This is an IGN opinion piece from Matt Purslow, who has been there from day one for every PlayStation generation since the PS2. He loves the style of narrative single-player adventures that Sony's studios have historically championed.
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.
“In mid-June of this year, we unexpectedly received notice from PlayStation Studios that they would cancel the Physint project,” explained Kojima in a recent social media post. The project is now, in a bizarre twist of fate, being financed by PlayStation’s direct competitor, Xbox. That itself is a whole cursed kettle of fish – it’s no doubt a kick in the teeth for the recently disbanded stealth specialists at Arkane to see Microsoft invest untold millions in a Kojima espionage game – but when it comes to PlayStation, the brand has cut ties with a distinctive creative powerhouse at a time when it’s in desperate need of a distinctive creative direction.
First announced during a Sony State of Play in early 2024, Physint was described as “a completely new 'Action Espionage' for the next-generation.” That specific wording, of course, is intended to evoke Metal Gear Solid, which sports the tagline “Tactical Espionage Action” across each of the series’ logos. The intention was crystal clear: Sony and Kojima were working together on a successor to MGS, and PlayStation would be the place to play it.
There are several obvious reasons why a new Metal Gear Solid in all but name would be good for PlayStation (and now stands to be good for Xbox). The name “Kojima” is pretty much as important as the MGS brand itself, and so a new Kojima game is potentially good business. The team at Kojima Productions are talented creatives, and so Physint has a high chance of being a critical success. And, perhaps most important, culturally speaking, Kojima’s “walking simulator” Death Stranding series has proved divisive, and so PlayStation Xbox gets to be the stage for his glorious return to the genre he’s so beloved for.
But there was more to this union than cultural “victories” and brand recognition. PlayStation has never felt more stagnant. The PS5 has been something of a disaster generation for Sony, and while there are numerous terrible business decisions to talk of – from Concord to physical media to pay-extra-to-stand-your-console-vertically – I believe one of the most crucial problems is that the PlayStation identity has begun to crumble. Historically, PlayStation has been the place to play exceptional, elite-tier single-player games that were constantly on the cutting edge of the medium. It’s a near-30-year reputation that goes right back to 1998’s Metal Gear Solid. But since the PS5 arrived in 2020, it’s been near-impossible to find the brand’s historic innovation in cinematic adventures. Somewhat ironically, Kojima’s own Death Stranding 2 is the alarming outlier.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/playstations-future-has-never-looked-bleaker
