AnotherLuke

I like the beep, but so does my toddler who has discovered what buttons to press to make it happen multiple times per day. Definitely muting!

I'm fairly certainly Premium only exists because people psychologically like to pick the middle option.

It makes Extra look like great value, as it has most of the benefits of upgrading from Essential while being cheaper than Premium. If there were only 2 options, more people would stick with Essential.

I'll always choose 60 over 30fps, but it's true that some games don't suffer from 30fps at much as others. With the stealth focus and main character being a teenage girl, suspect Plague Tale will be one of those where the lower freshrate is less of an issue.

Genuinely wonder the Premium tier mainly exists for sales psychology: with a 3 tier options, people tend to pick the middle one. I'll bet Extra is the most common subscription before long whereas had there only been Essential and Extra then fewer people might have upgraded.

@Uncharted2007 I'll be interested to see gameplay. The sequel improved combat a lot, and the engine allows more interesting level design and better AI. That could be the big draw of this remake. The cut scenes already looked great so only have so much scope to improve.

Called it- using all the original mo cap and voice acting will have kept costs down. This is essentially a port into the new (TLOU2) engine. The trailer doesn't show it but it sounds like they may have redesigned the actual levels to take advantage (and that could be a big boost to the game- combat in TLOU2 was much improved, especially against humans).

Is this remake "necessary"? No, the PS4 remaster still plays great, but from Naughty Dogs' perspective this is relatively cheap to do and helps them get to grips with new hardware (they were open previously about using the PS4 remaster as practice developing for the PS4).

@J2theEzzo buying games is technically a separate hobby from playing games.

It Takes Two is great.

This list seriously misses Lovers in a Dangerous Space-time, Helldivers and Towerfall Ascension which are all excellent. We also really enjoyed Haven.

Finally, Surgeon Simulator as co-op is one of the biggest laughs you can have with a partner.

@thefourfoldroot my wife and I enjoyed Haven. Nice and chill, well-written central relationship, some genuinely funny moments to discover with a bit of exploration.

Greatly enjoyed playing Haven with my wife. It works best as a casual co-op experience, I think. So makes sense to allow other couples to play with the characters that work for them.

For years on PS4 it seemed the opposite: first party titles were discounted early after release and were often heavily discounted in numerous sales.

I wonder if this is all due to the limited player base so far on PS5 (due to difficulty obtaining the console). First party games on PS4 sold in big numbers quickly and met their targets, so could then go into sales. Many PS5 games will still be expecting to sell more copies- but only once customers have PS5s to play them on, so the discounts come more reluctantly (for now).

@mephistosghost sometimes I think it's the opposite- games that sell well go on discount earlier.

The logic being: if a game has sold well compared to predictions then most of the people who were interested in buying it full price have already done so. Discounting it then hopes to tempt people who weren't interested in buying it full price. Waiting longer before discounting doesn't make it much more likely that those people will buy it as full price, so there's little to gain by waiting.

@theheadofabroom true. Slower than a SSD though, although in truth I don't know how much I'd notice the difference for this kind of usage. Just looking to split the difference if full speed SSDs are too expensive for the first couple of years!

@pip_muzz that's true to a point. Specs like resolution and visual effects can be easily scaled to different hardware. NPC density and so on can also be adjusted relatively easily in most cases (GTA V on PS3 vs PS4 a good example of this, although less feasible in every game). But core gameplay or level design is not so easily scaled without essentially designing 2 games, and CPU limitations and the need to hide loading points affect the sorts of immediate gameplay and level layouts that are possible. Multiplat games need to reach a wide audience and so won't exclude consoles with a large user base, and that means even high-end PC players are playing games with levels etc designed to work on slower machines.

I never really expected either HZD2 or Miles to really push the boat out into what's possible in the next-gen (too early) but the hope is that we will see games that simply can't be scaled back easily to older consoles (no matter how much visual effects can be turned down).

I know Sony have said PCIe 4.0 drives will be able to function identically to the stock SSD, but I hope Sony allows the following: you can stick a slower SSD in, but to play a PS5 title you have to transfer it the stock SSD. Because transferring a game install from a slightly slower SSD to a fast SSD will take what, a few minutes? If they set up the UI to make it easy I can't imagine I'll have any complaints: keep my current games on the stock SSD, keep ones I might come back to on the "storage" SSD. At least that way I can expand storage relatively cheaply.