THE GAP BETWEEN 12 AND 19 NOVEMBER MAY APPEAR AGONISINGLY LONG BUT IT WILL HAVE ITS PERKS.
Rather than feel left out, it’s best to see the PS5 launch-day gap as welcome breathing room
You’ve heard it a million times by now: “Good things come to those who wait,” whether that’s the platitude your parents gave you whenever you tried to slyly switch up the dinner-dessert order or, uh, waiting for PlayStation 5 to launch. We Brits have to wait one whole, agonising week longer than the US and Japan to smear our grubby little mitts all over the funky white box, even though a number of games and accessories for it will be available from 12 November in the UK. For myself, the queen of spoilers, the delay is something of a mercy.
As the launch lineup gets longer and longer, each freshly announced title begs the question “When am I going to find the time to play all of these?” This is an eternal question for most games journalists but with such a jam-packed list of PS5 games to be getting on with in November, the question gains a particularly frantic edge. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day for every journo to get a good grip on each game, let alone hit credits in a timely fashion before December comes barrelling in.
SHARING THE SPOILS
So I’m crowd-sourcing my spoilers. For me, it’s almost nostalgic; as a wee bairn I couldn’t finance playing every new release and so I turned to fan-written summaries and wikis online to keep up in conversation. This time around I’ll be trusting the qualified opinions of my industry colleagues across the pond in an effort to whittle down what I’m actually going to dedicate my precious time to playing on 19 November. After all, you should already be well aware that my singular sense of taste means a 10/10 next-gen masterpiece is unlikely to catch my attention; I’m far more interested in the overly ambitious titles that shoot for the moon but land somewhere among the stars and space trash.
All that said, there is one more reason I’m feeling surprisingly positive about the one-week gap – it certainly beats the six-month wait for PS3 and PS2 or the almost year-long wait for the original PlayStation. To dispense just one more parental platitude, we must count our blessings.