Balaam_

…Annnnnnnd that’s why I rarely if ever spend money on games with online, server dependent trophies.

Devs need to learn if they want our money, don’t butcher the trophy lists. Games built from the ground up around online connectivity/multiplayer are one thing, and everyone knows what they’re getting into when they get involved with them. But keep that trash out of our predominantly single player experiences. Either that, or build in a contingency. I believe Mass Effect 3 had the foresight to structure the trophy list wherein all online related trophies had alternative methods of unlocking that could be attained purely offline. That is competent, quality work—not the disgusting laziness most devs sink to nowadays.

Loved the base game. Hated that awful Legends multiplayer-centric dlc they shoehorned into it. Had to slog through that garbage to get back to 100% trophy completion.

Platform holders need to mandate there be no additional content bolted on if it doesn’t conform to what the base experience entailed. Not everyone wants a piss poorly designed raid, or the mindless, repetitive monotony of a low-effort wave survival mode. I never would have bought the game if I knew in advance that filth was going to be forced in.

What is it with Sony first party studios and the dichotomy of being able to craft nearly flawless single player masterpieces on command, and then butchering them with terrible DLC’s? Uncharted, The Last of Us, Days Gone, Ghost of Tsushima, GoW Ragnarok…WTF

Took me .0002 seconds to nail that multiplayer question.

Naughty Dog screwed over trophy hunting gamers the world over with the horrendous, god awful trophies they forced down our throats for that multiplayer in Uncharted 2. Absurd, stupidly outrageous criteria that I am eminently proud to have boosted with minimal effort. No way I would waste my time slogging through that trash a second longer than I had to. Finished that slop, dropped it and never looked back.

Naughty Dog are masters at crafting a near-perfect single player game and hurling it into an open sewer by bolting on multiplayer crap not everyone wants to deal with, and making trophy criteria as sadistic and selfish as they possibly can. I keep hoping they’ll identify the individual(s) responsible for forcing MP into otherwise perfect games.

And it deserves every single one of them.

The only thing preventing PlayStation controllers from being absolutely perfect (trom a design perspective) is their insistence on in line sticks. I much prefer offset sticks, but every other aspect of the PlayStation controller is exactly what I’d do if I were to design it. I understand why Sony won’t ever do offset sticks, but I don’t like it.

Totally worth it. Stellar Blade was substantially better than I expected. I went into it with doubts, then it completely captivated me until I obtained that shiny platinum (perfect trophy list too btw, no garbage criteria like in so many other games). Absolutely brilliant from start to finish; by rights it should have won Best Action Game at the Geoffs instead of Black Mid Wukong.

Usually there’s something in each month’s batch of freebies that I can find some enjoyment in, but this is a rare month where I’m not so sure. SS looks like the type of slop I’d rather die than play, and Need4Speed isn’t really my cup of tea. I don’t know anything about Stanley Parable, but it seems to have its fans. All hopes rest on that one, I guess.

Ugly visual aesthetic. No thanks.

If anyone was somehow still on the fence, Stellar Blade is fantastic. Recently platinum’d it and it was a blast from beginning to end. Superb combat, amazing visuals, excellent pacing throughout. Good replay value (multiple cosmetic items and gear variations on NG+ to collect). The Geoff’s made a mistake; This was Best Action Game of 2024, not Black Mid Wukong.

I would bump Stellar Blade up a spot to replace FF7Rebirth, since Stellar Blade’s trophy list is practically perfect while FF7Rebirth’s is so incompetently curated the game’s own director had to publicly apologize for his miserable, selfish failure. That alone should bump FF out of podium position.

Good to see Jez and Paul on their knees. They should spend more time down there instead of shooting their mouths off on that which they know little about.

Good. I have less than no interest in streaming any games through the cloud, and my interest in pc fades rapidly the more headaches and hangups and things that come between me and actually playing the darn game.

The recipe for fun isn’t complicated:
1) Sit in comfy chair
2) Hold controller
3) Turn on beautiful 4K 144hz OLED
4) Enjoy fantastic exclusive title that makes me glad I bought the console

Shadow of the Erdtree overshadowed almost everything; I forgot how much really solid DLC we actually got.

The Alan Wake stuff is brilliant, Stellar Blade’s was pretty nifty, and FF16’s was surprisingly good (aside from that survival mode trash that needed to have been left on the chopping block. What a tedious chore it was to slog through that filth. Wouldn’t have bothered if these scummy devs hadn’t forceably attached trophies to it. Thankfully you can use those boosters to sleepwalk through that garbage, which is exactly what I did because that crap isn’t worth playing legit).

So who’s to blame for the trash trophy list in the first FF7R? Who is the selfish scum responsible, Nomura or someone he should have been policing but failed to do so? Will we get a public apology from him like we did with Hamaguchi-chan for his incompetence?

I should probably mention I have the platinum—but just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should be done. If I could design the best sports car ever made, do I have the right to mandate the steering wheel be made entirely of razor blades? Someone making decisions that stupid doesn’t deserve his or her job.

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