Dogbreath

After slaughtering their golden goose TLoU IP, I can’t help thinking an Uncharted would be a guaranteed hit and restore their reputation.

They would need to stay boringly safe in my view. Stick to Nate, no risky character choices.

They've worked hard to earn back gamers respect and restore their reputation since the games launch.

I appreciate the Pro support and will check it out.

Like others though, I put a fair bit of time into the game but I just don't think it's that great a game, nothing to do with the launch issues. I bounced off.

To make this topical, I actually far prefer the "game" element of Starfield as far as enemy encounters and gun play are concerned.

They are "selecting" people.

As a 50 year old, bald, white, male, I ain't being selected for Jack.

He's got a great voice and delivery, no doubt about it.

I'm not sure the comparisons to Skyrim and Fallout are particularly helpful.

They are different titles, and I certainly don't think Skyrim and Fallout are all that once the rose tinted specs are removed.

You can also look at Witcher 2 and Witcher 3, which are quite different games and I wouldn't say one is better than the other.

Baldur's Gate 3 isn't particularly open world either yet no one had any complaints about that aspect, so I don't know where this "essential for an RPG" argument came from.

I think Starfield sits somewhere between Outer Worlds and Fallout, doing some things better than both, and some things worse.

It's a game in its own right that I found quite enjoyable, and like all the games I've mentioned in this post, and many I haven't (Cyberpunk, Crimson etc) they are all 8/10's.

Anyone buying it will complete it and not be able to argue that they didn't get their money's worth on a time v enjoyment v cost basis.

As others have pointed out, we seem to have taken a step backwards, given that I was able to scan my face onto my character in Rainbow Six on the 360.

The cameras on our phones now, many of which have lidar, are science-fiction technology compared to what I had back in the 360 days.

Why the hell doesn’t the PlayStation app allow us to scan ourselves and integrate with character designers in Games?

It is really quite pathetic that such ideas were never built on, and that the industry is stagnating and collapsing under the weight of sequel-itis where games barely iterate, and innovation is dead.

The original was lightning in a bottle, they should have left it there and left the legacy untainted.

Instead, they should’ve created a completely brand-new IP, which they were clearly capable of doing because this game itself was a new IP.

Games should be reviewed based on what I'd get when I hand over £60 on launch day.

Not what I "might" get if they fix lots of the flaws, weeks/months/years later (or never).

Sites should not wait for that to happen before issuing scores. Launch day is launch day. Like hell will developers wait before taking your credit card payment. If they are taking the payments, they can damn well take a score.

If a site wants to produce an updated review later then that's up to them, although such practices will only encourage more developers to rush out incomplete broken rubbish on day one, as if that wasn't a big enough problem already.

The fans criticising IGN are very hypocritical, given that they outright told lies and mislead potential buyers, denying the existence of problems that we know for a fact they witnessed, and even the developers admitted existed in later patch notes when they fixed/reduced them!

@Nightcrawler71 doesn't appear to be any difference in balanced.

Both suffer from an over-sharpened look.

@dwayne91 absolutely. I'm all for making jokes, but they should do it about everyone, else they look like hypocritical cowards.

They are like the kid who picks on the smallest nerdy kid in class who won't fight back, but won't say boo to the hardnut who'd square up to them in a second.

Pretenders with no bottle don't convince or get any respect from me.

As far as the store "cultivation" is concerned, I find that a bit hypocritical too.

We have these games that give out trophies for doing nonsense like clicking on a cookie, and that's apparently a bad thing. Yet AAA games give me achievements for literally completing the tutorial or getting 100 kills, things are literally impossible to NOT achieve by simply pressing X for 10 minutes.

Also those titles are no more repetitive than 90% of what you do in MMO's like FF14 or ESO. Plus what value do Trophy scores even have? Do people put them on their dating site profiles as a flex?

Then you have this subjective issue of "quality". Well, having seen the bungling mess of 90% of AAA UE5 games, I don't think we want to start booting games off the store for being "low quality". I'd take a sledge hammer to any game with stutter or screen tearing for example.

Then you have "clones". Such as these American Truck sim games that look similar to the real game, even though it isn't on PlayStation. Well to me, anyone with a modicum of intelligence can tell it's not that particular game, and we can always talk about the glut of AAA clones, copies and sequels.

Seems to me that if there is big money AAA cash in it for Sony, they don't care what's on the store...

@darylb24 Yup I always found cross buy on PC/Xbox to be excellent.

Depending on where we were in the hardware cycle, I could play on console at the start of the generation, and then switch to PC (with the exact same games/save-games, without having to buy the games twice) when the consoles got long in the tooth later in the generation.

Or console downstairs on the TV, and PC upstairs in the office.

Microsoft were the leaders and Sony were following.

Once Microsoft effectively gave up on their console business, Sony smelt the monopoly power and immediately went anti-consumer with some rapid backpedaling.

Meanwhile the comments here are tragically predictable and reflective of modern society in general.

They'd gladly cut off their nose to spite their face, and screw themselves over, if they thought someone else was losing more.

I attended a Team Building away day at work 20 odd years ago. One of the first exercises was that the leader gave us all a balloon and a piece of string. He told us to blow up our balloons and tie one end of the string to the balloon, and the other end to our ankle.

He then said "I'm going to start a 30 second timer, who ever has an inflated balloon at the end is a winner".

Guess what all the thickos did and the more I shouted stop, the more they did it. That's early 21st Century society to a tee.

Reminds me a bit of the 80's, where certainly in the early 80's as personal computers took off, getting into the business of building computers seemed like a good idea and something kids should learn as they moved into higher education.

In reality it wasn't a good idea, it became very low margin as these things were bashed out in overseas mass production sweatshops, and the real money was in design but mainly in the software sector.

Knocking out consumer electronics in the 2020's and beyond isn't going to be where the margins are.

Ironically something similar is happening in the Electric Vehicle market, where China are knocking out millions of low margin EV's, and major car firms like BMW aren't able to offer enough product differentiation to deliver the margins required for a premium product.

That's the issue Sony faced with their TV's.

I am typing this on a KTC monitor, which is better or even smokes your big name brand monitors, but at a fraction of the price.

Sony are right to bail out and focus on the content if it wants growth and margins.

I still don't get the negativity. I think it's just people still bitter about it not being available on PS from launch.

It's a good game. If you like your Bethasda RPG's, it's more of the same but with better graphics. Far larger in scope than your Outer Worlds etc, and just as good.

It won't change your life...people expect far too much. Skyrim and Fallout are not 10/10's, not even close yet you all loved them.

But why look a gift horse in the mouth? You are getting a very good RPG, with Xbox and PC owners having done the beta testing such that you get the best polished version.

Why not grasp it with both hands and enjoy it, instead of being negative because you had to wait?

If it had launched on PS5, the narrative would be entirely different.

I owned it.

It was a competent game and probably one of the best racers PlayStation had to offer for their users.

PlayStation obviously lacked Forza Horizon and Motorsport in the day, and I personally consider the modern Gran Turismo to absolute crap for the single-player career focussed player like me, who wants something similar to the original GT on PS1.

DriveClub was a franchise that could have filled that gap, in addition to Grid which never quite did it for me, or god forbid NFS which was something else entirely.

Further iterations would have improved the handling which wasn't quite there IMO, but they were on the cusp of greatness and could have left GT to the online-only types who build a replica cockpit in their basement.

@ChromaticDracula those are cherry picked bad examples.

It works ok on Portal - if anything I found it worked as well or better than streaming from the console and didn't require you to have the console powered on and the game installed taking up drive space. Although Sony are a long way from the best example as their bitrate and latency are 5 to 10 years behind the curve.

On market leader Geforce Now, games run at full 4k, 120fps with HDR. If I recall it requires about 40mb bandwidth for that, which most people have these days and fibre is gradually replacing ADSL across the UK.

Crimson Desert runs at higher settings than Pro's quality mode but at a locked 60fps or higher, where as Pro drops to 20fps. No discernable latency either.

Stadia and Switch are not representative of the tech in 2026, which can now rival home consoles.

This is not to say it is for everyone. People can still have a home console. Rather it will be like physical discs v digital games: you still have discs but an ever increasing percentage of gamers are migrating away.

@lazarus11 there is a big difference between asking questions about a game, and answering those questions…

As it happens, I have the game and I’m literally playing the intro and have it paused as I type this.

Obviously I did not have the game when I asked the question about performance a week ago, otherwise I wouldn’t have been asking the question…

Having seen suspiciously conflicting answers from different users on forums and YouTube, I had to wait for the Digital Foundry horses mouth to report on it before choosing a platform to buy it on. Fortunately, during that period, a number of patches were released too, which further aided my decision-making.

I think it will.

PS5 is going to have quite a long life, some very big titles are coming out, and the alternatives are also increasing in price.

If you don’t own a PS5 already, but are in the market, the PS5 is likely still by far the best value option out there.

The Switch is in a different segment, Xbox doesn’t need any explanation, and the cost of building a PC has exploded too, plus PC will not see GTA6 for quite some time.

I think people will complain, but will suck it up and keep steadily buying the PS5. Plus, as I always say, if you account for inflation, the price tag isn’t quite as bad as it looks.

@Pat_trick well yeah it could be one of two things.

1, Fans deliberately posting misinformation to boost sales of a game they've been cheerleading for.

2, Unintentionally inaccurate answers that were provided in good faith, and they were just mistaken based on their subjective inability to detect performance issues.

I can give people the benefit of the doubt and accept option 2, but my advice to those posters is this:

If you are playing a 60fps performance mode that you believed didn't drop a frame, but have now to your shock realised that it was actually stuttering down to 20fps, you might want to exercise caution before answering performance-related questions in future, lest someone loses £55.

I'll leave it there.

@Pat_trick

"Blah, blah, blah I don't agree with you therefore you're a liar speech."

This is no longer a discussion or debate where we come to an "agreement".

This news story is about the evidence and the facts. We didn't have the facts immediately following launch and had to trust what posters were saying in the comments.

Whereas now we are armed with the facts because Digital Foundry posted framerate graphs.

What those graphs prove, is that our trust was abused.

A significant number of people who posted in these comment sections deliberately posted misinformation. That's a fact.

They were so brazen that they even accused Push Square of lying in their review. But worse, they may have wasted a lot of people's hard-earned money who bought games under false pretences and unlike Steam, Sony don't have the best refund policy.

@Pat_trick poisoning the well fallacy.

Frame rate graphs do not lie.

Unlike the people commenting on here who hilariously claimed it ran at a flawless 60fps with no drops, when it actually drops to 20fps like an early Sega Saturn game.

They must have loaded Witcher 3 in error and got confused.

Question:

Do you want to pay a lot of money to play crap versions of home console games until your battery runs out after 90 minutes?

Or....

Do you want to pay a little bit of money to play the full fat home console experience for half a day before your battery goes flat?

99% of handheld use is in the home or within some other WiFi network.

It makes no sense to build a device with onboard processing, that is no where near as powerful as your latest home console so can't play the same games or has to play heavily compromised versions, is hideously expensive, heavy and has issues with cooling and battery life.

When a streaming handheld can be dirt cheap, deliver the same performance as the home consoles, and be lightweight with long battery life, why stick with the obsolete 1989 Gameboy concept?

A hybrid like the Switch has a place, but I've never bought AAA console titles on it. I'd only play such games on a streamer in future. Portal is the future of handheld for me.

@psmr In addition to the chip shortage, we are going to experience significant inflation over the next year or so due to the oil crisis. Possibly on a par with the inflation we experienced a few years back caused by money printing during the pandemic.

By 2030, a PS6 will very likely have a four figure price tag just by indexing your predictions.

Being entirely fair, of course, inflation hits everything so streaming will increase in price too. We could see a year of GFN increasing from £200 to £250.

Your salary won't keep pace of course. By the time PS6 is released I strongly believe that in real terms and relative to your salary, it will feel like £1000 would now.

@psmr pretty immature response.

You know perfectly well that we are talking about future market predictions, and that £1000 has been widely touted across the entire games media and industry experts as being a likely PS6 price point.

It's even in bold in the headline that you clicked on to get here. Dollar price usually equals GBP price. I didn't invent that number.

Even at £800, I don't think that alters the equations I listed much...

If we do the same maths that consumers will be doing in few years:

PS6:
*£1000 up front
*£60 per annum PSN Essential
*Ok performance at launch, stutter-fests after 3 years
*£1400 upgrade to PS6 Pro required after 4 years to avoid stutter
*£80 games
*Draws a fair amount of electricity
*Previous PlayStations produce significant fan noise

Geforce Now Ultimate:
*£1000 for 5 years subscription payable at £200pa, often with a new £50 game included free
*£0 online play subscription
*Vastly superior performance to PS6
*Minimal electricity usage
*no fan noise or heat
*free upgrades, so no £1400 charge to upgrade to a "Pro"
*£50 games
*Play anywhere included (PS6 owners have to increase sub cost for this)

Those are just the facts that consumers will have before them if they write it down on a piece of paper in a couple of years time and compare their options.

Not saying one is better than the other, but if I walk up to the average console gamer and hand them an invoice for £1000 to be paid up front, what do you think many will do?

Played it on PC/Xbox.

8/10 game. Decent title. Quite enjoyable. If you like Bethesda titles like Fallout, you will have a decent time and get your money's worth.

Much like Crimson Desert and Cyberpunk, it's just a game. It won't change your life.

As with many similar games, enjoyment can vary dramatically due to simple choices such as what type of weapon you are going to play with.

E.g. you might prefer to play a pistol wielding gunfighter in most games, but that might not work for you in another game and you prefer rifles. Or vice versa.

Glad people are enjoying it. I’m still mulling over which platform to buy it for, and waiting for further patches.

By then, there might be discounted keys for PC. On PlayStation, I don’t see this having massive discounts. It will probably hold its value like BG3. I.e. if I’m going to get it on PlayStation, I might as well crack on rather than waiting.

No one ever said it was a bad game, the disagreements came from those who had never played it, but had decided it was a 10 out of 10 before the game had even released.

Unfortunately, they then decided to be slightly less than frank on message boards, and e.g. “accidentally" failed to mention issues such as 10 frames per second slideshows on bosses etc. Granted, those issues were fixed, but it’s damaged trust in user reviews.

This was my game of the year when it came out. Absolutely exceptional game and one I will not forget for a long time.

I played on a mixture of Xbox, natively on PC, and the bulk of time on GeForce now. Strangely, I don’t recall any pop-in, but it was some time ago now.

I do feel the game didn’t need the combat sections, and they were only inserted to keep certain types of players happy, which to my mind was silly as those players won’t like this game anyway.

It worked best as a narrative based, walking sim and platformer. It only really needed the boss sections, which could easily have been done with some fairly simple and slick combat.

That being said, I just ploughed through those combat arenas on the easiest difficulty so as to quickly skip past them, and treated it as if it was a narrative platformer and walking sim.

@CVCubbington yeah those of us who purchased a large NVME drive a couple of years ago are certainly glad we did given the price rises.

That said, I see there are 2 TB PS5 compatible drives for £180. I wouldn’t say that was unreasonable or that large an increase over what I paid.

Back in the mid 2010s, I purchased a 1TB SATA SSD for that price.

If you think about the massive inflation since that time, the incredible improvement in read speeds, as well as double the capacity, I don’t see that £180 is anything to complain about.

If people want to keep multiple games continuously installed for some reason, then that’s the price you have to pay. Ultimately you only need one Game as a Service and your current single player game installed at any one time.

Modern Internet speeds allow game downloads in minutes rather than hours, or it can be left downloading overnight. Having permanent instant access to every title you own is a luxury with a pricetag!

When you lay off teams of people, there is always the chance that one of those individuals may have some kind of medical condition, disability or even a terminal illness.

That is not grounds for not laying them off though. Rather it is a simple factual decision as to whether that outputs are required anymore.

If they are no longer needed, they are no longer needed. You can’t hand a redundancy notice to someone with a mortgage and two young children because there is no longer any need to employ them, but tell a person with a health condition that you will pay them to sit on gardening leave just because "we are being nice".

Everyone being laid off has problems. Some more than others. Layoffs are not means tested.

@Andy22385 this is where we start getting into a lot of caveats.

Firstly if a game drops from 60 to 40 occasionally, and someone says "I have not noticed any frame drops", that's perfectly acceptable. I can believe they are genuine, acting in good faith and simply didn't notice.

Secondly if someone says "I've only played 20 hours and so far...." that's also fine, they are being upfront about not having seen everything and are acting in good faith.

Where I have a problem, and where it renders message boards completely untrustworthy as a source of advice, is where posters claim to have played long enough to have definitely experienced a boss where it turns into a slideshow, and where any player would have found that it impeded or severely impacted their ability to beat that boss.

Message boards become even more unreliable if people start assessing "I only saw X minutes out of Y hours of gameplay that were impacted, therefore I am going to report the game as having no frame drops".

This isn't Twitter of old with a character limit, so posters can explain how often it happened, and also where - i.e. does it impact key gameplay moments like boss fights, or just walking through a town as per Dragons Dogma 2.

I bought DD2 on PS5 Pro because I was given honest information and accepted the drops given where they occurred.

Where as I could have easily purchased CD before patch 1.01, on the basis that "the frame rate was bullet proof and doesn't drop a single frame in 100 hours of gameplay". Something that is not only false, but deliberately dishonest and not in good faith.

@Rich33 I think in this case those usual types who we see across a range of gaming forums and Youtube comments, who always claim/use the excuse that they can't detect fps drops have been exposed.

I've seen the videos. You can run down to the kitchen and make a cup of tea between frames, and players were finding it wasn't even registering their button presses properly. These were people telling porky pies about how far they'd got and what they'd experienced, out of fanboism.

As someone with £60 on the line, mulling over do it I buy it now or wait, and do it buy it on PC or PS5, I find that very disrespectful.

@Sulleymonster a serious fps drop that makes a boss a sideshow and is therefore game breaking for many players is certainly noteworthy.

That said, whilst a lot of people were able to beat the boss, there is absolutely no way it wasn't noticed as every player would be significantly impacted.

Therefore those claiming to have had no drops were clearly and irrefutably lying to readers of this board, either lying about the frame rate or lying about how much they had played and hadn't reached the boss.

My question is "why?".

I've been not only reading YouTube comments and reddit posts about 15fps on the Crowcaller boss, but seeing it with my own eyes as reputable streamers and let's players demonstrate it in action.

Now even the dev admits it was an issue and attempts to fix it.

Yet posters here who criticised the Push Square review have been claiming "50 hours in and never seen any drops"...

Xbox is dead.

They have a monopoly. You won't be getting great deals.

I can't be bothered to do the maths again, but as I said with the PS5 Pro and previous price increases, if you run these things through the inflation calculator and factor additional storage etc, you aren't seeing large "real term" increases versus the launch price.

Aside from some increases due to RAM, the bulk of price rises have been as a result of Governments printing vast sums of money, and as a result it's your money becoming worth less, but you perceive it as goods getting more expensive.

If we park next to each other in our cars, and you put yours in reverse and look out the side window, it will appear to you that I'm accelerating...

@Bob_Tempura yup the lighting issues exist on the PC too unless Ray Reconstruction is enabled.

The difference is huge, totally cleans up the flickering.

However I watched benchmarks of what RR does to the framerate on my 4080s and it made me cry, so it's not surprising the PS5 can't do it.

However I don't expect tearing and stuttering even in the balanced mode on PS5 Pro. The odd bit of pop in or instability with lighting is fine, but the damn thing at least has to run properly.

This is a "wait for a sale" for me.

It's a game I really want to play, rather than dismiss outright.

Oh and even as a Pro owner, it will have to be on Geforce Now, as the technical issues on console are too many and to severe to be fixed.

It's potentially something I could buy now for GFN, but even there it's still too "early access" to justify a £50 price tag. I expect a bigger discount if you want me to beta test your game.

The first poster nailed it.

For those younger readers who might be about to join the workforce, everything you do should be a ruthless decision for your own personal benefit.

Anything you do should either be for the money, or for enhancing your CV so that you have an exit strategy for getting more money.

Unless you work for your parents family business, you have zero investment in the future of your employer. It’s all about you and the compensation you receive now or in the future.

Never care about your employer, your colleagues, or their product.

This contradicts the vibe I was getting from the media and influencers.

I'd thought it was a massive success like Battlefield based off what they were saying.

Although again as an older gamer, and as I mentioned under another news story, the name Marathon has no recognition to a lot of gamers these days, particularly the young gamers.

Noting that old gamers like me have little interest in wasting our lives on an extraction shooter, where you can lose everything to no-life sweats.

That's a younger players genre, and they weren't playing a Mac game from the mid 90's. So really what's to attract them to this over rival products?

As a 50 year old it's disturbing that you stop categorising after 45!

Nice to see that we are quite numerous though.

The original and first gaming generation, who were brought up with games, before distractions like social media that now compete for the time of younger people.

Anyhow, I've always raised an eyebrow when I hear of franchises potentially being resurrected, when I point out that no one under 40 would likely have ever played the originals and as such there is no brand recognition and it's better to make original games.

I'm surprised that FF, which has received regular releases, wouldn't have a young audience though. It would appear that the younger audience actually don't game that much, and when they do, they are more into games as a service.

Sony are so lucky that the suits at Microsoft are so stupid and incompetent, that they couldn't hit the floor if they fell out of bed.

If you'd put a bunch of PG Tips chimps in charge of Microsoft back in 2018, Sony would have got its head kicked in given the catastrophic bungling, and would have faced a repeat of the 360/PS3 generation.

Just to weigh into the debate about journalists...

To be fair, millions of people had convinced themselves that this game would be the second coming of Christ, long before any reviews had been published.

The pre-orders of digital copies were proof of that.

No doubt millions had already decided in their heads that they'd go buy the physical copy on launch day, regardless of reviews.

Furthermore, when people have already convinced themselves that something will be amazing, they will ignore opinions to the contrary and seek out views that support their beliefs.

They could read 100 negative reviews, but will seek out the one positive review and treat that as gospel.

I'm not one to defend games journalists, but even if they'd given this game a 4/10 I wouldn't say they were wrong. Given that they've on average scored it very highly, I think the idea that they are "out of touch" is clearly flawed.

Given the issues with the game, I'd say a large swathe of gamers and the journalists got it wrong and over-rate it in it's launch day state.

@Intr1n5ic it's a perfect analogy.

How do similar games handle skills, powers and interaction?

You can learn to steer with right stick and accelerate/brake with left stick. None of that is difficult. Bruh just move the stick. EZ mode.

@Pat_trick imagine if a racing game put the steering on the right stick, accelerate and brake on the left stick, and used the triggers for gears.

Then they say "Get good. Y'all complaining because you aren't used to it".

It wouldn't fly. Don't imagine many people coming out to bat to defend that.

@iNightfarer moving a bit off topic, but I have a Samsung QD OLED for my PS5 Pro, but just recently I bought a Micro-LED monitor for my PC. One of those with thousands of individual lights and local dimming so you get close to pure black and mega brightness.

Have to say, I've come to the conclusion that OLED "ain't all that" in the face of the overwhelming brightness in HDR of the LED's. Swings and roundabouts, but overall I find the Micro-LED more pleasing.

So does my wallet, as it only cost me £330 and I prefer it to my £1400 TV. I'd recommend he cast his net a bit wider than the usual LG/Samsung OLED options as he can potentially get a better experience for a lot less money.

Sad to see. There are some pretty decent games in the Nacon portfolio.

Although I can't help thinking that whilst some are very respectable, they all fell slightly short of what was possible even with their more limited budgets.

I'd suggest one of the reasons there was a backlash against this game, is that regular average normies like me who have lives and don't spend all our time on social media, logged on one day and suddenly found ourselves being subjected to the most appalling insults and abuse.

A bit like when you come out of the toilets in a nightclub and immediately get punched in the face and find yourself in the middle of a massive brawl, without having any clue as to who is fighting who, and why.

In this case the reason given was that we supposedly didn't like a game that we hadn't seen or heard of before, because we'd been at work all day or out for a meal with the missus when it kicked off.

Then when we looked it up to see what the heck was going on, we could clearly see that it wasn't a great looking game and was visually unappealing.

Naturally we, who represent the majority of gamers, opted to side with those who were criticising the title, rather than those who'd been throwing unprovoked spiteful insults at us the second we logged on.

I see that behaviour is still going on in this thread. I'd say those of you doing that should reflect on the fact that you aren't the good guys, and actually harmed the product. I'm generally open-minded about games and would have given it a fairer crack of the whip if it weren't for you. Trying to insult people into spending money has NEVER worked.

If one of the chairs in the hospital was modelled by AI rather than a person, this affects me how?

If it reduces the development time and cost, which are out of control for modern AAA games, that’s really a good thing for me?

Someone will say that I should care about an artist losing their job, but those same people will quite happily order their McDonald’s in the restaurant using the touchscreen, or go through the self-service checkout in the supermarket.

Double standards me thinks. People only selectively care about the jobs of others.

@GamingGod there was a time when that would have been said about Bioware.

All those "journalists", Youtubers and "influencers" playing and hyping up this game in advance before we'd had our hands on it.

Yet not one of them mentioned this control issue to the developer?

Hmmmmmmmmmm

Neither did those journo's who get paid to provide dummy reviews?

Hmmmmmmmmmmm

Something stinks. Clearly the developers respond when people complain about it. So we must assume that no one had complained.

Did the access journalists keep quiet and loyally run their puff pieces, in order to retain access/review copies?