When the PS4 Pro was announced, there was a fair bit of disappointment from a lot of quarters. Here was Sony, the people who had brought us the PS4, an expertly engineered console that could lay claim to being the strongest ever, and it seemed like they were now bringing us an incremental upgrade that would be thoroughly lapped by Microsoft’s upcoming Scorpio.
As time has gone on, the Pro has started seeming more desirable, thanks to some ingenious tricks Sony are using (like the Checkerboard upscaling technique), as well as thanks to a lot of games being announced to be running natively in 4K on the machine. But in the end, as the Xbox One proved, no amount of software trickery can compensate for weaker hardware- and the PS4 Pro remains weak. Or weaker than the competition, at any rate.
That was the takeaway by the Escape From Tarakov developer Battlestate, too. When we had a chance to sit down with them and talk to them, we broached the topic of the PS4 Pro. According to them, while the Pro is certainly impressive, it isn’t much to write home about.
“[The PS4 Pro] sounds like an impressive piece of hardware oriented on 4k gaming with great antialiasing, and a good attempt at improving the visual quality on consoles, but hardly a revolution,” they said.
Which is how I feel about it, too- it’s definitely impressive, there is no getting around that. But it’s not cutting edge, and it’s definitely not a game changer, not like the PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4, or PSP and PS Vita were. Coming from Sony, it is definitely a bit disappointing.