Carnage

I dozed off a few times towards the end but I watched most of the pre-show and the show. Neither of my predictions (a Media Molecule reveal and a Helldivers 2 new phase announcement) happened but I enjoyed the show. Ontos, Phantom Blade Zero and Saros were my highlights.

Looks amazing.

The action looks intense (very Returnalesque) and Housemarque hasn’t disappointed me yet so I’ll be there on day 1.

‘Larian’s biggest game’ is all the info I need but some gameplay would have been nice.

The combat looks great. I didn’t need Chris to return but I’m fine with it.

The city scene looks wild. I’ll give the demo a try when it hits PSN.

Looks fun. I never played any of the Lego games but I enjoyed a couple of the Lego movies including the Batman one.

I loved SOMA and this looks really amazing.

Didn’t expect a new protagonist but it looks phenomenal.

4Loop’s gameplay looks fun though as a big Helldivers fan I’m not in the market for another online co-op game.

@HonestHick You clearly have no idea what you are talking about. Sony fully funded both Helldivers from their inception. Helldivers 1 started on PS4 and Vita and was later ported to PC.

I own all the old KZ stuff already but it’s nice it’s coming around again.

The guns are solid (though like all guest stuff they can’t be upgraded/modified like normal guns) but the best thing about the pack is the armor, whose multi element resistance (acclimated, which provides 50% resistance to gas, fire and electricity) was once unusual but which has now been almost equaled by the Dust Devils warbond (only 40% elemental resistance but also a 20% throwing range bonus). The only advantage Dust Devils armor has (IMHO) is it offers a heavy variant.

It’s also worth noting the Helghast armor looks very cool, especially the glowing red eyes of the helmets.

WB’s game division management has been awful of late but Netflix’s is even worse. Netflix recognizing that they lack the skills/temperament/incentive to manage a profitable game division strikes me as reasonable. It’s a damn tough business. Along those lines the ‘Netflix for gaming’ model hasn’t demonstrated that it is commercially viable yet. Games aren’t like tv shows or movies where many fans demand a constant stream of stuff, a few games a year satisfy the vast majority of gamers just fine. .

@PuppetMaster Don’t know about the quality (haven’t played any of the big Chinese made games) but the Chinese pop culture market is huge and like a lot of markets, values stuff which speaks to it. To not invest in China is to leave a lot of money on the table.

It’s incredible that Ne Za 2 is the biggest animated movie ever and made almost all its money in China. On the flipside lots of markets are cool with stuff shaped by cultures and myths they don’t know much about (Black Myth Wukong made most of its money in China but did well among Soulslike fans everywhere).

I think breaking FF7 into three big, separate parts (seen as the safest of safe bets) was a mistake. The first two are fine games but the fact Squenix is pouring more resources into FF7 remakes than they are into modern FFs (thus far just FF16 though I guess we might get 17 before the generation ends in a few years).

I’ll also note Squenix’s competition has gotten stronger (nods towards Clair Obscure and the modern Personas) and fans are more willing to look elsewhere. I thought the Shadow Hearts series (especially the second) was a great series on par with Square’s work but it never built up much of a fanbase.

Looks promising. It will be wild if the VR update of Flight Simulator 2024 hits before Aces of Thunder. I’m still on the fence.

86 games played, 1750 hours played, 2,355 gaming sessions.

Helldivers 2 - 764 hours
Two Point Museum - 181 hours
Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero - 169 hours
Ghost of Yotei - 94 hours
The Last Spell - 80 hours

Nice. The Alters is an excellent character based strategy game with lots of hard choices and branching paths I didn’t fully explore but I did play it several times (I saw one good(ish) ending in which most survived, but many bad ones).

My dance card is kinda full at the moment but I will jump back into it soon to check out the new content.

There is a rumor a new wave of Helldivers 2 content will be unveiled at the Game Awards this year (last show saw the start of the squid invasion of SuperEarth).

I am hoping Media Molecule’s next game gets unveiled. Littlebigplanet 1&2, Tearaway and Dreams are all great fun though Dreams didn’t catch on the way the LBPs did.

I love Returnal (and Housemarque’s prior arcade style games) so I’ll preorder this.

Thus far I’ve been playing Sektori (a twin stick shooter I suck at but the few minutes it takes to kill me are glorious), Luminees Arise (wonderfully trippy), GT7 (haven’t messed much with the new content because I am working on winning 1st on an older track), Helldivers 2 (which got a new warbond with an insane new shotgun as well as the long requested mini gun but also got new lava worlds which introduced new mission types including an incredibly brutal new extraction mission), Roboquest VR (gorgeous cell shaded roguelike fps with some crazy weapons and a ton of enemy variety), Demon School (which has a pixelart style and is kind of a fusion of Persona and a squad based tactics game and has become my game of choice when playing on Portal) and a bit of V Racer Hoverbike (I am having trouble with this one time challenge, missing the mark by .007 seconds at one point).

I would like to check out Path of Exile 2 (which just got a major update) and start on Ghost Town (VR puzzle/adventure game) but time will tell. I normally don’t get in this much gaming time but there are upsides to having a cold 😁.

Huge news. Netflix has been winding down its game division so I doubt WB’s long struggling game will do any better under its new leadership. I can’t imagine how the other divisions will fare.

It’s been months since I played Dreams but there are a lot of talented creators there and the engine is both easy to use and incredibly flexible.

As I noted in a long post I once made on Dreams I think what hurt it was the lack of any form of multiplayer at launch (offline co-op hit months after launch) and the fact the campaign was pretty simple (more a demo of the things the engine was capable of than a proper game).

I’m reading the Power Pack is only $30. I would have probably bit the bullet even at $50 since I have put in hundreds of hours into GT7 partly due to all the free updates including PSVR2 and Pro support.

Sektori is brutal fun, a bullet hell with deck builder elements (for ship upgrades) and a pulsing techno soundtrack. It’s wild how the battlefield is constantly morphing and enemies are spawning in the arena in weird patterns (it telegraphs shifts so you have at least a bit of time to get out of the way of incoming walls and enemies).

Not a Fortnite guy but that event was a fun watch.

Cool. Looked gorgeous on my Pro at launch but I look forward to my next playthrough being even prettier.

Hirogami was never on my radar so I am fine with the acquisition of the company. Churning out content tied to a small handful of franchises is safe and safety is no small thing given the amount of churn in the industry.

No complaints here. I’m perfectly happy with my PS5 Pro (and my Portal and my PSVR2). The hardware is nice and the library is wide and deep.

I’m currently playing Roboquest VR (lots of weird guns and for my money the best VR fps since Synapse), Sektori (a gorgeous twin stick shooter from an ex-Housemarque developer very in line with their 2D games and of course Geometry Wars), Helldivers 2 (whose intense co-op action reminds me of arcade classics like Smash TV) and Luminees Arise (I admittedly suck at it but I love the audiovisuals).

Well deserved. I’ve only played through it once on hard so far but it’s a great game. Well paced, atmospheric and the absorption mechanic makes every fight intense until the last enemy is dead.

I’m not a Fortnite fan and I’m not wild about the artstyle but I enjoyed most of Kill Bill so I’ll watch the new chapter if/when it hits streaming services.

While it’s not for me I respect how long Fortnite has been popular and how like Minecraft and Roblox it has become a platform many gamers (and some developers) spend all their time in.

The mini gun has medium penetration (light penetration was a possibility since a lot of fully automatic weapons fall into that category) and like other guns with backpacks one ammo pickup will only partially refill it.

Based on chatter among randoms this morning between dives I expect it to be phenemonenally popular (among people who play Helldivers anyway 😋) once it hits.

Also the chainsaw sword sounds like it will be hands down the best melee weapon (aka the tallest midget). It starts off medium penetration but kind of like the dual sickle damage increases over time so it can eventually cut through even heavy armor.

I’m glad the content drought is over. In my experience (I am gaming on a Pro though I crossplay with all sorts of randoms) the crashing was resolved weeks ago so I have been using the new content pause to play with some of the weirder weapons.

The mini gun and the assault rifle with grenade launcher under barrel look very useful but I think like the arc drone the fire drone will result in a lot of friendly fire deaths.

The chainsaw sword looks fun. I’m not a big melee guy but it’ll be nice to see people running around with the chainsaw rather than the one true flag.

I was a Bethesda fan for a long time (since the first Elder Scrolls on PC) and they have always shipped games buggy.

Early on people (including me) assumed that their limited resources and the large scope and freedom of their games precluded proper polishing but as the years passed and Bethesda got richer and more successful and other developers started offering polished worlds with lots of freedom, it became clear Bethesda just don’t care to do the hard, tedious work of finding and killing bugs.

People who didn’t want to become modders/mod users or alpha testers paying for the privilege moved on, those who remain (quite a few) are content with Bethesda’s way of doing things.

It’s bizarre that AI is hoovering up that many resources. I doubt a sudden hard crash of the AI market would be good for the economy (billions of dollars would dissolve) but a return to sanity would be nice.

I don’t think one stumble dooms this franchise but it does demonstrate that too big to fail is not a thing in the commercial art industry. Games, movies, tv shows, books annd suchlike are luxuries and if fans either stop having fun or decide something else is more fun, sales fall off a cliff. In this case I believe the ‘something else’s’ were Arc Raiders and Battlefield 6.

Also while I am sure neither the campaign nor the ads are focal points of the CoD community there was an intense backlash to humorous celeb skins in the prior CoD so giving the new CoD humorous celeb filled ads and a really trippy campaign didn’t help.

I’m happy for Ghost of Yotei, Silent Hill F and Helldivers 2. All three are games I’ve had a lot of fun with.

I’m not a competitive multiplayer guy anymore, but Battlefield’s more grounded world/outfits seen to be what many estranged CoD fans are looking for. This might be the start of an intense Overwatch vs Marvel Rivals type rivalry.

Valve stated the new system will be an open platform so them making a profit on every system sold (same as they did with prior excursions into the hardware space) makes perfect sense.

I suspect that like the Steam Deck it will find an audience sufficiently large to make the exercise worthwhile.

I don’t spend much time in my system’s dashboard but additional game data is nice.

@RunGMhx My mistake. I said I See You but the game I was thinking of was Before Your Eyes. I remember the game better than I remembered the title.

I enjoy my PSVR2 (played Lumines Arise, V Racer Hoverbike and GT7 this morning) but clearly PSVR2 in particular and VR in general has not caught on with the mainstream.

While Sony owned developers not named Polyphony Digital have little appetite for PSVR2 it is a nice piece of hardware (OLED is a beautiful thing) and it has a lot of fun games in its library (RE4, Synapse, Rez Infinite, No Man’s Sky, Humanity, Tetris Effect, Before Your Eyes, Moss Books 1 and 2 and Pistol Whip spring to mind) and some promising ones on the way (nods towards Roboquest VR, Thief and MS Flight Simulator).

If VR ever catches fire it won’t be this generation (the tech will need to get cheaper and smaller) but as with everything stuff can be fun before (or after) it’s genre or what have you is popular.

Battlefield 6 and Arc Raiders are two very recent massive multiplayer hits who probably target a lot of the same people CoD does.

Things are not going to be any easier for CoD next year if GTA6 (now a multiplayer driven franchise) isn’t delayed again and hits in November.

I don’t trust the government much but happily its intervention doesn’t seem to be necessary since the market is speaking and CoD sales are trending well below those of its predecessor

CoD is huge and has been for a long time but nothing is indestructible. Slop (not just AI slop but slop in general) has damaged the sales of a lot of once huge franchises. I don’t think the average gamer cares much about AI (nods towards Arc Raiders) but design decisions that negatively impact their experiences drive gamers away.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/christopher-dring-call-of-duty-black-ops-7-had-a-smaller-uk-retail-physical-launch-than-battlefield-6-61-down-when-compared-to-black-ops-6.1356259/

I feel bad for Tango Gameworks. They released a game most of the people who played it (including Phil Spencer) but they were out of step with MS’s reorientation so they got the chop. Tango were then bought by another big publisher who has subsequently announced a vision which seems to be incompatible with them.

Well deserved. There are a wealth of great games out there catering to a wide range of gamers and many people just want a hassle free way to play them, so while I get other spheres of gaming such as mobile are growing faster there are a lot of console gamers out there. Sony has remained dedicated to the console vision so it’s unsurprising it reaped the benefits. Developers flock to the system (by all accounts the cheapest/easiest to develop for) and gamers flock to the system (not the cheapest console but it has the widest developer support and the price/performance balance is reasonable).

As a fan of Returnal, Horizon Forbidden West, Helldivers 2, GT7, Astrobot, God of War Ragnarok, Spiderman 2, Ghost of Yotei and Death Stranding 2 I’d argue Sony haa offered a better lineup of games than some on the internet give it credit for. Games generally take longer to make this gen but they usually have longer tails in the form of paid and free post launch content.

I love the Disgaea series and enjoy action games but this trailer didn’t do much for me. The main character looks like he is from a different world than everything else (which might be part of a running gag) and the action looks kinda ‘meh’.

I am surprised Art Dink is still around. Never cared for Tail of the Sun or Aquanaut’s Holiday but I absolutely loved Carnage Heart (a game where one built and programmed mechs).

Broadly speaking their PS1 games were spiritually similar to modern indie games (low budget and often experimental). While there are ginormous indie successes it’s worth keeping in mind most such games fail because when you do something outlandish maybe you find out there isn’t enough of an audience to make your game profitable no matter how well it executes its concept.

I remember reviewers rubbishing the original Carmage Heart for not offering direct control of mechs like Armored Core did and clearly most gamers agreed with that position.

I don’t think Artdink found much of an audience outside of Japan so I don’t blame them for skipping a system whose marketshare in Japan is marginal at best. I doubt I’ll play any more of their games but I wish them.

I just spent two hours playing Luminees on PSVR2 (I took the day off but it didn’t unlock until 9 in the morning). Astounding audio visuals.

As I did with Tetris Effect once I fail (falling block puzzlers are not my strong suit) I just restart from the beginning just so I can see all the weird stuff again and try to do better on prior levels. Some really bizarre stuff goes on with the audio visuals. There are a lot of stages and while each has a theme, they often go through massive changes mid stage. I keep forgetting to look at the upcoming blocks due to all the stuff going on but as a fan of Luminees and Tetris Effect I am enjoying this immensely.

For me this was a pretty VR heavy weekend. I put a couple hours into Of Lies and Rain, an action heavy adventure set in a world destroyed by an evil AI. While it won’t win any prizes for originality so far it’s very fun.

Reloading guns is nerve racking business in the middle of a fight. Each gun loads differently but for an empty pistol you have to eject the spent clip, grab a clip from your backpack, slap it into your gun and rack the slide. To save a bit of time you can pop the empty clip with one in the chamber and spare the second it takes to rack the slide. You can also just grasp a clip and hold it in your free hand until you need to reload it and eject partially full clips (and pick them off the ground later after the fight). I’ve died trying to reload a few times. That being said death doesn’t set you back real far (the start of a room).

Also I started VRacer Hoverbike. It’s Wipeout with hoverbikes and exactly the sort of over the top arcade racer I’ve been waiting for. I think it feels quite a bit different though I confess I only used stick and trigger/button controls in Wipeout (IIRC there was some sort of motion control option). In VRacer I use a mix of stick and motion controls (I steer with the stick and brake and accelerate with the triggers but I lean to get my biker to lean).

In a nice touch you can choose if and how much your camera is tied to your racer (who moves around constantly and is often leaning to one side) as opposed to just being positioned behind the vehicle and remaining stable. My time dramatically improved when I went balls to the wall and fully tied the camera to character. There are a lot of tracks (I think 15) and race types and of course all the tracks have reverse modes.

There are extensive visual customization options which I dipped my toe into despite not having any drawing skill. You can paint anything you want, write text and slap it on the vehicle or just do what I did and just set the colors of bike parts.

Given that the studio formerly known as 343 decided to toss the old Halo engine aside for UE5, laid off a bunch of people and rebranded itself it would be shocking if they continued support for Infinite.

Master Chief is iconic even among non-gamers but as Lara Croft can tell you, a high level of character recognition doesn’t necessarily translate into game sales or continued engagement (a key metric in live service games).

Shrugs A lot of developers/publishers and fans want franchises to live forever but eventually a majority of one of those two groups (each key to success) gets their fill and moves on. That doesn’t lessen the significance of past games.