Balaam_

If anyone who doesn’t already own an Xbox and has even the slightest awareness of the state of that brand in the last ten years, I cannot see that person choosing to buy the machine now. It’s outdated, overpriced tech that now has what—two, three exclusives revealed in the pipeline from that showcase?

In that position I’d either get them on Steam, wait for Helix, or just skip them. All 3 scenarios simply feed the same problem Microsoft currently has, and has had, for the past however long.

A committed declaration of full first party (single player) exclusivity is really the only way to even attempt to undo their current dilemma, and that’s probably not feasible. Hence, another half step to nowhere.

Haven’t seen anyone confirm or deny yet—does the physical disc actually have the full game on it? I would presume so given that there’s also a digital voucher, but you never know. This is Micro—you will own nothing and be happy, and even things you used to be able to own like PC business software we’re now transforming into consumer unfriendly subscriptions to bleed you for more money—soft, after all.

Good first step. I’d like to see a Senior ‘Get These People Their Accounts Back’ Strategist role next.

On the one hand, at least it’s actual legitimate story dlc and not a low effort wave survival cash grab. On the other hand, known dlc and the game is 6months away? Sounds like this could have been part of the main game and it’s being artificially bisected and withheld for additional paid content.

@TheDarts came here just to post the same.

I’m sure it’ll see the light of day eventually. Maybe after the initial sales figures trickle in.

Everyone’s arguing about how Xbox is handling exclusivity and I’m over here thinking ‘Clockwork Revolution looks like absolute garbage. Thank you for not adding to an already overcluttered PSN storefront.’🤔

The only thing I was really disappointed isn’t coming to PS5 was that Vivarium game with that truly perfect Lupin III-esque visual aesthetic. What little was shown looked fantastic. Maybe an eventual port down the road

A good year for shows, all were pretty darn good I’d say. Fairly equal, actually; there are titles from all 3 I’m interested in.

Not really relevant, but two things from the trailer jumped out at me. A typical grenade takes about 10lbs of force to pull the pin so there’s no way that stupid tape player contraption in the beginning is going boom, and there was a split second bit of footage where a character is supposed to be aiming down sights but he’s holding the gun so high the red dot sight is over his head. His sightline is at the same level where the magazine is. Pretty goofy looking.

@DennisReynolds Unless they butchered it worse than anyone could imagine, the game still holds up after all these years (minus the Library). It’s worth playing at least once, especially if you never have before, and potentially needing to finish the series storyline elsewhere doesn’t really ruin what this game can offer.

It’ll get ported once the initial sales wave flatlines on Xbox.

@Oram77 *Trek

If true, no big loss.

Growing up in the golden age of E3, I prefer getting most third party game reveals in one big show. State of Plays, Xbox Showcases and Nintendo Directs should really be overwhelmingly focused on first party titles. I’m fine with this industry course correction, if indeed that’s what it is.

@DennisReynolds Birdo from the American Super Mario Bros. 2, Poison from Final Fight. Someone else can name a 3rd

5, maybe 6 games I’m very interested in. Great show!

Always liked the idea of NG+ in games, but it’s rarely realized to its full potential. Dark Souls 2 comes to mind as one of the few games to do NG+ well. Regardless of how you feel about the game itself, NG+ made enough tangible changes that it actually felt like a unique playthrough again. I hope Wolverine mixes things up at least a little after the credits roll. Different branching path unlocked, new enemy encounters etc.

I also would like to not be forced into doing a NG+ run arbitrarily. That’s lazy design. If your game is really that good I should want to replay it of my own volition, not because I’m being held at gunpoint by a trophy requiring NG+ completion. Sadly, Insomniac has a lousy track record specifically regarding this.

“At the same time, we're increasingly becoming a platform.”

This is irritating. The Xbox already is a platform. Always has been. If she’s talking about gamepass, then that means she’s discussing platforms within platforms like a Mandelbrot platform sandwich. Where does it end? Who really frames things like ‘The other day I was playing something on the Roblox platform through the Gamepass platform on the Xbox platform and streaming it all on the Twitch platform while standing on my back deck which is also a platfom while wearing platform shoes.’

I picked “I don’t know” because it’s the closest thing to “I don’t care”

Was secretly hoping for a “Mostly enjoy Bond but Die Another Day is hot garbage” bubble

Yet another case for quoting my favorite Palpatine line.

Splash screen

Main menu

Me: “Let’s see, I better go into the options and make sure the Y-axis is inverted.”

Click options

“Hi! I’m your Amazon virtual assistant. Instead of simply handing you full control so you can quickly be on your way, I’m going to impede your progress at every step by suggesting irrelevant crap you aren’t interested in. Would you like to switch to 30fps fidelity mode? Would you like to purchase additional skins for the Walther PPK? Would you…”

Eject disc, throw in trash

A game’s visual aesthetic can be a dealbreaker to me, but I really love how Marathon looks (art theft issues aside, it looks awesome). I’m sure it plays great (all Bungie games have great control/gunplay), and the sound design also seems impeccable.

Sadly, repeatedly running around in circles either dying or extracting is nowhere near enough to hold my attention. I need exponentially more than just that. I need a gripping single player campaign with a strong narrative and characters I can care about and form an attachment to. As it stands, the Marathon experience appears to be like one of those ultra high class luxury Michelin star restaurants where they serve you a sprig of parsley on a plate. I’m sure it’s the best parsley in the world, but that’s it? That’s all that’s here?

I saw some other ‘What letter grade would you give the State of Play’ polls out there with high percentages of C’s and low B’s. I cannot understand that mentality. There was a variety of content shown off here, and mostly of high quality. While some didn’t appeal to me (don’t like fighting games or multiplayer focused games so Tokon and Kemura were a miss) and some looked like hot garbage (cough…Until Dawn 2…cough), a lot of what was shown looked great. If haters and grifters make up a majority of the negative show assessments ok—that’s logical. But I can’t imagine anyone being legitimately disappointed. If so, I would not care to know what sorts of games these people play.

To be fair, weren’t the most recent collector’s editions for Sony 1st party games these really extravagant affairs with nothing but a worthless code in the box instead of an actual game? The sheer stupidity is mind boggling. These $250-$500+ enthusiast editions are clearly aimed at the hardest of hardcore fans and yet they commit the single biggest mistake they could ever make to piss us off by neglecting to add the actual game. With this recent trend, I really don’t care they didn’t do a special edition for Wolverine.

If it bothers you, go buy a cool statue from a third party manufacturer and a digital copy off psn and you basically have what Sony would have overcharged you for anyway.

At least there are almost certainly no physical versions for these games. It’ll almost be like they never existed once delisted.

Sounds like Jaffe hates the poorly written dialogue almost as much as I do.

Fantastic show. Until Dawn 2 was cringe inducing slop and the dialogue for Laufey looks to be about as bad as the crap in Ragnarok, but aside from that everything else looked excellent.

Wolverine seems very well polished, banishing lots of worries, and every other facet of Laufey looked to be of typical high calibre. The sheer amount of ‘single player, narrative driven experiences’ is a relief, and the general lack of anything live service is a good sign.

If they can only fire the script writers at Santa Monica and hire a decent dialogue coach, it would alleviate a big problem. People in ancient cultures in those areas at those times did not talk that way. That stupid cube was one line away from telling Laufey to ‘bust a cap in that fool’. Ugh.

@Anke Best community out there, are you serious? In my experience it’s nothing but lazy, do-nothing randoms camping inaccessible points during public events waiting for other people to do the work so they can collect loot/XP.

Was it this year’s or next year’s F1 game that DF had a look at behind the scenes at Codemasters where they had Path Tracing running on the Pro? I don’t expect they’d integrate that quite yet as it was in the circa ~30fps range and for a game like this that’s a pretty lousy experience, but maybe if they iterate on the underlying tech we could see a 40fps mode in the future. Whatever the case, bodes well for PS6 👌

Publishers should be given first right to keep a game’s servers up and running. If they refuse, it should then default to the community. That old mantra ‘Do your job or someone else will do it for you’ suddenly comes to mind.

@SuplexingTrains Couldn’t tell you. As an avid trophy hunter completionist, I view them as an accessory feature to compliment a game I would want to play even if the trophies didn’t exist. I wouldn’t waste my time playing slop just for trophies.

@8th_Observer Fake trophy posers. No self respecting trophy hunter would be playing this type of crap just to add to their trophy count.

Fingers crossed for that Phantom Blade demo, that’s been my most anticipated game for quite some time now.

One of the worst months in recent memory. Don’t like repetitive multiplayer shooters, don’t like smash bros. style fighters, don’t like live service slop. There’s variety, I can’t call them out on that; it’s just not the sort of variety that appeals to me.

@BearsEatBeets Only news I’ve heard regarding Gothic 1 remake is that hardcore fans are pissed after it was discovered the publisher flat out lied, claiming the full game is on disc when it is not. Download required 👎

Bears. Beets…Battlestar Galactica.

@3Above That is a hilarious, clever and extremely apropos comparison. I’m jelaous I didn’t think of it first 😅

Price increases, economic uncertainty and whatever brand damage was caused by the live service fiasco is all working against them, but Sony probably has more than a bit of goodwill left in reserve. It’ll probably do well; idk about ‘best state of play ever’ but it’ll do fine.

I watch a lot of pc tech videos and gpu comparisons etc and Beam.NG is a staple for benchmarks. Physics look to be some of the best I’ve ever seen in a game, and it’ll be interesting to see how PS5 (especially Pro) stacks up against some of the pc configurations. I don’t know enough about the game to know if this is the exact same game as on pc, a spinoff, a trimmed down port or what, but it’s on my radar.

@Northern_munkey welcome to Microsoft’s vision of the future. You will own nothing, you will be enslaved to a launcher that spams you with ads and you will be groomed into spending real money on in-game cosmetics and other microtransactions while it’s all disguised as an online multiplayer shooter experience, and you will do so at their pace and on the hardware they decide. To be fair this isn’t only Microsoft’s vision for the future, probably all of big tech, but…yeah.

Gasp

You mean it’s actual, legitimate story content operating as an extension of the core design principles laid out in the base game, the way DLC’s were always intended to be? No low effort wave survival slop screaming ‘asset reuse’ tacked on, no repetitive low-IQ horde mode or rogue like gameplay elements which have nothing to do with the base game shoehorned in? It’s almost as if CDPR is part of an elite group of studios which understand the original promise and intent of Add On Content.

FromSoft and CDPR are some of the only AAA developers that make genuine DLC. I’d be willing to number Bethesda among them if only they could iron out the infinite technical mess that is their engine&toolset.

@Skinny-Pete You make a very good argument with the ‘banana taped to the wall’ argument, but I think you miss your own point.

The Mona Lisa is valid art because few, if any, ‘normal’ people could paint that using the same canvas, paints and brushes. Anyone can tape a banana to a wall; it’s not art. Anyone can prompt an ai to create something; that’s not art either. When someone does something with ai in such a profound way that it can’t be replicated by anyone else using the same tools, that would be art. Until then, it’s a digital banana taped to a wall.

Charging that much for weak, outdated tech that doesn’t even offer a good home theatre experience (docked experience is poor; it’s basically just a handheld) is absurd.

Definitely style>function here. Looks awesome, but imagine jogging down the street to catch the trolley then tripping, the strap twists mid-fall, and you land on top of the bag and smash your PSP screen first into the sidewalk 😣

Protagonist looks like a cyberpunk npc

That Silent Hill F is tempting, particularly so now that PSSR2 has cleaned up that distracting warbling on Pro. I need to check what the disc version costs, it’s best to wait for a physical sale. I believe this game is complete on disc as per ‘Does It Play’.

@AdamNovice that one’s in my backlog, looking forward to it. Machinarium and Boxville are fun and worth a try if you haven’t played them. The trophy lists are pretty typical for the genre, with some real head scratcher puzzles to work through.

@Oram77 I never thought of that. I agree, that would be fantastic.