PlayStation’s Future Has Never Looked Bleaker
Crono ·
It’s impossible to know how PlayStation bosses felt after seeing many critics walk away from Insomniac’s Wolverine with an apathetic shrug. A sub-80 on Metacritic is infamously considered a disaster in the triple-A space, and so Sony certainly won’t be thrilled, but it would be easy for the company to brush this away as an uncharacteristic miss. Even Capcom, across its near decade-long hot streak, put out the middling Exoprimal, after all. However, that would require wilfully ignoring the sad reality that PlayStation Studios is currently far from fertile ground for single-player adventures.
What was once the miracle recipe behind Uncharted has now become the de facto template for almost every Sony project, resulting in an incredibly polished homogeneous mass. It’s a video game design rulebook later refined by the likes of The Last of Us and God of War: lavish cutscenes, approachable combat with a light sprinkling of RPG skills, sneaking through waist-high grass to perform simple stealth takedowns, and filling a rage meter to trigger an ultimate ability. Ten years ago, this was all incredibly exciting. Five years ago, it was comfortingly familiar. Today, it’s wearing thin. Never has it been clearer that PlayStation Studios needs to find the next evolutionary stage of the “traditional” video game. Never has it been clearer that it needs its next Metal Gear Solid, the revolutionary Hideo Kojima game that defined what we could expect from PlayStation back in 1998.
Now would be a very good time, then, for Sony to cancel Hideo Kojima’s PlayStation-exclusive spiritual successor to Metal Gear Solid.