Balaam_

$15 for an FMV game? I ain’t sayin’ this dev’s a gold digger, but…

This is as worthless as when publishers issue a physical disc that has only a few MB’s on it or requires an internet download. If it doesn’t play directly off the disc while you’re offline, there is literally no point in making a ‘physical’ release.

It’s crap, skip it.

Hm, that’s the most constructive advice I can give, but it seems the comment is deemed to be too short. I could try padding it.

Starfield is a janky, broken, half-baked empty promise of something that never gets off the ground. It lacks technical polish, still has performance woes, and is ultimately unfulfilling. Oh, and the disc is a worthless coaster so if you’re intent on punishing yourself by doing a playthrough, you might as well go with the digital version because you’ll be leasing a digital license either way. No permanent ownership here, although that’s arguably a good thing in this case.

I’d wager your time is better spent doing almost literally anything else, but no one can stop you from playing it.

I’ll wait until Darksiders: Warmastered Edition II Turbo comes out before I pick it up.

@Rambo-kind I was looking forward to seeing what state it’s in when it comes out on ps+ soon. I recall Digital Foundry speaking to how awful the image quality was at launch, but I know it’s received numerous patches to improve things since. Glad to hear it’s a noticeable difference.

It’s a fairly safe bet we’ll be able to use any SSD’s we have installed on our PS5’s on PS6, as that form factor hasn’t really changed much over the years. It’s the disc drive unit itself I’m curious about, whether Sony will allow us to use the ones we may have bought for PS5 on the next console. That’s something they’d have complete control over; all that would really be necessary would be to make sure the physical design of the unit can accommodate the drive.

Of course, why would Sony do that when they can force us to buy a slightly different version of the same thing 😑

This one already looked leagues better on the Pro versus all the other consoles, so improving on that is no mean feat.

@Andy22385 That’s too Pixar-y, too CG looking a visual aesthetic. It’s close, but definitely not the FF9 “ideal”.

I don’t care if there’s a 6 month exclusivity window or something, as long as they ship a real physical edition once more. They did well with Reloaded, it wasn’t a worthless coaster like so many of the other Microsoft published ‘physical’ releases that are deceptive lies designed to wrest control away from the end user.

The tech certainly isn’t worth it at these prices, and if I hadn’t bought a PS5 before now I think I’d seriously consider waiting for PS6 rather than splurge on this gen’s machine. Yeah, PS6 will be expensive too, but so is PS5. Why buy outdated tech now at overinflated prices when you can buy better tech later at overinflated prices?

This is incomprehensible. Why bother putting anything more than the absolute bear minimum on the disc if it isn’t totally playable offline? If you need to access the internet for a download for literally ANY amount of data, then there is zero reason to put any data on the disc beyond the check code. Either mint an actual physical copy or put 1MB on the disc and leave the rest blank. Putting 81GB’s worth of data on the disc is a waste of time.

Didn’t the developers go out of their way to specifically state that crimson desert was intended to be a single player experience? I vaguely remember reading a quote from them to that effect. If so, I wish they’d keep that promise. I’ve been on the fence with this one; was going to grab it at launch, but then the whole ‘disc is a lie’ thing happened so I figured I’d wait for a steep discount. Then they mentioned ruminating on forcing in some multiplayer component. Hope not, if so that’s a hard pass

I hold out a bit of tentative hope that the new Fable will be great. I liked the original, but really didn’t care for any of the sequels. The new one looks to recapture most of the quirky charm that made the original so good. Having just rewatched the IT crowd again, I’m also quite looking forward to Moss being a part of the new game.

@SleepyNick don’t forget my underscore

This is exactly the BS Sony and the other platform holders should have been on top of from the very beginning. A trophy like this should not have been permitted to pass certification and go live on PSN. There needs to be stricter criteria as to what is an acceptable trophy vs what is overly difficult or needlessly tedious. Online trophies should be segregated into separate lists so as not to interfere with a game’s 100%+Platinum should the servers be shut down or a glitch of some kind is found.

All of the above could be alleviated by simply allowing users to permanently remove games with partially completed trophy percentages from their accounts. Not games at only exactly 0% trophy completion, but all games regardless of how much trophy progress has been made. Not ‘hide’, permanently remove. Sony would still have collected all the relevant data&metrics regarding a given trophy, so there is no good reason why this shouldn’t already be an option for the end user.

I myself plan my gaming purchases around a game’s trophy/achievement list. I’ve skipped buying literally thousands of dollars’ worth of games simply because I won’t risk of staining my perfect account I’ve had since ~2006 with an incomplete trophy list. I’m not alone. There are tens of thousands of like-minded trophy hunters out there, and yet we still don’t have this option. Since trophy hunters are quite literally the only people who actually care about trophies to begin with, you would think anything regarding trophies on PlayStation would cater to us first and foremost. Sadly (and inexplicably), this is not the case.

That Legacy of Kain game initially had me excited, but then I saw the art style they went for. It’s that cheap, generic looking one that’s been copy&pasted a thousand times over on countless games. No thanks.

Finished up the slop of Yotei dlc, but still helping friends with that repetitive wave survival stuff. We can only play a few matches at a time before the tedium wins out and we have to stop. I wish they had released the Raid along with Legends just so that we could have gotten the whole mess over and done with all at once.

All the contributing factors cited in the article are true, but none moreso than the scourge of ai. As if we needed yet another reason to hate it. I don’t mean the modest, appropriate uses of ai (upscaling etc) but the type of ai these greedy corporations are pushing for is the root cause of all of these price increases due to the vast amount of components it requires to keep these LLM’s functioning. It’s the (de)generative ai, the ‘stupid person is too lazy to do their own research and would rather be told by an ai owed and maintained by a corporation with its own selfish agenda what to do’ ai and the people who support it that are the problems. These people are one step removed from ‘Hey copilot, I just went number two. What do I do now?’

So you’re saying it’s actually cheaper to pay for language courses, learn Japanese, then source a black market Japan-only PS5 because they won’t ship them internationally than it is to just buy one at Walmart a week from now.

It’s like a math equation.

Overbloated AAA budgets+Overinflated salaries for incompetent executives like Hermen Hulst+Useless younger generation of ‘gamers’ playing mostly Roblox, Fortnite, other FreeToPlay stuff=Massive price increases for the rest of us.

I look at this game and all I can think of is that classic Principal Skinner line “Am I so out of touch? No…it’s the children who are wrong.”

I can hear ‘Penny!’ in Desmond’s voice right now

Really comprehensive review. Well done, and thanks for putting enough time in to give it a fair trial.

A 6-7 out of 10 isn’t horrible, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed. On the surface they did everything right; single player rpg with no multiplayer slop grafted in, lots of interesting systems driven gameplay, ambitious visuals, a propriety engine (no UE5 thank god), and some decent world building potential. Sadly, it seems it’s a jack of all trades, master of none situation.

The lack of a true physical release (minting a disc is worthless if you decide to force an internet check/download anyway) was the final nail in the coffin as far as determining if I was actually going to buy this at launch. I don’t pay full price for things I won’t own, so at best I’ll grab this in like a 75% off sale a few years down the road. No pity for the devs there, that’s a choice they made and now they can deal with the consequences.

Maybe Crimson Desert can have some sort of redemption story, maybe they’ll fix some in-game foibles in addition to the tech stuff they’ve already addressed, and maybe we’ll get a GotY version with everything actually on the disc as well.

‘Is PSN down?’ does seem a little more efficient than having to individually search ‘Is PS5 down?’ ‘Is PS4 down?’ ‘Is PS6 down?’ ‘Is PS3 down?’. I suppose it could be ‘Is PlayStation down?’ but typing out PlayStation instead of just PSN gets old fast

The quote makes me wonder if there’s a mirror universe full of ai that’s complaining about ‘human slop’ being introduced into their games 🤔

I wonder how bloated and over inflated the C-suite salaries are at these publishers/developers? I would imagine executives at your indie studios and other developers with a low head count are probably underpaid, while people like Neil Druckman are exorbitantly overpaid. There’s some overhead right there that can be cut to save some money.

Never played any of the games, but the original anime is excellent. Might be worth looking into

Afeela great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror at a lack of first party output, studio closures, and nonsensical PlayStation/automobile crossovers and were suddenly silenced…by a bungling moron named Hermen Hulst.

Someone needs to play 4D chess with this and build a case against Sony under the guise of something else. If someone can scrape together enough relevant info proving a higher percentage of the costlier dynamic pricing is being applied to a certain race, gender, social status etc then this could feasibly explode and backfire in such a huge way as to force Sony to back down. It would be pure coincidence, yes, but the appearance would be all that matters.

Bluepoint crafted a handful of nearly flawless ports and remasters over the years. Just prior to being bought, and regardless of how you feel about the art direction, Bluepoint ships easily the best launch title for PS5 and it’s still one of the best graphical showcases 5+ years later.

They get shut down.

Media molecule ships a janky platformer with sluggish, unresponsive controls in the ps3 generation, follows it up with a less inspired sequel that Shanghai’s players into buying expensive peripherals (PS Move, PS Vita) in order to get full 100% trophy completion, then eventually shuts the servers down instead of fixing an ongoing problem (thereby screwing thousands of trophy hunters from ever being able to get the platinum—go check the forums, there’s dozens of threads regarding this). Then they ship one more lackluster ps3 game in the series, make a ‘build your own game’ game that doesn’t light the world on fire, then do LITERALLY NOTHING the entire PS5 generation——yet somehow that garbage studio remains open.

Yeah, I’d say Sony definitely mismanaged their first party teams.

I must be a minimalist when it comes to furniture. The chair looks well built and comfy for pc gaming, but that overstylized paint scheme is garish. I wouldn’t want an eyesore like that sitting in my setup.

It’s a good game if you like retro styled racers. There’s a demo still up too if you’re on the fence.

Hey, maybe they’ll finally go back to turn based combat instead of the inferior real time stuff they’ve gravitated toward for the past decade.

I hope DF does some sort of comparison between Microsoft’s AutoSR technology and PSSR2. Not sure there’s any game out there yet that uses both, but I’d be very curious to see what the differences would be. I find all that fine grain technological detail endlessly fascinating. All the specific upscaler related quirks; artifacting, resolution differences, what sort of budget it’s allocated in the overall frame time, any latency issues introduced etc. I suspect this new iteration of PSSR would win out, and it’ll only get better from here. Great time to be a PlayStation player, image quality has never been better.

I don’t see anything about fixing the issue where you tear open the cellophane, put the disc in, install it, but then can’t play because it inexplicably demands a connection to the Internet when this shouldn’t be the case. I’ll wait until they fix that before I spend any money on this.

This will all come back around again by the time, oh, maybe PS8 or PS9 comes out.

All us old heads that grew up with the original PlayStation still use terms and phrases which are outmoded and sometimes scoffed at by the current bulk PlayStation demographic whose first console was PS3. When PS9 is out and all you 18-34 year olds are denounced after using an archaic term like ‘PSN’, you’ll be where we are now 😄

They’ve definitely gotten worse over time, but not egregiously so. The series peaked with the original, but 2-4 were each excellent games in their own right. CV is solid; only played a bit of Ø and it was so long ago I can’t really say much about it. I thought 5 was a laughable joke…until I played 6. Now 5’s not so bad. 7 was part return to form, part new inspiration, part ‘let’s drive a great game into the ground with trash dlc no one asked for’. 8 was a step back but still had some redeemable elements. I don’t play the spinoffs, and I haven’t finished 9 yet. All in all, not a bad average of quality for the series.

In the middle of finishing the Slop of Yotei dlc I got an error message about down services. It didn’t affect the game, strangely. Matchmaking continued just fine.

…?

Unless I’m missing something that trophy doesn’t seem to be so bad. It doesn’t ask any ridiculously difficult feat to be completed, or involve any insanely lengthy time consuming criteria. It doesn’t force multiplayer gameplay or require an internet connection or involve an additive game mode that’s nothing like the core gameplay. It isn’t glitched or bugged. That seems to be a really run of the mill trophy to me.

I’d like to push back against this statement though: “I bring this up because I'm about to complain about one solitary Trophy, which feels like quite a silly thing to moan about when the game is one I truly believe to be a modern masterpiece.” I don’t think that’s silly at all. In fact, you can find an identical perspective among literally any enthusiast sport or hobby. Those immersed in their favorite milieu frequently lament that one little thing which keeps them from enjoying their interest to the full 100% degree. This is true even of creators; Miyamoto or Miyazaki are quoted as praising their favorite projects with the exception of that one thing they wish they could change.

I guess what I’m saying is it isn’t wrong to call out that which is flawed, as that’s how things are improved and perfected. Bring these defects into the light, then correct them.

Good job removing all these ‘press a button for a platinum’ games, that’s not what trophy hunting was ever supposed to be about. It was about providing a realistic incentive for gamers of all skill levels to work toward while completing games. Now, on to the next item on the agenda: the removal of games with absurd, ludicrously difficult and unrealistically time consuming trophy lists.

I wish games were handled in the same way as books. There are books on paper and there are e-books, but no one ever picks up a physical book and asks ‘Is all the artwork printed within, or is it only a handful of illustrated pages with the rest available though download?’

Maybe improve your so-called ‘physical’ edition to be playable offline out of the box

Perceived latency will make or break this.

It does sound like PR pandering to us layfolk, but remember: the guy’s a technical wizard of the highest order. For him, this is almost certainly legit geeking out over some awesome tech he’s privileged to be instrumental in creating. I don’t think this is disingenuous or hollow in the least.

To paraphrase a famous line, ‘Mark Cerny, I may not fully understand on a technical level what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it!’

There’s just no accounting for some people’s taste.

To me, PSN is associated more with account services, passwords, payments and other technical stuff than anything else. I still ask people ‘What’s your psn name?’ if I happen to have a gaming related conversation with someone in real life.

I’m assuming the full game is on the disc?

I bailed the moment I learned the game wasn’t shipping complete on disc. Not saying it would have made any difference, but it’s interesting to consider in the context. If Pearl Abyss didnt have the confidence to think their own game was worth a few pennies to press an extra plastic disc to allow the whole thing to be playable offline, that kind of lines up with the general sentiment. Two unrelated things being strangely related.

Fear not PCMR, I’m sure someone from your department has already ensured the goal posts are in mid-transit to their next location.

Is there a physical edition for Kiln? I like double fine’s stuff, but my purchase habit is either physical or ‘wait for deep discount’.