The first year of a console generation is never the best year of a console generation. You know what we got in the first year(ish) of the PS3? The first Uncharted. You know what we got in the last year of the PS3? The Last of Us. I’m not an Uncharted 1 hater, but it was very much a proof of concept that later games would improve upon. The Last of Us, meanwhile, shows what a developer can pull off when they’ve been working with a console for its entire life cycle.
Though the games aren’t at their strongest, the first year is always exciting because the console is new and fresh. You’re still stoked to play games with motion controls or haptic feedback or grip the N64’s weird central controller hump.
Launch Games Are Good, But Farewell Games Are Better
Plus, there’s usually at least one really good launch game. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is one of the greatest games of all time. But you know where I played it? On Wii U, because it was developed for the Wii U! It just got delayed so many times that Nintendo turned it into a cross-generational launch game (like Twilight Princess before it).
This tends to be the reality of the early life of a console, especially now that generational leaps are less substantial than they were in the ’90s and ’00s. God of War Ragnarok and Horizon Forbidden West were released two years into the PS5’s life cycle, but both still came to PS4 because — aside from looking prettier, loading faster, and running better — there wasn’t much about the games that required the power of the PS5. Those bells and whistles are great, but they aren’t necessarily game-changers.
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2025 Is The Year Games Get Great
As TheGamer Video Producer Christian Macias argued in this video, 2025 is the year that trend will finally start to change. A combination of heavy-hitting third-party multiplatform games like GTA 6, Monster Hunter Wilds, Elden Ring Nightreign, and Assassin’s Creed Shadows will keep players on Xbox, PC, and PS5 busy. Each console will get its own heavy-hitters, too. Microsoft (courtesy of Obsidian) is serving up Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 (which is actually multiplatform) and PlayStation is giving players long-awaited sequels to Death Stranding and Ghost of Tsushima.
Sony also recently launched the PS5 Pro, and a mid-gen refresh is as sure a sign as any that we’ve entered the back half of these boxes’ life cycles.
Nintendo got off schedule when it launched the Switch in 2017 — smack dab in the middle of the Xbox One and PS4 life cycles — so its 2025 efforts will look significantly different from the two other hardware manufacturers. It’s moving into a new generation, instead of kicking into gear. So, we actually get the fun of both ends of the spectrum this year: the energy of Nintendo putting a new console into the world and the more accomplished games on Xbox and PS5.
2025 is looking like a busy year, and the first year things will truly feel ‘next-gen’ — whatever that means in an era when graphical returns have severely diminished and consoles are more like PCs or phones than ever before.
The first part of this generation wasn’t bad per se. 2023 was an all-time great gaming year. But triple-A has been fairly uninspired. As incredible as a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 is, most triple-A developers have doubled down on the same, hyper-linear, cinematic, third-person experience with games like Final Fantasy 16, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, God of War Ragnarok. In the back half of the generation, I hope that these developers put their mastery of the systems they’re creating for to better, more interesting use.
