@PorkChopExpress I’m a few years (generations even 🤣) behind the curve, when it comes to questions like this. As most people know, the vast majority of my 2024 was beavering away at my PS3 backlog and the vast majority of that was… honestly really-good to absolute banger.
There was a few games that I felt were below that high bar though, namely Red Faction: Armageddon (worst game), Asura’s Wrath and most surprisingly Enslaved: Odyssey to the West (my biggest disappointment). Not to say I didn’t enjoy all three of them to varying degrees but they were the bottom of a particularly good bunch.
@Jimmer-jammer If there's a silver lining to @colonelkilgore picking Enslaved as his biggest disappointment of 2024, he is a pretty extreme outlier overall. I played it earlier in the year finally and loved it.
Obviously everybody can't like every game no matter how well liked the game is, but I'd be surprised if you didn't end up liking it.
PSN ID/Xbox Live Gamertag: KilloWertz
Switch Friend Code: SW-6448-2688-7386
I didn’t play any really awful games this year but I’d say probably the worst game was Power Wash Simulator. It’s not a bad game, but after 3 jobs I was done and haven’t booted it up again.
Most disappointing though would have to go to Child of Light. There was aspects of it that I liked and I wouldn’t rule out returning to it one day, but I had heard such superlatives used to describe it that I was expecting to be amazed and it just didn’t quite hold my attention. Next most disappointing was Sifu, which I did finish the campaign and got some enjoyment from it, but I don’t think I felt the thrill and awe that I was led to believe it would bring.
@Jimmer-jammer@KilloWertz yeah it’s not that I didn’t like it… it was fine, I was just expecting something special-ish (like an 8.5-9) though and I ended up thinking it around a 7.5 (if that tbh). We all have our own likes and dislikes when judging the quality of a game, so for sure I hope I don’t put anyone off giving it a go.
Spider-Man 2 Be better, Insomniac. You suck at Open World game design. Stop trying to make your Marvel games open world sandboxes unless you hire people that can do that aspect properly.
Biggest disappointment...
Astro Bot? Right out of left field to catch people off guard. It's a perfectly made game,
I just don't really like platformers that much, and even though I know it's very good, it didn't manage to make me like platformers, so therfore it's the only one that kind of fits the disappointment. Even if I rated it higher than Star Wars Outlaws, for example. Outlaws didn't disappoint me as such, apart from it not being as technically polished as it should have been. And I still think people who moaned about the insta-fail stealth are properly bananas 😅
Crikey, two PS first party games. Who'd have thought 🙉
My answers are perhaps a little weird as I've only really played games I've liked, overall. Apart from Spider-Man 2. But I also know SM2 has a bunch of really good stuff in it, set pieces, mostly, and the technical stuff, everything Insomniac actually does well.
Just going through my PS wrap up for last year again before it goes on the 10th, and the stats are FUBAR! Apparently I played 73 games in March but 60 for the year...
Life is more fun when you help people succeed, instead of wishing them to fail.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
I just wanted to copy this down in the forum somewhere, as to me it feels like an interesting discussion relating to PS imploding it's live service push and all that wasted time, money, effort, and literally people's lives.
Seriously, think for a moment how many small scale independent studios could have been financially supported by Sony/SIE over these past few years. Studios that could themselves potentially hit live service/latest craze or cult hit gold with the type of genuine artisan creativity that can only be achieved in small passionate teams.
Sony could have literally given heaps of money to every single genuine independent game studio in the world and in return published their games for them... for free! And it would still have been money better spent with much more of a chance of a positive return on it than what they have got by backing all of these failed and binned "AAA live service" ideas.
It is gobsmackingly crazy that they ever thought "you know what makes a live service hit... a giant AAA budget" 🤔 it is probably the most stupid thing they have ever done as a company. How many live service hits have started as mega budget, mega expectation efforts anyway, and how many have simply happened by sheer f***ing chance? The scales must favour "sheer f***ing chance" by a fair few.
It kind of hurts my soul that they have gone through this period, when much more genuine efforts could have been supported without the need to fully own the license of the ideas. And I kind of hope Sony now take a more benevolent approach in the future. They have done it before, and that has led to them eventually acquiring the talented creators to be a part of SIE anyway. But that doesn't even need to be the end goal. Let's just use all that money in the future to support gaming as a whole (as well as the stuff you actually do well) and I'm sure in the end it will pay off a little bit more than whatever the sh** they've been trying this whole generation has or ever will.
Also, f*** Bungie. Just because they started all this and have poisoned Sony from within. I know they recently started to get rid of all the bad apples and Sony had to step in, but their influence has already ruined a generation of work. The hot takes thread is maybe where that last bit should be 😅 but still, f*** Bungie.
@Ravix Didn't Sony bring in Bungie specifically to help with the live service initiative? As in they already had plans in place and wanted them to help?
PSN ID/Xbox Live Gamertag: KilloWertz
Switch Friend Code: SW-6448-2688-7386
@Ravix I’m sure they Sony would like to call a Mulligan with the whole Bungie acquisition. What an expensive mess that’s become.
I have been fairly vocal about my displeasure with the GaaS push and my overall disinterest with live service games. Even the successful ones hold no interest for me. Any of them that I seem the least bit curious about are so incredibly impenetrable for newcomers or exploitative that it kills all appeal.
Seeing that BluePoint’s project was an online live service game that’s been shuttered really hurts. I was very excited to see that studio do something new. We’d be so much better off if they’d spent the last 4 years doing a Bloodborne Remake. 😅
The ironic thing is that I’ve never had so many games to play in my backlog. Despite Sony first party basically taking the entire generation off, I still can’t catch up. So if I’m honest with myself, I shouldn’t really complain. Still, it sucks. So much wasted time and money. Concord by itself would be considered catastrophic. Apparently that was just the tip of the iceberg.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
@Herculean@KilloWertz
Even though I am detached from the live service side of gaming, I do acknowledge that it takes a different skill set to develop and produce games in that environment. I think that’s become very clear now and a hard lesson learned by many companies, not just Sony. Rocksteady and Warner Bros as well as Crystal Dynamics / Platinum Games and Square-Enix, not to mention major failures by Ubisoft, BioWare, and others.
I suppose Bungie is an expert in the area, and the knowledge and experience of doing it was coveted enough to spend that money acquiring them. But to me, I think it’s becoming apparent that not all live service games are the same. I think what Bungie does well (or at least did well) was keeping a game going through regular expansions and holding onto a dedicated online fanbase. They talk about having a game with “stickiness”, or one that can remain relevant and keep players coming back. I think that’s really a different animal than the big GaaS hits like Fortnite, Genshin and the Hoyo-verse. And I think that GTA online, Minecraft/Roblox, FIFA/NBA2K, and CoD are an even separate sub-genre.
All live service needs stickiness, but that can come from various elements, such as: an engaging gameplay loop, a creative outlet that evolves, a community and social space, an addictive gambling/loot box style dependence, an engaging developing and well realized narrative, a low barrier to entry for consistent new player recruitment, or a popular pre-existing IP that already is established with a rabid fanbase. There’s probably other elements I’m not thinking of too, but the point is — I’m not sure Bungie is good at many of those things, but has really had success only in one little corner of the live-service market. And the slow death of their marquee property Destiny shows that even they don’t have all the answers for colossal success.
I also think that in additional to a special sauce of stickiness, there needs to be an element of luck. The stars need to align in the marketplace, the online buzz and discourse needs to be just so, and world events and economy have to be conducive to a specifics idea’s success. What worked in 2020 may not work in 2025.
All that said, there’s some very obvious red flags that Sony and Bungie really should have seen. As gamers who engage in this hobby on a daily basis and are the backbone of the industry, we could all see the train wreck coming even though we don’t have MBA’s or decades of business expertise.
Yeah, you can mostly ignore the Bungie element. I just wanted to vent about them at the end of the rest of my comment, because they are and have been atrocious and consistently run by a type of scammer mind set execs (that directly influenced Concord with their ex Bungie execs conning the idiotic Hermen into funding that too) I do think they were in Sony's ear the whole time telling them that 12 live service games are worth pursuing, though, whilst lining their pockets as "consultants" even though these other games were being made by devs that could be making good games, that they already knew how to make, instead. It was only this past year thay Sony had to send in the troops to reorganise Bungie, wasn't it? And it is also this past year that they have realised it has all been for nothing. I'd say Sony are pretty pissed with Bungie, and maybe that was a bit of foreshadowing when they gave them all slap. I'm unfamiliar with the timescale of everything though, hence it was mostly a hot take. I don't think they are innocent bystanders, let's say 😂
But anyway, my other thought still stands. Waste of time and money, and probably lost so much talent by trying to force them to make sh** they don't want to make. Time to go back to supporting the genuine creators rather than the suits
@Ravix The timeline is the real issue now. The projects coming out now were probably greenlit like 5-8 years ago. And likewise, canceled projects have been in the works for many years, most likely. Add to that the general stagnation of development caused by the pandemic, and you have a situation where studio production is going to be a whole console generation behind. It would be possible (maybe even probable) that Bend and BluePoint aren’t heard of again until PS6.
If Microsoft hadn’t fallen on their face this gen with all their own flavor of mismanagement, we could have been experiencing the swan song of the PlayStation brand over the next 5 years. Nevertheless, I think Naughty Dog, Insomniac, and Sucker Punch can keep them afloat, on top of their second party relationships and aggressive pursuit of console exclusives. They have a sizable cushion in the market, so should have time to right the ship. We may have something actually viable cooking from Housemarque, Media Molecule, Guerilla, and Santa Monica. Faith in the system is shaky at this point though.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
@Herculean as far as Concord it was people who worked at bungie that were in charge there. That's all. Never mind 😅 I know Concord as an entity was a new venture. It was two seperate points, and just for the sake of venting. Take no notice of me 😛 I did think Bungie was acquired way earlier than that, too, to be fair 🤦♂️
@Herculean no worries. I know can be a bit exaggerated and miss some actual factual information out when I'm doing hot take elements in posts 😂 I do think a rot has set in, and there are multiple sources of that rot. But it is indeed wild speculation. The whole Concord saga reads like a story about a con would read. And every time bungie change ownership the reasons read a little like they are the problem, but are blaming outside sources for everything, or... playing the victim to get what they want, a bit like a con artist would. So I like to throw some of those elements in sometimes, considering the link between people that worked for both.
It probably boils down to, Big Jim overreacted and overcommited to GaaS and had way too many of SIE's studios working on them. They Bought Bungie to print some GaaS money and help. Then doubled down on the plan. Then Hermen trying to be a good little boy tried to snatch up something he was convinced to be "the one" whether he was misled, or bought into the fact that the devs really thought they'd thought of something unique without stepping back to ponder: maybe there's a reason GaaS don't usually have AAA budgets and storylines unrelated to the gameplay.
I do remember genuinely thinking when the Concord trailer dropped: okay it is a little goofy but I could really buy into a fun space heist game with a crew and a ship and plenty to plunder. And then being totally shocked and disinterested by the reveal that it was in fact a PvP shooter with no connection between the cutscenes and the game play of randomly shooting the people you were just talking to like mismatched partners in crime in a Marvel buddy comedy or whatver 🤷♂️ it was properly bananas 🙈
But, yeah. That's why I mostly wanted to focus on the hypothetical of what Sony could have better spent the money on instead of all the massive live service gambles, and what they can do to attone in the future. They have a lot of making up to do, but there is probably still a way to focus on GaaS on a much smaller scale using independent studios with much lower risk, or by using IP's suited to being GaaS in the first place 😬
…there is probably still a way to focus on GaaS on a much smaller scale using independent studios with much lower risk, or by using IP's suited to being GaaS in the first place 😬
Amen to this! As much as I have close to zero interest in the multiplayer online GaaS universe, I completely recognize its importance in the market. I don’t expect Sony to completely concede the whole live service arena to the competition. Even though I’ll never play them, I do think it best that they have some efforts to be active in that space. But good grief, use some basic sound judgment and don’t bet the whole farm on this stuff. I wouldn’t even mind a couple of the larger AAA studios to work on a GaaS from time to time, but not 75% of the entirety of PlayStation Studios. Or at least reign in the costs.
And the point about using the right IP is a good one too. Marvel Rivals hero shooter — ok, I think it fits. A Spider-Man multiplayer PvP game?… uh, I don’t think so. A God of War multiplayer game? …also not sure that makes sense. Last of Us Factions 2? … uh, ok but do we have a support studio who can do that instead of our single player A-team? A Horizon MMO? …ok, it might work, but is there a team we can farm that out to as a side project if we still want a Horizon 3 in the next 5 years?
Basically — the right project, by the right team, at the right time, for the right cost. Is that too much to hope for? 😄
@Th3solution it is indeed too much to ask for, a bit like asking for the Celtics to play fast for more than one quarter 🙈 Which games succeed as live service? Low budget, cheap and cheerful graphics, addictive gameplay loop and/or shiny loot. What kind of basketball is more effective than walking it up and being incredibly slow and predictable with your passes? Playing fast, loose and free.
Logic will never prevail, and the forest will remain hidden by all those damn trees 🤦♂️😅
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