like you're not going to be looking at all that stuff but at least now you've seen a difference for me it's actually kind of a tough call but i think in this game most of the time i prefer high performance mode at 60fps you get that smooth motion like even without the super realistic reflections on glass and textures it still looks pretty damn good and the lighting still beams off the character the snow still flows in all the tiny little particles i love the look of this game even with ray tracing basically turned off now in case anyone's wondering why the pc comparison is still so far off go back and watch my video it's linked below about 8k gaming where we played 8k games at 60fps on the rtx 3090 with ray tracing fully turned on high quality graphics settings that's the difference between a pc which is much bigger and much more expensive and this that's all the other ps5 game i spent more time in was nba 2k 21 and this game is technically next gen of course it's made for ps5 but for my fellow 2k players we already kind of know 2k is kind of like the iphone of console games like they make a new version every year but it's kind of same stuff just a little bit different maybe a little bit better so the gameplay is all still familiar same controls but for this game their focus on realism really seems to be in again ray tracing and like on the way the materials look so players hair textures are more accurate and the sweat rolling down their face and reflecting the lights all that stuff is more clear the textures on the court also with reflections off the hardwood are a little better more detailed and even the cut scenes just overall everything has a little layer of polish and shine over it this might be a placebo effect also but i feel like there are some new animations as well that are a little more accurate to the players though still not totally fluid but it helps that you know everything seems a little more realistic even though you can already tell when james harden is doing james harden things you can already tell when russell westbrook is doing russell westbrook westbrook things it's just a good time you know what game you got to play though if you get a ps5 astros playroom i'm telling you you got it's the best demo of the new controller that you're gonna see so i've done an entire video about this new dual sense controller it'll be the first link below that like button definitely check it out but to summarize this new dual sense controller is sweet it's bigger it's a little heavier in the hands it has these quality buttons it's usbc and the battery life for me turned out to be pretty good i got two full days of a ton of gaming before i killed it which is in line with what i was getting out of a ps4 controller but the real next-gen feeling part of it is the new and massively improved haptics inside and the adaptive triggers so playing through astros playroom it's actually not even that good of a game to be honest like you're more just kind of exploring and wandering around doing stuff hitting stuff grabbing stuff whatever you could play for a while and never really do anything or win anything but the next gen feel of the controller haptics making sand feel like sand through your hands making ice feel like ice is amazing and the adaptive triggers kicking in making it difficult to squeeze and when you need to compress a spring really adding and feeling that resistance as you squeeze them is so good it's even more immersive to me than the haptics the spider-man game to my disappointment kind of didn't really do much with all or either of these things i was hoping spider-man climbing on metal and glass would feel like metal and glass or maybe the triggers would get harder to pull if i was slinging through the city and i slung through a building that was extra far away something like that but there's pretty much none of that in this game at best you get the occasional vibration when punching or throwing things obviously that doesn't feel at all like the difference maker on the ps5 in 2k 21 though i love this so in this game you hold the trigger to sprint right if you're running hold the trigger and so in 21 the more tired and fatigued your player was the harder it was to pull down the sprint trigger so if you're getting back on defense after a fast break you can feel it's heavier and it's harder to sprint and throughout a game it gets heavier and heavier so that to me that was good that was a great use because really the point is instead of having to look at the screen you're now feeling when the character is more tired and that is what makes it feel more next-gen to me um nevertheless i i still personally wish i would see more of this stuff throughout other games so i played some other ps4 games like fifa and need for speed and dirt and of course it's still doing normal tiny vibrations you would think like in a driving game the controller would be going crazy with all the different surfaces and collisions but here it's not the ps4 stuff still feels like ps4 stuff and the ps5 stuff feels like a little bit underutilized i think part of it might be that developers might be a little tentative to overuse it like they might be scared of like scaring people off in a way i've been told on twitter a lot of people just turn off the vibrations on controllers right away so you don't want to over utilize it and put too much of it in your game or people will turn it off but yeah i don't know i think the triggers are i think they're great all right a couple other little things so the console is quiet which is really nice now and a stark difference versus the ps4 for me which sounded like a jet after five minutes of gaming under my tv fingers crossed it stays this way after years of sitting here slowly gathering dust and probably not having ideal airflow with me not using the stand but yeah so far so good load times was a big thing to keep an eye on for the new generation of consoles i found load times to be faster but not like some blink of the eye never see a splash screen again type faster but it was noticeably faster in every single game whether it was a ps5 optimized game or even a backwards compatible ps4 game and that is thanks to the lightning fast ssd and again it's one more little thing that adds to the experience that feels like next-gen gaming and then i like the slightly new menu organization the new ui with all your most recent games in that strip on the home screen and then the rest of your library at the end with all your games and when you press the playstation button now in a game you can not only go home or to your normal settings but it pops up this card view that's pretty useful for navigating around checkpoints or different stages or progress in a game and every developer will use it differently but some will just show your level or some trophies others will show whole tutorials inside this card that will help you get around but yeah generally this is a welcome addition i like it and just generally speaking i'm a fan of the whole thing i guess as flossy carter would say the ps5 is a major major go if you can get your hands on it right it's a it's basically a computer that's guaranteed hopefully to have a long life cycle and to improve over time as the game library grows and that's something we got to keep an eye on and trust developers to do but i think it's happening i'm excited for it the most interesting piece for me will be to wait and see how this controller gets implemented in future games but as a whole i'm giving a thumbs up to the ps5 and i can't wait to get home and play more games instead of reviewing games i get to i get to go play games which is different believe it or not it's fun anyway that's been it thanks for watching this review and i'll catch you guys very soon in the next one peace

Channel: Marques Brownlee

Views: 6,929,369

Keywords: PS5, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 5 review, gameplay, unboxing, MKBHD, Spiderman Morales, next gan gaming, next gen gameplay

Id: MepGo2xmVJw

Length: 16min 44sec (1004 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 14 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Golfguy809]

“We only get truly new consoles every couple of years”

What?