Now that we're in the ninth generation, can we now consider 7th gen (PS3/360/Wii) to be "retro"?

[Estil | 1,264]

So I've now started to work on some PS3 trophies (especially in the two Kingdom Hearts games) and I was just wondering if it's not too early to now consider the 7th gen (PS3/360/Wii) to be "retro"?  Or will that occur when PS3/360 completely retire online compatibility?  Like the original Xbox did in 2010 for example?

[austin532 | 467]

Too soon. I barely consider the 6th gen retro but maybe that's just me.

[DoctorEncore | 3,690]

Of course it's all semantics and opinions will vary, but I definitely wouldn't consider PS3 retro. I'm willing to concede that PS1/N64/Dreamcast are retro, but I'm not ready to give the title to the PS2 generation, even if it did begin 20 years ago.

Edited January 31, 2021 by DoctorEncore

[cj_robot | 540]

That gen is old now, sure, but it hasn't really aged. Even the early PS3/360 games still pretty much feel like modern games.

[croagunk | 798]

I wouldn’t consider them retro yet. Maybe in a few more years. 

[broncofantd793 | 138]

No.  The gameplay has to age by a lot.  Just played Gears of War 2 yesterday.  It feels in 2021 just as it did in 2008.  I'm not sure if PS3/Wii/360 will ever be retro.  GC/PS2/Xbox might get there someday, but aren't quite there yet.

[ThePhleo | 2,184]

Nope.

I just recently started calling PS2, Xbox, Gamecube, Dreamcast, and Game Boy Advance “Retro”

Maybe midway on this generations of games I’ll start calling PS3, 360, Wii, DS/DSi, and PSP “Retro”

But for now, they’re just outdated, obsolete, or deprecated game platforms. Still some solid libraries though!

[a_profile_name | 230]

I still have a hard time considering even the n64 / ps "retro".

[scaryice | 585]

2 hours ago, broncofantd793 said:

No.  The gameplay has to age by a lot.  Just played Gears of War 2 yesterday.  It feels in 2021 just as it did in 2008.  I'm not sure if PS3/Wii/360 will ever be retro.  GC/PS2/Xbox might get there someday, but aren't quite there yet.

There's a lot of gameplay elements from the PS3 gen that feel retro already, such as turret sequences and QTE boss fights.

[Sumez | 2,935]

No

[DarkTone | 984]

Too early. 

[BortLicensePlate | 652]

I am now fairly comfortable saying PS2 era is retro. Anything newer not so much. It won't be long before we start getting into games that will flat out not work anymore due to servers shutting down and all that, so I dunno how lucrative this era will be from a collecting and preservation stand point anyway

[Estil | 1,264]

4 hours ago, Sumez said:

No

As my school assignments often said, explain your reasoning.

It's just that the PS3 games I've been playing already go so far back...you wouldn't think a remake of Kingdom Hearts for example, would already be 2013.  Or the Wheel of Fortune already almost nine years ago, and so on.

[fcgamer | 4,722]

Yes, XBox360 and Wii pass , PS3 fails.

I use something called the full set principle to determine this. It's as follows:

Are the games entering into the position where you can get a wide variety of titles for pennies on the dollar, so to speak, making it reasonable to "go for the start of a full set without sacrificing your left nut"? If the answer is yes, it's retro, if not, it's modern.

Locally, for me anyways, 360 and Wii are cheap and plentiful, whereas PS3 is always priced a bit higher. Hence two are retro for passing the full set test, one fails.

[Tanooki | 4,932]

Things are murky.  What once took 5 years to look outdated and crusty by gamer standards, when we hit the GC/PS2 era suddenly things kind of started to change.  There are games on these, and very very largely so in the PS3 era that just don't by any means look, feel, or play dated enough to really honor being called 'retro'.

 

Maybe mobile gaming, maybe the divergence Nintendo also caused with the Wii, then decisively so with Switch has made it even more challenging to do it, but it just doesn't feel retro.  Retro for gaming really does feel like old generation style, mechanics, visuals, audio... the indie nuts who throw around their honest 8bit and 16bit 'style' of things and the rest.  It's just so hard to call a 2001 and after system really 'retro' and yeah I even include the GBA in that and DS/PSP stuff too.

[RegularGuyGamer | 2,012]

Wii might pass but PS3 and XB360 look too good. Even on a crt with component, most 360 games look like a dream compared to every other console before them. 

[Estil | 1,264]

I also was thinking that I've gone on record as saying that PS4 didn't look hardly any better than PS3 games (at least for the first year or two of PS4) while in every console gen transition before there was a MAJOR leap in graphics capability.  So I guess the PS3 games still resemble too closely PS4 ones and thus it would be hard to call PS3 retro compared to the 6th gen?

[Estil | 1,264]

55 minutes ago, RegularGuyGamer said:

Wii might pass but PS3 and XB360 look too good. Even on a crt with component, most 360 games look like a dream compared to every other console before them. 

Yeah Wii was more like 6 1/2 gen rather than full 7th gen TBH.

[koifish | 555]

I still argue that 6th gen isn't "retro". My xbox 360 controllers are about 15 years old now, and they still work all but identically to the third-gen xbox one controller I just bought last week, except that the xbone pad has bluetooth. Even then the layout is almost identical to the original xbox. The 9th gen just came out, and most of it is just visual upgraded versions of stuff that was already out, or just a promise of better visuals coming. I don't see much change since the 2000s systems; It's all very samey. Other than visual fidelity and some genre styles that became possible due to mass proliferation of the internet or advances in level streaming, the games are pretty much identical to what was already there. The only thing that feels "new" to me anymore is VR; There's nothing in 6th-8th gen like what you can do in VR now.

10 hours ago, scaryice said:

There's a lot of gameplay elements from the PS3 gen that feel retro already, such as turret sequences and QTE boss fights.

I'd call that more game fads, like how everybody had a open-world mission-based gameplay after GTA blew up. I'd argue that if you're comparing something like a 2006 PS2 platformer to a 2021 PS5 platformer that the controls and "feel" are largely the same, except that the latter is probably dumbed down a lot by comparison.

It's just reflective of standardization. The industry, whether by natural selection or by financial necessity, has determined what to expect and we sort of accept it. I feel like the 2000s and the 20th century have between them a fuzzy, blurry divide, the front of which is "classic" style of games, and the behind of which is the "current" style. I cannot say how the eras will come to be defined or where they will go from here, but I can say that I don't feel like the 2000s systems really fit into that same group as those that came in the century before them.

[fox | 1,665]

To me the Dreamcast feels like the youngest old school console and that is because of the unique position it was in.  It had one foot in the past, building on that great Sega arcade and console legacy, while having one foot in the future pushing 3D gaming and online play.

PS2/GameCube are right on the cusp representing that pre-HD mostly offline era.  Everything else is just too modern.

[ZeldaFreak | 3,600]

Personally I consider the PS1/N64 era to be the last retro gaming era and the PS2/Xbox era to be the start of the modern era, or failing that, at least a bridge between the retro and modern eras, but not quite being either of them. Somewhere in between.

[Jfreakofkorn | 282]

Whats the rush , give it time 

It ll get there but not now . . . 

Maybe 10 to 20 years , imo 

[Reed Rothchild | 9,516]

Super Mario Bros. is retro

Crysis is not

That's just my hot (improvised) take

[MagusSmurf | 577]

7th gen games are probably never going to be classic within our lifetimes unless entire genres of currently-popular games completely implode. Their technology, budgets, scope, and design are too far advanced and modern for more recent consoles to ever seem likely to achieve escape velocity and create a substantially different experience within the same genres as AAA 7th gen games.

Edited February 1, 2021 by MagusSmurf

[TDIRunner | 2,731]

No, but I still remember the day the PS4 launched, someone on Facebook was saying, "Now that the PS4 is out, we can finally start referring to the PS3 as retro."