Sony's PSN outage made me love my PS5 Pro even more – for one simple reason

If you turned on your PS5 or PS5 Pro in the late hours on Friday night, or at literally any point during the course of Saturday last weekend, you might have noticed some funny business going on. It's not exactly news at this stage, but the entirely of the PlayStation Network was down for over 24 hours, and it ruined plenty of online sessions.

I was going to spend most of Saturday crushing exactly that sort of session, rotating between The Finals, Rocket League and Call of Duty with my squad, but we were all foiled by the outage, which seemed to stretch on forever. Now, PlayStation has confirmed that everyone will get a free five-day extension on their PlayStation Plus membership to account for it, which is a pretty decent make-good.

Still, the gap in which online multiplayer simply wasn't an option was borderline refreshing – it made me look at my PS5 Pro askance and figure out what to do instead. The answer was to fire up a game I'd had in my backlog for months (the rather excellent Lies of P) and crunch through a whole heap of it.

Sometimes you need a push like this to make you switch gears, and I've been hoovering up this soulsborne action happily. Even more pleasingly, it's been another vote of confidence for the powered-up Sony machine. While the game hasn't added a "Pro" mode explicitly, it's been patched to run better on the machine.

That means that on my variable refresh-rate (VRR) OLED TV I can use the fidelity-first mode along with a VRR toggle to enjoy really smooth frame rates at higher detail. It's the exact description of the "best of both worlds" that I also experienced in Kingdom Come: Deliverance II recently.

This is a marker of how the console is coming into its own, just as I hoped it would – 2025 is going to be its year, and it already looks really well placed. There are huge releases coming up, from Monster Hunter: Wilds to the new Assassin's Creed, and each should be able to launch with dedicated settings for the PS5 Pro.

Crucially, I also own Lies of P on disc, having forked out to add a disc drive to my PS5 Pro before scalpers grabbed them all. In this case, as a native PS5 game, I'd likely have been able to access a digital copy even during the outage, but there have been stories circulating of caveats to this.

Some people found that PS4 games they owned on a disc wouldn't let them access PS5 versions they'd upgraded to digitally, for instance, reverting to the PS4 version. Others noted that trying to pair a new disc drive with their PS5 Slim or PS5 Pro was impossible during the outage, because the first time you plug it in, it requires PSN to activate as a one-off.

These are all red flags, to put it lightly – while I didn't encounter issues playing offline games myself, it's not reassuring that any of these foibles can happen. Matters like the disc drive could well be fixed down the line, but from a preservation standpoint, any hardware that needs an online handshake to activate is one that could be bricked by the death of a set of servers.

Still, that won't affect the majority of normal gamers, who just want to game on the latest hardware available to them regardless. Still, it was another weekend of bonding with my PS5 Pro, and it left me able to say that anyone who loves Elden Ring but hasn't tried Lies of P should definitely check it out if they haven't already.