MTMike87

I find it absolutely fascinating that there are significantly more people that are interested in Highguard's analytics than people that care about the actual game.

I think the message is clear that the space is over-saturated with this genre and the trend-chasing will need to come to an end sooner rather than later if companies want to stop losing millions of dollars in worthless investments.

Video games just need to be video games. Not services.

@themightyant Yep! I highly recommend looking up guides on maintaining any & all hardware being used long term. The "jet-engine" sound that everyone memes on is rarely because the system can't handle the game it was playing. It's just lack of maintenance after heavy use over the years.

Really excited for this one! Looks crazy good. Hopefully it isn't too close to Onimusha: Way of the Sword. I really want both of these games to succeed!

I don't think it's going to ever have the player base it needs to remain sustainable. It'll quickly stop getting regular updates and get shut down within 1 to 2 years.

This model is only sustainable if you can get people to jump from their current GaaS time sink, and get into this one. That only gets harder, the longer an individual commits to a single thing.

Sadly, we all knew the fate of this one the second the TGA trailer ended. Hopefully they can make a little bit of money to stay afloat.

Definitely see this as a "YMMV" kind of game. I know my wife and I will enjoy it immensely but I am disappointed in the performance dips for sure.

Excited to jump into it in a couple of days!

Ooooo, my wife is going to be excited! I'm getting the full game for her for her birthday, so she'll be happy to get the hours long process of creating her perfect avatar before release!

I honestly have no clue what to expect from Sony and PlayStation. I think they are sadly in a state of flux with their Live Service push blowing up in their faces. We're going to be feeling the damage from that colossal waste of time and resources for another 2+ years sadly.

If anything, 2026 is going to be a very Capcom heavy year for PlayStation. With the free updates wrapping up in Monster Hunter Wilds, there may be a major expansion coming in 2026. Street Fighter 6 DLC continuing to release as well. Monster Hunter Stories 3, Pragmata, Resident Evil Requiem, Onimusha: Way of the Sword and Mega Man Star Force Legacy Collection... I think they are the studio to look out for this year for sure.

Square Enix needs to start pumping out trailers for Final Fantasy VII R Part 3, Kingdom Hearts IV and Dragon Quest XII. After Dragon Quest VII Reimagined, I don't think we know anything else they have in the pipeline, do we?

Then of course, Silent Hill remake from Konami/Bloober Team is likely releasing in 2026 as well.

Huh, I thought it was shut down years ago. I must have got that mixed up with another title. I guess it ended up finding a small niche to make it worth keeping the servers going for awhile.

I remember hearing it sold a decent number of copies but later found out quite a large chunk of that was from sales of $1 - $5 each. I remember seeing stacks and stacks of copies of Anthem at Five Below.

Given that it's likely been in development already for 6 to 7 years alongside Persona 3 Reload and Persona 4 Revival... I'd say this would be the perfect time to give us a trailer, but the cynic in me doesn't believe it

I dunno, I have a feeling it will be late 2027 or early 2028 before it finally comes out. Since development started prior to the events of 2020, that likely caused significant delays regarding when they really wanted to unveil it as it is. We'll just have to wait and see though. It would be really hard to accept any other Persona announcement except for Persona 6.

Personally, I'd rather see a sequel to Metaphor: ReFantazio or Shin Megami Tensei V, but I'm just not the target demographic for the Persona series.

Pay-Per-View means no advertisement breaks... right? ...RIGHT?!

Yeah, I have no hope for this model to prove sustainable. You need a high viewership to entice ads and sponsors. Sticking a paywall on an event that 99.5% of the world doesn't even know exists (myself included and I play SF6) = devastation.

I personally just don't label a video game by anything more than it's genre. Being AAA or Indie means nothing to me. I should not know a game's budget, publication practices, dev time, team size... the most I want to be educated on is if the game is utilizing AI in nefarious ways.

If the game is good, I'm going to play it. The community/industry created labels put on them is 100% irrelevant.

@AK4tywill That's a fair point. I hadn't really thought about Sony's direct output no longer reaching PS4 consoles, just that games in general are still slated for that machine for 2026 and 2027.

@Wentos I'm honestly kind of shocked that it isn't on the other platforms. Kind of seems like a no-brainer to make this for Mobile, PS4, PS5 and PC via Steam, to tap into the widest pool of players.

Nice! I'll definitely have to hop back into it and gear up. Capcom is probably going to take over a vast majority of my gaming time in 2026!

Very Capcom heavy year for me next year:

1. Resident Evil Requiem
2. Pragmata
3. Onimusha: Way of the Sword
4. Phantom Blade Zero
5. Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection

Ooooo, I never expected third person mode to be added! That is really cool!

Looks incredible and the hit of music at the end had got me excited for it! Wonder if it'll have an English dub to hit as wide of an audience as possible. I hope it's great AND successful!

Excellent! Will undoubtedly be the best State of Play of 2025 for me.

@DragonSlayer1759 I see where you are coming from. It can be frustrating to pay full price for a game, only for others to pay far less and have a better experience than you...

...but in this context, I don't think your statement really fits here as it's free additional content for fans that have been asking for it. If you weren't asking for it, then it simply wasn't made with you in mind.

Well can't complain here! I'll jump on that this weekend!

It generally sounds like the author of the article has a point, but at the same time, also showcases their linear pattern with gaming in general. The only way you really miss games like Astro Bot, Ratchet & Clank & Stellar Blade is if you gravitate towards the other games mentioned specifically for their stories.

So I don't know what to really take away from the original article. It sounds more like personal burn-out than an actual issue with Sony's output thematically. I also think Sony's output has been much slower this generation than any other, so there is that as well, but the third party support is so vast and complements the platform so well, it's almost a moot point.

Most story-driven motivators in general have all been done dozens of times at this point, but the storylines always diverge into their own separate narratives by the end, and differentiate themselves with the world they take place in, the character's origins and development over the course of the events the player is forced to engage with, etc.

TL;DR, Sony is doing just fine, and the article has no real merit on the industry as a whole, but a personal issue that can be easily remedied by not focusing solely on PlayStation Studios for PlayStation 5 content.

Funny enough, PS3 servers are fine, lol.

Wait, this game hasn't even been officially out a year, and we're already FIVE seasons in???

I don't think platform fighters as a Live Service game works when you're that aggressive on the battle pass/DLC. Its not hard to see what the issue is with that. It's either really tedious, or more expensive than a full priced game and you aren't going to find enough people willing to commit to constantly investing into a product that will inevitably cease to exist.

I'm just saying... Let Team Asobi make a brand new Ape Escape game. It's a match made in heaven.

I think this is the final strike against it for us.

I just wanted to co-op with my wife, like we did in Elden Ring. Now every accomplishment is going to feel cheated because we have to lug around an awkward 3rd wheel that might be at a completely different part of the game and carries us through the fight.

Sounds like its bargain bin material for me now.

@Xbox_Dashboard Comment of the year. Absolutely lost it. 😂

My wife has been playing it so I let her score it. She gave it a 9 as well.

She does disagree on pretty much every con that was listed in the PushSquare review. She thinks Architype Conveyance was poor to the player and she feels like not enough dialog is voiced in story segments. Everything else is exactly what she wanted.

Definitely a 9 out of 10 from me! Without comparing it to the original, its just a really great horror game. Some of the best sound design in the genre, and the visuals look great. The only real complaint I have is that the camera has quite a few issues that were simply ignored to meet the deadline. There's no way it didn't come up in the debugging process.

It really gets hung up on doors and most other objects in small spaces and jitters uncontrollably for a couple of seconds. I feel like the camera has 0 flexibility and can get you in a bad situation once or twice per playthrough.

Definitely going to be a game that will get improvement patches over time. Probably not going to review too well.

It didn't really click with me that this was a thing until I started play A Plague Tale: Requiem, that an advertisement for the bundle of a game series I was already playing and had installed was being shoved in my face instead of the normal progress and social media stuff. What a waste.

Death Stranding Director's Cut is doing the same thing now too, advertising that its coming out soon even though I'm already 40+ hours into playing it. Its hard to believe this was intentional.

I thought at one point they could collaborate in an update, but after seeing this interview, I'm highly doubtful. Oh well, its not too important anyway, Astro Bot is awesome with or without Square Enix cameos!

Really looking forward to this one. I've missed the Budokai Tenkaichi series and many of the other DBZ games that have come out recently just didn't do it for me.

This issue was totally self-inflicted. There are SO many reasons why this happened that no one can even list them all. They pushed way too hard on this holiday season.

I am curious to know if the large revenue stream Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis brings to SEGA is incorporated in these sales reports or not. I didn't see any mention of it from any of the outlets so I'm going to assume not. It might be self-sustained since its live-service and SEGA doesn't pull from it unless needed. I'm not really sure how it works in a business sense.

1080p60 is perfectly fine to me! I just want those frames!

I bought my TV with a higher refresh rate because Sony and subsequent studios kept touting 60FPS and even 120FPS modes for their games.

Now if a game runs 30FPS on my new TV, it's jarring, choppy, the games look horrendous and the picture quality suffers as a result anyway. If studios aren't going to put in the effort to optimize their games for current technology, I'm not buying them.

60 FPS is a must for me on the PS5. 30 FPS games stutter bad on my high refresh rate 4K QLED TV. I bought this console because I wanted a gaming platform to be compatible with my TV and make the most of what it offers. If I can't get a smooth 60 FPS experience, it's very unlikely I will invest any time or money at all into it.

I will still tolerate 30 FPS on handheld gaming devices though since the screen should be dedicated to whatever experience the system can offer. It's not as noticeable.

Thank you for this informative review. I really loved the first game, but I think I'll wait a little while before picking it up, just to see if the performance issues are able to get resolved. I don't like the idea of the game crashing my entire console, if it can be helped. Would really like graphical options in the future as well. 60 FPS has completely spoiled me.

I had heard about this as an issue from friends that have been with Destiny 2 for 1,000+ hours, and it had always deterred me from playing it. Maybe I'll see for myself on December 6th if these changes will make it easier for me to jump in for the first time.

@Cadeni Right? I would have figured this would come with the Limited Edition Controller and custom cover plate too. What a weird decision.

This reminds me when the ColecoVision had the add-on "expansion module" that let you play Atari 2600 games on it. It's just... weird to imagine. That was also done without the permissions of Atari though.

In this case, Sony would be hammered with royalty fees they would have to pay out to Microsoft. I'm sure there is money there for Sony to make, but I bet it's not enough to be worth making that move. Definitely more to the story here that we aren't seeing though.

@Agramonte Exactly! This game was made very poorly, and was unappealing on nearly every level. A game running on PlayStation 5, should not be having consistent framerate issues. Especially if that game already looked last gen to begin with.

I don't have high hopes for Platinum Games with this model personally. I think their investors want low-risk with a high-reward and that's not how this industry should work.