Sony and Microsoft have had 12 months to address supply shortages and improve game libraries for their new consoles. Here's how it went.
It's been a year since we reviewed the Xbox Series X / S and the PlayStation 5, ( here and here also the reviews of the Italian team) and a lot has changed in this time. We've had 12 months to live alongside them, watch their game libraries grow, and see the developers leverage the next-gen capabilities of both consoles. Or, at least, we should have. It's been a year of supply shortages, so many people are still on the hunt in hopes of grabbing a new console.
Usually, a "versus" article would pit the Xbox Series X / S against the PS5 head-to-head, comparing their specs, stats and games. We will certainly get there, but the interesting question is not "How do they behave?", But "How do they behave, considering everything?".
They are difficult to buy
By the end of September this year, Sony had sold 13.4 million PlayStation 5. Microsoft does not release sales numbers, but an analyst at market intelligence firm Niko Partners has estimated that it has sold around 8 million X-Series consoles and Yes, together. These are good numbers, considering the supply shortages, but they don't really paint the picture of how hard it still is to get your hands on both consoles. A full year has passed, but it's still a choice between paying extra to touts on eBay and Amazon and signing up repeatedly to receive up-to-the-second availability notifications and waiting in an online queue during a supply of new consoles at a retailer.. They sell out in seconds, leading to plenty of disappointed next-gen wannabe players.
Both the Wii and Nintendo Switch were difficult to buy until their second year of life, but this is unusual for Xbox and PlayStation. Supply usually begins to match demand at this point. Normally you should be able to grab one at any local electronics store or buy one at its actual selling price on Amazon. But this is not the case.
Game libraries have improved
It took a year, but the game libraries on both consoles are starting to be decent. They aren't big yet, and there aren't enough flagship titles to make both consoles a must-buy, but things are getting better.
The exclusive titles are not there yet. We won't be seeing Halo: Infinite on Xbox until the end of 2021, and Horizon: Forbidden West won't be out on PlayStation until February 2022. Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Demon's Souls are fun, ok, but they're not enough. From a design standpoint, it's also hard to tell whether a new game is actually a next-gen or a previous-gen title. Exclusives aside, most of the new games are still coming out with the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions at the same time.
The great thing is that both consoles seem to have all the good third party games. This is good for anyone who can buy one of the two consoles, but not that great for Sony and Microsoft as there is less and less difference between the two consoles.
Graphics and performance
The Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, from the outside, couldn't be less alike. One is a real box, the other is a curvilinear space oyster that looks like a backdrop from Mass Effect. But on the inside, they are practically twins.
They have the same price. They have the same 8-core AMD Zen 2 processors with slightly different clock speeds (3.5 GHz for the Ps5 and 3.8 GHz for the Xbox), the same AMD RDNA graphics chipsets (again with small differences in clock speed ), the same 16GB of RAM, almost the same stock storage capacity: 825GB for the Ps5, and 1TB for the Xbox Series X. And both have 8K, 4K and 120Hz outputs.
The cheaper Xbox Series S, by contrast, is really little more of an upgrade than the Xbox One. It doesn't play real 4K games, but it does support ray tracing and, theoretically, 120 FPS gameplay. It's a good choice if you don't have a 4K TV and don't plan on getting one, but I'd recommend most people to keep their money and wait for the X Series to be more readily available. It is more future-proof, thanks to its more powerful hardware.
In terms of storage space, the Ps5 has the advantage, but only if you feel comfortable opening up your Ps5 and installing new hardware. You can upgrade its standard 800GB hard drive with an additional drive, but that requires some hardware know-how and isn't for everyone. You can also use an external drive, but its extra space cannot be used to store the games you are playing, but only to keep them instead of, say, erasing and re-downloading them. For the Xbox Series X, you just need to buy an expansion card and insert it into the console. They're super easy to set up and work great, and you can play them smoothly. Unfortunately, they are expensive: 220 euros for 1 terabyte of extra memory. Both consoles should have come with more internal storage and easier expansion options. The Xbox Series S is even worse, with just 500GB of memory.
Ps5 has a new controller
The simplest way to tell the two consoles apart is by their controllers. The Xbox Series X / S controller is largely unchanged from previous generations. It's the usual Xbox controller you've used since the Xbox 360, with the addition of a share button. On the other hand, the Ps5 boasts a radical redesign (at least for Sony, which has had the same controller for decades) and a force-feedback system.
Sony's new DualSense provide more than just normal vibration. The trigger buttons can have different levels of resistance, depending on game factors such as the weapon you are using, so you can actually feel when you are using a pistol with a thin trigger against the heavier resistance of a large rifle.
The haptic feedback system also provides a truly three-dimensional sense of where the pulse is coming from. Instead of two roaring motors in the palm of your hand, the motors in the DualSense controller can vibrate through the controller. When it works, it's amazing. For example, Assassin's Creed: Valhalla plays great on both consoles, but with the DualSense controller, the trigger pull is different for each type of bow, so you can really feel the extra tension in your big predator bows or the touch. fast and light of the light bows. It gives you the real feeling that these weapons are different in your character's hands. Few games take advantage of the new DualSense features, but it's fun when they do.
Services are expensive and indispensable
Both consoles have subscriptions that are required to play online, and another to access a library of games to play "for free". Xbox Series X has Xbox Live Gold and Game Pass Ultimate, and the Ps5 has PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now.
Game Pass Ultimate is the best. It gives you access to online multiplayer and has a fantastic, very current catalog of over 100 games that you can download on your console and often on your pc. You can actually install the Xbox app on a gaming laptop or desktop and download many of them with ease.
PlayStation Plus offers only a few "free" games that you can download each month, and are required to play online. Then there's PS Now, which is more like Xbox Game Pass, but focuses on older games for Ps4, Ps3, and Ps2. It gives you access to a huge catalog of over 800 old PlayStation games to play online.
All in all, these subscription plans are all super confusing. Because that's how it is? At this point, no one knows.
The winner: Everyone and nobody
So which console is the winner here? None of the two. Because it doesn't matter how good your console is if no one can buy it. PlayStation 5 is probably the best console, and as more of them are sold, your friends are more likely to have it or buy it, but I wouldn't call it a winner.
DualSense is great, but internally, both consoles are pretty much identical and it shows. It's as if Sony and Microsoft bought the same Honda Civic, but Sony installed a nice after-market steering wheel. Sure, it's cool, but is it really that much better?
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