Cakefish

Sounds like some good changes to me.

The saving grace about it being a PC is that it doesn’t matter how many units it sells, it’ll be fully supported regardless. That was my big concern with XSX losing all its exclusives, what it means for third party support. At least I won’t have to worry about that with Helix. It means it’s still a viable option for me to consider purchasing.

Depends on the execution final product, but yes I absolutely would pay that amount for a high performance gaming machine assuming it’s high quality. Though the lower price the better, of course.

Well assuming Mr T’s jolly adventures in the Eastern territories doesn’t mess with my country’s economy too much 👀

As far as I can tell ‘dynamic pricing’ is a misnomer. It seems to be functionally the same as Xbox’s ’Just For You’ deals, with the difference being that Xbox is being fully transparent that it’s a special targeted deal for your account, while PlayStation seems to be obfuscating this — which I agree is definitely scummy behaviour. It just doesn’t sound like the dynamic pricing that the likes of Ticketmaster indulge in. I don’t have a PlayStation though, so basing this off what I’m reading, maybe it’s different to what Xbox is doing.

@Gunbeld the 22% were people like me who were happily buying PlayStation games on Steam lol

Can’t deny that porting games to PS5 was the death knell of Xbox, so I understand why Sony is choosing not to repeat their colossal mistake.

I played it via Game Pass. It’s okay. I didn’t enjoy it as much as reviewers did. The game is structured in quite a formulaic manner, there’s a lot of repetitive elements to each level — both combat and the actual structure of the levels/gameplay elements. Also the story is a bit all over the place, all the side characters are forgotten about almost as soon as they’re introduced, and the best character is sidelined in the latter third to focus on a really unlikeable character instead.

@ElectricWizard true, I do often make use of that option too! Loaded (formerly CDKeys) is great for that type of thing.

@sanderson72 as far as I understand it the £9.99 is the standard RRP and the £3.74 is the sale price? If so that’s exactly how it works on Xbox. You get offered random deep discounts on a select few games, typically ones that you’ve wishlisted or are in the same genre as other games you’ve purchased. It’s a fairly narrow selection of games though, I often see repeats being offered to me.

Worth noting Xbox has been doing this for donkey’s years. They’re called ‘Just For You’ deals. They don’t try to hide it though, it’s made very clear when you’re being offered targeted sales.

@Crimson_Raven they wouldn’t need to target it specifically. It’ll just simply run the PC build of games, which can scale to any hardware. But yeah, hard to see why developers would support the Microsoft Store when Steam would be the logical choice.

Starting to think that Asha the new head of Xbox should maybe take some notes from Sony’s lead here 👀

@Fiendish-Beaver that’s great to hear! I’m looking forward to resuming my play through when I get back home.

Well damn, I was one of the PC players happily playing Sony games on Steam. My PC had pretty much effectively become a PlayStation as I primarily use it to play games that I can’t access on my Xbox. So this’ll definitely impact me a lot.

Great stuff. Reddit folks seem to be saying performance is indeed noticeably improved on consoles. Balance changes are very welcome too. I was struggling a lot, despite being an experienced From Software player. Glad I decided to pause my playthrough. Sounds like the game’s gonna be in a much better state by the time I return to it after my current work trip. They said they plan to release more patches through March so this is only the beginning, but sounds like a good start. Just a shame it was needed in the first place, all UE5 games seem half baked at launch, such a crappy engine honestly.

Wishlisted on Steam 😊

Well I guess at least I definitely get to play Kena 2 on Steam, but it’s a shame that the future beyond that is starting to look more uncertain now.

Bought them only to close them down 4.5 years later, after not even one game launch. Waste of a talented team. I can’t see the logic in it. Sad news.

I really liked the first one. I wasn’t expecting a sequel as they kinda hinted they didn’t want to do one and intended do something new instead, had us all fooled there! Will wishlist as soon as it pops up on Steam.

@LiamCroft darn, I won’t be able to play at launch then without Friend Pass (as it makes no sense to buy two separate copies when it has been promised for future)

Well deserved! Best soulslike not made by From Software themselves, yes I fully agree with that statement. I look forward to the sequel.

Easy 100 mil by year’s end then due to the inevitable GTA6 boost.

@CutchuSlow it’s in the article; 18 years!

Economy is in bad shape. Inflation has beaten the country into submission. Cost of living is so high these days.

@evan23 @Jay767 @OldGamer999

The data for the USA has just been revealed and the Switch 2 got a 24% market share on BF compared to the 23% BF market share noted in this article. So a whopping difference of one singular percentage point. This idea that the UK is somehow anti-Nintendo really needs to stop!

Lies of P is another recent and fantastic Korean-developed game. More Korean games please! They have great taste.

I’m getting Déjà vu!

https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2024/02/ps5-is-entering-the-latter-half-of-its-life-cycle-says-sony

It’s just curious how they were saying the exact same thing back in Feb 2024. They really must be extending their original plans!

@Acquiescence be careful what you wish for! So much money has been invested in AI by all these mega corps that if the bubble were to suddenly just burst the global economy will take a huge beating (even more than it currently is!).

@kcarnes9051 I completely agree. Also the fact that 95%+ of games have 60fps performance modes. That’s a huge win over ye olde generations.

I enjoyed the original, despite the mediocre combat and level design. It felt unique in the genre because of the anime styling and focus on narrative.

So I’m totally up for some more anime cheese!

I also was impressed by the character creator in the original, so I’m really glad that they’re keeping custom player characters in this sequel.

Sounds promising, I’m pretty excited for this. Hope it ultimately reviews well.

@Kiefer-Sutherland yeah, I mean weapon wheel ammo crafting. It’s certainly not the end of the world, just feels a bit tedious after a while to always having to bring that up to craft more ammo. The higher level machines are very tanky and you inevitably burn through a lot of ammo in those fights. Upgrading ammo pouches obviously helps a lot, but then my complaints about the tedious upgrade resource farming comes into play. From my experience, in Forbidden West, Spike Throwers are the best weapon class - highly recommend them! Tonnes of damage dealt, so less need for constant ammo crafting and they knock down opponents often allowing for critical strikes with the spear. They became my go-to weapon class for much of the game.

I finished Forbidden West’s Burning Shores campaign last night. What a game, really good stuff. I enjoyed it even more than Zero Dawn Remastered. The whole character arc of the Burning Shores would’ve been better off as part of the main campaign I think, as the story beats and character development do feel rather rushed being crammed into a DLC expansion. What’s there is good, it just needed more room to breathe to feel natural. The final boss sequence was a pretty darn cool spectacle. The whole thing is a bit bittersweet knowing that Lance Reddick sadly passed away, but Sylens is such a great character I really hope that they keep him in the third game despite this, which is credit to his acting talent in bringing that character to life.

Brilliant game overall, but I hope they improve the upgrade system in the next one because OMG farming for the weapon/armour/pouch upgrades is so incredibly tedious and boring. Weapon wheel could also be streamlined I feel (why can’t I change weapons and equip coils there instead of having to go into inventory?). Also the constant pausing the action to craft ammo feels unnecessary busywork.

As someone who preordered, I’m still very salty over the abysmal state that the game launched in. I’ll go into this sequel with significantly more scepticism and caution. I learnt that lesson the hard way. Even after all the patches the game still cannot hope to compete with the quality and polish of Lies of P in my opinion, so I hope to see significant improvements in this sequel.

@Flaming_Kaiser yes exactly. Windows is the singular platform now, with Xbox as one of the game clients being offered. Xbox is just being rolled into PC, it’ll no longer be a distinct entity on the software side.

@Anya-chan why bother blocking their games from running on this Windows device in particular though? As you said yourself it poses absolutely no threat at all to the PS6. So Sony would just be losing money from potential customers by doing that for no real benefit whatsoever.

@Medic_alert Hardware will almost certainly be sold for profit and not subsidised. They will heavily promote Game Pass Ultimate in the console-like default UI, just like on XSX currently. Finally, I think this this is their way to counter the very real threat of Steam OS devices.

@GeeEssEff I already have a PC, but not one that can play my XSX library nor one that is optimised for a living room centric, console-like experience. Taking my PC and plopping it in front of my TV would just result in a suboptimal experience, Windows 11 is really not designed for controller-only input.

It's going to be surreal playing Sony published games on my next Xbox - in the best way possible!

It explains why they gave up on exclusives, they're just transitioning Xbox from a closed console platform over to PC instead, so simply have no need for exclusivity anymore.

I don't think Sony's PC strategy will change. They will still have their 1-2 year timed exclusivity to justify the PS6 hardware. And the next Xbox will no longer be subsidised hardware so will cost a lot more upfront than the PS6, so it's not going to threaten PS6 in any meaningful way.

Sensible. It’s a lot easier to scale graphics and other game systems up than down. Slap path tracing on it and you’ll bring a RTX 5090 to its knees easily. Good base level performance also benefits PC optimisation for mid-low range hardware.

It’s at the top of my Steam wishlist, but the surprise launch of Lies of P: Overture means it’ll have to wait a while longer. Which itself must wait in turn for me to finish Horizon: Forbidden West which I’m only a third of the way through so far (including Burning Shores). So much to play this summer!

What a week! Switch 2 launch and SGF! Love to see it.

5th - 8th will be the most interesting few days for gaming news we’ve had in years. Mostly thanks to the new console launch, but still I’m very interested in all the announcements for other platforms too. Lies of P: Overture, Tides of Annihilation, Little Nightmares 3, Reanimal - these all need release dates. Not to mention all the brand new stuff that could be announced.

My most anticipated release this year. I am so hyped to return to Krat.

Unfortunately the souls community has many hypocrites amongst us, who simultaneously defend the lack of difficulty options in From’s games as Miyazaki’s creative vision (fair enough), but then are the first to criticise other developers when they decide their creative vision for their game includes giving players menu-selectable difficulty modifiers. Not every soulslike has to strictly abide by Miyazaki’s vision, developers should be allowed to introduce difficulty options into their game if they want to expand the potential playerbase. There shouldn’t be a backlash, what does it take away from your experience of the game if others choose to play it on an easier difficulty mode?

Split Fiction in top 10, love to see it!

I will be purchasing it for sure, it’s at the top of my wishlist. I just have Horizon: Forbidden West to get through beforehand.

It’s currently the second top seller on Steam (once you subtract Steam Deck) and the third top seller on PlayStation. Isn’t it a bit premature to call it a commercial failure?

As to the difference with Doom Eternal; well Eternal did not launch on Game Pass, while The Dark Ages did. That’s one obvious aspect. The other one is that this has been a fiercely competitive period for games, as clear GOTY forerunner Clair Obscur and massively popular Oblivion Remastered are currently sucking up much of the oxygen in the room.

Again though, I think it’s a bit too early to denounce the game as a sales flop.

There's something about the design of the protagonist that's making me avoid the game in all honesty. I can't really explain what it is, something just feels off about him to me.

@Oram77 haha yes, I’ve heard the game is great on its own merits beyond the super sexualised protagonist, which is why I’m very interested in playing. I don’t really mind the sexiness at all, I just hope it’s not too much of a distraction when actually playing. When a game goes too fan servicey it can prove somewhat distracting and immersion-breaking; for example, there’s a character in Code Vein that definitely fits that description!

Oof £60 is quite pricey (all the other recent Sony games on Steam have been £50). I do really want to play it though.

I played it on XSX but seeing as Pure Xbox haven’t bothered covering this I’ll comment here. It’s my GOTY so far without doubt and I’ve played it three times over already. Fantastic game, 10/10. I love to see it doing well in the sales charts. Hazelight deserve all the success.

The article and comments seem a bit unnecessarily confrontational and hostile to Xbox players? We did pay to be able to access to the game, Game Pass is not a free service. This shouldn’t be a foreign concept to PlayStation fans as PS Plus exists and also provides day 1 games - such as Stray. Do I now get to passive-aggressively berate PlayStation players for not supporting the developers of Stray? I feel we should be celebrating the success of the game rather than accusing subscription users of being free riders (again, Game Pass is not free lunch!).

Given that Elden Ring is my favourite game of all time my hype for this is surprisingly low. They really restricted the game’s appeal by having no option for two player co-op I think. I can find time to play two player games quite easily, but each additional player that you add on makes it exponentially more difficult to schedule a time that everyone is available for. I’m not even sure if I’ll buy at launch because I don’t know how much free time my brothers will have to spare over the summer. If I just needed the one brother I could dedicate plenty of time, but two is a tough ask. And yeah you can play single player, but it’s clearly designed for co-op play so I don’t feel I’d be getting the full experience if I went that route.