On Wednesday night Sony held their latest PlayStation 5 conference, and people got pretty excited. With Microsoft having reacted so well to the leak about their price and release date, it was imperative that Sony responded strongly. What we got was roughly 40 minutes of games, with lots of ACTUAL GAMEPLAY and the price/date bombshell at the end to see us out.

I don’t want to bury the lead, so let’s start by discussing the price. I went in thinking that Sony had to match Microsoft’s $499/£449 Xbox Series X with one of their consoles and in a great move they did it with the most expensive model – the disk version. Where things get interesting is that they knocked $100/£90 off for the digital, rather than the $50/£50 I had anticipated. A full console price breakdown is shown below;

These are exceptionally well-priced machines. Some might look at the price of the PS5 Digital being $100/£100 more expensive than the Xbox Series S but you have to remember that PlayStation’s digital console is the exact same power as the disk version, only without a blu-ray drive. In terms of features and affordability, I would strongly argue that makes the PS5 digital the best value next-gen device.

In terms of release date, the consoles will launch in the US, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Australia, New Zealand & South Korea on November 12th. Then, a week later in the UK and the rest of the world. So that’s both two and nine days after the Xbox Series X | S. It’s a bit annoying here in the UK having to wait that extra week, but it does mean I get Cyberpunk 2077 day one… so I’m not complaining.

Now let’s take a look at the games they announced. First up was Final Fantasy XVI – a game that will be coming to PS5 exclusively. That was a big announcement and a huge get for PlayStation. I’m not going to try and explain what was happening throughout this trailer, because despite playing through FFVII Remake I don’t have a clue about this world and lore. Instead check out the full trailer that I have embedded below;

Next up was Spider-Man Miles Morales. It felt like since the initial announcement people have been a little down on this and the fact that it’s going to be a shorter experience. Well the footage shown off here was superb and the reaction I have seen online has been almost universally positive. It was also announced after the show that it would also be coming to PS4 should those not looking to upgrade consoles right away wish to play.

Another world premiere followed here with our first official look at the long rumoured Harry Potter RPG. Footage of this game first leaked in 2018 so it was nice to see that it’s definitely real and has been making steady progress. I’m not a huge Harry Potter guy, but the game looked really interesting and I will consider checking it out when it launches in 2021 (Or 2022 after the inevitable delay). This one is also available on PS4, Xbox Series X | S and the Xbox One.

Next we saw gameplay of Call of Duty which looked excellent, followed by another cinematic trailer for Resident Evil Village and an update on Deathloop confirming it for a Q2 2021 release. We saw gameplay of a Devil May Cry 5 Special Edition which will feature loads of enhancement and more on the new Oddworld game which is still coming soon.

The next big one was a gameplay demo of Demons Souls, which didn’t look anything special to me but then I am not the desired audience. People on Twitter seemed really pleased with what they saw, so I will bow to their superior judgement on this one. The biggest news from Bluepoint Games though came after the console where Geoff Keighley had to step in for Sony’s bungled marketing and announce that the game will be a PS5 launch title. This is a huge boost to the launch lineup.

Next-gen Fortnite was shown. It looked pretty… and like Fortnite. I have no more to say about this. Next up we got a really cool surprise. Anyone with PS+ that picks up a PS5 at launch will get access to the PS+ Collection. A collection of must-have PS4 games – for free. This list includes;

  • God of War
  • Bloodborne
  • Monster Hunter World
  • Final Fantasy XV
  • Fallout 4
  • Mortal Kombat X
  • Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End
  • Ratchet & Clank
  • Days Gone
  • Until Dawn
  • Detroit: Become Human
  • Battlefield 1
  • inFAMOUS Second Son
  • Batman Arkham Knight
  • The Last Guardian
  • The Last of Us Remastered
  • Persona 5

That’s a really impressive lineup of games that will just be sitting waiting for you to download on your PS5. If you were an Xbox or PC gamer last-gen it will be such a boost to get access to all of those games at launch as part of your PS+ subscription.

What followed this was the news of the PS5 release date and prices that I covered above. But Sony wasn’t done there. As often happens with these showcases, they had ONE MORE THING. That thing was the highly anticipated confirmation of the next God of War game, titled Ragnarok. Most surprisingly of all the game has been dated for 2021.

And so that was the show. Overall I thought it flowed brilliantly and really delivered. There was hardly any filler and it was sprinkled with loads of big announcements. My one criticism would be that we should have had more info on release dates at the time. Spider-Man just said ‘Holiday 2020’ and had to be confirmed later in a presser. Demons Souls had no date and had to be announced by a third-party games host. I get that giving both release dates for games before you drop the console release date buries the lead, but why not just flash up ‘launch day’ after these games were shown off? It felt rushed.

Now onto my predictions from Twitter. I had a really busy day yesterday and so I wasn’t able to do a full predictions post on here, but I did tweet them out. For clarity, I will list them all below along with my response/excuse for why it’s wrong and I’m shite at this below

Silent Hill will be revealed as either a full exclusive or a timed one.

I still feel this has to be coming at some point. There has been too much talk about it for it not to be happening. Maybe at the Game Awards.

PS5 will not be a global launch. Instead focusing on key markets in 2020 due to low stock.

I mean it isn’t a global launch, so I’m gonna give myself half a point. But I’ll readily admit that’s generous. It appears the PS5 will launch globally inside 7 days with only China being held back.

The price will be £449 disk, £399 digital.

Again I’ll go half a point. I got the disk price right, but I didn’t expect them to be able to drop the digital by £90. I’m still so impressed with the digital price (it’s the one I pre-ordered).

The release date will be either November 13th or 17th

One day out and two days out. Ah well. I was in the ball park. Zero points.

The next Uncharted game will be shown. It won’t be called Uncharted 5 and Nathan Drake won’t be the main playable character.

The whole day I was going back and fourth between Uncharted and God of War being shown off and I knew whatever I chose would be the wrong one. My decision was based on it being longer since we had seen Uncharted. Again I think we will get an Uncharted announcement in the not too distant future.

Pre-orders for PS5 will go live before the Xbox Series X | S

Point for this one. It was a good idea for Sony to capitalise on the hype immediately and they did exactly that. Most retailers jumped the gun and started taking pre-orders last night, to the point where almost everywhere is sold out before the time Sony had even said they would be available. If you are in the UK and still looking to pre-order apparently Argos are taking orders starting today – Friday, September 18th.

One last discussion piece is that Sony announced Spider-Man Miles Morales and Horizon Forbidden West will be coming to PS4 as well as PS5. This has caused a bit of a stir with some disappointed and others jumping to justify it. As tends to be the case with these things, I fall somewhere in the middle with what I would call a reasonable reaction.

Without all the information it’s hard to properly know how this has been handled. For instance apparently in Miles Morales the differences between the two versions won’t just be graphical. The PS5 version is supposed to have a much more NPC’s on the street, giving the city a more living and breathing feel. It remains to be seen what the differences in Forbidden West will be, although it should be noted that it has long been reported that this game started off as a PS4 game but development shifted to PS5.

Well, that’s it for this rather long PlayStation 5 Showcase review. Overall I thought it was an excellent show in terms of content, let down only by the mixed messaging that had to be cleared up via blog posts and social media. We are currently less than NINE WEEKS away from these consoles launching in the UK and my hype levels are through the roof now. What did you think of the event? Let us know on Twitter @VizualDze.

-VDZE ✌️