Balaam_

I’m more impressed by the series S numbers. Or whatever word is the extreme polar opposite of impressed. Japan is home to literally millions upon millions of people and only 30 of them decided it was worth their time to buy a series S this month. I almost wonder if they’re mostly Americans working overseas who felt like they wanted a touch of home in their gaming?

Wow. Just wow.

I appear to be in the extreme minority in that I found GoW:Ragnarok to be a massive disappointment. I loved GoW 2018, but Ragnarok is a colossal step backward—particularly in the writing/dialogue department. Much of the spoken dialogue teeters on the border of ‘bad writing’ and just plain anachronistic. (Was the F word even a thing in Norse culture of that time period?)

The game itself was mostly alright aside from some occasionally confusing level design, but the dialogue just deteriorated over the course of the game to such an extent than I half expected Kratos to bark out “Boy! Let’s hop in the dogsled and bounce out this joint!” The discourse between the various characters did not at all feel ‘of the era’ if that makes sense. Idk whose job it was to write it, but I highly doubt the individuals that wrote GoW 2018’s lines wrote the sequel’s. I only hope they don’t write for the next game.

Ten was great. Not my personal favorite, but great nonetheless. Most mainline FF games have been great. 13 is the only exception. 13 isn’t just a bad FF game, it’s a bad game in general. Worthless characters, lame story, awful linear gameplay funneling you down hallways for most of the game, poor battle system, forgettable soundtrack. It looked good at the time but that was it. I’ve tried to replay 13 on four separate occasions but could never finish it, it’s that bad. FF10 might as well be the greatest game of all time by comparison.

The simple fact you could attach a disc drive makes this an infinitely superior choice.

Nice to see trophy issues being given attention, but this should have been prioritized prior to launch. Platform holders need to crack down on trophy and achievement implementation and enforce stricter guidelines as to what is acceptable criteria for unlocking, and what is not. Either that or allow us to permanently remove games from our accounts no matter what the trophy completion percentage is. This would alleviate glitched trophies, unobtainable trophies, or poorly curated trophies from staining otherwise perfect accounts.

Well, we can’t argue with the logic here. Every single landmark title released since the days of the NES have all used ai. Industry figureheads like Miyamoto, Kojima, Miyazaki etc all credit their success to generative ai solving the problem of their own lack of creativity.

Just a heads up for anyone interested in I Am Dead: Though an incomprehensible thought for a game released in the last 30 years, the game does not allow you to invert the Y-axis. There is no toggle in the limited options menu. Might not seem a big deal if you’re one of those people that plays non-inverted, but this glaring oversight made the game unplayable for the rest of us. Pity, since it looked interesting and I imagine that’s the easiest thing in the world to patch in.

They say Concord is down there somewhere if you dig far enough

Posted over on PureXbox, might as well post here too. Expedition 33 is a great game in many ways, but no way on earth does it deserve to win ‘Best Visual Design’. It’s ugly as sin. Not just the underlying tech mind you, I’m referring specifically to the visual aesthetic they went for—it’s absolutely hideous.

This seems more like a ‘placate the crowd’ maneuver than a legitimate award. Too many people foaming at the mouth for what was simply a very well made, well written game with solid turn based excellence that happens to look like doody and which is being lofted on high an paraded around like the greatest game of the century.

@Dalamar I’m in a similar boat but I don’t think I feel as strongly as it seems you do. It’s just that nothing particularly appealed to me the couple times I tried to get into it. I don’t like the whole ‘caveman vs high technology’ trappings (probably why I don’t care for the Avatar movies either). It’s just blah. It’s quality software, just not my cup of tea.

There are a great many small quality of life things that could be implemented but Sony really doesn’t seem to care enough to be bothered. Something as simple as the option to sort trophies alphabetically existed on PS3, but was inexplicably removed for PS4 and never returned. Many of us hate the ‘last trophy earned bumps that game to the top of the list’ method.

Presentation is magnificent, but he’s not necessarily in unanimous agreement with whatever’s going on in Miyazaki’s mind when it comes to his lore breakdowns. Better than most, but not perfect. Something about buying a lore book where said lore isn’t guaranteed accurate is disconcerting. As much as I’d love to have this adorn my shelf, I think it’d need the blessing of Miyazaki, or at least FromSoft itself, for me to pull the trigger.

There are multiple current GotY nominees that Ghost of Yotei easily outshines. This is a very odd, slightly random list of inclusions.

Really can’t fathom the largely unearned praise heaped on Expedition 33. It’s turn based, which gets major points in my book, and was competently written/scored, but the visual aesthetic and design language is hideously repugnant and I literally don’t give a crap about any of the characters. It’s a good game, and just a good game. Nothing more.

The other nominees in nearly every single category it’s up for a possible award in all outclass it in those respective ways. KCD2 is a better rpg. Yotei’s graphical style and presentation is infinitely superior. Death Stranding 2 had better game direction. More heart went into other indies like Silksong or Split Fiction. Better voiceover work in Indiana Jones.

E33 is as overhyped as Skyrim was (and is), and most of you people are out of your minds 😅

I’m no CoD fan (especially when the campaign is apparently awful) but if this game somehow becomes the catalyst to get ai regulated into submission, it’ll become one of my favorite games of all time.

@Oram77 precisely. Miss me with that mobile slop, but if legions of fake “gamers” playing exclusively on cellphones can funnel cash into Sony that feeds our Ghost of Yoteis, Returnals, timed exclusives etc than I’m behind this mobile push 100%.

It’s a half decent month. Pacific Drive, Thank goodness you’re here! and Still Wakes the Deep all look promising but I’ll have to check the trophy lists. Rogue lites are notorious for garbage, trophy hunter unfriendly lists so I’m a little worried I’ll have to avoid Pacific Drive like the plague, but the other two shouldn’t be too bad I would think.

“Like so many around the world, we use…AI”

Ah yes, the ‘Everyone else is doing it, so we are too’ defense.

Steam Machine will only be a threat to someone trying to hybridize the best aspects of pc’s with the best aspects of consoles while attempting to mitigate the downsides of each. Last I heard, Nintendo isn’t trying to do that…PlayStation isn’t trying to do that…

We need a remaster of 2 minus the awful multiplayer component. Make it a single player paradise

@Rich33 I wouldn’t say the best, but I agree that most have been far too critical and unnecessarily so. Perhaps many forget, or perhaps they haven’t lived and gamed through the PS1 and PS2 eras, but PlayStation was never historically a first party powerhouse with consistent output.

It wasn’t until the PS3 was getting its butt kicked by 360 that Sony found a path forward by creating multiple GotY winning first party exclusives. Until this point, PlayStation had always been the most developer friendly, de facto third party machine.

If he’s referencing GTA6, that’s kind of lame to be honest. It’ll be the biggest seller by far, I’m sure, but everyone knows that. I’d like to think he’s talking in-house titles. That’s far more intriguing. Maybe Wolverine, maybe Intergalactic, maybe something we don’t yet know about (Bloodborne Remaster… 🫠)

Fatal Frame 2 was great to see, but I think we knew about that already (?). Otherwise not much for me. DQ7 and Octopath, but Octopath is based off a gatcha so it might be garbage. Nothing else. I play souls games for the incredibly immersive single player exploration, lore, worldbuilding and ‘at-my-pace’ discovery. Nightreign is the antithesis of literally every reason I love souls games so that’s one is a mega dud.

Game was fantastic. Perfect trophy list, wouldn’t change a thing. One of the most pleasant platinums I ever popped.

Wholeheartedly agree with the sentiments expressed here.

Even though I have zero interest in CoD, my heart goes out for my trophy and achievement hunting brethren who are now literally forced to play this to preserve 100% completion. Platform holders need to force any and all dlc and multiplayer components of otherwise ostensibly single player games into separate SKU’s, which can then be avoided by anyone not wishing to play them.

It’s like the Wild West as far as trophies and achievements are concerned; a no man’s land where any publisher can get away with anything from supremely tedious collect-a-thon’s to extraneous game modes shoehorned in post-launch that have nothing to do with the core experience to ‘kill ten thousand players in a single match without getting hit on a Tuesday when mercury is in retrograde’ absurd levels of trophy difficulty. We need law and order.

This game desperately deserves a 60fps remaster along the lines of the Uncharted Legacy of Thieves collection where they perfect the single player and leave the multiplayer on the chopping block. Make it a trophy hunter’s paradise!

It’s a mixed bag.

Does some things well, others not so well, but my overall impression and the aspect that most readily comes to mind is how outright broken it is. Even to this day it’s difficult to play more than an hour straight without getting stuck on environmental geometry, falling through the map, shot by invisible enemies (I don’t mean cloaked enemies I mean enemies that are not properly rendered with either textures or hitboxes), having followers’ ai and logic break causing sporadic behavior, or any one of a thousand other random bugs or glitches appear out of nowhere. These often crash the game directly or else softlock you and force a reload.

And No, this is not Bethesda’s “charm”—it’s piss poor coding on a geriatric engine held together by scotch tape. It’s an embarrassment.

$40 seems fair if they finally completely fixed all 3 trillion bugs, glitches and broken, janky gameplay systems plaguing all the iterations of Fallout4 we already have. If they didn’t…then that’s a total rip off.

Think about this for a moment:

Essentially the entire 343 Studios team was focused on completing Halo Infinite and having it ready for launch, and we all know the state that it launched in (even after a lengthy delay). Now, the team is split between multiple projects.

They couldn’t produce a feature complete product with the their full attention and now they’re dividing their focus…

Is the picture the scene where the kid dumps Woody for Buzz Lightyear? That’s savage😅

Square isn’t even on my radar anymore. It isn’t the quality powerhouse I grew up with in the 90’s and early 2000’s pumping out 10 out of 10’s on a consistent basis. I think FF12 was the last big game of theirs I was truly amazed by. FF13 is one of the worst games I’ve ever played in my life (no joke), 15 is mediocre, 16 has glaring issues and they butchered the remake(s) of 7. Aside from the occasional HD2D release of an old classic, I’ve completely written them off as churning out shoddy single player trash and worthless MMO stuff im not interested in.

Funny how Square’s golden age is so closely tied to SNES and PS1 exclusivity an not the AI driven, multiplatform death spiral they’re locked in now🤔

I bet GTA has been done for a year and Strauss Zelnick is just sitting on it because he enjoys shifting the release date to watch all the other industry publishers scatter out of the way like roaches when the light turns on

Wish these publishers would separate the multiplayer trophies from the single player ones. There are legions of trophy and achievement hunters who would jump at the chance to play through the great campaigns of various R* games, but the mp trophies are a death sentence killing any desire to actually dive in. Separate lists cater to all individuals whether you’re only interested in the story, the multiplayer, or both. This isn’t a R* only problem, it’s an industry wide issue. Platform holders need to clearly define what is acceptable behavior regarding trophies and achievements and what is not.

Those titles will launch so broken they’ll be halfway to Bethesda levels of janky glitchtitude

Atsu crossed every other game off the list like the names on her sash

‘Can’t wait for Microsoft to buy [insert Publisher]—it’ll be so awesome, we’ll get [insert nostalgic game from back catalog] on Gamepass! Haha PlayStation Ponies!!’

This warms my heart. Preferential treatment for those who prefer superior physical media and permanent ownership, while the lesser digital caste stands idly by waiting. It’s 10 o’clock in the world, and all’s well.

Great games, trash trophy lists for the majority. Multiplayer trophies, forced multi-playthrough trophies, tedious collect-a-thon trophies…all are a cancer to trophy hunters. On the upside, I met many players in LFG posts to slog through the garbage uncharted multiplayer dlc’s and these people are still on my friends list. A reliable, like minded group of people to play with is a valuable asset so I suppose I should thank whoever designed ND’s trademark atrocious filth trophy lists.

Yotei is phenomenal. BF6 is great for what it is, but I need more than running around in circles shooting, dying and repeating. That loop gets incredibly stale incredibly fast. Yotei offers the depth and engagement I require at this point in my life; perhaps once I begin my post-lobotomy life BF6 multiplayer will be enough.

Shoe-hei Yoshida approved ✅

The only game I’d even consider aside from the obvious best choice that most people here seemingly have the good sense to vote for would be Dragon Quest 1+2 HD2D.

Every single PC oriented YouTube channel I’ve seen all complain how poor the optimization of PUBG is. I imagine it’s the same on console. I wouldn’t be surprised if a more skilled team could squeeze out better performance on base PS5, but 1440p is sharp enough already. It’s when resolutions dip down toward 1080p that it looks fuzzy on a 4K set.

@Scottdevine53 those games definitely need full on remakes. The player control/camera control is horrendous in all of the titles you mentioned and a complete overhaul to where those systems aren’t broken jank would do them a world of good.

Anything looks better than the grotesque aberration they settled on. Whoever designed the exquisitely beautiful launch model PS2 and PS4 systems must be spinning in their grave at what the final PS5 design turned out to be. If I had the technical know-how I’d certainly build a custom plastic shell for this monstrosity. Love the interface, love the games, love the ecosystem; hate the look of the thing.

Ghost of Yotei, without a doubt. For what it is, it’s practically perfect. Expedition 33 is a technical mess and I personally can’t get past the hideous visual aesthetic they chose. Those things really drag it down despite other areas it excels in. Death Stranding 2 is phenomenal but too niche, and KCD2 has some awkward controls and bad trophy design that lessen the experience.

@Daleaf it’s a great game to be sure. The Saga voice actress was awful though. Constant accent bleed through to such a severe extent that I’m surprised she wasn’t replaced. Like an ice pick in my ear, truly. I resorted to muting the tv whenever she talks and relying on subtitles. I can’t imagine how the first table read didn’t weed her out immediately. But yeah the rest of the game is absolutely fantastic

I can think of an infinite amount other things I’d rather do than try Fortnite for the first time.

Just watched the DigitalFoundry video on Outer Worlds 2 and can honestly say this isn’t PSSR’s fault for once. Every version of this game is hideous. The foliage is a joke. Ghost of Yotei has trillions of exquisitely detailed blades of grass delicately fluttering in the wind and yet OW2 has a couple tufts of bushes that wiggle back and forth when you get within 6 inches? The foliage animation cascade is truly pathetic. The whole game is blurry, constantly fizzling with splotchy, artifact ridden reflections (particularly on the Series X version’s more glass like reflective surfaces for some reason) and just aesthetically ugly all around.

Played Stray at launch, it’s a great game but I feel like it was part of PS+ extra or premium for a long time as well. There’s nothing new here for me so it’s a poor month.

Clicked “Unsure” only because it’s technically possible they could continue to charge for mp and yet offer some sort of compelling side benefit to make it seem worthwhile. Do I think they will? Absolutely not. But if I’m wrong and that’s what happens, I could see a state of affairs where it’s not as big a deal as people might think. I would prefer no charge of course, as no one in their right mind wants to waste money when they don’t have to, but I’m not so sure Sony feels the same way…