ElectricCity

I hope Ubi survive - they really know how to create beautiful-looking worlds - but suspect they might not. Started playing a new Japanese game last night and there was more story, interesting characters, and intrigue in the first 10 mins than in pretty much a whole Ubi game.

I don’t know much about IP law, but to my eye this looks like a blatant infringement of Guerilla’s IP. Some interesting questions include: how does Guerilla feel about having their work copy-pasted in this way; whether they knew about this new game before now; whether Guerilla and Sony may yet sue; and if they don’t, whether a commercial licensing deal of some kind has been done in the background.

@gingerfrog Enjoy your new PS Portal, and have a good recovery from your op.

Agree that Sony should take a long, hard look at how this all happened.

But maybe games journalists should also take a long, hard look at themselves and the role they played in this, too?

@nessisonett Completely agree. Your comments are always interesting. However, at the same time, the main problem with Ubi games today is not the environments, which invariably look detailed and spectacular, but the bland storytelling, forgettable scripts and indistinguishable characters. It’s almost as if at Ubi the game-world tail is wagging the story-telling dog: build a beautiful environment and then copy-paste repetitive activities and identikit characters and locales to fill it all up. So you’re absolutely right about Ubi’s ability to build immersive worlds - but maybe they should be focusing instead on making them narratively engaging?

@__jamiie 'Everything needs an account/login these days.'

Sort of true. And at the same time, the further spawning of account requirements is exactly the problem.

Maybe there's a difference between needing an account for an ongoing service (e.g. Netflix, or PSN if you're a PS4 owner) which seems fair enough and gives me various benefits, and software publishers requiring gamers to create an account to play an individual game (which doesn't).

Imagine if we were to have a PSN account, yet for every single game we either bought from the store or downloaded from PlayStation Plus we had to create an account for that particular publisher before you could even play the game?

Wouldn't that be incredibly annoying?

@get2sammyb: ‘I'm not saying this is all okay, but it seems utterly inane to just cause a stink over this very specific instance. The door has already been long unlocked.’

You’re usually spot-on, Sammy, but I can’t agree with you here. If it ‘isn’t okay’, why on earth should any of us continue putting up with this nonsense by platforms and publishers? It’s a problem experienced by gamers across PC, PS5 and Xbox. All such account sign-ups should be optional, not mandatory.

Merry Christmas, and thank you to everyone at Push Square for all your work in 2023! Well done, it’s a great site, and here’s looking to even more fantastic gaming - and gaming news and discussion - in 2024.

Typo in headline?

Looks awesome to me!

Sorry but honesty don’t think Push Square should be trying to offer links to this seriously copyright infringing material even if indirectly. Report it as a news story, by all means, but please don’t provide links.

I’m really excited by this. The modern world stuff completely didn’t work for me in the recent games - it shattered the illusion, was poorly scripted, and frankly all rather silly.

The new games all look potentially very promising. If Ubisoft think they can make the modern stuff work by hiving it off to some online meta portal thing - and indeed it has a certain storytelling logic to it - that’s fine by me as long as (a) I never have to use it and (b) I never have to pay for it.

What I think all the Ubisoft games have in common is the ability to create beautiful open worlds set in a range of different eras and places.

However, what they also have in common is mediocre plots and scripts and forgettable characters (a few notable exceptions aside - e.g. Bayek) and uninspiring quests and side-quests. The bloating of the worlds via copy/pasting of forts etc. is in some ways just a manifestation of the deeper problem of shallow storytelling at the heart of their games. Whatever Ubi does now I hope they finally grasp that nettle and hire some better storytellers to give deeper meaning to their characters and worlds.

Thank god for that indeed.

@Shepherd_Tallon “Makes me wonder if they've done this to keep the launch price of PSVR2 down.”

Interesting thought and good point. But could it be the opposite - that they’ve raised the PS5 price to give themselves headroom to charge more for PSVR2? (Because if PSVR2 as an add-on was significantly more expensive than the PS5 console that could look weird, imbalanced and over-priced?)

@Richi-388 It’s about competition law and consumer protection law in the UK. The issue isn’t whether anybody is forced to buy PlayStation digital games or DLC (clearly they’re not), but whether (if they do want to) it’s unfair and against consumer interests that this can only be done via Sony’s own digital store.

I’m not a lawyer but my guess is the claim has some chance of success. There’s a similar-sounding claim against Apple currently working its way down the same route (UK Competition Appeal Tribunal). The Tribunal recently granted permission for the Apple case to go forward and be heard in full. The claim against Apple is that iOS apps can only be purchased by users from Apple’s digital store; that payment has to be made via the store; and that the 30% cut taken by Apple is unreasonable. Overall, the claim is that this is uncompetitive and against consumers’ interests. My guess is the claim against Sony would be very similar.

Interestingly, these claims are being brought as ‘collective proceedings’ (a sort of UK version of a consumer class action) in which all UK consumers who have paid for a digital download from the platform in question over the past few years are automatically included in the action (unless they elect to opt out), and would stand to receive a payout in the event the claim was successful.

That’s my understanding, anyway. As I said, I’m not a lawyer, and happy to stand corrected.

Creatively this has got to be the right decision. But commercially this has also got be something of a disaster for the developers and publishers, because (a) they will miss out on the lucrative Christmas period, which would have been especially important for this particular game, and (b) by Feb folks may be baulking at spending money on games if there’s a significant squeeze on household budgets come the New Year.

As many have noted this update will only benefit those with VRR-capable TVs.

However, for those whose setups will be able to take advantage of VRR, I’m guessing it will have two main benefits for this generation of PlayStation games:

1. For games that currently target 60fps (or 120fps) but don’t always meet this target it will mean smoother gameplay (because visible stuttering and tearing will be reduced even though actual framerate slowdown will remain).

2. For games currently capped at 60fps they will now be able (with a suitable small update patch) be able to unlock this cap and exceed this framerate where possible during the game.

I am furthermore guessing that Astro’s Playroom has already recently received such a patch allowing it to exceed 60fps.

It's a very small patch, and since the patch's supposed purposes include performance improvements, gameplay optimisations, addressing framerate drops, and stability improvements, is it possible its primary function is to enable the game to utilise VRR ahead of the forthcoming PS5 VRR update?

Given that the game comes preinstalled on all PS5 consoles, Sony might want to ensure that it, of all games, was immediately able to take advantage of VRR once enabled...