GeeEssEff

£13.39 with PS Plus…don’t mind if I do.

Yesssss this looks exciting as hell. Give me a date so I can give all my friends and family enough notice not to disturb me for at least 2 weeks.

Never been excited for news about a patch before….I'm obsessed with this game.

I’m angry. I spend £60 a year on essential and for that I expect at least 2 AAA GOTY contenders a month. Where was BG3 and Alan Wake 2? It’s Christmas FFS Sony. At the very least they should be comparing my library against my wishlist and curating three games that i personally haven’t played. Weak month, weak year, can’t wait to let my subscription lapse. Just depressed I am subscribed till 2031

I’d be interested if they released something new and different or did some cool crossovers with their IPs. However if they just reskin your standard mobile games (infinite runners, colour matching puzzles, point and click adventures etc) with PS characters I really couldn’t care less.

Some features I would like in the future:

• ability to search your party and non party members inventory
• ability to rename backpacks, pouches, chests etc
• A much easier way to move loose items from your travellers chest into backpacks/pouches within the chest.
• ability to change your active party from a menu rather than needing to talk to a character to dismiss them then talk to the character to replace them (although I imagine this is a design choice for immersion and proper RPGing)
• cross play…every single one of my friends who plays BG3 has it on steam.

General bug fixes in act 3 would certainly be welcome but so far I’ve not had anything game breaking and an overall improvement of load times would lead me to experiment a bit more. That said I have happily played this game for nearly 140 hours without those features and will no doubt put 140 more in for a second play through. Bugs and minor annoyances haven’t stopped this being a 10/10 game of the year for me.

@BetaRabbit64 Same. Mid 30s and looking forward to my physical games from the wife….she definitely thinks I’m a big kid though.

Out with the boys for some day drinking today. If I’m not too hungover tomorrow it will be some BG3 and I am going to get Dave the Diver on switch.

@Czar_Khastik You genuinely crack me up 🤣 Always look forward to scrolling for some savage industry critique.

Finally Sony are going to be held accountable for all those times they held a gun to my head and forced me to buy £70 digital games day one when I couldn’t afford it. Thank you Alex Neill, I can’t think of a more important use of the court’s time!

@Ward_ting It’s just soooo good. I’m still learning new mechanics and spell uses 120 hours in and have barely even scratched the surface of multi classing. I know when I wrap up this playthrough I am going to dive straight back in to a new game to apply everything I have learnt.

Pretty busy this weekend but when I do get some time to play it will be Mortal Kombat 1 which was my Black Friday treat and of course BG3.

I’m way more tempted by it now having read quite a lot of user feedback saying it works better than standard remote play on a phone. Unfortunately I can’t afford luxury purchases like this a month from Xmas so may look again next year.

I bought Mortal Kombat 1…off Amazon.

Well this is a slap in the face for existing premium customers. Sony are really doing their best to burn through PS+ subscribers good will over the last few months.

Great games and great times. God of War for me. Everything about that game blew me away from start to finish. Probably Dark Souls 3 second although my gaming hours would definitely suggest Black Ops 3 was my fav of the generation.

I don’t think he is saying that he just wants to make a crap game that’s long. I think there’s an underlying assumption here that users are only going to spend hours and hours on something they enjoy. I don’t pick up a game, dislike it within the first 2 hours and then think “well the next 60 hours are going to be a slog but here we go”…….I just play something else.

Overall my unpopular opinion is that I agree that games for the most part are still good value at £70. We like to pretend that gaming is the only inflation proof industry but with the price of literally everything else on earth flying up why shouldn’t games? They are bigger, better, smarter and more interesting than they have ever been before and a new AAA game is just £10 - £20 more than last gen which is like a 15% price increase. My grocery shop, petrol, clothes, gas/electric etc are 30-50% more expensive and those aren’t considered luxury entertainment they literally keep me alive. Frankly with the cost of development I think the industry overall has done us a solid and we are lucky a base edition AAA is still under £100. hides

@Scottyy I think they probably will but just haven’t announced it ahead of time. I extended my premium by a year last Black Friday. The main limiting factor for me is that I want to downgrade to extra but last time they offered extensions you could only stack on the service you were on.

I have no plans and the wife is away so for the first time in a long time a completely free weekend to devote to games. I am on act 3 in BG3 with about a billion side quests to look into and I will also be playing Alan Wake 2 but only during daylight hours and when I’m feeling brave.

@somnambulance Same for me. I have tried so many of the Yakuza games and never got past the first few hours. I loved Like a Dragon though and cannot wait for Infinite Wealth. Giving this one a go on Gamepass but from what I have played so far it’s not massively drawing me in.

My personal favourite is BG3 by a country mile. Im not usually massively invested in these awards but I really hope it wins GOTY simply because of the obvious passion and attention Larian has put into it.

I am about an hour away from the Spidey platinum and then I will give more time to Alan Wake 2.

I have no time to Talos Principle 2 at the moment but the first is one of my favourite puzzle games ever. So glad the second one seems to be living up to expectations

@somnambulance swift recovery mate!

I’ve only managed around three hours so too early for a score but I am really enjoying it even if it’s scaring the hell out of me

@Markatron84 Yes I was never a massive fan of GT7 AI last year but playing Forza has given me a fresh appreciation of it. At the very least the GT7 AI doesn’t ram into you, take suspiciously weird racing lines and just plain give up once you have passed them.

If GT7 just added a competitive time trial system like Forza has in Rivals it would be the near perfect racing sim.

Very meh month. Hopefully Sony end the year with a bang.

Happy 500 everyone!

I will probably finish Spider-Man 2 story this weekend then aim for the platinum. I don’t want to rush it but also really keen to star Alan Wake 2 after the rave reviews. Other than that some Forza and BG3.

Came here to see if it’s just my PlayStation it’s not playing ball with but I see there’s problems for others. Gonna download and try on Xbox

@Th3solution I didn’t care for voice commands until I got AirPods for iPhone and now I use them all the time! Setting timers while cooking, changing music while walking the dog, getting texts read to me and responding to them without taking my phone out my pocket. The PlayStation ones I had to turn off though because whenever I said the word “PlayStation” while in a party it started listening to me and interrupted games….very annoying.

Happy with better music controls on this update though!

I’ve had a few minor graphical bugs and one major one where I had to defeat a bunch of enemies, beat them but it didn’t register so I had to reload the checkpoint.

This is a shame. While I couldn’t fully get into the first game I could appreciate its quality and what it was trying to do. Even though I probably wouldn’t have picked this up I had high hopes for it.

Love a bit of Devolver. Will give this a go during a quieter period.

I played an hour before work and loved it, going out tonight but then a completely free weekend. The wife is picking up Mario wonder so we are going to have a romantic few days of completely ignoring each other on the couch in favour of our new obsessions (although I am looking forward to playing a bit of co op Mario with her)

@Kidfried Pull the trigger my friend! The world is amazing and beautiful to explore and there is a lot of choice in how you build out your character. You could be a stealthy hacker, some crazy melee brute, a ninja, a heavy weapons specialist. Honestly it’s in such a good place right now. Still the odd bug but compared with three years ago it’s like playing a different game.

I’ve been completely obsessed with cyberpunk since the 2.0 update. It’s the only game to successfully tear me away from BG3 (although I did pick up Spider-Man 2 today).

So glad they are continuing to support and improve it. It’s such a U-Turn from the hot mess that we were presented with in 2020 which always had a bones of a brilliant game underneath.

@Sakai I think it has been a bit of a system seller but this was before release rather than after. Reception to the game has been mixed and I think that has led to a slow down in console sales but for sure if you go on Reddit or the comment section on most gaming outlets there were tons of people who bought a series console before September with Starfield/Bethesda in mind.

I am speaking as one of those people who got my XSX in 2021 shortly after they made it obvious all future Bethesda titles will be exclusive. I don’t want to buy a high end PC or laptop and I have tried streaming games to phone/tablet and the quality is awful…I am, and probably always will be, a console gamer. Funnily enough I have had way more fun on my Xbox with the third party gamepass releases as Bethesdas Xbox journey so far has not been massively impressive.

@Rjak Also apparently not old enough to remember it was Microsoft who started this practice with COD in the 360 glory days @OldGamer999 let me jog your memory https://www.eurogamer.net/after-five-years-of-xbox-exclusivity-call-of-duty-switches-to-playstation

Can’t wait to play this. I loved both the other games and it’s been a while since I played either so not too worried about the familiarity. Bring on the 20th!

I really enjoyed my first play through. My 2nd season 1 playthrough felt more of a slog though. I will no doubt get the inkling for some more Diablo in the future so I am looking forward to seeing the state it is in when that time comes.

I keep forgetting this falls in 2023! Looking forward to reviews although I have earmarked Spiderman as the last game I will be purchasing this year. In over 30 years of gaming I don’t think I have ever seen a year packed with as much quality as this one. The wallet needs a break!

I actually prefer the asymmetrical layout which is one of the reasons I bought an expensive Nacon pro controller last gen for my PS4. The R2 trigger stopped working within a week of me getting it so I very quickly regressed back to my attitude learned in childhood of not trusting third party peripherals.

@nessisonett I worked in tech recruitment for years and contractors know this is part and parcel of the game. @naruball is absolutely right, a lot of them earn a truly obscene amount of money, sometimes as much as 3x what their perm counterparts earn and with that comes the risk that you could be let go with very little notice. One of the reasons for the governments IR35 legislation in UK was because private companies were treating contractors like perm staff who paid a fraction of the tax while earning extortionate amounts of money….essentially contractors were being treated too well because they were desired for their skills and perm staffing is laborious and comes with its own set of trials (paying benefits, being stuck with an employee who is amazing during probation period and crap afterwards etc)

Obviously ND is an American company so things might be different over there but if it’s anything like here they have probably been earning in excess of $400 a day (over $100,000 p.a) to do the exact same job as their $45,000 salaried counterparts. When ND start getting rid of perm staff I will be among the first to condemn but contractors know exactly what they are getting themselves into when they decide to go down that employment route.

@MasterPlayerOne Every gaming system on earth is “unnecessary”….it’s a hobby that falls in the luxury category. Some fanboys like to turn it into their whole way of life though and make it their entire personality…do you know anyone like that? Anyone so obsessed with a company they need to praise everything that company does and piss on everyone else’s chips because it makes them feel good?

@Maddie47 how do I bypass? Just plug backbone in and open remote play app? Gotta admit I’ve not tried I just caved and paid

@Maddie47 I have a backbone and it’s very good for certain games but is missing the touchpad function which basically renders it pointless for certain games and also the fact that you have to pay a £40 a year subscription to use it isn’t particularly paletable. It does beat the portal for use with Xbox and other mobile games though.

@DennisReynolds Please at least acknowledge comment #2

@Gaia093 This felt like the most unsubtle dig of all time. Brilliant

I started a new game and it’s still a bit buggy but definitely feels more like the game sold to us in the run up to release.

Been to engrossed with Baldurs Gate and going on holiday in a couple of days so didn’t feel it’s worth starting it. Will give it a gamepass go when I’m back though