Konks

I enjoy what I have played so far… but I have to wonder: was the jarringly bad performance of the demo somewhat responsible? I know that on launch it was cleared up (and even more since) but any casual PS fan who just tried the demo maybe peaced out fast.

Amazing results for HD2. If 6 months ago you said it would be within 3% or FF7 as most popular game of the year, 90% of people would probably have asked what Helldivers is.

As someone who played MMOs for years on and off, the pricing is not that bad.

@Dodoo I mean it launched over 6 weeks ago. I imagine it is over the peak of its “launch window” sales parabola. It is unrealistic to expect a single player game to have the growth of a GaaS like Helldivers.

Good points all around. We don’t know how much money and support Sony gave Square—maybe it compensates for fewer sales of the actual game.

Exclusives are like these broadcast deals in baseball and racing. Leagues accepting lower viewership for guaranteed money.

I also think people are a bit dated calling FF7 the most popular game ever made… it is, for a generation of us older gamers.

I get most Zoomers and those after have next to zero cultural zeitgeist for FF7. That would be Fortnite or Minecraft for them. Worth adding that when FF7 was the biggest thing in gaming there were a lot fewer gamers in general.

I think 2 million is perfectly fine for a sequel game. If its deemed insufficient by Square, they need to knock off the ridiculous budgets for these games. Recent GoTY titles have had much smaller budgets.

Very interesting piece! Would love to go there some day.

Love this on PC but people demanding DLC already are not doing this hobby any favors. Some of the performance burps you see every hour are janky at best. This needs to be tuned up and worked on before they move on to DLC and end-of-life status.

@UltimateOtaku91 its how things usually go. Most years the Pullitzers, Academy Awards and BAFTAs go to books or movies very few have seen and winning the awards does not cause more people to want to see them. Critics review media for its artistic merit and value. Most consumers want more fun. This is why games like Fortnite, Apex, Madden, FIFA, or CoD carry a sizable amount of the active player time on all consoles, despite seldom winning awards these days.

DD2 on PC is quite good. FF7 was a great start but the minigame heaviness in Junon then Costa del Sol tanked my interest and I have not played since launch weekend. Hoping to get back to it and pick up at Costa del Sol some day.

@gaston story and grinding aside, Ancient Greece is probably my favorite open world to actually return to. I have over the years re-installed Odyssey just to putz around on the ship. Especially pleasant living rather far in the northern hemisphere where the sunshine and ocean is a nice contrast to 7 hours of sunlight and weeks below freezing… this is probably why Valhalla was a one-and-done… felt like my state feels all of October, November, March, and April haha.

@wildcat_kickz I would love a new Splinter Cell or GR.

Wait so the game will go into life support? Have not been on in a while, and had no clue it was going to “end” ever.

So they are just done with it?

@Coolmusic the skull with crown is all I see. Its us kings waiting for the trailer…

6v6 superheroes all shooting each other sounds so divorced from the franchises.

Got Days Gone on PC for $12. Looks amazing maxed out.

It is a CPU beast reminiscent of Skyrim when it was a baby, or bit 4x games on PC.

Its not like you can just use upscaling gimmicks on that. Short of them scrapping the PS5 Pro and making one with a 7800x3D for $999.99, people should not get hopes up on the current Pro specs providing much benefit. Short of the devs making all the NPCs typical UE4 moron NPCs who stand around (which would ruin the entire game), this game simply needs a big boy processor.

I do plan on getting it on Steam when it’s closer to the $30 mark. Gaming is and has for a while been a hobby that punishes early adopters with less content and higher fees.

@thefourfoldroot1 gaming has basically become a hobby that taxes the early adopters (unless its a seasonal type game). For example I play a lot of racing games and waiting a year means I get all the cars and tracks for 60% the original MSRP—while early adopters paid MSRP and either paid for tracks/cars or waited a year for them all.

I have been meaning to go back for a NG+ run. Beat it last summer and definitely would like to check out the new zones.

@DennisReynolds no, my point is still on. If its useless, why are they selling it at all? Because they want to dupe naive players out of their money.

People defending it are like guys who snicker at people who lost $10,000 at the casino while they walk in confident to beat the house: the next mark is all of the rest.

You need state of the art CPU and GPU to get baseline performance you get in 7:Remake on PC.

Cash shop Day 1. Defenders trying to defend it too… if it was truly useless time-savers being sold, then why are they selling them at all? The game lead championed Zero Fast Travel, and then added some points in game you can find to fast travel and Minute 1 CASH SHOP fast travel enablement. What is the point here? To prey on less informed consumers, who don’t realize this stuff is unlocked eventually, I guess is the only viable answer. Which means the studio and publisher are scummy. Next up will be locking ring/accessory slots behind the Capcom Cash Store.

Instant pass for me. The best defense people provide is “the company is just duping its more trusting and naive customers, not us smart guys.” Which means the next mark for their bad practices are all of us.

@Nowings FF16, Infinite Wealth, and Sea of Stars sold well.

P3R did well too.

To your point though, maybe the problem is a AAAA budget where 30% of the console’s owner base needs to buy the game for it to make a huge profit. That is an unsustainable baseline.

And no, consumers are not obligated to pay $69.99 pretax for every game in their preferred genre. To boot, FF7R is the least JRPG-like game in the series in a long time. Its like Ezio Auditore got sucked into a gigantic Mario Party match.

Unsure why everyone is angry about the FF rebirth reporting on this website.

We are almost done with March and all reported sales so far support the conclusion that the vast majority of FF7 Rebirth copies sold to date were sold on or before the March 2, 2024 end date of the reporting. There is nothing shown that sales in the 20 days since come close to matching that first week.

Which makes sense. AAA RPGs are most often picked up either immediately or sales spikes later on in much smaller volumes whenever the game is discounted.

Re: Fort Condor, it is astounding how they took a really fun and eased-into minigame in Remake into a ragefest by trying to jam it into 4 events and REQUIRE you to win instead of weighing out a winner in a draw/turtle game. It destroyed all the nuance and strategy of the original and made it largely a process of selecting the “correct” forces to deploy at the “correct” time.

When I think back on that now, it makes me wonder how many of the other annoying minigames could have been truly deep and fun if they focused on 4-5 games like FF7-12 did, instead of seeing if they could have more minigames in their RPG than two Mario Party titles combined.

@Pat_trick it is also a sequel RPG that is rightfully not being advertised as a stand-alone experience (you need to have played Remake to understand what is going on at all, unlike the BioWare games, where little prior knowledge of the game was expected). From the start its player base was going to mostly (though not only) be people who played Remake, enjoyed it, and own a PS5.

Helldivers, with its budget and expectations, doing this well is tremendous. People throwing shade on PushSquare about Rebirth seem premature. March will show more how that game did. It is not PushSquare’s fault the game launched the last day of the month.

In any event, Rebirth needs to sell a ton with its development cost and advertising budget. It selling HD2 numbers is a necessity and not exceptional. They probably spent more on the face modeling and facial movement in Rebirth than HD2 had for its entire game.

I paid for a year that expires in a few weeks and I am done. I realized the only incentive now is to replay FF games on the service. For the $200 or whatever they want a year now I can get them all on the current steam sale and have $100 left over.

I did not end up playing ANY PS games online this year, so going with zero subscription at all just makes sense.

I admittedly bought it Day 1, and binged it that weekend. But I got to the military parade and sort of haven’t done much. In the 13 days since the opening weekend I played through to the beach area, maybe an extra 2-3 hours?

The mini games and the open world collection marathon is grueling and relentless. People tell me to skip them then, but so far every meaningful Tifa/Aerith/Barrett side quest has required side quests. The summons require exploration. If you do skip the minigames and exploration its the equivalent of having to skip important cutscenes that make the game’s characters have depth and story have significance.

It really plays out like Mario Party: Ezio’s Last Far Cry (Rebirth). The actual story, action/dungeons, and meaningful characters development are the rewards for doing the Ubisoft open world and mario party minigames—when Square should have made them the joy and life of the game itself.

Rebirth being so high makes sense as its so new. Should almost omit it for a while until people actually beat it and the honeymoon phase wears off.

Strangers of Paradise definitely punches above its 18th slot but there are a lot of good games here as well.

@UltimateOtaku91

The article raises the major points I think: this is a sequel to a remake of a specific game. The audience is thus mostly going to be fans of the original game or fans who beat FFR7 (probably a lot of the same people).

The Ubisoftian formula probably is not a big plus to Japanese gamers, and that is the meat here: get the mount for each area, climb lookout towers to download locations of PoIs, clear out fiend packs, solve some puzzles.

I know some people who are seriously planning to wait until the entire FF7 has been remade before they try it.

Makes you wonder… will Part 3 be a 150 hour game or something? Narrative wise, Disc 2 and 3 together have more going on than Disc 1. They could have Wutai, Northern Region, and Mideel all be regions like the ones in Rebirth and still not have covered the Huge Materia stuff (which includes backtracking to Rebirth areas too), Midgar raid, crater finale.

Rebirth took about 6 hours of the game into 60, Remake 3-4 hours into 40. All of Disc 2-3 plus Rocket Town from Disc 1 is closer to 20 hours of the game.

I am getting it first thing after my FF7 Rebirth play. Thinking of balling on PC though unless PS5 has more stability?

I have played games at 15 FPS (MMOs in the early 00s) and 155 FPS today.

I have noticed the 60 FPS mode is too blurry for me. The 30 is the GOAT mode for this game. My only issue so far has been that camera rotation in certain texture-dense areas results in obvious screen tearing above 2/3 up my screen. Not unplayable though.

I am enjoying it. I am also a huge open world guy. This is like the MGS5 treatment for Final Fantasy.

I will be soon.

@Zenos Nah the PS5 can handle better upscaling. This is a rush job on the post processing.

If anyone tells you this is a PS5 Pro testament, consider it an insult. Its like of a car salesman who sold you a 2024 Honda Civic that broke down going to the grocery store just wasn’t enough—you need to buy a Porsche 911 Rally.

@shgamer if the model is making money on the initial sale, it doesn’t need to be a game people play more than a month. The problem is games with insane budgets that need a lot of people who bought it for $70 to buy battle passes and expansions over a period of years for the company to make back its money.

@DonJorginho ironically the AAAA behemoths are the only reason gaming employment is so huge. If studios see games like Palworld and Helldiver can be made with handfuls of people, while AAAA games struggle to make their budgets back, lay offs are guaranteed. Which is what we are seeing. The better smaller games do, the less justification leaders have to hire 700-1,000 people to make a game.

Most of the problematic aspects of major PS5 games came from clown-esque implementation of FSR. The games are rock solid engines and chassis but they just mess up the paint job and trim horrendously and get a bad rap as a result.

The same clown stuff can happen on a PS5Pro or a 7900 XTX, if you are stuck using a specific FSR setting.

Hogwarts was a monster for that studio.

@andrix9743 right now it is roughly 1.5-3 hours depending on if you play through and explore a bit or spend a ton of time just looking at stuff. I spent 2 hours 15 minutes.

In a few weeks it will have additional demo content in the form of a free roam area.

@jmac1686 this was my problem. It took until the demo ended for me to not have motion sickness. Rebirth looks like it was the 2020 game and Remake looks closer to a 2024 game.

The 30/60 FPS part is meaningless to me. I play PC games at 155 fps and Switch games at 20. In Rebirth the big problem is the textures vary so much in quality that it’s like a water-colour painting anywhere but the closest foreground. No amount of increased FPS will help that at all. That is not how that works. It is a setting in how its processing the visuals.

Some guy on a different forum pointed out how the open world in FF15 on PS4 looks better… this is my issue with it. If it ran at 20 FPS but gave me no headaches from blurriness, I would be completely fine. I ran it on 4k mode (despite not having it plugged into a 4k tv but a 1440p monitor) and the gains are marginal at best. The open world still looks really bad. When Horizon and GoW aced this on a cross-gen game… this just looks bad.

It looks like it’s 720p or below being upscaled. Digital Foundry was looking into it and said it runs at 1440p, upscaled to 4k… but post-processing has compressed assets to as low as 400p. The corridor sections will run like Remake, the open world will be much much rougher. Which is disappointing as the PS5 is much more powerful than the PS4 that the Remake was made for. I will be waiting for a Day 2 patch.

Unsure what if anything they can change about that in a couple weeks but hopefully they do. I appreciate that they had a demo at all. All too many games release next to no information before release.

Maybe it improved somehow from the betas I did. It looked great but the gameplay loop was soul crushing grinding to do ANYTHING.

They need to figure out the FSR crap that is doing a C- job upscaling from 720p or whatever. Remake runs better on both a PS5 and a 5700XT, which is worse than a PS5.

Stellar looks good but interested to see the performance. Rebirth has some major upscaling going on in the Demo that has me scratching my head: Remake Integrade looks better somehow!?

Robin is just not my genre so passing on that one, but not to say it won’t be fun.

The future of “console” gaming is more and more streaming to a Smart TV or mobile device. Sony and MS are all about getting into that market.

The games will be BYOD basically. And Sony/MS can ditch the hardware that is a loss-leader anyways.

A return of the notorious bro-night with Barret, maybe??

IIRC in the original game, Aeris’s score was by default so high that you had to really ignore her to get Tifa as a date, and had to take incredibly specific dialogue and party options to have Yuffie or Barret.

$1,400 TV (entry price anyways, goes up into the $5,000+ range) plus the $500 machine to get 40 FPS? Yeeesh. You can get a minimum of 60 fps, native 4k (PS5 being upscaled) for that cost buying a PC, assuming you can wait a bit for the game.

The basic Bravia or entry level Sony TVs will get you 30 for $200-300.

@Professor_Niggle I get the vibe that Ubi is launching SnB to put the project out of its misery, and they expect it to suck… after 11 years in dev hell I don’t doubt it either.

They are probably hoping to salvage some of the development by using the engine to remake a more popular title.

I just finished the PS4 version on my PS5. Maybe it came with a 60 FPS mode? Felt very fluid. Playing it on my 1440p display so gonna pass on the 4k mode. Cool deal for newcomers to the games though.

@AFCC yes I agree and came here to say this. There seems to be a weird thing going on with game reviewers on this stuff. Fast travel and loads of POIs = terrible, Bad, and Ubisoftian clutterfest in most reviews. I think it’s okay personally but I can already anticipate the “wow 100 bandit camps to clear, really Square!?!?”

I am excited for the game but ordinarily fast travel or horses/mounts, is short for “we made a big map you won’t want to spend much time roaming.”