Balaam_

Finally some recognition for this gem. Fantastic experience from beginning to end. I just platinum’d it a few days ago and the trophy list was exquisitely curated. No tacked on garbage modes with forced trophies, no difficulty related trophies, no online trophies, just about the most perfect list there could possibly be.

Sony needs to press its foot down on developers like Neil Druckmann’s neck and force them to use the trophy list in Stellar Blade as a guideline of sorts, since Naughty Dog is notorious for making fantastic games with trash trophy lists.

I’d have gladly bought a copy if that worthless game director had curated an acceptable trophy list. As it stands, unless they patch it I wouldn’t throw a nickel at Hamaguchi-chan if he was starving in the street. Devs need to learn to put the gamer ahead of their own selfish interests.

@Cloud39472 The trophy list is. I should mention I haven’t played Balatro, and don’t even know what the trophy list is, but simply by virtue of the fact that FF7 Rebirth has one of the most piss poor trophy lists ever curated by a selfish game director unfit to occupy that role (and who has publicly apologized for his failure), Balatro’s list is automatically better by default no matter what it is.

Fine by me. I am interested in Stalker 2, but not the current ‘near-Bethesda-levels’ of broken jank Stalker 2. I’m more than happy to wait until after I play the best console version of Indy on the Pro before I get to Stalker.

Any game with a trophy list this poorly curated doesn’t deserve a place on the list.

The game director has gone on official record citing the trophy list as a mistake and has publicly apologized for his miserable failure at putting his team’s selfish interests above those of the gamer. There are countries that will lop off a hand for lesser offenses. Will personally invest in creating/supporting mods for the pc version whose sole purpose will be to piss off Hamaguchi-chan.

Publishers should not have subscriptions, only platform holders. Where does it end? Let’s subdivide Sega into its core pillars and have a subsubscription for Sonic games, yakuza games and everything that falls under the Atlas umbrella.

This is absurd. This would be like if Marvel and Star Wars under Disney each had their own streaming services as well. Like my comments? Maybe I can work out a deal with Push Square where you can subscribe to my profile to get all my latest posts first, before releasing them a la carte in this comment section.

I personally wouldn’t classify DD2 as an Action Game. Stellar Blade was inexplicably snubbed as Best Action Game at the Geoff’s this year in favor of the good-but-strictly-inferior BMW, so it’s nice to see it get the praise it so rightly deserves here.

Would I be interested in an Oblivion remake? That depends. The core ideas at play are fantastic. Putting Bethesda developers in charge of coding it would be like placing Stevie Wonder at the helm of the Titanic. They are the last people on earth that should be punching in code.

Literally everything wrong with the Oblivion we have is due to Bethesda’s utter inability to produce a game that isn’t a bug filled, glitch riddled broken mess. I cite Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallouts 3, 4, 76 and Starfield as all the proof you need. Their engine always has been, is, and always will be trash.

That said, a completely different studio (Virtuous) using a completely different engine (UE5) instills hope that we can get the Oblivion we always deserved but never received. I’m no fan of UE5 in and of itself, but oh dear god is it infinitely better than that geriatric alphabet soup of game code that Bethesda’s been churning out slop with since the early 2000’s. Fingers crossed.

Uh…huh. It’s making me type more, but this was the entirety of my thought reading that person’s speculation. Uh…huh.

Just art the game box with a giant arrow pointing at the PEGI rating with a message saying ‘Parents can ignore this’

@mariomaster96 Not quite. They’d need to make the platinum for Genshin Impact or ZZZ unattainable for the average gamer or disabled gamer. They’d need to add overly difficult, utterly unnecessary trophies based on tedious, awful VR battles that are as fun as chewing tinfoil. They’d need to add trophies based on forced replays on ridiculous difficulties for a game that already is far too long as it is. Only after driving the trophy list into the ground and pissing off trophy hunters the world over (and subsequently publicly apologizing for it, but lazily not fixing their admitted mistakes) would they make the director of FF7Rebirth proud.

After what that butcher did to the trophy list, I hope modders do literally anything and everything that pisses Hamaguchi off.

Honestly, not much on the horizon I’d be interested in. Were already getting Indy, which was the only title that I deemed a ‘must buy’ from their recent shows. We’re also getting Stalker 2 (a better version, after the beta test launch is over and it’s patched to a playable state…), along with Doom and some others. I’d be more interested in the back catalog—old Halo’s, maybe a Forza (from the horizon series, not ‘we have Gran Turismo at home’ Motorsport bunch). Not much else on offer to be fair.

Stellar Blade is a better game than BMW, and even that didn’t deserve full GotY honors. Astrobot won because it deserved the win.

That’s funny, I felt revulsion when BMW won Best Action Game. The combat/gameplay loop in BMW is…pretty mediocre. It isn’t bad, per se, but it didn’t ’wow’ me in the slightest. Stellar Blade got snubbed big time in Best Action Game category, it should have won hands down. The combat/exploration/gameplay loop/visuals in Stellar Blade blow BMW out of the water; it isn’t even close. Tell the frenzied denizens of a certain people’s republic to put that in their opium pipe and smoke it.

I don’t think Sony needs to worry unless we start getting Forest Ranger Life Simulator Remastered.

The fact that we still don’t have a remake/remaster/60fps patch for Bloodborne.

Edit-Sorry, I thought the question was ‘What was the most unsurprising, expected, predictable thing PlayStation did in 2024?’

Something better happen soon, that Madness meter is filling up awfully quickly among the Xbox playerbase.

Question—can I deduct points from FF7Rebirth’s eventual tally? After how the director put his own selfish desires ahead of what’s best for the gamer and completely butchered the trophy list (and subsequently apologized for, but lazily never patched), it deserves acclaim less than whatever it will receive.

@torquex thanks Torquex, that explains it at least a little bit more. I get the feeling it’s predominantly multiplayer from the faq info. Probably not for me, but maybe I’ll try it to see what all the hub bub is about anyway. ‘Tanks’ again (see what I did there?)

Someone knowledgeable help me out here.

I am totally unfamiliar with ARMA. All I know is it’s a pc game (until now). What type of game is this? Is it a story driven, mission focused campaign type of thing, or is it more of a free for all PubG type experience? I couldn’t quite tell from the trailer, but want to avoid looking at too much footage in case of spoilers (if there is a story).

Main character design aside, this looks promising. High quality assets, high quality mocap, all the trademark NaughtyDog flair. I’ll need to see more gameplay, of course, but I’m hopeful. Fingers crossed we play as a normal person who just so happened to shave her head for whatever reason.

I give FromSoft credit for making it a standalone package. I would absolutely loathe the idea of FromSoft shoehorning this predominantly multiplayer affair (and whatever terrible trophies it may have) into the main Elden Ring trophy list. This (Nightreign) is not what I signed up for, and now I can try it on an alt account without the onus of a butchered trophy percentage hanging over my head.

Astrobot with an eminently deserved win 😊

Thank god it’s standalone. Would not be looking forward to coordinating with people trying to get whatever multiplayer trophies this will have.

Rebirth does not deserve to win based off the piss poor way the game director implemented the trophies (which he has already publicly apologized for, but is too lazy to correct his mistake with a patch). That said, Astrobot deserves to win regardless. A perfect game (with a perfect trophy list. So far. Unless they screw it up in one of these endless post-release content updates).

There was an old Revolution X arcade cabinet in the lobby of a movie theatre near me growing up. It was one of those shooter units with a mounted gun. Your weapon shot CD rom discs at the enemies instead of bullets, and it was a great way to pass the time until a movie started. Now arcades are all but gone, movie theatres are floundering, and physical discs are slowly dying. Send your Thank You’s to greedy corporations in pursuit of total control and the worthless younger generation too stupid and short sighted to realize what they’re giving up.

Kadokawa: Let Sony solo this

Tom Holland was miscast in the Uncharted movie. He makes a fine Peter Parker, but he’s no Nathan Drake. Too young, too immature (in the context of what is supposed to be a worldly wise globetrotting adventurer) and not the right build. They didn’t even have to look far for a better pick, Marky Mark would have made a superior Drake.

Sony just popped a rune arc and is currently buffing outside Kadokawa’s fog door

I managed to get my wrap up around midnight last night. I think it’s available intermittently.

I’m sure once FF7R eventually makes its way over and new players get to that disturbing dance segment, the Xbox usage will skyrocket.

Good. The dlc is fantastic, as any competent gamer well knows by now, but it should never be included alongside full games. If a particular award ceremony wants to create a dlc subcategory, then by all means.

There’s another article floating around from a different site claiming the bump to Sony share prices is a direct result of the potential Kadokawa deal. I don’t know enough (or care to know enough) about financials/stock market to know which is more accurate, but it’s interesting nonetheless. Truth is probably somewhere in the middle, I would imagine.

Ha, the lads at Digital Foundry will appreciate this.

Where is MGS3elta

Ugh. Where is MGS3: Delta

Todd Howard an “exacting boss”? Is that a joke? We are talking about the same Todd Howard that deemed the bug filled, glitch ridden, broken messes known as Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim/Fallouts 3/4/76 and Starfield as ‘fit to launch’, correct?

I’m waiting until spring to play Indy, but all indications so far are that it’s phenomenal—the only stain being that game-code-butcher’s name attached to it.

I don’t like the idea of Tencent owning anybody, but if it must be done, the lesser of two evils would be for them to push Ubisoft on through and leave their filthy fingers off of Kadokawa. Nobody really cares if Ubisoft is driven (even more) into the ground, but FromSoft is sacrosanct.

Stellar Blade, easily. I won’t touch the filth that is FF7Rebirth due to Hama-scumbag-guchi’s piss poor failure in butchering the trophy list (which he has publicly apologized for, yet apparently doesn’t feel the need to patch his mistake) so Stellar Blade takes the crown for most effective use of the Pro’s feature set.

So it’s safe to assume square is displeased with these figures? I’ve often wondered how the three brain cells shared among Square’s executives reason things out.

Dragon Quest is exponentially more popular in Japan than in the west, and this was available on all platforms at launch. The sales, while solid, aren’t exactly beating out GTA or anything. So all the mewling about how Final Fantasy—an IP with arguably less pull than DQ—would have sold amazingly if only it had released on Xbox as well seems kind of…short sightedly incompetent to me.

Good. This is the single game they showed at the last big showcase that I cared about, and I am eagerly awaiting it’s Spring release on PlayStation (and hopefully the Pro patch won’t be garbage). I don’t know Machine Games’ track record as far as curating the achievement lists in their games. Are they alright, or are they typically glutted with difficulty related achievements, multiplayer/online-server-dependent achievements, or any other offensive trash like tacked on low effort wave survival modes?

I hope to god this über competitive spirit is not reflected in any forthcoming games’ trophy lists. The day I see ‘Place among the top 10 players globally in a level speedrun’ is when I drop this platform like it’s diseased and migrate permanently to PC.

Playing Stellar Blade right now on DF’s recommended “Pro” mode @120hz (NOT Pro Max) and it’s sensational. Would have liked to go through FF7Rebirth @60fps without the need for corrective lenses, but with the trash trophy list, that game is of no account. That scum Hamaguchi even formally apologized for his incompetence and promised to do better in the future—my question is, Why not fix what you ruined in the first place? Address your failure and patch that garbage.

Where is the ‘Nope, I have less than no interest’ poll option?

Classic games. I still vividly remember playing the demo for the first one way back on PS1, from OPM. Or maybe it was a Pizza Hut demo disc promotion? I don’t recall where I got it, but I enjoyed what I played. Looking forward to revisiting these.