Having launched at the tail end of 2013, the current eighth generation of consoles are entering the end of their life cycles. With the ninth generation from Sony and Microsoft being slated for release sometime in 2020, we finally have some information on what these systems will include. Of course, the full details of these next-gen systems remain to be seen, but we want to go over what we know so far, and what these elements could mean for the typical gaming enthusiast.
Solid State Hard drives
A constant concern for any disk-based system is the issue of loading times. Whether from a traditional hard disk or the Blu-ray, these can incur a significant waiting time. As games grow larger and more complex, as they have with each subsequent generation, the amount of data to transfer has increased. This results in long waiting times and frustrating bottlenecks.
The next generation of consoles have been stated to include solid-state drives as standard. These include no moving parts, instead relying on a specialized type of circuitry called non-volatile RAM. This is much faster at both locating and reading/writing data, which leads to significant reductions in load times.
For comparison’s sake, a fast HDD might be able to achieve reads and writes at a rate of 125 megabytes per second. A standard SSD, on the other hand, can reach speeds above 520 megabytes per second. It should also be noted that Sony has stated that their SSD solution can achieve much higher bandwidth that any currently available for PC.
As the fastest PC SSDs can achieve speeds of over 3,500 megabytes per second, this is a hell of a pace, if true.
For a real-world illustration of this point, take a look at this leaked video from Sony comparing load speeds on the current-gen Spider-Man game.
The implications here are astounding, especially for open-world games which require enormous data streaming availability.
Speaking of last-gen games…
Backward Compatibility
The issue of backward compatibility can be a difficult one to quantify. Getting older generation games to run on current generation systems is something which many people claim to want, yet actual usage in this regard is lower than you might expect.
According to one report by Ars Technica, only 1.5% of Xbox One usage over a period of four months was dedicated to playing Xbox 360 games. There are questions, however, as to how game availability might affect this pattern, and how this pattern might skew heavily if surveyed closer to the console’s launch.
While there have been attempts over the years to enable backward compatibility on some systems (the Xbox One being the strongest in the current field), these attempts usually fall short. Sometimes this is due to console manufacturers not having the will, other times it can come from problems bridging the gap between very different console hardware.
The next-gen, however, seems to have overcome both these problems. At this point, both Sony and Microsoft have expressed heavy interest in making last-gen games playable on their coming systems. What we don’t know is how this will be implemented.
It seems a reasonable assumption that many of these could operate on boost mode, similar to how PS4 Pro and the Xbox One X function. This could give advantages like higher frame rates, resolution, faster loading, and more detailed game worlds.
Since this could require a huge time and financial investment from many publishers and developers, however, this might not always prove to be the case. In some instances, it might require such an investment that games run unmodified, playing the same or even worse than they did originally.
A Higher Focus on 4K and Above
As much as we would personally prefer games concentrate on higher frame-rates most of the time, it is far more likely that the majority of games will instead focus their attention on hitting the 4K and 8K resolutions. The PS4 Pro and Xbox One X have made this move into 4K already, though they often struggle with the implementation.
With the next generation of consoles being much more powerful than what we currently have, and high resolutions being so important to Sony and Microsoft, expect 4K and even 8K to become a major advertising push as the next consoles approach launch.
Virtual Reality Support
At the time of this article, there have been no official announcements made regarding the development of dedicated VR headsets for the new consoles. That said, it is almost guaranteed that these will support VR on some level. If not out of the box, then sometime after launch.
One of the primary advantages here comes from the extra power as made possible through these new devices. VR takes considerable processing power to operate smoothly, which is why PC has so far offered better virtual experiences. The next-gen of consoles should be able to raise this level of quality significantly, meaning better and less blurry worlds.
Game Streaming
Google’s Stadia has been gaining a lot of attention recently in what it claims it can bring to game streaming. This is not a new process, as Sony has been doing it for years with PS Now. That said, there are indications that this technology has finally reached the mainstream, with both Sony and Microsoft putting a greater emphasis on game streaming with their coming consoles.
At best, this could mean playing your consoles games on the go over a phone. As bandwidth and latency remain an enormous factor for this technology, we would caution placing your faith in this experience. Those in larger cities should expect better experiences, especially once 5G arrives, but the rest of us will likely have much less fluid experiences.
The Cost of Next-Gen
Perhaps the biggest question regarding these new consoles is how much of a dent will they put in our wallets? Generally, newer consoles retail between $400 and $500 US. As with the last couple of generations, we would expect the release of different models with slightly different specs. This would probably come down to SSD size, as well as the pack-ins like controllers.
Whatever the case, it might be time to start making a dedicated savings account. Let’s just hope that in this batch of consoles we don’t end up with a case similar to the notorious Xbox 360 red ring of death.
If Lana Del Rey’s work has often felt like the definition of style over substance, then Norman Fucking Rockwell! is the album that changes it all. The pop singer-songwriter’s sixth full-length release is a record full of emotional substance – not only her best material yet, but also her bravest and most mature. Del Rey lays her soul bare on every single track here, and it feels painfully honest at times: “If you hold me without hurting me/ You’ll be the first who ever did,” she sings on ‘Cinnamon Girl’, as if whispering close to your ear, while a similar sentiment comes through on ‘Happiness is a butterfly’: “If he’s a serial killer, then what’s the worst that can happen to a girl who’s already hurt?” Producer Jack Antonoff, who has produced for the likes of Lorde, Taylor Swift, and St. Vincent in the past few years, doesn’t alter Del Rey’s sound all that much; but his subtle contributions provide the groundwork for her elegantly quiet voice to shine rather than drown in reverb as it often does, while adding instrumental embellishments here and there. It’s also Del Rey’s most musically coherent album, and at 67 minutes, rather than feeling overlong – another pop album full of filler designed for Spotify playlists – nearly every song (with the possible exception of ‘The Next Best American Record’, the weakest cut here), is impressively heart-wrenching and well-written. But Del Rey saves the best for last, a raw piano ballad with her voice front and center titled ‘hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have – but I have it’, where she likens herself to Sylvia Plath, takes a stab at her critics (“They write that I’m happy, they know that I’m not”, she sings, a reference to the discourse surrounding her previous album Lust for Life), pours her heart out, and holds on to a tiny glimmer of hope – just enough to rise from the ashes, like Lady Lazarus herself.
To match the massive hype surrounding their first new album in 13 years, Tool understandably had to make Fear Inoculum their most ambitious effort yet. Every Tool album so far has been more than an hour long, but this one clocks in at nearly 90 minutes, with most tracks being 10-minute-plus progressive metal epics. And yet, it’s somehow sadly their most disappointing album as well; although almost every song here would sound impressive on its own, in the context of the record, the band’s approach starts to grow stale, as they rehash a lot of the same ideas over and over to the point where the album becomes monotonous, frequently repetitive, and at worst, exhausting. There are certainly stand-out, solid moments here, like the track ‘Invincible’, where Maynard James Keenan express the band’s concern with staying relevant in the contemporary music scene through familiar war metaphors (“Warrior struggling to remain consequential”), or ‘7empest’, which remains hypnotically engaging throughout its 15-minute runtime. But, utilizing similar structures and themes, other tracks just aren’t exciting enough to justify their length, while the interludes don’t offer much either. Tool’s comeback feels a little bit like the latest Quentin Tarantino movie: technically masterful, characteristically aggressive (though the violence – or heaviness – is curiously watered down), featuring some undeniably virtuoso performances (drummer Danny Carey shines the most on the album) and a morbid sense of humour, but ultimately overlong and occasionally vapid.
Legendary Chicago rapper Common comes through with a breezy, soulful, and mostly laid-back album to accompany his recently released memoir. There’s nothing really extraordinary here, but it’s not trying to be – unlike his previous full-length release, 2016’s upbeat and politically charged Black America Again, Let Love is an easy-going, occasionally inspirational affair (despite what lead single ‘Hercules’ would have you think), with reliably competent rapping from an experienced artist who comfortably acknowledges and incorporates the new generation of hip-hop into his sound (he references the likes of Cardi B while featuring artists like Daniel Caesar and BJ the Chicago Kid alongside older souls like Swizz Beatz and Jill Scott). You can probably guess the main theme of the album from its title – or the title of nearly every song here, which includes the world ‘love’ – be it love for hip-hop masquerading as romantic love (‘HER Love’), or a generic love for God on ‘God is Love’. But the most heartwarming moment is ‘Show Me that You Love’, where Common sings about his relationship with his daughter with admirable honesty, admitting his mistakes and trying to view things from her perspective in the chorus: “Show me that you’re there/ Show me that you care/ I’ve been looking for you/ But you don’t wanna share,” Jill Scott sings on the chorus. This is dad rap at its finest. Unfortunately, much of the album is ultimately forgettable, but it’s a pleasant, sometimes moving listen while it’s on.
If Ezra Furman’s previous album, Transangelic Exodus, was an angry but meticulously crafted and ambitious concept album, Twelve Nudes channels that same kind of societal fury, this time in a raw and manically brief fashion. A ‘spiritually queer punk’ record, as Furman aptly described it, the indie songwriter’s eighth full-length release is filled with exhilarating, frantic garage rock tunes with the distortion cranked up and Furman’s unbridled, howling vocals as impassioned as ever. It’s a short but fun ride, with infectiously catchy songs like the opening single ‘Calm Down aka I Should Not Alone’ or the fast-paced ‘My Teeth Hurt’, but there’s a lot of personal pain behind these deceptively simple tunes. “Remember I tried to ask what it means to be a man? They threw me in the back of a truck and they tied my hands,” Furman laments on ‘Transition from Nowhere to Nowhere’, while on ‘Trauma’ he maturely proclaims, “Years roll on and they still have not dealt with our trauma”. It’s not as if there aren’t any playful songs here, though; the tongue-in-cheek ‘I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend’, by far the most musically accessible song on the record, is also the most lyrically subversive, making the impact of Furman’s gender-defying lines all the more potent: “All my friends are writing their resumes/ My responsible friends are applying for jobs/ But me, I was considering ditching Ezra, and going by Esme”. At the end of the day, despite all the pain and frustration, Furman suggests with the title of the closing track, ‘What Can You Do But Rock n’ Roll?’.
