The thing is, if a game releases on Series X without any bonus bells and whistles like (pick one) 4K, 60fps, or ray tracing, it’s kind of failed the move to next gen. If it then cannot scale any of those things back for the Series S, then it’s failed at designing scalability.
The new consoles do not exist to serve programmer inefficiency.
There’s a game with pre-rendered backgrounds called Alisa. I always really enjoyed the pre-render look. The excitement of reaching a “cinematic FMV” that moves the story in a PS1 game is very different from standard cutscenes.
I hate to say this, but I doubt that will ever happen.
It’s the ‘Kingdom Hearts’ issue. When you build on a plot thread across multiple games, you devalue a number of entries as a result. People want the modern convenience and superior design of recent releases, but also don’t want to be left out of central information. It’s why it’s hard to get people into the Trails series. To Ace Attorney’s credit, something they’ve done right in their games is avoid spoiling the central culprit of past games in future ones, even going so far as to only reference vague turnouts of past cases.
It really, really doesn’t help that a large number of people consider AJ:AA to be one of the least satisfying games in the series (in part only because they almost all hit a high bar). So if anyone were to skip a game, that might be it.
There’s going to be a bunch of confusion abound in fan discussions, as each of the characters appearing in this game get different names from the fan translation.
I think it’s vehement disagreement with the premise, or in other words “We don’t need a PS5 Pro”.
One explanation for the sentiment is that people have already invested a significant chunk of their limited savings into the mammoth PS5 - and want that to provide them some of the best games on offer. They’re worried that after a Pro, they will become second citizen or get downscaled games.
Even if you provide an answer like “But that won’t happen”…they don’t trust that answer. Trust is not common in consumer sentiment right now.
I’ll admit I’ve been in that crowd that believed they saw early efforts like horse armor and Bioware’s infamous pay-to-continue Dragon Age quests, and backed off - resolving they need to shift monetization elsewhere like skins. Seems I was wrong.
You could argue given Starfield’s overall failures, it’s still in the sector of terribly-designed monetization that just gets forgotten by history, much like most mobile games. But, we’re still in the process of writing that history.
Trails in the Sky definitely comes to mind. But if you browse Square Enix’s catalogue, there’s probably plenty that fulfill it. Final Fantasy stands out because it’s a little less tropey.
For anyone done buying discs, it’s a removed point of failure in the device. The Series S sold well, so if your point is “No one wants a digital console”, then no, you are wrong.
People wanted more storage in existing models
For a lot of people, the $100 difference between models is a heavy consideration. Anything that can get trimmed out may make them more likely to buy.