Why God Of War: Ragnarök on PS4 made me sell my PS5 – Reader’s Feature

A reader is angry that the new God Of War is another cross-gen game and accuses Sony of not taking advantage of the PS5’s full power.

We’re a week out from E3 and we’ve heard nothing from Sony about having any kind of equivalent event. It’s possible they could still announce one, since everyone seems to be leaving things to the last minute this year, but I’m going to guess all we’re going to get is a few more PlayStation blogs and maybe a few more trailers.

It’s been obvious for years, especially with all the controversy surrounding cross-play, that Sony considers itself separate from the rest of the games industry and would rather pretend its would-be rivals just don’t exist. So it’s no wonder that they’re not big fans of E3, even though they’ve benefited from it far more than Microsoft has over the years. Heck, the reveal year for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 basically won them the generation right there, with no further effort needed.

As it is though, and for whatever reason, the biggest newest story for the PlayStation 5, in the week leading up to E3, is that God Of War: Ragnarök has been delayed and that it’s also going to be on PlayStation 4. I do not consider this good news.

I’m not happy about the delay, I’m sure nobody is, but I never expected anything else given we’ve seen absolutely nothing about the game up to this point. Horizon Forbidden West might not have been seen properly until recently but at least we had a short teaser trailer and knew what it was really called, but neither is true of the new God Of War, which may or may not be subtitled Ragnarök.

No, what really upsets me about the announcement is that the game is cross-gen, and so is Gran Turismo 7. Which means, once again that Sony won’t be taking full advantage of the PlayStation 5. I’m sure Sony will claim the PlayStation 5 is the lead format and hasn’t been compromised but that’s simply not true. If someone comes up for an idea for Ragnarök that only the PlayStation 5 can do it’s not going in, simple as that.

If they wanted to make a new game mechanic based around the SSD, then no. Can’t do it, because the PlayStation 4 hasn’t got one. If they wanted to do something based around ray-tracing, maybe using reflections for a puzzle or the distinctive look of certain characters, then nope – can’t do it. Not unless you make two separate games, which clearly Sony is not doing.

Cross-gen games on PlayStation 5 look good but you always know that they could look better and that is infuriating to me, especially when I’m already being charged £70 for a compromised product. As some have already pointed out, it also implies the third game, if this is a trilogy, will also be cross-gen, which means this policy is going to potentially go on for four years or more.

Make more PlayStation 4 games by all means, they’d be cheaper and potentially more experimental, so I’m all for it. But stop wasting your time on games that are neither in one generation or the other. The PlayStation 5 is not cheap, the games are certainly not cheap – I did not pay all this money to have little more than a PlayStation 4 remaster.

The thing that really concerns me though is Gran Turismo 7, even though I don’t care about the game itself, as I have no interest in racing games. But according to rumours Sony only made the decision to port it over very recently. Why was that? I’m really not sure, but the only suggestions I can think of is that they’re either winging this and have no clear plan for anything, or there was a recent mandate from above to make everything cross-gen.

The weirdest thing to me is that Returnal is one of the few PlayStation 5 only games and yet it’s easily the least impressive first party game. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great game, but it looks like a PlayStation 4 title and clearly could work as one. All you’d lose is the short load times. So why wasn’t that ported as well? Was that because it came out before the mandate? Sony certainly didn’t put much effort into marketing it so were they embarrassed by it for some reason?

None of this makes sense from any angle and I can tell you if I’d know about all this before getting the PlayStation 5 I wouldn’t have bothered. So I’ve done the next best thing and have decided to sell my PlayStation 5. I’m not interested in Ratchet & Clank and with no E3 to show off any new games I’ve had it with Sony. I never did get rid of my PlayStation 4 so I’ll just go back to that, sell my PlayStation 5 (probably at a profit, or close to it) and wait until Sony decide to properly join the next generation.

By reader Ashton Marley

The reader’s feature does not necessary represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.

You can submit your own 500 to 600-word reader feature at any time, which if used will be published in the next appropriate weekend slot. As always, email gamecentral@ukmetro.co.uk and follow us on Twitter.

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