MattBoothDev

@Fiendish-Beaver it was always going to be the case that the upgrade path wouldn't show until today.

Man, nothing pisses me off more then "a gesture of goodwill" as though this is a kindness performed by the company and not something that should happen as a matter of course because it's obviously the right thing to do.

And this should show Sony they need to put the £10 upgrade option up much sooner.

If they made that Gollum game free I'd still avoid it...

I won't be buying it just for the unlock and nor will I be playing the new "rogue-like" mode. Zero interest on that stuff. I want narratives and story, not gimmicky modes.

@PALversusNTSC it's pretty poor business sense not to make sure you have enough money to ride any storm before paying out to shareholders.

This is a fairly new phenomenon. In the past, some companies didn't pay dividends at all if they were struggling or didn't make as much as they thought. Amazon don't pay dividends and yet still get investment.

Yet we see, all the time, companies paying dividends out right up until calling in the administrators.

@Mikey856 Not every company is a PLC with shareholders to appease.

And the issue is most PLCs exist only to generate revenue for shareholders. If a business says "we're not paying dividends this year because we're going to reinvest in the business, everyone loses their *****.

But a responsible business should be keeping money in the bank and not paying out dividends whilst taking on loans to operate. A lot of these businesses do that. They loan all their operating capital from a bank and repay at the end of the year, pay dividends and then repeat for the following year.

So, back to it, they don't take the revenue from these games to invest in more AAA it just gets bled out of the business into dividends.

@StylesT Paparazzi are the like boss level at that stuff. They don't provide any useful service to society. They just exist to harass celebrities and then get all indignant if someone smashes up their camera, or face. They deserve every red light, stone in their shoe and kick up the arse.

Zero interest in this game and Rocksteady being indignant about it makes them look ridiculous.

It's a live service always online game that doesn't need to be. It's more of the same ***** hocking MTX and cosmetics. Everything i dislike about these kinds of games.

It's DOA for me. It's a shame to see a once great studio stoop to this level of *****.

Any game that's a live service, games as a service and any of that cosmic purchases rubbish deserves failure.

I have to admit, I was very interested in Bulletstorm VR but they interest has waned since I own Bulletstorm already and they're asking another £30 for it.

@iSmokeWii Agreed. I had no interest in a multiplayer only TLOU game and especially not anything "live service". I would've been happy with new IP or another singleplayer narrative driven Uncharted or TLOU.

I get that Naughty Dog want to try new things but a star footballer announcing they're going to try rugby is the best analogy I can think of.

I'm sure the comments section of the video will be a pleasant place with absolutely no thinly veiled political rubbish dressed up as critique.

@Mikey856 nah, they don't provide revenue for more AAA. They provide more divideds for shareholders. As soon as the players stop playing they shutter the game.

Where's Epic Games' new AAA game since Fortnite? Where's Bungie's new AAA game after Destiny 2? Both have been ongoing for over 5 years. Given development time scales, which are 5 years or less, usually, we'd be seeing new AAA games from these studios by now.

All the efforts of both studios have been in making sure people are still playing those games and FOMOing on purchases.

I want them to announce a cancellation to the live service initiatives and stop messing around with that rubbish. No one wants it.

The problem is all the games that were financed during the pandemic are chasing that live service trash model because those games were popular when everyone was at home with nothing better to spend their money on.

Now things have gotten back to normal, we want real games with substance and with their hands out of our pockets.

@Tomato_Goose Spending thousands on a game still blows my mind, though.

I agree that the mobile game tactics are really bad but, still, the abilities to spend thousands on a single game is just mind blowing.

@Tomato_Goose the problem is, no one would ever spend that much money on, say, God of War. If you've spent more on a free game than you would on a priced upfront game, that blows my mind.

If I played F2P game, I wouldn't spend more than £30-50 over the entire course of the game life, as a rule.

@Smooshy Smelling Night City would be an experience.

Probably a very bad experience. But an experience none the less...

@Kienda I came here to point this out as well. The PS5 was properly priced at £379.99 for the "old" disc version.

It's massively overpriced at £479.99 for the new "disc edition" with the detachable disc drive and no stand.

I understand they were clearing the old stock to make way for the new slim model, but at £479.99 it's just too much. They set a good, competitive, price.

So, no surprise it sold massively less at the higher price.

I finished Cyberpunk 2077 this week, 100% on both the main game and expansion. There's a slight sense of loss at the moment 😅

I tried playing Company of Heroes 3 Console Edition but I found the controls really frustrating. I may try it with a mouse and keyboard. However, my other problem with the game is the over world map thing they've got going on and the serious lack of good storytelling, unlike the previous games.

So, I've been trying Anno 1800 console edition, which is my first foray into the Anno series at all, but I've actually been really enjoying it.

Good. Honestly? Bloody good.

I'm a PlayStation gamer (used to be a PC player up until this console generation. GPU prices are still stupidly overpriced). I don't want to have to buy both consoles to play previously third party games.

My opinion of Microsoft has soured massively since the Activision acquisition and the release of Starfield. As much as Sony acquiring CDPR would be fine for me, it would mean a significant portion of the gaming market would be locked out, just like we were with Starfield and, honestly, that's just bull faeces. For everyone involved.

@Icey664 As a complete mug who bought it for £60 on release, you are right to wait. It's not worthy of a full price release. The graphics were improved and the 3D audio was added and that's basically it. For a "Remake" they didn't remake anything. I was looking forward to the newer combat style from TLOU2. Naughty Dog said they didn't die that because the level designs didn't lend themselves to the style... Which begs the question why call it a remake if you're not going to do things like that?

It's good and worth the effort to play but you do right waiting for a cheaper price.

@sanderson72 the decision to have Naughty Dog do a "live service" game was definitely an odd one... Though it does seem as though order has been restored as they've dropped that notion.

@KoopaTheGamer they aren't rendering at 4k, though, just outputting. The Series S is hard limited to 1440p internal resolution. It will upscale the rendered image to 4k if you are using a 4k output device. With video content, there's no rendering, just outputting at 4k. The images are already 4k.

There are no native 4k rendered games on the Series S.

Edit:

Here's what the Xbox support page says, under the drop-down entitled "What's the difference between Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S?". I've added the relevant part in bold.

>Both consoles deliver next-generation capabilities powered by the Xbox Velocity Architecture, such as faster loading, the ability to seamlessly switch between multiple games with Quick Resume, richer and more dynamic worlds, and frame rates up to 120 FPS.
The primary difference between the two consoles is that the Xbox Series X displays games at native 4K, comes equipped with a UHD Blu-ray Disc player and 1 TB of custom SSD storage. Xbox Series S is designed for disc-free gaming at 1440p (with the ability to upmarket to 4K), with a customised SSD. And, of course, they're priced differently. Both consoles have the option to expand available customised storage via the Storage Expansion Card.>

https://support.xbox.com/en-GB/help/hardware-network/console/xbox-series-x-faq

@KoopaTheGamer yep, exactly. It can only render at 1440p, max but can upscale the image to 4k if that's your output.

And yeah, the Series S has some really poor RAM choices. Both the Xboxes have a weird configuration, but the Series S is severely limited in bandwidth with the small bus size on the largest portion.

I've pulled this from Wikipedia:

Series X: 10 GB/320-bit & 6 GB/192-bit (16 GB total)
Series S: 8 GB/128-bit & 2 GB/32-bit (10 GB total)

It may be GDDR6 and around 230GB/s but it's still not enough. The smallest portion of the RAM setup is even worse, 2GB at 56GB/s, which is basically DDR3 1600MHz speeds.

@sanderson72 I don't really agree. You have to look at this differently.

I suspect this has a lot to do with PC. Naughty Dog released Uncharted 4 on PC a few years back. They, first, give the UC4 and UC:LL games a lick of paint on PS5 and ported their engine from PS4 to PS5 and sold it to customers, basically getting paid to port their engine. Then, later that year, released on PC, with great success.

So, next comes the TLOU1 remake/remaster. This time porting an older game from PS4, released before Uncharted 4, to the new engine and, again, later, PC.

So now there's TLOU1 on PS5 and PC, why not TLOU2? This was the latest and most up to date engine version on the PS4, the release pipeline now has 2 successful PC ports under its cap.

The main thing they gain here is another PC release and they then have both TLOU games on the latest console.

Finally, if there's any notion that Naughty Dog have been wasting time with remasters, think about the fact that it's very, very likely that newer, junior, team members have been working on this port. They don't need to develop a full game from scratch, they have senior team members who've worked on the original games to refer to for help. These junior team members get experience with the engine and release pipeline, plus credits in the game under their belt.

Plus, these things sell and make money. It's makes perfect business sense and doesn't look like Naughty Dog are suffering.

I think the problem may be the problem you seem to have with Neil Druckmann colouring your opinions of the company.

I'm going for the £10 upgrade route and I'm mostly in it for the main game. The extra mode doesn't really interest me. I'll try it, of course, but I'm mostly looking for the cut content and levels that have supposedly been added in.

No quarter timeframe given means, probably, Q3/4.

@EfYI I don't recall any of that happening. Days Gone was great as was TLOU2.

Except the cringe line about riding all day long, but, yeah, Deacon was cool. The game mechanics were good. I ended up getting the platinum and having a blast.

I have absolutely no faith in their judgement at all. Days Gone was a great game and a sequel would've been well received, but they called it a failure and ditched it.

@Drago201 no?

Honestly, Jack Black has the Midas touch. I don't think I've seen anything he's been in that's been rubbish.

Phantom Liberty was absolutely amazing. I'm glad I held off and didn't suffer the shoddy release and I'm really glad CPR didn't give up and throw in the towel, stuck with it and refined their game.

Cyberpunk has very quickly become one of my favourite series. I've got the platinum trophy, which is something I rarely feel driven enough to do.

@MrMagic that's because the Series S can't render at 4k, only upscale and output, whereas the PS4 Pro, etc, have 4k render modes.

This is absolutely on my wishlist but I'm holding off until I have time to play it.

Even way back in the PS1 era third party controllers sucked. I've never bought any since then and always had official controllers.

Also, how are some of your going through so many controllers? I've still got my original Dual Shock 4 controllers from 2014 and they work great. Same for my Dual Sense controllers. Got two when I got my PS5 and haven't experienced any drift or problems.

The whole points thing pisses me off because they have campaigns for new games but only if you've overpaid and bought it digitally.

So if you pop in your disc and play it doesn't register and you get nothing.

And they have the option to not do that, it's clearly to get you to buy digital from them, full price, with their 30% cut off the sale.

Have they got rid of the easy mode in online play yet? That mode where you don't need to know the combos and moves, just press a few buttons?

Perfectly fine for people offline but it was not fun playing online against these people during the beta.

Never.

I will never play this or buy this.

@UltimateOtaku91 honestly, hard disagree on PS Plus Premium being better.

The Sony Pictures Core application was a waste of time. The free movies are old. A missed opportunity to improve the offering would've been to make Core fully free to Premium subscribers. Much the same way Amazon bundles Prime Video with a Prime subscription.

Cloud Streaming is very niche and not something I've found myself needing. It's cool, but just one of those things few people will really get the most out of.

Game trials shouldn't be locked to Premium subscribers. They're great, and something everyone should have access to for free. I actually don't see the point in having them as Premium features because such trials have been shown to increase sales.

Definitely not worth the extra cost that they've added.

@ChrisDeku let me guess, these people complain about it being something that rhymes with "broke"?

Resident Evil Village didn't seem like it was balanced properly for VR and was as hard as the normal game with a controller. I didn't enjoy the demo and never bought it. Which is a shame because the gunplay in the tutorial was really good and was really promising.

All the sympathy here is misplaced.

He tried to extort Rockstar and ruined the work of hundreds of people. He was already on bail for hacking offences. In police custody at the time he hacked Rockstar.

In custody he'd been violent and abusive towards people looking after him. Shown zero remorse and has viewed his incarceration as a temporary setback to more hacking, extortion and so on

So he's in a mental health hospital instead of prison and some of you are acting like they put rainman on death row. His 4chan buddies are laughing at the courts right now

The licence should be in perpetuity, transferable in the event the service shuts down and there's a replacement with the rights holder.

If Sony and a Discovery sign a three year desk, that should be how long Sony can sell it for, but buyers have a digital licence forever.

Yes, why not publish on the largest console platform by 2:1?

Bittersweet, really. He's an ***** of the highest order and yet whomever replaces him will likely continue the trend

They could've properly remade the original, faithfully, by now and we'd have been enjoying it for ages.

I've absolutely no excitement about this game and FFVII was seminal within my childhood.

@Grimwood God of War 2018 is a direct sequel to the previous games.

If was a reboot and a change of tone and direction, but still a a sequel. Everything that happened in the previous games is still canon.

@EfYI 😂 you don't get to "wrap up" my arguments like that.

I said it was only polarising to the terminally online and spent a few more posts clearing that up. I maintain that position.

I don't discount your experience, it is your own, but you have to realise the phenomena where only pissed off people leave bad reviews. Most happy customers don't go out of their way to leave a good review. As mentioned, the game sold really well and won many accolades.

TLOU2 is around the 9th best selling Sony game of all time, at 10 million sales, just beating Ghost of Tsushima (another amazing game) for that place.TLOU1 and the remaster sold around 20 million together.

You say it's had a dent in the fanbase, but it sold about as well as the first game and the TV show had great ratings and viewership. I think you massively overestimate how many people hated the game/story and that colours your perspective.

@twitchtvpat I would've been more upset if they become a "live services" studio, that's for sure. I really, really didn't care for that idea.

Yeah, I really do doubt that. The GaaS/Live Service model basically negates any fun to be had by trying to get you to open your wallet some more.

These types of games can just die already.