When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:PlayStation house style is beginning to seem a lot like a hammer. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Housemarque, which unveiled its new game Saros during this week'♍s State of Play, is the latest st♉udio to inadvertently become the nail.
Sony Makes Games In One Genre Now
Those were my slightly unfair thoughts upon seeing the upcoming third-person shooter, which is slated for a 2026 launch. I say that my thoughts were slightly unfair because all we got was — which can't tell you much about what the actual game will look and feel like in action — plus 40-ish seconds of the game's creative director, Gregory Louden, discussing the team's vision for Saros. But having seen what’s happened to most of Sony's first-party developers, I think it's unlikely Saros isn't basically what I expect it to be.
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That's because, over the past decade or so, Sony has transformed the majority of its studios into the same thing. PlayStation once had a diverse slate of games that targeted different audiences. Guerilla 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:made first-person shooters. Santa Monica 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:made character action games. Insomniac made games in a wide variety of genres, from action-platformers like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Ratchet & Clank to sci-fi FPSes like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resistance, while developing casual games like Fruit Fusion and VR titles like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Stormland for other platforms.
But Sony now only really offers various flavors of third-person action. Sometimes it's third-person stealth action, like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Last of Us Part 2. Sometimes it's third-person multiplayer action, like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Helldivers 2. Sometimes it's third-person action adventure, like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:God of War Ragnarok. And sometimes it's third-person open-world action, like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man 2. But the perspective and focus remain similar. When gamඣes can be so many things, it’s a bummer to see this one paradigm become so prevalent.
How Sony Gave Up On Variety
It's easy to see this cha🀅nge occur if you look back at what the studios behind Sony games used to make. The first Helldivers was a top-down shooter, for example, and Housemarque made arcade-y shooters like Resogun, Alienation, and Nex Machina. For Returnal, Housemarque switched to a more cinematic, third-person approach. Its roguelite gameplay still made it an outlier by Sony standards, but it was a far cry from the studio's previous work.
And, again, with Saros, Housemarque is going back to that same well, with Louden saying that the game "builds on Returnal's award-winning third-person action". There's a lot to like here. The trailer's conclusion, with a giant, eight-armed figure towering over the protagonist as the sun dies in the backgro💯und is pretty cool. It's rad to see Rahul Kohli, a British Indian actor, stepping into the hero role in a triple-A game (even if that character looks like the same gruff, bearded soldier type we've seen a hundred times). Returnal’s heroine was a middle-aged woman, and I respect Housemarque immensely for working to represent a broader spectrum of humওanity in its games — especially at a time when a game starring a person with a marginalized identity tends to get it noticed by the worst people on the internet.
And, honestly, I like third-person action games more than the kinds of games Housemarque was making before. This is a win for me. I'll play Saros and I'll probably like it because I like third-person action games. But variety is a good thing. I love 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Naughty Dog as much as the next person, but so many of Sony’s studios chasi♚ng The Last of Us' gritty gamepla🐠y and somber tone is a creative dead end. Sony is only hurting itself by defining what a ‘PlayStation game’ can be this narrowly. It's a loss for the industry when everything gets the hammer.
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