Just as the PS3 and the Xbox 360 gave way to the PS4 and the Xbox One, it’s time for new consoles to step up and show us what they’ve got. By the time 2020 comes to an end, we’ll all be playing the PS5 or the bizarrely-named Xbox Series X. Never let be it said that Microsoft is afraid of an abstract sequencing system when it comes to naming their devices.
With new consoles will come new games, and the new games should represent a huge leap forward from the standards we’ve become so familiar with. As impressed as we all were by the graphics and speed of current-generation games when they first appeared, we expect to be blown away by the capabilities of these new machines. We have a very big question, though, and it’s this:- what are we going to see from the PlayStation 5 that’s going to convince us all to buy one?
As questions go, we feel it’s a good one. We’ve had the occasional hint about what we might be entitled to expect from the new Xbox, but Sony has been so quiet about the status of the PS5 that we haven’t even had an official confirmation of its launch date yet. Everybody knows it’s coming, and everybody knows that several major game developers are working on launch games for it, but beyond that, nobody knows a thing. Where there’s no information, speculation and rumors begin – and so we’re going to indulge in a little bit of speculation today!
Sadly, we know at this stage that we’re not going to get a new Grand Theft Auto game when the console launches – the sixth installment of the smash-hit game series has been pushed back to 2021. With that stalwart out of the picture, what might step up and grab the headlines instead?
Let’s take a look:
A New Call of Duty
Call of Duty gets everywhere. If you’re a dedicated gamer, you probably have at least three Call of Duty games for your current console. You might even have a Call of Duty online slots. It’s even possible that you’ve played the official Call of Duty game on online slots websites, where the franchise has made a whole mess of money. The Call of Duty name has raked in so much cash from online slots players that a knock-off version called Call of Fruity was released to capitalize on the trend. If Call of Duty can make online slots operators rich, imagine how much money it’s worth to Activision.
There’s no official indication that a next-gen specific Call of Duty game is in development, but there hasn’t been a point in the past five years where Activision and their partnered companies haven’t been working on a new Call of Duty, so that doesn’t mean anything. It wouldn’t surprise us at all to find there’s one up their sleeve for console launch day.
Rainbow Six Siege
Yes, we know what you’re thinking. Rainbow Six Siege already exists and has done so for a long time. It’s also not going anywhere any time soon. Speaking in 2018, Ubisoft indicated that they might be planning to keep the game alive for another decade, and that would certainly involve moving onto the next-gen consoles. We know that a PS5 playable version of Rainbow Six Siege is coming to the PS5 because Ubisoft has confirmed it. What we don’t know is whether or not we ought to get excited about it.
Will this be a significant upgrade, or will it just be a faster-running version of the same game? Ubisoft has already confirmed that multiplayer mode will be cross-platform compatible, so PS5 players and PS4 players will be able to play together. That sounds to us like the PS5 version won’t be a major step up. Put this one on the ‘maybe’ pile.
Lord of the Rings: Gollum
Say it quietly, but the last set of Lord of the Rings games could have been better. We know that most people enjoyed them at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight, we feel like a lot more could (and maybe should) have been done with them. Daedalic now has the chance to get it right with Lord of the Rings: Gollum. This game was first announced in March 2019, and everyone presumed it was a current-gen release, but we now know that it was designed with the future in mind.
Both the PS5 and the Xbox Series X will get this game at or very close to their launch date. This has been described as an ‘action-adventure’ game, telling the whole Lord of the Rings story from the perspective of Gollum alone. If it’s done right, that could be very interesting.
Ghost of Tsushima
This game, set in feudal Japan, has been delayed for such a long time that it almost became a ghost in its own right. Now, as we creep closer to the launch date of the new consoles, it appears there may have been a method to SuckerPunch’s madness. All those preview pictures of the game we’ve seen so far looked a little too pretty to be current-gen, and there’s probably a reason for that.
Ghost of Tsushima was announced in 2017, seemed to disappear, and was then reconfirmed during 2019’s Game Awards as having a late 2020 release date. We could be way off target here, but we suspect that SuckerPunch was making it for next-generation consoles this whole time.
If they were, we strongly suspect that it’s already finished, and it will be one of the games that’s used to sell the new console when it launches.
Gran Turismo
If it doesn’t have its own Gran Turismo game, is it even a PlayStation?
Gran Turismo – with no disrespect intended towards Ridge Racer – is the racing franchise that the PlayStation is known for. It sold like hot cakes when the very first version came out for the PlayStation 1 in the 1990s, and it’s continued to sell in big numbers ever since. We heard rumors a long time ago that Polyphony Digital was working on a new Gran Turismo title using a PS5 Dev Kit, but more recently we heard a whisper that the seventh Gran Turismo game will be launched on November 20th – and that November 20th will also be the launch date for the console. Don’t hold us to that – we’re only telling you what we’ve heard!
Those are just five of the games that we might be playing before the year is out, and we think there’s good reason to be excited about all of them. Whether you prefer war games, racing simulators, or in-depth RPGs, it looks like the PS5 is going to have something for everyone when it hits the shelves – and we can’t wait!
