When you look back at the consoles of past generations, topics tend to give themselves away.
With the SNES and the Mega Drive? Cartridges and neon-lit platformer. Sonic and Mario. Top-down role-playing games and street fighters. The PlayStation and the N64? Clumsy, adventurous leaps into the third dimension. Tomb Raider and Mario 64, Resident Evil and Ocarina of Time.
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But writing a laudation for the generation that has just passed is more and more difficult. As time goes on, trends become more apparent, and right now there seems to be little that sets the PS4 / Xbox One consoles apart from previous generations. The controllers were similar, the consoles themselves were similar.
That is even more important Games were similar.
If I had to identify a trend that defined the generation of games past, I would say that this was the period when big budget games - the type produced by Sony's first-party studios or Ubisoft and EA - felt indistinguishable from each other. Games, games you made yourself, felt like box exercises.
Third person camera, check. Tinkering, checking. Skill trees, check.
The problem was made worse for me by a fan-made video made by the Twitter creator Suhni legend. A video that shows the quality and breadth of Sony's first-party line-up. The video was cut seamlessly between games like Uncharted 4, Spider-Man, Horizon Zero Dawn and God of War and was beautifully created and edited to perfection. However, if you blinked hard enough, you probably got it - aside from some unique cosmetic options - the footage was all of a single video game.
The mono game.
A homogeneous mix of styles, camera angles and mechanics. The end of video game history. Open world adventure in the third person, interspersed with film. Hunt mission markers, beat bad guys, upgrade your equipment, level up and unlock new attacks. God of War is more battle focused and Horizon has more RPG elements - but those sliders work on the same spectrum. The same melody in a different key.
Naughty dog
It is understandable. We know video game budgets are spiraling out of control. The developers are working through terrible, intense times of crisis to bring games like The Last of Us 2 or Cyberpunk 2077 to the market. We know video game creation is the ultimate record spinning exercise, and in this insane pressure cooker, it's well worth looking at games with familiar, discreet mechanisms that marketing teams and gamers can cling to.
But I also believe that something has been lost.
In the last generation of consoles, the majority of big budget video games like Marvel movies were played. Well-made crowd pullers that work with a comfortable aesthetic. You could never say games like Assassin's Creed: Odyssey or Spider-Man were bad, but very few - even Competitors of the Year like God of War - ventured into new territory that distanced gamers from well-worn expectations.
When I look back on the generation, the games that stand out are the ones that resisted mono gaming. The games specifically focused on one type of mechanic. Games that broke the rules in a way that got me out of the discomfort of pressing the same buttons in exactly the same order.
Games like Baba is You, a puzzle game and a satire of puzzle games at the same time. Games like Outer Wilds, a pure exploration experience in a perfectly designed snow globe of a universe. Games like Breath of the Wild, perhaps the only big budget game that really undermined the tropes we expect from the mono game. An experience that feels good in your own skin and is brave enough to break the rules that we take for granted. Games like Return of the Obra Dinn or Disco Elysium. Games like Death Stranding - a bloated, bizarre, but ultimately flawed mix of the familiar and the downright bizarre. This game might be the bravest given the stakes involved. I haven't enjoyed every second I spent playing this game, but I probably won't forget it.
On the way to this new generation of consoles, this bold chaotic energy is one that I hope can be recreated in future games. We invented the mono game, maybe it's time to break it. The indie space has always been the place where the most risk is taken, but I would like more big budget games to follow suit. Undermining expectations instead of satisfying them.
Otherwise, the next generation of consoles will serve more of them.