Balaam_

Voted No, Helix will not change anything for one logical reason.

People within Sony would have either already been privy to this Helix news long before the general public, or they would have made educated guesses and internal predictions regarding the same subject. In other words, the reality of Project Helix would preemptively have been factored in to whatever Sony’s plans are. That won’t change now just because we the people learned something Sony already knew in advance. Any upcoming PS6 announcements will, to paraphrase the late great Emperor Palpatine, be proceeding exactly as they have foreseen it.

Bought a brand new living room set and had it delivered just in time for launch. I’ll be playing Scott Pilgrim EX from the comfort of my home-owned sectional.

I’ll have to check the trophy list and whether or not the game ships complete on disc without any ‘internet connection/download required’ BS. If it proves to be pro-consumer, I wouldn’t mind owning this on PlayStation.

Lmao I still have this installed on my launch PS5 and glanced at it just the other day, wondering if the rumor mill would ever churn again for it. This is my favorite vaporware story of the generation👌

@DTfearTheBEARD playing the demo right now. Sadly, it is indeed a soul crushing 30fps with pretty severe drops, even on Pro. One might call them fatal frame drops. Also, the film grain filter or whatever they’re using is so thick I keep wanting to grab the swiffer and run it over my tv screen. No way to adjust that either. I like what I’m playing so far, I just don’t like how they’re making me play it ☹️

Very suspicious terminology used in the reveal. “…play your Xbox and PC games.”

No mention of Steam, EpicGameStore, GoG or any other actual pc storefront. Are we to conclude it’ll only play Xbox and Windows store games? One would think the momentous occasion of ushering in a new era where you can play honest to goodness Steam games on your Xbox would be accompanied by specific verbiage directly naming the world’s most popular pc storefront…🤔

I’m not a baseball guy but I clicked on the video just to see what sort of tech the game is running. There are more shots of real life people reacting to what’s going on onscreen than footage of the actual game. I hate this style of trailer with a passion. It reminds me of the absolutely worthless (and probably ai generated) Netflix movie summaries that tell you literally nothing about the actual film and instead simply quote reviews. ‘This groundbreaking debut from [director] placed 3rd at Cannes. [Critic] hails it as ‘a poignant masterpiece.’

Sweaty competitive live service online multiplayer server dependent extraction shooter which will either fail quickly or succeed and receive endless successive content updates over several years = trophy hunter’s nightmare. No thanks

Had to go with DQ7. RE9 is certainly pretty great as it is; the problem is it assuredly won’t remain as it is.

Capcom has a history of grafting on extraneous modes and unnecessary DLC’s, some of which don’t even have anything to do with the core gameplay experience (the reason you’d buy resident evil in the first place). 4 had that mercenaries mode where you run around in circles doing nothing, 2 had that god awful wave survival crap and that tedious “4th survivor” scenario, 7 had that trash blackjack dlc, 8 doubled down on that mercenaries slop etc. Not a good track record and I expect more of the same for 9.

Glad they pointed this out. Sony has some misguided notion that all their first party games need an unrelated rogue like mode shoehorned onto them, as if that’s what everyone wants. It makes an otherwise straightforward platinum+100% a tedious chore filled with throwaway runs and restarts. Glad Konami knows enough to not hop on that tiresome bandwagon.

@Krlozgod honestly can’t tell if your trolling or not based off that last bit about wishing all these hookshot sites were amalgamated. That’s so…[adjectives fail me]. The sites are segregated because not everyone likes or plays on every platform. Some people only care about Nintendo for instance and having PlayStation or xbox news is nothing but clutter to them. This way everyone can engage with the content they prefer. It’s free to make an account on each site so there’s really no drawback. This is the competent way to manage the websites, and collecting them all into one is one of the worst takes I’ve heard yet.

I personally have zero interest in this game but it should be praised and lauded regardless. In fact, developers should be forced to follow this path when any online only game inevitably closes its servers and shuts down. Anyone who played this online and enjoyed it and was working toward platinum trophy completion will still be able to do so after the online->offline transition. Imagine that.

It may very well be that they aren’t ’hiding’ anything, but not revealing any actual console footage this close to launch means they can’t cop an attitude about the reaction to that either. “Let us cook?”—if you tell people their restaurant order will take about 20mins, you need to expect your hungry patrons to start peering in the direction of the kitchen if the food hasn’t been placed on the table after 19 minutes. If there’s nothing to hide, stop hiding it and show the footage. Problem solved.

These two things might actually be mutually exclusive, but imagine being the type of person to think ‘Highguard looks good I will play that’ and also being a trophy hunter. Better grind out that platinum immediately or the devs will have screwed you forever because that platinum will be impossible to obtain after the 12th. There should be laws against this sort of thing.

I buy physical whenever possible for multiple reasons. I like to own what I pay money for. Platform holders can revoke game licenses, ban your account or console (whether deserved or otherwise) or delist content. When I own said content on disc, that’s all a non-issue.

Physical copies of games retain resale value. I own mint, sealed, black label original printings of certain games that are worth more than what many would pay for a decent used car. How much is a digital copy of [insert game] worth?

There are subtle benefits to buying physical too, things the common gamer admittedly won’t care about but which make a difference to the hardcore gamer. I’ve played games where an update or patch either broke a trophy and prevented it from unlocking, or else redefined the criteria to unlock it in some negative way. Having the game on disc with that gold master code etched into it alleviates that hassle and can circumvent a number of trophy related roadblocks.

There’s also the whole collectibility aspect to consider. A slip of paper with some alpha numeric string of numbers as a voucher code doesn’t quite have the same effect as a jewel case with gorgeous artwork sitting on your shelf.

All I want is more FromSoftware (traditional FromSoft, not that Nightreign crap with its awful gameplay loop for people with a Fortnite IQ). Sadly, I’m betting this is some unrelated generic anime rpg from a Bandai IP which will use that copy&paste visual aesthetic that makes all those types of games blur together and become indistinguishable from one another.

I’m not really a GTA person, but I’m very curious about the technical performance and scalability of this one. Cannot wait for DF’s coverage, specifically how the Pro handles the game. Will there be more than one mode on consoles? 40fps maybe? Will PSSR 2.0 be in use, and how good will it be? How rough will base PS5 be? How much of the wow factor of this game gets butchered in the series S version?

I’ll be here for the sequel regardless. The first game was fantastic. Some of the best real time combat out there, great graphics, great soundscape, great performance, perfect trophy list, shipped complete with the full game on disc. This is as good as it gets, people.

They should hire a team of talented experts who excel at remastering older titles. Sony has a wealth of back catalog IP to lean on and we could even get a Bloodborne remaster! 😍

Oh wait

Hope they hire better writers than whoever scripted the dialogue in Ragnarok. The game was alright but the dialogue was incredibly poor and borderline anachronistic. I’m no historian but certain phrases as well as the placement and sheer amount of F bombs seemed rather questionable.

PSA to anyone wanting to give this a try: when it comes to using the paintbrush, the developers did not take the time to offer the option to invert the Y-axis. There is no toggle in any part of the options menu. When using the brush, up is up and down is down and if that’s not how you prefer to play, too bad. You weren’t worth the time it would take to make such a simplistic option available. Stuff like this is why it’s best practice to play anything you’re unsure of on an alt account.

This was a particularly poor selection.

It looks cool and I bet the gunplay feels solid as with all Bungie games. Too bad everything else about this game is the complete opposite of what I’m looking for. I’d have bought this immediately if it had been a single player focused, narrative driven sci-fi game.

I hope if he uses the chains it isn’t just CGI. The axe shouldn’t be an issue (except the boomerang effect obviously) but I can see them ditching practical effects for the chains. That would be a shame.

Practical special effects > CGI

Exclusives being good for brand recognition and as a way to entice users into an ecosystem really isn’t a matter of debate. Forget gaming, this is why any exclusive product or service exists. It’s the reason McDonald’s won’t let Burger King sell a Big Mac, it’s a reason you can’t buy Reebok Air Jordan’s or a Ford Corvette. Exclusivity matters, period.

It is, however, wise to broaden the reach of live service multiplayer focused type games and expand those titles to reach as large an audience as possible. The very nature of the thing in question thrives or dies based on player count, so it is an altogether different beast.

Really like the fact that when you guys at PushSquare write up these sale related articles, you take the time to list the physical releases too (when applicable). That’s going above and beyond 👍

“Here’s some salt in your Bluepoint wounds.”—Hermen Hulst

I knew this would happen. Catering to the larger demographic with the cheesy over the top action instead of what made the originals so great to begin with: survival horror. Wha Capcom should have done is split Requiem into two actual games, one for the slobbering masses and one for the elites.

@Fiendish-Beaver it’s developer dependent. Some games force you into only one mode that uses PSSR, some games offer a toggle, and some games don’t use it at all. Good news is Sony first party games are largely pretty good about using it and implementing it well. Same can’t be said for certain third party titles.

There are two types of consumer, the informed and the uninformed.

The informed consumer (most likely the ‘hardcore’ gamer) already knows a bit about the industry and the players in it and how they operate. They know Microsoft’s abysmal track record of flip flopping, abruptly changing course, empty statements and the litany of broken promises. Trust in the brand or leadership is at an all time low and completely eroded, and would take generations to build back (if that’s even possible at this point).

The uninformed consumer (‘casual’ gamer) is the person who walks into a Walmart or Best Buy or is shopping around online and sees a PlayStation copy of Halo or Gears and thinks ‘Hey I thought that was an Xbox game? I guess PlayStation bought the rights or they’re the ones who make them now, neat.’ It’s a passing thought. They aren’t following the industry, don’t know the monumental shift over the past 5 years and don’t really care enough to learn what’s been happening. To them, it’s simply ‘I can get that Halo on the PlayStation now, so I don’t need to look at the Xbox stuff.’ They won’t know who Asha is, that the multiplatform push could theoretically be walked back, any of that. And they won’t care. The uninformed consumer will drop Xbox from the radar.

Even if Microsoft does yet another 180, it might not even matter now.

Up until quite recently I was of the mindset that no matter how badly you detest what Xbox’s vision for what the industry should be is, the alternative(s) were going to be worse.

An Apple console? A Google console? An Amazon console? All bad.

But that was before ai clouded Satya’s mind and began rotting his brain. Now I’m not so sure Microsoft is the better of these evils. It’s a pipe dream, but I want nothing more than for current Microsoft to bow out and 90’s Sega to come back and replace them as the third big player in the console hardware space. Won’t happen, but just imagine if it did😍

Cannot begin to fathom the mentality of someone who saw this and thought ‘that looks good, I will buy and play it’. I am bewildered.

Seems to be a good choice, but this might be a case of too little, too late.

Best anime of all time.

Sounds good. I’ll still hold off until a year or so after launch. Can’t trust them not to shoehorn in another horrendously awful and out of place rogue like mode and forceably attach trophies to it. Not going through that slop again like how they blindsided players with Ragnarok or the PS5 version of TLoU2.

It’s not a first party game. It’s a second or third party game depending on how you want to look at it, so I always expected it to inevitably head to other platforms. When you contract someone you don’t own to make something you don’t own, you won’t ever have eternal exclusive rights to that thing. It’s why they’re called ‘timed exclusives’ and not ‘exclusives’.

At the end of the day the game is fantastic. Best real time 3D combat I’ve ever played. If ShiftUp wants more people to experience their awesome game and pay them for the privilege, I say that’s great.

I wonder which would be potentially more damaging to the brand—another 10 years of this RAM crisis, or another 10 years of Hermen Hulst? 🤔

This is Xbox-level tone deaf stupidity.

Haven’t had a chance to give it the time (I hope) it deserves, but I like what I’ve seen from screenshots and gameplay snippets. Great pixel art, solid looking combat/gamplay, good ambient fx and score, and while I only took a cursory glance at the trophy list it seems well designed (i.e. no online trophies, no difficulty related trophies, no low effort tacked on modes like wave survival or rogue like stuff etc). If the game proves to be what I think it’ll be, I’m expecting a solid 8 experience.

What about the static NPC’s rooted to the ground? What about the hideous visual aesthetic and its garish pastels? These glaring issues haven’t been addressed, and true PS5 Pro support is nonexistent.

£100 says you won’t get 20mins into Elder Scrolls 6 without getting stuck in the stairs, falling though the map or soft locking the game in some way. That Creation Engine is the root of most of Bethesda’s problems. Gamers want quality, stability and polish—we don’t care if you can stack a thousand grilled cheese sandwiches in a line and topple them like dominos. Someone needs to do the world a favor and take the Creation Engine out behind the barn and put it out of everyone’s misery.

I hear the Pro has difficulty upscaling hideously garish pastel visuals. I wanted Avowed to look like the awesome teaser reveal trailer, but it’s clear they…went a different direction.

I’m aware this game is of necessity shackled to online servers, so a true physical copy was likely never going to happen anyway, but pretending this was a different game with equally awesome packaging I’d still say: No physical disc in box, No buy

I’m none too concerned, it’s too high profile an IP to not perfect the gameplay style, whichever way they choose to go. I’m far more concerned with Sony’s history of ‘it’s fine how it is, let’s force in content no one asked for to fix what isn’t broke’ mentality. They might try to bolt on some awful rogue like mode like they did with Ragnarok.

Actually, what really needs to happen is to ditch the side content, that Challenge of Olympus mode or whatever it was called.

Wave survival modes are just about the most patently obvious low-effort “extra content” a developer can add to pad out their game. It’s tedious, repetitive and doesn’t fit the core gameplay loop, the driving reason behind why anyone would buy/play GoW to begin with.

@get2sammyb No, “a great game with bad trophies is still a great game” is not true. You’re allowing your personal opinion to cloud what should be an unbiased, impartial assessment. Just because trophies aren’t that important to you and don’t necessarily impact your experience doesn’t mean that everyone else feels the same way. This is effectively the same as someone saying ‘Mind’s Eye is a great game because I didn’t mind the endless bugs and technical issues.’ That’s faulty reasoning.

If you wanted to highlight a specific aspect of an otherwise great game with bad trophies, that would be different. Mind’s Eye may have had great combat or something (don’t know, didn’t play it, don’t really care) and you can cite that point, but you can’t say it’s a “great game”. A “great game” is the composite experience as a whole. A bad trophy list is hand picked by developers and is part of the intended experience and drags that down.

Online multiplayer doesn’t belong in a game of this nature, never did. Konami made the right call. The psp game was structured differently and online made more sense there. It’s been so long since I went through PW that I don’t recall if there are any online specific trophies, but if so these should be reconfigured to be unlockable offline as well to protect the trophy hunting experience from server closures, bugs, the added hassle of even playing online etc.

No sports team goes for a Hail Mary type of play unless they’re either so far ahead it doesn’t matter, or so far behind that it’s their only option. When you’re comfortably in the lead, you don’t take unnecessary risks.

PlayStation has nothing to gain by messing with the status quo, while the Xbox brand is in dire peril, shriveling like a raisin in the sun. It’s do or die for them, so their desperation moves are logical. There’s a reason Xbox didn’t port everything to PS3 during the 360 gen. Those days are over for Team Green and they’re just trying to stay afloat while they tread water.

So the game operates under a single player first mindset, multiplayer is an afterthought, and no multiplayer trophies to screw up the trophy list? Sounds perfect to me.

Love that Konami is returning to form, but this rpg was immediately dead the moment they showed what it looked like. This is th exact same cookie cutter, generic anime art style that’s copied&pasteda thousand times over in the past 10 years. If you took these screenshots and said it was a new Trails game or a new Gatcha game no one would know any different.

Doesn’t mean the game is automatically bad, but it does mean they’ve failed to capture my interest. A game is a composite of multiple aspects, a strong core visual identity needing to be one of them. This doesn’t have it.

Jaffe can be contentious to be sure, but I picked out one sliver of his rant I can get behind 100% (and which makes a larger point): the 2D games he cited which “look better” (Shinobi, Blasphemous, Ninja Gaiden etc) genuinely do look better. I don’t hate Sons of Sparta’s visual aesthetic, but it could have been a bit better I think. More important, Jaffe didn’t cite one of the trillion of ugly magic marker styled 2D games to compare it to—and in that way he’s 100% right. He picked games with a visual design language and art style that actually are top of their class.

There are literally countless games (both 2D and 3D) that all use that magic marker slop aesthetic, the ‘Fortnite look’. The new 2D Castlevania shown off at this most recent State of Play is a prime example. The gameplay looks great and I’m overjoyed to get a new 2D entry in the series, but that artistic ‘style’ is just awful. It’s cheap, low effort, and reminiscent of a low budget Saturday morning cartoon from the era post when cartoons used to look good.