Topic: Is this the PS4 generation better than last gen?

No way is this a golden age imo. It's a strange generation in many ways. The vast majority of my PS4 library is playable on PS3, and there are also many genre gaps like never before. Just as an example over 3 years into the life-cycle and there hasn't been a proper tennis or boxing game released or even revealed.

This new generation is a lot more social than before and I prefer the bigger more open world of this generation. As for games its had to say we are only probably half through the cyle of the current generation so I can not compare games. I do not think there has been a bg jump in graphics but its the size of games thats impressed me. The best games always seem to come in the last couple of years of a consoles life so ask me the same question in 2 years.

YES.

The overall standard for games has improved due to the greater costs involved and longer development time. IIRC the PS3 gen started of slow, but finished strong. Barely 3 years in we have had UC4, Bloodborne and The Witcher 3 which imo are generation defining games (UC4 the pinnacle of storytelling, Bloodborne the pinnacle of gameplay+art design & TW3 the pinnacle of open world gaming).
Add to this the indie takeover and its a no contest.

@Fight_Teza_Fight: Agree - Uncharted 4, Bloodborne and The Witcher. Personally I only really enjoyed Bloodborne but my own tastes aside you really can't argue with those three. Chuck all those indies into the mix and you've got super fun happy time.

Hate to say it... No, this, the 'remaster' generation, is not better than last. By this time in the last gen, the 360 at least had a brilliant library. The Wii had solid games, even the PS3 had some great stuff. There were more new IPs, and eventhough there were a lot of sequels, they were at least still new games. This gen has just been delay after delay after delay, remasters on top of remasters and disappointing hardware all the way around. Maybe when we revisit this in a few years things will have changed, but I doubt it.

@Kidfried:
I don't think there's any comparison at all. For the 360 the list is pretty impressive.
2005 - Project Gotham Racing 3, Condemned: Criminal Origins, Call of Duty 2, Dead or Alive 4
2006 - Fight Night Round 3, Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Dead Rising, Saints Row, Rainbow Six Vegas, F.E.A.R., Gears of War, Viva Pinata
2007 - Crackdown, Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2, Forza Motorsport 2, The Darkness, Bioshock, Project Gotham Racing 4, Mass Effect, Halo 3, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
2008 - Devil May Cry 4, Rainbow Six Vegas 2, Grand Theft Auto IV, Ninja Gaiden 2, Tales of Vesperia, Dead Space, Saints Row 2, Fable 2, Fallout 3, Gears of War 2, Left 4 Dead

That's just the 360 and it's already an unfair fight, now lets add the PS3 exclusives (which make an impressive for that console alone as well when combined with the multiplats that I listed in the 360 section) from the time it launched until the end of 2008
2006 - Resistance: Fall of Man
2007 - MotorStorm, Heavenly Sword, Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune
2008 - Metal Gear Solid IV: Guns of the Patriots, LittleBigPlanet, MotorStorm: Pacific Rift, Resistance 2

And I don't care what anybody says, I count the Wii U as part of the PS4/Xbox One gen, so we're going to throw the original Wii's library from 2006-2008 in for good measure since that counted against PS3/Xbox 360, even if the hardware was a gen behind
2006 - The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Wii Sports
2007 - Super Paper Mario, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Super Mario Galaxy, Nights: Journey of Dreams
2008 - No More Heroes, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Mario Kart Wii, Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World

There's only two possible legit arguments I could see here. One is that some of the games don't hold up well, that is true of every gen and will be true of some of the top early games from this gen as well. You can't, however, deny the impact some of the games on this list had at the time of their release. The other argument is that PS4 and Wii U might, and I'm being very generous here, have stronger exclusives in the same time frame from their predecessors. But when you factor in multiplats and the 360's first few years there is absolutely no comparison. Last gen crapped on what has so far been the remaster/delay generation, with few great sequels and even fewer great new IPs sprinkled in. Some of the ones we've received are awesome like Rise of The Tomb Raider, Uncharted 4, Bloodborne and the two Forza Horizon sequels, but for the most part, this has not been a stellar first few years at all. I don't know if I'd go as far as 'worst gen of all-time' bad but it's closer to that than it is to the top of the list.

At the moment it's a
NO

While there's has been some cracking games this gen like Uncharted 4, Witcher 3, Splatoon, Pokken, MGS V, Bloodborne and Life is Strange for example, there is a over abundance of remasters and sequels and a lack of new fresh IP's that the last gen was full of.

NO

by the end of the 3rd year of PS3, just for first person shooters, we already the original modern warfare, battlefield bad company, killzone 2, bioshock, 2 resistances.. and while it had a lot of flaws, MAG's 256 player online multiplayer battles tried to do something different. there is just no comparison on PS4. KZSF is a poor imitation of KZ2/3, feels like a different game almost, CoD is.. CoD. well, ghosts was garbage, but black ops3 is a solid if somewhat formulaic package. BF4 launched with massive problems, although it turned into a solid multiplayer experience, i don't find it's better than either of the bad company games from last gen. battlefront was average at best. maybe it's just harder to thrill in online multiplayer shooters.

but even on single player games, what was said about arkham knight and UC4 being bigger, more open worlds, etc. etc. is true, and technically they're on a different level, but for me, arkham knight wasn't nearly as much fun to play as arkham city, in fact i got cheesed off with the batmobile being shoe-horned in at every opportunity that i only half finished it. UC4 was a great game, but i still prefer UC2. we had 3 mass effect games in 5 years, andromeda is going to take almost that long on its own. i think AAA game development has lost its focus (more pixels! more colours! more textures!) this generation which is why there are so many more delays, and so many more re-masters to fill longer gaps.

maybe in 3 years time there will be several astonishing games that we'll be waxing lyrical about this gen, but i can't see it right now, and as it stands for me, it seems like a bit of a troublesome transitional generation..

One other thing I would say is that this has been a generation for excessive hype. I know games are always hyped, it is what marketing is all about, but I feel the hype train for some games has gone beyond anything that can be met. Not sure if that has affected quality but I know it has affected how I feel about some of the big name games.

Game development is taking longer and longer and the hype is starting early. Even when these games are solid, they've been hyped to the max.

When Persona 5 comes out the answer will be yes

@mrobinson91: So that's a no until then right?

@themcnoisy: Mmm I think this generation has been really good and I've had so many games to play I can't keep up. There is huge variety on what's on offer too. I wasn't gaming much of last generation so not too sure if it is better.

Last gen didn't have a Persona game though so it can't have been lol

@KratosMD: I forgot that little (but important) piece of information. Woops.

Xbox360 gen over this gen any day, up to now. I really hope it pick's up and maybe it will with Ark, Horizon and FF on the Horizon but until then it doesn't look good at all for me personally, i'll be getting BF1 but I don't have high hope's for it at all I just NEED something to play. But with the lack of bullet drop, the Battlefront pick up's the jousting, I mean people will be getting sniped by six year old's from the other side of the map with the exclusion of bullet drop unfortunately I think BF1 will suffer what I feel this whole generation has suffered from and that's casualisation, nothing has depth anymore. Just look at NMS is that really the kind of depth Sony think we want? (I believe that game suffered greatly at the hand's of Sony and would have been a totaly different game without them).

Result

PS4 / X1 / WIIU = 7
PS3 / X360 / Wii = 10

Last gen wins it. This gen has a way to go to stamp its authority as a great time for gamers, from what I gather nothing has set us alight as much as the likes of Gears, Mass Effect, Bioshock etc etc, maybe, just maybe when some of the new IPs come out later this year the voting could look different. But as it stands our community has spoken.

LAST GEN WAS BETTER NOW START MAKING BETTER GAMES!

I know it's too late to vote, but I still think this is an interesting discussion topic, so if you don't mind.....
Since I have yet to actually upgrade to a new gen system, this is from a spectator's point of view.

I think that so far with how things are going, I'd say last gen is better. It hasn't "won" yet because this gen isn't over, and the fat lady hasn't sung yet. But so far it has an advantage over this gen.

For starters, I feel there isn't enough new IPs. So far this gen, we've seen mostly the same stuff we saw last gen, only with better tech. One of the PS4's launch titles was Injustice, which was a last gen game. So far, it seems like most of the games we have now are part of franchises that debuted last gen or have been around before that, just improved with the new power. Of course, there are also the remasters, but to be fair there were plenty of HD collections last gen. To be unfair, we have remastered games in abundance this go around. It also took a few years for the HD collections to appear (starting with God of War collection in 2009 I believe) while we practically had remastered games right out of the gate. In addition, there have been some franchises that we saw get revived this gen, such as DOOM and Shenmue. One of the most anticipated games is a remake of a PS1 RPG. While there have been some good new IPs, and there are still more to come, I think we're lacking in that area, and it doesn't help some haven't done well either sales wise or quality wise.

Another thing, and this goes hand in hand with a bit of the above, is that I don't feel the generational leap was that big this time. Some new gen sequels don't look like really play any differently than before, or in some cases play the same as before. This, or at least the former, isn't entirely a bad thing, but generally you'd expect some bigger improvements to last gen's stalwarts. 2016's Ratchet & Clank doesn't really look much different than the PS3 entries, and neither does Assassin's Creed. It appears the big technical innovations are going to be related to VR, which to me has a high probability of being another gimmick like motion controls before it.

Heck, even the gaming community and general hype is worse than last gen. These days, fanboyism is more rampant than ever before, and even if a game looks like it could be huge hit, more than ever it feels like 50/50 chance that it'll turn out great. I'm looking forward to Horizon, but as much as I'm anticipating it, I'm also getting the feeling it could fall on it's face. Even long awaited games like Shenmue 3 and FF7 Remake have that feeling they could fail spectacularly. No game is really a "safe" bet anymore. Maybe sales wise, but quality is always up in the air.

Well, there's my essay of a post.

@DerMeister: "Another thing, and this goes hand in hand with a bit of the above, is that I don't feel the generational leap was that big this time."

Ahhh but that's not entirely true. I believe what has happened is seemingly every company doing its damnedest to go against the good nature of gaming. I'm talking pre order crap, badly thought out single player components and of course microtransactions. The tech itself is worlds apart from last gen, but other than a few amazing examples (such as witcher 3, the fox engine and Rocket League) every big league AAA company seems hellbent on feeding us the same old tripe with premium add ons. As much as my old mate @kyleforrester87 says he doesn't mind some of the exterior 'optional' bits for games and we have opposing views, I'm sure he could agree that as we dont use them we miss out on big parts of games.

@themcnoisy: Agree with you to a point there, for example The Missing Link scenario was blatantly cut from Deus Ex. I didn't really mind that, or that they were charging for it, I just simply didn't feel like going back to play it after I'd done with the main game, so I did miss out on a chunk of story.

Generally though I'm aware of how much money I waste elsewhere (£3.90 for a coffee? £9 for 2 beers? £23 for a cinema ticket and popcorn/drink combo?! Spent £450 on a new ignition set and fitting for my bike. That's more than a PS Pro costs and 1/100000 as fun!!)

@themcnoisy: Also take Alien Isolation, literally one of my favourite games ever yet I'm not interested in buying and playing the Nostromo mission. It's not because it costs money, it just feels like a tacked on extra to me that should have been better implemented into its own game. But I understand why they did it - they needed to maximise profits. As it stands, AI wasn't profitable enough for a sequel, and that really sucks. Clearly they need to be charging more somehow if we can't get sequels to awesome games like that :/

@kyleforrester87: Generally though I'm aware of how much money I waste elsewhere (£3.90 for a coffee? £9 for 2 beers? £23 for a cinema ticket and popcorn/drink combo?! Spent £450 on a new ignition set and fitting for my bike. That's more than a PS Pro costs and 1/100000 as fun!!)

But actually it costs 20p to make a coffee at home, £10 for a crate of lager and £9 a month to watch any film of thousands on Netflix and you can walk to work lol. To be fair I work for a car supermarket so my car gets fixed for peanuts.