I am the biggest, easiest sucker for anything Marvel but I put around 10 hours into Midnight Sons and the writing/voice direction are so bad in this game that I just couldn't stomach any more.
Two weeks ago I went back and did a full NG+ run of GK, even going through the Heroic Assault mode (the last two floors of which are absolutely f'ing miserable escort missions), to get 100%.
I'm at near 100 hours with the game and can say with absolute certainty that having anyone play the first hour of this game is going to do far more harm than good. You need a good couple of hours just to get used to the needlessly convoluted control scheme.
And, FWIW, for anyone saying they're waiting on a 60fps patch...don't hold your breath breath. It can't even maintain a stable 30fps on Series S at 1080p, without the forced ray tracing of the PS5/Series X versions, and even on high-end PCs suffers from massive frame drops, constant shader compilation stutter, and the worst pop-in I've ever seen in a modern "AAA" game.
We've known this was going to be a live-service game for the past two years. Whether all that live-game nonsense end up dragging everything down still remains to be seen, but I trust Rocksteady.
Let's save the pitchforks for release and judge it on what it is, rather than what we assume it to be.
Well that feels like a huge stretch. The trailer for "f" is very cool but it's prerendered, so it's not representative of what the actual game will be. It's just a tone piece and a statement of intent.
f is being developed by the same team that handled Resident Evil REVerse, and that game is...let's just say rough, to put it mildly. I'd love to be happy that Silent Hill is coming back after so damn long, but all but one project Konami announced has some kind of sizable red flag attached.
We're getting a Silent Hill 2 Remake, but it's coming from Bloober. We're getting a new movie, but Gans is writing AND directing. We're getting SH Ascension, but it's some weird ass community choice driven, one-off, live-streamed not-a-game. Silent Hill f is coming from the REVerse team
SH Townfall is the only one of the announced projects that I have even a modicum of faith in, and that's only because I know developer No Code's reputation.
I'll happily eat my words if these turn out great, but I have so little faith in Konami that I'm not holding my breath.
I like the movies well enough, but I'm not enough of an HP fan to really care about this game.
This is a licensed game and, as such, the only people that low sales hurt is the 119 people who work at Avalanche Software. Rowling gets paid the same regardless of whether it sells one copy or a million, that's how licensing works. She may get royalties on top of that initial licensing fee, but she's already made her money on this game, and she made it before development ever even started.
Rowling sucks, but whether you choose to support the game or not doesn't matter as anything but a statement of personal values. I'm absolutely for that statement, but don't assume that it hurts Rowling in any meaningful way.
My biggest fear with this remake isn't necessarily that they'll try to make big, substantial changes to the narrative or gameplay, but that the minor changes they do make will kind of miss the point of what SH2 was trying to accomplish.
For example, SH2's original voice acting isn't great by any means, but it all has this weird, slightly off-kilter and disaffected tilt to it that gives the experience a more dreamlike, Lynchian air that works hugely in its favor. James' dialogue and reactions don't make sense within the context of the individual scenes most of the time, but that happy accident (I assume it was a happy accident, at least) just adds to the fever-dream-like atmosphere.
Any attempt to make him (or any other character) more dynamic and emotive, I feel, is going to hurt more than it helps.
On that same note, I also really worry that Bloober may try to make James more sympathetic, which would just miss the point completely. James sucks, he's SUPPOSED to suck, and trying to make him in any way likable or relatable would destroy the core of the games narrative.
Judging by the comments here it seems like either something is getting lost in translation, or reading comprehension and using context clues is a lost art.
Look at the last gameplay trailer that showed off the new opening. It's still recognizably RE4, but it's all been completely overhauled. So, when they say "it has a lot more too it", I take it that doesn't mean it'll be bigger, but that it'll be more involved, it'll perhaps have less straight combat, and the feel and pacing of it has been better thought out and it will (hopefully) feel more like a part of the whole.
@OrtadragoonX It's not the quality of the writing or performances, it's entirely the style in which it's written. With rare exception, I do not care for capital "F" Fantasy, and it looks like that's exactly what they're going for with XVI.
I really WANT to be excited about XVI, and the combat obviously looks incredible, but...man...watching the trailers I already absolutely hate the writing.
I can already tell it's just going to be a firehose blast of nonsense proper nouns and THEEs and THOUs and all the horrendously overplayed Fantasy tropes that completely turns me off the genre. The story bits they've been showing in the trailers just do less than nothing for me.
I've been a defender of PS controller since the day the PS1 launched. The original non-analogue PS1 controller, Dualshocks 1 & 2, even the DS3 is great despite the shoddy build quality and how easily breakable it is. I even love the DS4, despite its pitiful battery.
That said, after near 2 years of use, I cannot defend the Dualsense. The touchpad is all but useless as anything other than a giant button. Both the rumble and haptics are super neat in theory, but wear out their welcome incredibly quick, and I ended up turning both off after a few days. The battery life, even with all the extra features off and the lights set to dim, is absolutely pathetic.
To add injury to insult, and I recognize this is entirely subjective, I hate the form factor. I can chalk that up partly to the size of my hands, but it's also just not particularly well designed. The curve of the grips is such that it twists my wrists into such a position that strains them on prolonged use (none of the modern Xbox controllers, the Switch Pro controller, or any of the previous PS controllers did this) and the large, exposed seams between layers of plastic dig into my skin after a few hours.
Now they want $200 for a version of that same controller with a worse battery life? I'm a PS devotee, always have and always will be, but they are so far up their own a** this generation (really since Jim Ryan took over) that I am loathe to support them...good thing they have the quality 1st party titles to keep folks like me around.
Played through the demo yesterday and...eh...it's fun enough but nothing that's going to blow the socks off anyone.
I like the variety of the combat but, good lord, the controls are clunky as hell. It works and you'll get used to it, but it's super cumbersome and unintuitive swapping between the Red and Purple magics on the fly, and there's multiple mentions of a Blue magic in the demo...and I just can't imagine it feeling good having to swap between three or more during combat. It's perfectly serviceable, but it all feels undercooked.
Also the menu UI is terrible and, as everyone else has said, the constant quips from Frey and the cuff are terrible (though, luckily, there IS an option to turn off cuff chatter for everything but necessary story dialogue in the options).
Fells like it's going to be a sold 6 or 7 and not something I'll be picking up at launch, but something I'd certainly check out on sale.
@Mostik Yeah, there's really no good jumping-on point for Destiny, and the new (or very lapsed) player on-boarding is pretty terrible. You kind of just have to either watch/read a recap of what's been going on throughout whatever you may have missed, or just jump into the deep end and make peace with not really knowing what's going on with the larger narrative. My best suggestion, either just hop in and don't worry about it, or find a group/player who can get you up to speed.
The crappiest thing about no Crossplay is that Capcom sent out a survey asking if players wanted it BEFORE Rise came to PC and released a statement 11 days after the survey went out saying they already looked into it throughout development and, nope, it couldn't be done...so...why did they even ask if we wanted it to begin with knowing full-well they were never going to add it?
@Athrum Only the base game is coming in January, with Sunbreak launching on those platforms later in 2023.
Now, why they're only releasing vanilla first instead of holding both until they're ready and dropping a "complete" edition is beyond me, but once Sunbreak is out they'll have a bundle, like they do on Switch and PC.
I was just thinking about Rise a couple days ago. I put 300+ hours into vanilla Rise on Switch, then another 130+ on PC playing through the base game and Sunbreak and the further away we get from it, the less I like it.
Don't get me wrong, it's fun as hell and I hope a lot of the new mechanics (like the wirebug and follower team-up quests) make their way into whatever they call the sequel to World, but I also feel like it missed the mark on a lot of stuff.
Sunbreak was excellent, but the majority of the post-release content has been weird, bad, and/or wildly overpriced. All the crossover stuff was bad (except the Amaterasu palamute skin, which rules), and then it was just a bunch of bad hairstyles, ugly layered armor sets, and a ton of voice packs that let you replace your character voice with the voices of various in-game NPCs, which might be the single weirdest and unwanted dlc I've ever seen for any game.
Whereas World was the huge leap forward the series really needed to break into the mainstream, Rise feels more like a step back into the 3DS era just with a bigger scope and all the QoL improvements World brought. Though, I will say it does feel like Capcom was trying a bunch of different, wild stuff with Rise to see what stuck with players and was worth adding to the sequel to World, which I appreciate.
It's very, very good, but if you go in expecting something more like World, you might be disappointed.
@kyleforrester87 I distinctly remember thinking I was the crazy one seeing it getting really solid reviews across the board (it's sitting at 81% on metacritic), IGN, Eurogamer, and the Official Xbox Mag all give it a 9/10 and it sold pretty well.
I think hindsight is 20/20 on that one, clearly a lot of people really dug it at the time, but now it's all but forgotten.
Man, I was so, so, so excited for SSX 2012...and that game turned out to be a massive disappointment. I know a lot of people enjoyed that game but, to me, it lost just about everything that made SSX special.
Related aside, it's crazy how EA has all these beloved legacy IP they've just let straight up die for literally no reason.
I started it on launch day, got about 4 hours in and had a hard crash. Took a break, came back a couple days later and, had another hard crash, and haven't touched it since. Been mainlining Pokemon for the past week and I'm about halfway through, but I'll get back to it soon enough...hopefully it's a bit more stable when I circle back around.
Well, I was excited for Unbound, being Criterion's return to the series...guess I'll wait for a steep sale or get it heavily discounted on a grey market site cause I'm loathe to support any company that thinks this kind of behavior is acceptable.
Yeah, no...he's trolling. He knows everyone WANTS either IJ3 or MK12, he wouldn't just say it like that if either were true, but (if memory serves) he's already hinted a few times that their new game is not going to be what people expect.
I'll happily eat those words when/if it's revealed to be one of those but, even if it is, I'm expecting whatever shape those take to not quite be what we would assume.
$600 after tax for no backwards compatibility with PSVR1, a new exclusive every, what...18 months...until Sony gets bored and stops supporting it, and a bunch of stuff that's already on Quest.
Played around 4 hours of Ghostbuster Spirits Unleashed with a buddy tonight, and man that's a very good game, huh? Also still working my way through Gotham Knights...it ain't great, but it's not the train wreck people are claiming. And I just finished the first chunk of the RE Village DLC, so far I'm digging it quite a bit..
It's definitely not the unmitigated disaster so many reviews have been painting it as, but it's also just not up to par with its contemporaries. I'm 27 hours in and enjoying it, but it has a ton of frankly insane design choices and little inconsistencies/annoyances that are kind of death by a thousand cuts.
I adore Kojima-san and I'm excited for anything he wants to do, but sometimes the stuff he says veers into Will Wright levels of pompousness and all I can think is, "Ok, my man, pump the brakes a bit, eh?" Always happy to be proven wrong, though!
@Mythologue Before digital it meant a master copy had been printed to disc, the first print was usually done on a gold colored disc, hence the "gone gold". Nowadays, it it doesn't really mean much of anything, it's just a development milestone signifying that it's nearing release and has been given publishing approval by platform holders .
They do have two studios, so I could see it, that's probably what they're shooting for, but I wouldn't be surprised if it gets pushed to 2024 before they announce a date.
@KidBoruto I'd be more surprised is we even get another remake after RE4. With the exception of CV, we're all caught up to modern RE, and even if you don't like the GC remake you have to recognize you're in the most absolute minority on that. I can't see them ever talking about or touching RE0 again, and while I'd be happy to see another RE1 remake in the RE Engine to bring it up to parity with the 2/3 remakes, it's entirely unnecessary.
As everyone else is saying, I too would love a CODE: Veronica remake because that game was bad at release, has aged as well as spoiled milk, and the one entry in desperate need of a remake...but it's almost certainly never happening. Outside of the re-release on PS3/360, Capcom has really gone out of their way to avoid ever mentioning CV over the last 10+ years. They rereleased RE0, the one game most RE fans universally agree is one of the weakest entries, on everything and CV is the single mainline "modern" entry to never get a PC port. They want to bury it.
@BeerIsAwesome Likely just weird timing, but it's Konami, so f**k 'em.
@MFTWrecks It's not, but it's also important to remember that as much as they're billing it as a sequel, until the PvE gets here next year, it's really just a big patch to a now 6 year old game. Of course it's not going to blow the doors off the place like the first one did.
@AdamNovice This exactly. I talked a whole bunch of sh*t about Blizzard and all the boneheaded changes they were making, but I'm genuinely surprised at how much fun I'm having and how many of those changes do seem to be for the better.
My only real complaint is the battle pass. It's fine, and I do not miss loot boxes at all, but the way it's setup now is just a bit too slow to progress and littered with filler no one is interested in. The challenge system is neat but needs way more variety, and they desperately need to add some premium currency to the pass because as it stands it's essentially impossible to get cosmetics for the heroes you use without buying them if they have nothing on the season pass. It's a decent first attempt, but there's a lot of room for improvement.
I actually did because I was doing some Wipeout research a couple of years ago, as I am want to do because Wipeout is one of my top 5 all time gaming series' and Ian Anderson/tDR's design work in the late 90's/early 2000's is a massive inspiration on me, and I found this twitter thread from Y2k Aesthetic. https://twitter.com/y2k_aesthetic/status/1072867891396075521
@XinGViruS Stock car racing (which wipeout was heavily inspired by) takes place on a figure 8 shaped track, but it's mainly meant to represent a stopwatch to emphasize the speed of the series.
Remaking TLoU1 was dumb, but I get it, the original still looks good but can't hold a candle to any modern title. Horizon, though, still looks incredible and runs at 4K/60 fps on PS5. There's literally no reason to bother wasting money and manpower remaking it.
If wasting time and resources on remaking PS4 titles is part of Sony's new strategy to fill in gaps between they big titles once or twice a year, then I may just fully drop PS as my primary console platform and just wait for the inevitable PC ports of of the big stuff I do want to play.
Omega Force being involved makes me slightly curious, but what bugs me about this (and Toukiden and God Eater) are the monster designs. Capcom followed the silhouette design philosophy, and all monsters in MH are instantly recognizable by their outline alone.
This and the other MH clones, if you were to silhouette their creature designs, would just looks like random blobs of nonsense. They're just super overdesigned, and that kinda kills my interest.
Hi, Crisis Core semi-expert here. It is my all time favorite FF and I've played through it, start to finish, maybe a dozen times. I know it inside and out, so I watched that 13 minute demo video, and it looks great...but I do feel like I should clarify what Square-Enix has yet to clarify.
Based on that demo video, it's not really a remake, at least not in the same sense as something like FFVII Remake. They don't seem to have remade this from the ground up.
As far as I can tell, all the geometry is more or less the same as the original. The in-game combat and cut-scene animations are identical to the original. The music in that video doesn't seem to have been remixed, though I'm sure some tracks will be. Combat controls even look more or less identical to the original, with the only real change being that your materia is on a separate button from your potions instead of all in one big list (which is a good quality of life update) and the ability to move the camera easier.
This looks to be more akin to something like the Master Chief Collection or the Shadow of the Colossus remake in that the models, textures, and lighting have been redone, but they're just a layer running over the original game.
I'm sure there are more substantial changes in stuff they haven't shown us yet and I'm sure it's going to be incredible because the original is incredible, but I did want to warn folks not to go in expecting something on the level of FFVII Remake.
"We want to guarantee PlayStation gamers continue to have the highest quality Call of Duty experience, and Microsoft’s proposal undermines this principle."
"We want to guarantee our 30% cut of all Call of Duty games sold on Playstation platforms, and Microsoft’s proposal undermines our quarterly profit potential!"
I may be in the minority on this (I know I am), but Naughty Dog's gameplay has been stagnant since the first Uncharted and by the time The Last of Us rolled around it was downright archaic. I like the Uncharted games in spite of how they feel to play, and trying to do that in a universe as oppressively dour as TLoU has less than zero appeal to me.
I love Beat Saber's gameplay but, tbh, I hate most of the music in it. Ended up picking up Synth Riders on sale on my Quest and it is my go-to VR rhythm game.
@Would_you_kindly And a lot of people still don't seem to understand that the potential profit from re-releasing RE 1-3 classic would not cover the cost of porting them to modern systems. The best we could hope for with stuff like that is getting the old roms running via emulation through a wrapper, which we can already do.
Capcom rightly knows the very, very few people that genuinely want to play those games in 2022 already have relatively easy access to them, and for everyone else the remakes are right there.
@Flaming_Kaiser Imagine a Mortal Kombat movie where everyone constantly talks about a Mortal Kombat Tournament that never happens. A Mortal Kombat movie that leaves out Johnny Cage, but fundamentally changes Kano to make him a Johnny Cage stand-in, endlessly spouting bad one-liners and quips. A Mortal Kombat movie that feels the need to unnecessarily explain why everyone has superpowers in the most asinine and needlessly convoluted way possible. A Mortal Kombat movie with some of the worst fight choreography of any modern action film. A Mortal Kombat movie with a budget of $55 Million dollars, produced and distributed by the second largest studio in the world, that has the single worst editing of ANY modern action. This thing has jump-cuts, like you'd see in a sh*tty youtube video by someone using iMovie for the first time. It ALSO features one of the weirdest undercurrents of sexism, with everyone telling Sonya she can't fight in the tournament that never happens because of the most moronic plot contrivance, DESPITE showing us over and over that she's the ONLY character with any skill.
It's legitimately insane how f'ing bad it is. If you want to watch an MK movie, just watch the '95 one again or the semi-recent animated films, which are genuinely pretty great.
This is so frustrating because I can see both sides. On one hand, I have no doubt Naughty Dog is putting as much work into this remake as any other new project they'd be working on...on the other hand, not only does it feel entirely unnecessary (especially at that $70 price point), but it kind of comes off as incredibly masturbatory (and, a small aside, ever since Neil basically took over ND, I've felt the air around them has been incredibly self congratulatory) and sets a precedent that could be worrying.
They're remaking the original in the sequel engine, that's all well and good, but what happens when TLoU3 comes out? Surely they're going to make some major upgrades to the engine for that title, so are they going to remake the first two games in that engine...and so on and so forth, to keep parity across games? It's a super slippery slope and, to me, just feels like a huge waste of resources and ND's considerable talent.
This isn't an FFVII Remake situation, where it's using the basic setup of the original as a jumping off point to tell a new story. It's not a Resident Evil Remake situation, where the available tech at the time wasn't up to the task of realizing the actual vision of the devs like the new hardware can. It's not even a Shadow of the Colossus or Demon's Souls situation, where the originals are beloved and still widely available but haven't aged as well because they were AAA ideas produced on A or AA budgets.
I don't know...sure, the sequel plays and looks better than the original, but not SO MUCH better that I feel the original necessitates a full, ground-up remake. The whole thing just rubs me the wrong way.
Comments 391
Re: Deadpool Deals Big Damage in Marvel's Midnight Suns Next Week
I am the biggest, easiest sucker for anything Marvel but I put around 10 hours into Midnight Sons and the writing/voice direction are so bad in this game that I just couldn't stomach any more.
Re: Try Gotham Knights for Free in New PS Plus Premium Trial
Two weeks ago I went back and did a full NG+ run of GK, even going through the Heroic Assault mode (the last two floors of which are absolutely f'ing miserable escort missions), to get 100%.
I'm at near 100 hours with the game and can say with absolute certainty that having anyone play the first hour of this game is going to do far more harm than good. You need a good couple of hours just to get used to the needlessly convoluted control scheme.
And, FWIW, for anyone saying they're waiting on a 60fps patch...don't hold your breath breath. It can't even maintain a stable 30fps on Series S at 1080p, without the forced ray tracing of the PS5/Series X versions, and even on high-end PCs suffers from massive frame drops, constant shader compilation stutter, and the worst pop-in I've ever seen in a modern "AAA" game.
Re: Suicide Squad Leak Reveals Live Service Elements Like a Battle Pass, More
We've known this was going to be a live-service game for the past two years. Whether all that live-game nonsense end up dragging everything down still remains to be seen, but I trust Rocksteady.
Let's save the pitchforks for release and judge it on what it is, rather than what we assume it to be.
Re: Konami Open to Even More Silent Hill Game Pitches
Well that feels like a huge stretch. The trailer for "f" is very cool but it's prerendered, so it's not representative of what the actual game will be. It's just a tone piece and a statement of intent.
f is being developed by the same team that handled Resident Evil REVerse, and that game is...let's just say rough, to put it mildly. I'd love to be happy that Silent Hill is coming back after so damn long, but all but one project Konami announced has some kind of sizable red flag attached.
We're getting a Silent Hill 2 Remake, but it's coming from Bloober.
We're getting a new movie, but Gans is writing AND directing.
We're getting SH Ascension, but it's some weird ass community choice driven, one-off, live-streamed not-a-game.
Silent Hill f is coming from the REVerse team
SH Townfall is the only one of the announced projects that I have even a modicum of faith in, and that's only because I know developer No Code's reputation.
I'll happily eat my words if these turn out great, but I have so little faith in Konami that I'm not holding my breath.
Re: Simon Pegg Revealed as the Voice of Hogwarts Legacy's Headmaster
I like the movies well enough, but I'm not enough of an HP fan to really care about this game.
This is a licensed game and, as such, the only people that low sales hurt is the 119 people who work at Avalanche Software. Rowling gets paid the same regardless of whether it sells one copy or a million, that's how licensing works. She may get royalties on top of that initial licensing fee, but she's already made her money on this game, and she made it before development ever even started.
Rowling sucks, but whether you choose to support the game or not doesn't matter as anything but a statement of personal values. I'm absolutely for that statement, but don't assume that it hurts Rowling in any meaningful way.
Re: Silent Hill 2 Remake Dev Taking 'Very Safe Approach' to Any Changes
My biggest fear with this remake isn't necessarily that they'll try to make big, substantial changes to the narrative or gameplay, but that the minor changes they do make will kind of miss the point of what SH2 was trying to accomplish.
For example, SH2's original voice acting isn't great by any means, but it all has this weird, slightly off-kilter and disaffected tilt to it that gives the experience a more dreamlike, Lynchian air that works hugely in its favor. James' dialogue and reactions don't make sense within the context of the individual scenes most of the time, but that happy accident (I assume it was a happy accident, at least) just adds to the fever-dream-like atmosphere.
Any attempt to make him (or any other character) more dynamic and emotive, I feel, is going to hurt more than it helps.
On that same note, I also really worry that Bloober may try to make James more sympathetic, which would just miss the point completely. James sucks, he's SUPPOSED to suck, and trying to make him in any way likable or relatable would destroy the core of the games narrative.
Re: Resident Evil 4 Remake Keeps Infamous Island Section, Makes it Bigger
Judging by the comments here it seems like either something is getting lost in translation, or reading comprehension and using context clues is a lost art.
Look at the last gameplay trailer that showed off the new opening. It's still recognizably RE4, but it's all been completely overhauled. So, when they say "it has a lot more too it", I take it that doesn't mean it'll be bigger, but that it'll be more involved, it'll perhaps have less straight combat, and the feel and pacing of it has been better thought out and it will (hopefully) feel more like a part of the whole.
Re: Final Fantasy 16 Is Already Hyping Up a Huge Year
@OrtadragoonX It's not the quality of the writing or performances, it's entirely the style in which it's written. With rare exception, I do not care for capital "F" Fantasy, and it looks like that's exactly what they're going for with XVI.
Re: Final Fantasy 16 Is Already Hyping Up a Huge Year
I really WANT to be excited about XVI, and the combat obviously looks incredible, but...man...watching the trailers I already absolutely hate the writing.
I can already tell it's just going to be a firehose blast of nonsense proper nouns and THEEs and THOUs and all the horrendously overplayed Fantasy tropes that completely turns me off the genre. The story bits they've been showing in the trailers just do less than nothing for me.
Re: PS5's Pricey DualSense Edge Pad Has Shorter Battery Life
I've been a defender of PS controller since the day the PS1 launched. The original non-analogue PS1 controller, Dualshocks 1 & 2, even the DS3 is great despite the shoddy build quality and how easily breakable it is. I even love the DS4, despite its pitiful battery.
That said, after near 2 years of use, I cannot defend the Dualsense. The touchpad is all but useless as anything other than a giant button. Both the rumble and haptics are super neat in theory, but wear out their welcome incredibly quick, and I ended up turning both off after a few days. The battery life, even with all the extra features off and the lights set to dim, is absolutely pathetic.
To add injury to insult, and I recognize this is entirely subjective, I hate the form factor. I can chalk that up partly to the size of my hands, but it's also just not particularly well designed. The curve of the grips is such that it twists my wrists into such a position that strains them on prolonged use (none of the modern Xbox controllers, the Switch Pro controller, or any of the previous PS controllers did this) and the large, exposed seams between layers of plastic dig into my skin after a few hours.
Now they want $200 for a version of that same controller with a worse battery life? I'm a PS devotee, always have and always will be, but they are so far up their own a** this generation (really since Jim Ryan took over) that I am loathe to support them...good thing they have the quality 1st party titles to keep folks like me around.
Re: Preview: Forspoken PS5 Feels Like a More Magical inFAMOUS
Played through the demo yesterday and...eh...it's fun enough but nothing that's going to blow the socks off anyone.
I like the variety of the combat but, good lord, the controls are clunky as hell. It works and you'll get used to it, but it's super cumbersome and unintuitive swapping between the Red and Purple magics on the fly, and there's multiple mentions of a Blue magic in the demo...and I just can't imagine it feeling good having to swap between three or more during combat. It's perfectly serviceable, but it all feels undercooked.
Also the menu UI is terrible and, as everyone else has said, the constant quips from Frey and the cuff are terrible (though, luckily, there IS an option to turn off cuff chatter for everything but necessary story dialogue in the options).
Fells like it's going to be a sold 6 or 7 and not something I'll be picking up at launch, but something I'd certainly check out on sale.
Re: Destiny 2: Season of the Seraph Is Out Today on PS5, PS4
@Mostik Yeah, there's really no good jumping-on point for Destiny, and the new (or very lapsed) player on-boarding is pretty terrible. You kind of just have to either watch/read a recap of what's been going on throughout whatever you may have missed, or just jump into the deep end and make peace with not really knowing what's going on with the larger narrative. My best suggestion, either just hop in and don't worry about it, or find a group/player who can get you up to speed.
Re: Monster Hunter Rise Confirmed for PS5, PS4 Release, Out 20th January
The crappiest thing about no Crossplay is that Capcom sent out a survey asking if players wanted it BEFORE Rise came to PC and released a statement 11 days after the survey went out saying they already looked into it throughout development and, nope, it couldn't be done...so...why did they even ask if we wanted it to begin with knowing full-well they were never going to add it?
Re: Monster Hunter Rise Confirmed for PS5, PS4 Release, Out 20th January
@Athrum Only the base game is coming in January, with Sunbreak launching on those platforms later in 2023.
Now, why they're only releasing vanilla first instead of holding both until they're ready and dropping a "complete" edition is beyond me, but once Sunbreak is out they'll have a bundle, like they do on Switch and PC.
Re: Monster Hunter Rise PS5 Looking Like a Lock for 20th January
I was just thinking about Rise a couple days ago. I put 300+ hours into vanilla Rise on Switch, then another 130+ on PC playing through the base game and Sunbreak and the further away we get from it, the less I like it.
Don't get me wrong, it's fun as hell and I hope a lot of the new mechanics (like the wirebug and follower team-up quests) make their way into whatever they call the sequel to World, but I also feel like it missed the mark on a lot of stuff.
Sunbreak was excellent, but the majority of the post-release content has been weird, bad, and/or wildly overpriced. All the crossover stuff was bad (except the Amaterasu palamute skin, which rules), and then it was just a bunch of bad hairstyles, ugly layered armor sets, and a ton of voice packs that let you replace your character voice with the voices of various in-game NPCs, which might be the single weirdest and unwanted dlc I've ever seen for any game.
Whereas World was the huge leap forward the series really needed to break into the mainstream, Rise feels more like a step back into the 3DS era just with a bigger scope and all the QoL improvements World brought. Though, I will say it does feel like Capcom was trying a bunch of different, wild stuff with Rise to see what stuck with players and was worth adding to the sequel to World, which I appreciate.
It's very, very good, but if you go in expecting something more like World, you might be disappointed.
Re: SSX Isn't Coming Back, So Shredders Is Your Best Snowboarding Bet
@kyleforrester87 I distinctly remember thinking I was the crazy one seeing it getting really solid reviews across the board (it's sitting at 81% on metacritic), IGN, Eurogamer, and the Official Xbox Mag all give it a 9/10 and it sold pretty well.
I think hindsight is 20/20 on that one, clearly a lot of people really dug it at the time, but now it's all but forgotten.
Re: SSX Isn't Coming Back, So Shredders Is Your Best Snowboarding Bet
Man, I was so, so, so excited for SSX 2012...and that game turned out to be a massive disappointment. I know a lot of people enjoyed that game but, to me, it lost just about everything that made SSX special.
Related aside, it's crazy how EA has all these beloved legacy IP they've just let straight up die for literally no reason.
Re: 25% of Players Have Beaten God of War Ragnarok, Two Weeks After Release
I started it on launch day, got about 4 hours in and had a hard crash. Took a break, came back a couple days later and, had another hard crash, and haven't touched it since. Been mainlining Pokemon for the past week and I'm about halfway through, but I'll get back to it soon enough...hopefully it's a bit more stable when I circle back around.
Re: Need for Speed Unbound's Overly Aggressive Social Media Apologises
Well, I was excited for Unbound, being Criterion's return to the series...guess I'll wait for a steep sale or get it heavily discounted on a grey market site cause I'm loathe to support any company that thinks this kind of behavior is acceptable.
Re: Midway Legend Ed Boon Isn't Giving Much Away About NetherRealm's Next Move
Yeah, no...he's trolling. He knows everyone WANTS either IJ3 or MK12, he wouldn't just say it like that if either were true, but (if memory serves) he's already hinted a few times that their new game is not going to be what people expect.
I'll happily eat those words when/if it's revealed to be one of those but, even if it is, I'm expecting whatever shape those take to not quite be what we would assume.
Re: Marvel's Spider-Man 2 Will Have a Different Harry Osborn on PS5
@MFTWrecks If I'm remembering correctly, he barely is. Aside from one very quick "on camera" appearance, his part is all voice mails to Peter.
Re: PS5 Exclusive Ghostwire Tokyo Is Coming to Xbox, According to Wall Art in Bethesda Office
No snark, wasn't this announced like, a year ago? We've known since before they launched that both were 1 year PS exclusives.
Re: PSVR2 Launches 22nd February 2023, Costs $550
$600 after tax for no backwards compatibility with PSVR1, a new exclusive every, what...18 months...until Sony gets bored and stops supporting it, and a bunch of stuff that's already on Quest.
That's a galaxy sized no from me.
Re: Talking Point: What Are You Playing This Weekend? - Issue 450
Played around 4 hours of Ghostbuster Spirits Unleashed with a buddy tonight, and man that's a very good game, huh? Also still working my way through Gotham Knights...it ain't great, but it's not the train wreck people are claiming. And I just finished the first chunk of the RE Village DLC, so far I'm digging it quite a bit..
Re: Poll: What Review Score Would You Give Gotham Knights?
That'd be a 6 for me.
It's definitely not the unmitigated disaster so many reviews have been painting it as, but it's also just not up to par with its contemporaries. I'm 27 hours in and enjoying it, but it has a ton of frankly insane design choices and little inconsistencies/annoyances that are kind of death by a thousand cuts.
Re: Hideo Kojima Says Next Project Will Transcend Video Games, 'It's Almost Like a New Medium'
I adore Kojima-san and I'm excited for anything he wants to do, but sometimes the stuff he says veers into Will Wright levels of pompousness and all I can think is, "Ok, my man, pump the brakes a bit, eh?" Always happy to be proven wrong, though!
Re: Star Wars Eclipse 'Controlled Leak' Was Reportedly Intentional, Meant to Gauge Interest
It could be the best Star Wars story ever written, doesn't make a difference, it's QD so I will never touch it.
Re: Uncharted PC Port Has Lowest Player Count of Any Sony Game at Launch
It's almost as if porting the 4th and 5th entries in a series before the first three was a monumentally dumb idea...
Re: Highly Promising PS5, PS4 Horror The Callisto Protocol Is Ready for Release
@Mythologue Before digital it meant a master copy had been printed to disc, the first print was usually done on a gold colored disc, hence the "gone gold". Nowadays, it it doesn't really mean much of anything, it's just a development milestone signifying that it's nearing release and has been given publishing approval by platform holders .
Re: Microsoft Claims That Insomniac Developed Marvel's Wolverine Will Launch in 2023
They do have two studios, so I could see it, that's probably what they're shooting for, but I wouldn't be surprised if it gets pushed to 2024 before they announce a date.
Re: Resident Evil 4's PS5, PS4 Remake Headlines RE Showcase Just One Day After Silent Hill Stream
@KidBoruto I'd be more surprised is we even get another remake after RE4. With the exception of CV, we're all caught up to modern RE, and even if you don't like the GC remake you have to recognize you're in the most absolute minority on that. I can't see them ever talking about or touching RE0 again, and while I'd be happy to see another RE1 remake in the RE Engine to bring it up to parity with the 2/3 remakes, it's entirely unnecessary.
Re: Resident Evil 4's PS5, PS4 Remake Headlines RE Showcase Just One Day After Silent Hill Stream
As everyone else is saying, I too would love a CODE: Veronica remake because that game was bad at release, has aged as well as spoiled milk, and the one entry in desperate need of a remake...but it's almost certainly never happening. Outside of the re-release on PS3/360, Capcom has really gone out of their way to avoid ever mentioning CV over the last 10+ years. They rereleased RE0, the one game most RE fans universally agree is one of the weakest entries, on everything and CV is the single mainline "modern" entry to never get a PC port. They want to bury it.
@BeerIsAwesome Likely just weird timing, but it's Konami, so f**k 'em.
Re: Overwatch 2 (PS5) - More 2.0 Than a Full Sequel
@MFTWrecks It's not, but it's also important to remember that as much as they're billing it as a sequel, until the PvE gets here next year, it's really just a big patch to a now 6 year old game. Of course it's not going to blow the doors off the place like the first one did.
Re: Overwatch 2 (PS5) - More 2.0 Than a Full Sequel
@AdamNovice This exactly. I talked a whole bunch of sh*t about Blizzard and all the boneheaded changes they were making, but I'm genuinely surprised at how much fun I'm having and how many of those changes do seem to be for the better.
My only real complaint is the battle pass. It's fine, and I do not miss loot boxes at all, but the way it's setup now is just a bit too slow to progress and littered with filler no one is interested in. The challenge system is neat but needs way more variety, and they desperately need to add some premium currency to the pass because as it stands it's essentially impossible to get cosmetics for the heroes you use without buying them if they have nothing on the season pass. It's a decent first attempt, but there's a lot of room for improvement.
Re: What're Ya Buyin'? Meta Snags Resident Evil 4 VR Dev
That's a shame. RE4VR is excellent, and Armature are a great little studio. Shame their talents are going to be wasted on Zuck's Meta bullsh*t.
Re: Random: Did You Know WipEout's Iconic Logo Was Made Up of a Bunch of 8s?
I actually did because I was doing some Wipeout research a couple of years ago, as I am want to do because Wipeout is one of my top 5 all time gaming series' and Ian Anderson/tDR's design work in the late 90's/early 2000's is a massive inspiration on me, and I found this twitter thread from Y2k Aesthetic.
https://twitter.com/y2k_aesthetic/status/1072867891396075521
@XinGViruS Stock car racing (which wipeout was heavily inspired by) takes place on a figure 8 shaped track, but it's mainly meant to represent a stopwatch to emphasize the speed of the series.
Re: Horizon Zero Dawn Remaster for PS5 Reportedly in Development
Remaking TLoU1 was dumb, but I get it, the original still looks good but can't hold a candle to any modern title. Horizon, though, still looks incredible and runs at 4K/60 fps on PS5. There's literally no reason to bother wasting money and manpower remaking it.
If wasting time and resources on remaking PS4 titles is part of Sony's new strategy to fill in gaps between they big titles once or twice a year, then I may just fully drop PS as my primary console platform and just wait for the inevitable PC ports of of the big stuff I do want to play.
Re: EA's Wild Hearts Has Big Next-Gen Toukiden, Monster Hunter Vibes in PS5 Gameplay Reveal
Omega Force being involved makes me slightly curious, but what bugs me about this (and Toukiden and God Eater) are the monster designs. Capcom followed the silhouette design philosophy, and all monsters in MH are instantly recognizable by their outline alone.
This and the other MH clones, if you were to silhouette their creature designs, would just looks like random blobs of nonsense. They're just super overdesigned, and that kinda kills my interest.
Re: Hands On: Crisis Core Is a Welcome Reunion with Final Fantasy VII
Hi, Crisis Core semi-expert here. It is my all time favorite FF and I've played through it, start to finish, maybe a dozen times. I know it inside and out, so I watched that 13 minute demo video, and it looks great...but I do feel like I should clarify what Square-Enix has yet to clarify.
Based on that demo video, it's not really a remake, at least not in the same sense as something like FFVII Remake. They don't seem to have remade this from the ground up.
As far as I can tell, all the geometry is more or less the same as the original. The in-game combat and cut-scene animations are identical to the original. The music in that video doesn't seem to have been remixed, though I'm sure some tracks will be. Combat controls even look more or less identical to the original, with the only real change being that your materia is on a separate button from your potions instead of all in one big list (which is a good quality of life update) and the ability to move the camera easier.
This looks to be more akin to something like the Master Chief Collection or the Shadow of the Colossus remake in that the models, textures, and lighting have been redone, but they're just a layer running over the original game.
I'm sure there are more substantial changes in stuff they haven't shown us yet and I'm sure it's going to be incredible because the original is incredible, but I did want to warn folks not to go in expecting something on the level of FFVII Remake.
Re: Reaction: Sony's Struck State of Play Gold Not Once, But Twice in a Row
Nintendo Direct: Ya like farming? WE GOT ALL THE FARMING!
State of Play: Ya like Samurai? WE GOT ALL THE SAMURAI!
Re: PlayStation Bites Back At 'Inadequate' Call of Duty Offer from Microsoft
"We want to guarantee PlayStation gamers continue to have the highest quality Call of Duty experience, and Microsoft’s proposal undermines this principle."
Google, please translate.
<translating>.....standby.....
"We want to guarantee our 30% cut of all Call of Duty games sold on Playstation platforms, and Microsoft’s proposal undermines our quarterly profit potential!"
Re: Poll: Did You Buy The Last of Us: Part I?
I may be in the minority on this (I know I am), but Naughty Dog's gameplay has been stagnant since the first Uncharted and by the time The Last of Us rolled around it was downright archaic. I like the Uncharted games in spite of how they feel to play, and trying to do that in a universe as oppressively dour as TLoU has less than zero appeal to me.
Re: Synth Riders Announces Latest Song Pack, Features League of Legends Music
I love Beat Saber's gameplay but, tbh, I hate most of the music in it. Ended up picking up Synth Riders on sale on my Quest and it is my go-to VR rhythm game.
Re: Poll: Did You Buy Saints Row?
I had planned on buying it, but ended up building a mini-pc for emulation and media streaming a few weeks ago, and got it free with my gpu.
I'm only a few hours in, but I'm having fun with it.
Re: Poll: How Much Would You Pay for the DualSense Edge PS5 Pro Controller?
Precisely $0 USD.
The Dualsense is the most feature packed, technologically impressive controller ever made...and it's absolutely miserable to actually play games on.
Re: Mortal Kombat's 30th Anniversary Bundle for PS5 Gets Over Here
If you can't see the difference between the two things, I can't help ya.
Re: Mortal Kombat's 30th Anniversary Bundle for PS5 Gets Over Here
@Would_you_kindly And a lot of people still don't seem to understand that the potential profit from re-releasing RE 1-3 classic would not cover the cost of porting them to modern systems. The best we could hope for with stuff like that is getting the old roms running via emulation through a wrapper, which we can already do.
Capcom rightly knows the very, very few people that genuinely want to play those games in 2022 already have relatively easy access to them, and for everyone else the remakes are right there.
Re: Mortal Kombat's 30th Anniversary Bundle for PS5 Gets Over Here
@Flaming_Kaiser Imagine a Mortal Kombat movie where everyone constantly talks about a Mortal Kombat Tournament that never happens. A Mortal Kombat movie that leaves out Johnny Cage, but fundamentally changes Kano to make him a Johnny Cage stand-in, endlessly spouting bad one-liners and quips. A Mortal Kombat movie that feels the need to unnecessarily explain why everyone has superpowers in the most asinine and needlessly convoluted way possible. A Mortal Kombat movie with some of the worst fight choreography of any modern action film. A Mortal Kombat movie with a budget of $55 Million dollars, produced and distributed by the second largest studio in the world, that has the single worst editing of ANY modern action. This thing has jump-cuts, like you'd see in a sh*tty youtube video by someone using iMovie for the first time. It ALSO features one of the weirdest undercurrents of sexism, with everyone telling Sonya she can't fight in the tournament that never happens because of the most moronic plot contrivance, DESPITE showing us over and over that she's the ONLY character with any skill.
It's legitimately insane how f'ing bad it is. If you want to watch an MK movie, just watch the '95 one again or the semi-recent animated films, which are genuinely pretty great.
Re: Mortal Kombat's 30th Anniversary Bundle for PS5 Gets Over Here
@Deoxyr1bose Calling that movie a 4/10 is being VERY generous.
Re: Poll: Is The Last of Us: Part 1 Really a 'Cash Grab'?
This is so frustrating because I can see both sides. On one hand, I have no doubt Naughty Dog is putting as much work into this remake as any other new project they'd be working on...on the other hand, not only does it feel entirely unnecessary (especially at that $70 price point), but it kind of comes off as incredibly masturbatory (and, a small aside, ever since Neil basically took over ND, I've felt the air around them has been incredibly self congratulatory) and sets a precedent that could be worrying.
They're remaking the original in the sequel engine, that's all well and good, but what happens when TLoU3 comes out? Surely they're going to make some major upgrades to the engine for that title, so are they going to remake the first two games in that engine...and so on and so forth, to keep parity across games? It's a super slippery slope and, to me, just feels like a huge waste of resources and ND's considerable talent.
This isn't an FFVII Remake situation, where it's using the basic setup of the original as a jumping off point to tell a new story. It's not a Resident Evil Remake situation, where the available tech at the time wasn't up to the task of realizing the actual vision of the devs like the new hardware can. It's not even a Shadow of the Colossus or Demon's Souls situation, where the originals are beloved and still widely available but haven't aged as well because they were AAA ideas produced on A or AA budgets.
I don't know...sure, the sequel plays and looks better than the original, but not SO MUCH better that I feel the original necessitates a full, ground-up remake. The whole thing just rubs me the wrong way.