Sony loss lead with subsidised hardware, and then claw it back with subscriptions and an extra premium on games. The new generic ‘xboxes’ that AMD and nVidia produce will be more expensive to buy, but they will be open systems with cheaper games, like PC.
That value proposition is nothing new and as somebody who plays a lot of games it has generally caused me to gravitate towards PC, historically. It’s going to have a lot of hardcore appeal. Last gen was dominated by my cobbled together SteamBox.
This gen I’ve been pretty much glued to my PS5, however. It’s a great bit of kit and PSN is a great value service. This looks bobbins by comparison. It feels very risk averse. A low spec Steam extender. nVidia have phat AI money and are gonna swing big at high spec, hardcore gamers.
When you’re comparing salaries vs house prices from 40 years ago, please don’t forget to factor in interest rates from 40 years ago. Generation Rent being told to ignore interest rates, blame “Boomers” and YOLO is a deliberate con job imho.
House prices in particular are misrepresented to create an illusion of accessibility. In reality, when interest rates go up house prices are driven down by mortgages becoming less affordable and less accessible. Ya dig? Home ownership is not getting closer in this instance. It’s a sign of the path to it tightening.
Question any source that neglects to mention interest rates WRT house prices.
Personally, I’ve always wanted to play an open world game set in a realistic, fully realised city and if any of the whiners have a better way of realising that dream than generative AI then I would be fascinated to hear it.
Every single year the games I play are better than the games I was playing the year before. More powerful tools are unlikely to spell the end of that. It’s driven by the competitiveness of a very competitive market.
PSVR2 is a great bit of kit. I’ve never regretted buying mine. It’s my 3rd VR set and the first I’ve used regularly. I’ve done hundreds of hours in GT7 alone purely on the strength of the experience in VR. I only stopped playing because there’s nothing to do. The moment I get a racing game with a career mode, I’m living in the Matrix.
That’s your new Xbox. Or one of them at least. Microsoft are getting out of hardware, and have been ever since they dipped a toe in and got their leg stuck.
This is the AMD/Valve entry into the vacuum left, and its main competition will be whatever nVidia are about to announce. Expect it to roundly kick this in the nuts. ‘Xbox’ is going to be a Netflix-for-games service available across PC and all compatible consoles, which includes PlayStations. (Like EA’s current subscription service, only good.) It will also become the generic name for a living room games machine. This is an Xbox. nVidia’s will be another Xbox. Build yourself your own Xbox, if you’re cool.
Meanwhile Sony are pulling back from sending PlayStation games multiplatform, which I see as a response. They’ll ring fence their killer IPs like Nintendo do, loss-lead their entry price and try to hang on to their hardware advantage, which is their forte. nVidia have a great track record in graphical performance but they’re starting from near scratch on ergonomics. I’ll likely buy a PS6 for the controller. Sony just make really good gear, generally.
In the new world order, Sony’s PlayStation will market as the premier type of Xbox, and the only one to get PSN instead of Steam.
In my opinion, it’s a mistake to pander to these ****s. They’re the worst of the community.
The people who review bomb, the people who complain that scrounging Super Credits from Trivial missions is “too boring”, and the people who won’t share their precious ‘meta’ gear: all the same people. P’tooey.
It’s showing its age. I’m enjoying the nostalgia more than I’m enjoying the game, and part of that nostalgia is remembering how much we used to laugh at it.
It is more fun than Skyrim, mind you, which is leaving me hoping that the next one is a bit less serious and conflicted and a bit more playful.
You don’t need to know the rules of poker to play Balatro. If anything, having zero knowledge of the terminology is an advantage because it doesn’t use anything correctly. It’s very broad. It’s a game about jokers and cheating so hard you break the game. If you have PS Plus, just try it.
Plenty of games don’t find their mojo until the sequel, so fingers crossed for this. With the first one I could see where all the bits came from, so it did nothing to surprise me. Same problem as Starfield. Please surprise me, Obsidian. Let loose. Go full Anachronox. Something. Anything.
Obsidian feel like one of those legendary 70s rock bands that are still touring despite not having any original members left.
You are describing the pricing model accurately but then inventing a bogus motive to apply to the creators. Why do that? They have faith that some people will pay $80, and they have faith that more people will pay $40, and that even more will pay $20.
If they don’t offer all three prices over time, they would leave some money - your money specifically - on the table. That would be bad business sense that has nothing to do with the faith they have in their game.
The crowing about EA is even more derivative than the writing in Veilguard. The games repeat the same hackneyed content, the trolls retread the same hackneyed criticism. Neither has had anything new to offer for 20 years.
Echo, echo, echo.
Game studios are like bands. They go through different line ups, and they don’t last. The idea that if BioWare weren’t at EA they’d still be the BioWare of 20 years ago is a delusion. EA is Vegas. They don’t make the Elvis’s get fat and old, they’re just where old, fat Elvis’s go to make money.
“ if a game's been out for 4 years and they still want to charge full price for it, well, they can do that, and there's nothing you can do about it.”
What digital games market are you talking about?
Everything 4 years old is 95% off rrp. Nothing is full price for more than a month. This is because of the fierce competition between games, and because it is the established digital model for maximum profitability. You keep appealing to a wider audience at a lower price until you have every penny you can get. Everyone does it. Digital games get cheaper and cheaper until they’re whatever price you want it to be. You pay a premium day one, a pittance year four.
It’s cheaper in the long run, because manufacturing and distributing round bits of plastic is a wasteful expense. It can’t help but be worse value.
Patience, grasshopper. The digital price will undercut the physical price eventually, even the fire-sale prices. So says my digital only PS5 with literally hundreds of games. Driving plastic discs around the planet does not ultimately secure anybody any financial savings.
I have never had so many games so cheap in any previous console generation, ever. Official fact.
Musk is the idiot boss of idiot bosses. If you’re forced into crunching, you’re heading for redundancy and illness. Forget about renewing your contract. Leave before they go bust!
If you ever have the choice, refuse. Refusing to crunch is the biggest open goal there is, career wise. It’s like being the only person who’s sober. In no way fun, but actually pretty easy to get ahead.
People absolutely shouldn’t feel guilted into crunching long term. Working 80 hours a week only increases productivity for a fortnight or so. After that, you get more out of the healthy people working 40 hours a week than you do out of the exhausted people working 80. If you decline to crunch, you will soon find yourself picking up their slack, not the other way around. After a few months, you’ll be begging them to stop breaking everything and go to bed!
The only purpose of crunching is for your idiot boss to create a false impression to their idiot boss that everything that can be done is being done. Underneath all the churn it’s an admission of managerial incompetence. The first thing any successful manager would do on entering a failing environment is eliminate crunch. It’s a failure spiral. And it destroys people’s health.
Studios don’t fail despite crunching, they fail because they’re crunching. It’s a warning sign that nobody knows what they’re doing.
Earnt by who? Developers get more money from digital sales. The proportion of a physical sale that goes to the developer is small.
75% of physical goes on manufacturing, shipping and to the retailer. So, buying 75% off digital is about as good as full price physical. 95% off digital is better than 2nd hand resale.
There’s good reasons publishers and developers are so keen on digital. If you buy a full price game at release, all the money wasted on a physical release goes to them. If you buy it massively reduced in a sale, all the money wasted on a physical release goes to you.
My PS5 doesn’t have a disc drive. I have more games for it than I could fit in my house and I picked most of them up for the price of a sandwich. I’d say ‘it’s the future’ but physical media already feels ancient to me. The idea of crossing the room to switch games is as archaic as crossing the room to switch channel.
Elden Ring is only hard if you ignore all the things that make it easy. Most players ignore anything they don’t need, giving everyone the feeling of being taxed to the limit, but if you want an armchair ride it’s there for you.
Good to have Miyazaki confirm he did put all those things in deliberately, and you are supposed to use them. It’s a very clever and well executed design that should get more praise for its accessibility. It delivers the feeling of conquering the impossible to players of a very wide skill range.
Elden Ring isn’t difficult. It’s only difficult if you choose to ignore the things that make it easier, like multiplayer.
If you play multiplayer, you power level your character with zero risk and then other players come and kill the bosses for you. It’s easier than almost any other action RPG you can name.
All the ‘easy mode’ you could ever need is incorporated into the design and world building. The completion and platinum trophy rates reflect this, as do the sales.
PSVR2 is my 3rd VR system and the first I use regularly.
I’m amazed there hasn’t been more buzz about GT7. Players talk about it BTL all the time. It’s such an enhanced experience I’ll never play a flat screen racing game again. I can’t pick a braking point or hit an apex without the parallax effect moving my head in VR provides. The necessary depth information isn’t there on a flat screen and I never realised. I’d forever be driving up the back of people and just thought I sucked, but I was half blind. It’s been a complete game changer. If the F1 game adds support, that’d be an instabuy. I’m not even trying it otherwise.
More cockpit experiences please, devs. Less jumping around.
I loved the cards. They played really well, especially to begin with. Drawing from a deck of cards is a nicer randomiser than rolling virtual dice as the odds of a particular outcome narrows until it happens. With naked RNG you can miss all day. I’m surprised if that really put strategy game players off in large numbers. People expecting an action game like Guardians of the Galaxy, perhaps. They were the bit I would keep. Without the cards, it wouldn’t even be a cult hit.
I think it flopped because it felt unfinished. It started well, but the mission maps were repetitive and the difficulty didn’t scale well. The bosses were frustrating. The upgrade system was powerful, but also unbalanced. You would end up with uber moves you had to use over and over.
Also, it’s cosmic. Everybody hates cosmic. Even the characters in cosmic know that everybody hates cosmic, and that’s what people don’t like! How do your own characters know that cosmic always flops, and you don’t? 🤣 And there was a LOT of it. It’s another bold choice…
I’m not sure cards were simply a bad idea. I think it’s a not great card system. It’s a good concept, but the execution feels hurried. The closer you get to the end of the game, the more unpolished everything seems. I’d love to know if they felt rushed.
Did you try playing on a difficulty high enough for you to need to work as a team? I find team tasks engaging. I can’t complete the objectives on my own, nor can I keep using the same strategies with every team, and that keeps things fresh. The point at which we need to cut and run is different each time. It’s very nicely balanced so that everyone can find a level where you can make it out, but things can also totally go to hell. If you’re in and out with no trouble all the time, you’re missing all the fun.
It also moves really nicely. Those are the two things that stand out for me.
No. Games made by studios owned by Sony are ‘first party’. That’s the party. Games made by legally distinct third parties are ‘third party’. Tetris, for example, was published by Nintendo on GameBoy but was and is a third party game. Nintendo publishing it didn’t make it first party.
Games made by third parties that are entirely funded by the first party are in a grey area that is as inaccurate to call ‘first party’ as it is to call them ‘indie’. Why label them as either? If we must have a label, I would suggest ‘associate third party’.
Have you not been paying attention for the last fortnight? It’s been a cautionary tale as to why almost all other developers keep their ‘communities’ at arm’s length.
Helldivers 2 has an Al Murray: Pub Landlord problem. That is, if you satirise fascism you attract fascists who don’t understand satire and are starved of other content aimed in their direction.
The community they’ve garnered, and it seems to be the PC community in particular, can’t tell the difference between a community goal against fictional automatons and the mass bullying and harassment of real human beings.
Immortals died of genericism, but always looked quite fun to play. Not worth a purchase, but definitely worth a download. Will probably get a dozen hours at least.
Keep bringing AAA near misses to the service. That’s what it should be all about and is much better value than indie darlings like Stray appearing for a few weeks. I’ve been looking forward to this happening ever since it flopped last summer.
This sort of a deal has been on the cards since Disney Infinity. It makes much more sense to put Disney, Marvel and Star Wars characters in Fortnite than it does to try and launch your own Fortnite. That was always a big ask for a company that doesn’t really understand video games. Or toys. Or movies. Or corporate unity.
C’mon. Kids are gonna love this. They get to play Fortnite and meet Mickey and wave a lightsaber and dress up as Spider-Man. These are all things kids love. It’s not aimed at middle aged Empire Strikes Back fans, so our opinions are kinda irrelevant.
You make one mediocre game, you go bust. This is the reality for most developers, regardless of platform.
GT7 in VR is one of my most played games this year. It was my only premium full price purchase of the year too. I’d be in the market for any competitors. VR is an absolute game changer for some genres, and I want more sims.
AAA VR is perfectly viable, but it needs to actually be AAA. This is a £35 B-game, which is a very crowded market, and is an online shooter the best VR genre? It sounds exhausting.
Could happen. Xbox is getting squeezed between PlayStation and PC extenders like Valve’s Steam Deck. Microsoft are a software and IT company at heart. There must be a lot of internal pressure to get out of consumer electronics and just sell software subscriptions and cloud services.
If Mr John Carpenter is giving up on your video game in boredom, the problem might be with your video game, not with Mr John Carpenter. I mean, no single human being has been plagiarised more in popular nerd culture than John Carpenter. Everyone from Hideo Kojima to James Cameron has ripped him off at some point. Maybe instead of sucking, he actually has a point? He might know something about combining action with storytelling? Something your groundbreaking fetch quest design might not be delivering?
I’m not really surprised by any of this. I gave up after the first one, which I found very repetitive and forced. I think their whole approach to gameplay and narrative is a dead end. Fetching gas cans to fill a generator? Ooof, that’s some weak sauce right there. I’d give that about 10 mins tops.
I have a full annual PS+ subscription, and all in all I’m very happy with it. If they left it exactly as is but called the expensive monthly chunk of AAA games ‘Premium’ instead of ‘Extra’, and the cheaper cherry-on-top add on of special interest legacy games ‘Extra’ instead of ‘Premium’, that would seem to fix most people’s complaints. It’s a great service, but why did they name it backwards?
No you don’t. You say you do, but you’re a hypocrite. If you love collecting things, collect them. If you love playing games, play them. But don’t try and tell me you love something you plan to trample on and steal. People who really love games don’t pirate them. They embrace the new opportunity to buy 118 of them in a generation.
Your proposed theft isn’t justified by any of your imagined rights or ideals. You’d not be making a point or taking a stand. It’d just be thieving for your own gain, both material and to inflate your self importance.
You might be ok with being a hypocrite, but it means nothing you write is worth reading. You’re lying to everyone, yourself included.
My PS4 games tally reads as follows: Physical: 4 Digital: 118
And one of those 4 came with the console...
That’s not me trying to save the environment. That’s just me going where the bargains are. The bargains aren’t in manufacturing and distributing redundant things. That costs money.
PlayStation have reacted to this by releasing a digital only edition of their new console, which I’ll obviously be getting. I’m not sure they can do much more than that when it comes to eliminating waste.
Ultimately, I don’t understand who this packaging is for. Biodegradability is only a desirable quality in disposable things people throw away. If you’re admitting this stuff is heading for a landfill, why manufacture it at all? If it’s for collectors and posterity and future generations, don’t they want packaging that lasts, like 90s Sega, rather than packaging that disintegrates, like 90s Nintendo?
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Re: Valve Won't Subsidise Steam Machine, Expected to Be Pricier Than More Powerful PS5
Sony loss lead with subsidised hardware, and then claw it back with subscriptions and an extra premium on games. The new generic ‘xboxes’ that AMD and nVidia produce will be more expensive to buy, but they will be open systems with cheaper games, like PC.
That value proposition is nothing new and as somebody who plays a lot of games it has generally caused me to gravitate towards PC, historically. It’s going to have a lot of hardcore appeal. Last gen was dominated by my cobbled together SteamBox.
This gen I’ve been pretty much glued to my PS5, however. It’s a great bit of kit and PSN is a great value service. This looks bobbins by comparison. It feels very risk averse. A low spec Steam extender. nVidia have phat AI money and are gonna swing big at high spec, hardcore gamers.
Re: Ubisoft Is All In on Generative AI, Says It's as Big a Leap in Tech as the 'Shift to 3D'
@Medic_alert
When you’re comparing salaries vs house prices from 40 years ago, please don’t forget to factor in interest rates from 40 years ago. Generation Rent being told to ignore interest rates, blame “Boomers” and YOLO is a deliberate con job imho.
House prices in particular are misrepresented to create an illusion of accessibility. In reality, when interest rates go up house prices are driven down by mortgages becoming less affordable and less accessible. Ya dig? Home ownership is not getting closer in this instance. It’s a sign of the path to it tightening.
Question any source that neglects to mention interest rates WRT house prices.
Re: Ubisoft Is All In on Generative AI, Says It's as Big a Leap in Tech as the 'Shift to 3D'
Personally, I’ve always wanted to play an open world game set in a realistic, fully realised city and if any of the whiners have a better way of realising that dream than generative AI then I would be fascinated to hear it.
Every single year the games I play are better than the games I was playing the year before. More powerful tools are unlikely to spell the end of that. It’s driven by the competitiveness of a very competitive market.
Re: $100 Off PS5 Consoles, PSVR2 for Black Friday 2025
PSVR2 is a great bit of kit. I’ve never regretted buying mine. It’s my 3rd VR set and the first I’ve used regularly. I’ve done hundreds of hours in GT7 alone purely on the strength of the experience in VR. I only stopped playing because there’s nothing to do. The moment I get a racing game with a career mode, I’m living in the Matrix.
I wouldn’t trade it for a PS5 Pro upgrade.
Re: Twisted Metal Renewed for Season 3 and Gets New Showrunner
Yay! Such a great cast. With the change of showrunner, is there any news on whether the Deadpool writers are staying on?
Re: PS Plus Gets a Decent Black Friday Discount, But There's a Catch for Existing Members
So what Sony are saying is I should downgrade from Extra when my renewal comes round to profit from future offers. Cool, cool, cool. Good info.
Re: Poll: Does the Steam Machine Pose a Threat to PS5?
That’s your new Xbox. Or one of them at least. Microsoft are getting out of hardware, and have been ever since they dipped a toe in and got their leg stuck.
This is the AMD/Valve entry into the vacuum left, and its main competition will be whatever nVidia are about to announce. Expect it to roundly kick this in the nuts. ‘Xbox’ is going to be a Netflix-for-games service available across PC and all compatible consoles, which includes PlayStations. (Like EA’s current subscription service, only good.) It will also become the generic name for a living room games machine. This is an Xbox. nVidia’s will be another Xbox. Build yourself your own Xbox, if you’re cool.
Meanwhile Sony are pulling back from sending PlayStation games multiplatform, which I see as a response. They’ll ring fence their killer IPs like Nintendo do, loss-lead their entry price and try to hang on to their hardware advantage, which is their forte. nVidia have a great track record in graphical performance but they’re starting from near scratch on ergonomics. I’ll likely buy a PS6 for the controller. Sony just make really good gear, generally.
In the new world order, Sony’s PlayStation will market as the premier type of Xbox, and the only one to get PSN instead of Steam.
Re: Helldivers 2 Pays Homage to Brutal Review Bombing Campaign with Free Cape
In my opinion, it’s a mistake to pander to these ****s. They’re the worst of the community.
The people who review bomb, the people who complain that scrounging Super Credits from Trivial missions is “too boring”, and the people who won’t share their precious ‘meta’ gear: all the same people. P’tooey.
Re: Poll: What Review Score Would You Give Oblivion Remastered?
It’s showing its age. I’m enjoying the nostalgia more than I’m enjoying the game, and part of that nostalgia is remembering how much we used to laugh at it.
It is more fun than Skyrim, mind you, which is leaving me hoping that the next one is a bit less serious and conflicted and a bit more playful.
Re: Poll: What Review Score Would You Give Oblivion Remastered?
@Balaam_
Digital discs really aren’t conducive with permanence. You might want to think about backing up. lol.
Re: PS Plus Essential Games for May 2025 Announced
@skaarj217
You don’t need to know the rules of poker to play Balatro. If anything, having zero knowledge of the terminology is an advantage because it doesn’t use anything correctly. It’s very broad. It’s a game about jokers and cheating so hard you break the game. If you have PS Plus, just try it.
Re: The Outer Worlds 2 PS5 Gets a Huge Gameplay Debut Ahead of Summer Unveiling
Plenty of games don’t find their mojo until the sequel, so fingers crossed for this. With the first one I could see where all the bits came from, so it did nothing to surprise me. Same problem as Starfield. Please surprise me, Obsidian. Let loose. Go full Anachronox. Something. Anything.
Obsidian feel like one of those legendary 70s rock bands that are still touring despite not having any original members left.
Re: Talking Point: What Are Your Thoughts on Potential $80 PS5 Games?
@KougerKing
You are describing the pricing model accurately but then inventing a bogus motive to apply to the creators. Why do that? They have faith that some people will pay $80, and they have faith that more people will pay $40, and that even more will pay $20.
If they don’t offer all three prices over time, they would leave some money - your money specifically - on the table. That would be bad business sense that has nothing to do with the faith they have in their game.
Re: PS Plus Essential PS5, PS4 Games for March 2025 Announced
The crowing about EA is even more derivative than the writing in Veilguard. The games repeat the same hackneyed content, the trolls retread the same hackneyed criticism. Neither has had anything new to offer for 20 years.
Echo, echo, echo.
Game studios are like bands. They go through different line ups, and they don’t last. The idea that if BioWare weren’t at EA they’d still be the BioWare of 20 years ago is a delusion. EA is Vegas. They don’t make the Elvis’s get fat and old, they’re just where old, fat Elvis’s go to make money.
Re: Poll: What Review Score Would You Give Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2?
It’s a solid 8, but there is plenty of room for improvement in the general all-round clunkiness and grind.
Fans of inventory management can add 1.
Re: Fans Are Buying Fewer Boxed Video Games Than Ever in the US
@IntrepidWombat
“ if a game's been out for 4 years and they still want to charge full price for it, well, they can do that, and there's nothing you can do about it.”
What digital games market are you talking about?
Everything 4 years old is 95% off rrp. Nothing is full price for more than a month. This is because of the fierce competition between games, and because it is the established digital model for maximum profitability. You keep appealing to a wider audience at a lower price until you have every penny you can get. Everyone does it. Digital games get cheaper and cheaper until they’re whatever price you want it to be. You pay a premium day one, a pittance year four.
It’s cheaper in the long run, because manufacturing and distributing round bits of plastic is a wasteful expense. It can’t help but be worse value.
Re: Almost 3,000 Massive PS5, PS4 Deals Added to PS Store
@UltimateOtaku91
Patience, grasshopper. The digital price will undercut the physical price eventually, even the fire-sale prices. So says my digital only PS5 with literally hundreds of games. Driving plastic discs around the planet does not ultimately secure anybody any financial savings.
I have never had so many games so cheap in any previous console generation, ever. Official fact.
Re: Life Is Strange: Double Exposure Dev Hit with Second Round of Layoffs
@Flaming_Kaiser
Musk is the idiot boss of idiot bosses. If you’re forced into crunching, you’re heading for redundancy and illness. Forget about renewing your contract. Leave before they go bust!
If you ever have the choice, refuse. Refusing to crunch is the biggest open goal there is, career wise. It’s like being the only person who’s sober. In no way fun, but actually pretty easy to get ahead.
Re: Life Is Strange: Double Exposure Dev Hit with Second Round of Layoffs
@MeanBeanEgg
People absolutely shouldn’t feel guilted into crunching long term. Working 80 hours a week only increases productivity for a fortnight or so. After that, you get more out of the healthy people working 40 hours a week than you do out of the exhausted people working 80. If you decline to crunch, you will soon find yourself picking up their slack, not the other way around. After a few months, you’ll be begging them to stop breaking everything and go to bed!
The only purpose of crunching is for your idiot boss to create a false impression to their idiot boss that everything that can be done is being done. Underneath all the churn it’s an admission of managerial incompetence. The first thing any successful manager would do on entering a failing environment is eliminate crunch. It’s a failure spiral. And it destroys people’s health.
Studios don’t fail despite crunching, they fail because they’re crunching. It’s a warning sign that nobody knows what they’re doing.
Re: A Massive 75% of UK Game Sales Were Digital Last Month
@Jdubz
Earnt by who? Developers get more money from digital sales. The proportion of a physical sale that goes to the developer is small.
75% of physical goes on manufacturing, shipping and to the retailer. So, buying 75% off digital is about as good as full price physical. 95% off digital is better than 2nd hand resale.
There’s good reasons publishers and developers are so keen on digital. If you buy a full price game at release, all the money wasted on a physical release goes to them. If you buy it massively reduced in a sale, all the money wasted on a physical release goes to you.
Re: A Massive 75% of UK Game Sales Were Digital Last Month
My PS5 doesn’t have a disc drive. I have more games for it than I could fit in my house and I picked most of them up for the price of a sandwich. I’d say ‘it’s the future’ but physical media already feels ancient to me. The idea of crossing the room to switch games is as archaic as crossing the room to switch channel.
Re: Preview: Dead Rising Plays and Looks Like a Dream in PS5 Deluxe Remaster
What about the final boss? Did they fix the screamingly awful final boss?
Re: FromSoftware Boss Uses Every Elden Ring Advantage: 'I Absolutely Suck at Video Games'
Elden Ring is only hard if you ignore all the things that make it easy. Most players ignore anything they don’t need, giving everyone the feeling of being taxed to the limit, but if you want an armchair ride it’s there for you.
Good to have Miyazaki confirm he did put all those things in deliberately, and you are supposed to use them. It’s a very clever and well executed design that should get more praise for its accessibility. It delivers the feeling of conquering the impossible to players of a very wide skill range.
Re: Helldivers 2 Director Defends Elden Ring Difficulty: 'Always Cater to a Select Audience'
Elden Ring isn’t difficult. It’s only difficult if you choose to ignore the things that make it easier, like multiplayer.
If you play multiplayer, you power level your character with zero risk and then other players come and kill the bosses for you. It’s easier than almost any other action RPG you can name.
All the ‘easy mode’ you could ever need is incorporated into the design and world building. The completion and platinum trophy rates reflect this, as do the sales.
Re: Sony Is Allegedly Pulling PSVR2 Funding, Report Claims
PSVR2 is my 3rd VR system and the first I use regularly.
I’m amazed there hasn’t been more buzz about GT7. Players talk about it BTL all the time. It’s such an enhanced experience I’ll never play a flat screen racing game again. I can’t pick a braking point or hit an apex without the parallax effect moving my head in VR provides. The necessary depth information isn’t there on a flat screen and I never realised. I’d forever be driving up the back of people and just thought I sucked, but I was half blind. It’s been a complete game changer. If the F1 game adds support, that’d be an instabuy. I’m not even trying it otherwise.
More cockpit experiences please, devs. Less jumping around.
Re: Helldivers 2 Trolley Problem Forces Players to Choose: Save Sick Kids or Anti-Tank Mines?
If we save the kids, we’ll get something better than the mines - which we’ll also still get anyway.
Video games 101.
Re: PSVR2's PC Adapter Available on 7th August, Costs $60
That’s a lot cheaper than I was expecting.
Re: Poll: Are You Happy with Your PS Plus Essential Games for June 2024?
I’ve been hanging on for AEW. Perfect guilt free risk free PS plus fodder. If I like it I’ll buy a DLC.
SoR4 is great for anyone who doesn’t have it yet.
Good month.
Re: Strategy Legend Jake Solomon Explains Where Marvel's Midnight Suns Went Wrong
I loved the cards. They played really well, especially to begin with. Drawing from a deck of cards is a nicer randomiser than rolling virtual dice as the odds of a particular outcome narrows until it happens. With naked RNG you can miss all day. I’m surprised if that really put strategy game players off in large numbers. People expecting an action game like Guardians of the Galaxy, perhaps. They were the bit I would keep. Without the cards, it wouldn’t even be a cult hit.
I think it flopped because it felt unfinished. It started well, but the mission maps were repetitive and the difficulty didn’t scale well. The bosses were frustrating. The upgrade system was powerful, but also unbalanced. You would end up with uber moves you had to use over and over.
Also, it’s cosmic. Everybody hates cosmic. Even the characters in cosmic know that everybody hates cosmic, and that’s what people don’t like! How do your own characters know that cosmic always flops, and you don’t? 🤣 And there was a LOT of it. It’s another bold choice…
I’m not sure cards were simply a bad idea. I think it’s a not great card system. It’s a good concept, but the execution feels hurried. The closer you get to the end of the game, the more unpolished everything seems. I’d love to know if they felt rushed.
Re: Helldivers 2 on PS5, PC Is Sony's Fastest Selling Game of All Time
@IOI
Did you try playing on a difficulty high enough for you to need to work as a team? I find team tasks engaging. I can’t complete the objectives on my own, nor can I keep using the same strategies with every team, and that keeps things fresh. The point at which we need to cut and run is different each time. It’s very nicely balanced so that everyone can find a level where you can make it out, but things can also totally go to hell. If you’re in and out with no trouble all the time, you’re missing all the fun.
It also moves really nicely. Those are the two things that stand out for me.
Re: Helldivers 2 on PS5, PC Is Sony's Fastest Selling Game of All Time
@ChrisDeku
No. Games made by studios owned by Sony are ‘first party’. That’s the party. Games made by legally distinct third parties are ‘third party’. Tetris, for example, was published by Nintendo on GameBoy but was and is a third party game. Nintendo publishing it didn’t make it first party.
Games made by third parties that are entirely funded by the first party are in a grey area that is as inaccurate to call ‘first party’ as it is to call them ‘indie’. Why label them as either? If we must have a label, I would suggest ‘associate third party’.
Re: 'Negative Sentiment' Prompts Helldivers 2 Dev to Put Releasing Polar Patriots to a Vote
@themightyant
I don’t read desperation. I read weariness, and genuine fear of it all kicking off again.
Re: 'Negative Sentiment' Prompts Helldivers 2 Dev to Put Releasing Polar Patriots to a Vote
@Anke
Have you not been paying attention for the last fortnight? It’s been a cautionary tale as to why almost all other developers keep their ‘communities’ at arm’s length.
Re: Helldivers Turn on Arrowhead Following Undemocratic Firing of Community Manager
Helldivers 2 has an Al Murray: Pub Landlord problem. That is, if you satirise fascism you attract fascists who don’t understand satire and are starved of other content aimed in their direction.
The community they’ve garnered, and it seems to be the PC community in particular, can’t tell the difference between a community goal against fictional automatons and the mass bullying and harassment of real human beings.
Re: PS Plus Essential Games for April 2024 Announced
Immortals died of genericism, but always looked quite fun to play. Not worth a purchase, but definitely worth a download. Will probably get a dozen hours at least.
Keep bringing AAA near misses to the service. That’s what it should be all about and is much better value than indie darlings like Stray appearing for a few weeks. I’ve been looking forward to this happening ever since it flopped last summer.
Re: Disney Secures $1.5 Billion Stake in Epic Games, Plans 'Entertainment Universe' in Fortnite
This sort of a deal has been on the cards since Disney Infinity. It makes much more sense to put Disney, Marvel and Star Wars characters in Fortnite than it does to try and launch your own Fortnite. That was always a big ask for a company that doesn’t really understand video games. Or toys. Or movies. Or corporate unity.
C’mon. Kids are gonna love this. They get to play Fortnite and meet Mickey and wave a lightsaber and dress up as Spider-Man. These are all things kids love. It’s not aimed at middle aged Empire Strikes Back fans, so our opinions are kinda irrelevant.
Re: Dev Behind PSVR2's Firewall Ultra Blames the Lack of Virtual Reality Support for Closure
You make one mediocre game, you go bust. This is the reality for most developers, regardless of platform.
GT7 in VR is one of my most played games this year. It was my only premium full price purchase of the year too. I’d be in the market for any competitors. VR is an absolute game changer for some genres, and I want more sims.
AAA VR is perfectly viable, but it needs to actually be AAA. This is a £35 B-game, which is a very crowded market, and is an online shooter the best VR genre? It sounds exhausting.
Re: PlayStation Users to Be Considered 'Part of the Xbox Community', Says Xbox Boss
Could happen. Xbox is getting squeezed between PlayStation and PC extenders like Valve’s Steam Deck. Microsoft are a software and IT company at heart. There must be a lot of internal pressure to get out of consumer electronics and just sell software subscriptions and cloud services.
Re: Random: Filmmaker John Carpenter Has Been Struggling to Get Through The Last of Us 2
If Mr John Carpenter is giving up on your video game in boredom, the problem might be with your video game, not with Mr John Carpenter. I mean, no single human being has been plagiarised more in popular nerd culture than John Carpenter. Everyone from Hideo Kojima to James Cameron has ripped him off at some point. Maybe instead of sucking, he actually has a point? He might know something about combining action with storytelling? Something your groundbreaking fetch quest design might not be delivering?
I’m not really surprised by any of this. I gave up after the first one, which I found very repetitive and forced. I think their whole approach to gameplay and narrative is a dead end. Fetching gas cans to fill a generator? Ooof, that’s some weak sauce right there. I’d give that about 10 mins tops.
Re: PS Plus Premium's Logic Doesn't Even Make Sense to Sony
I have a full annual PS+ subscription, and all in all I’m very happy with it. If they left it exactly as is but called the expensive monthly chunk of AAA games ‘Premium’ instead of ‘Extra’, and the cheaper cherry-on-top add on of special interest legacy games ‘Extra’ instead of ‘Premium’, that would seem to fix most people’s complaints. It’s a great service, but why did they name it backwards?
Re: Feature: Could PlayStation Do More to Promote Green Packaging?
@Zuljaras
Aw. Bless.
Re: Feature: Could PlayStation Do More to Promote Green Packaging?
@Zuljaras
No you don’t. You say you do, but you’re a hypocrite. If you love collecting things, collect them. If you love playing games, play them. But don’t try and tell me you love something you plan to trample on and steal. People who really love games don’t pirate them. They embrace the new opportunity to buy 118 of them in a generation.
Your proposed theft isn’t justified by any of your imagined rights or ideals. You’d not be making a point or taking a stand. It’d just be thieving for your own gain, both material and to inflate your self importance.
You might be ok with being a hypocrite, but it means nothing you write is worth reading. You’re lying to everyone, yourself included.
Re: Feature: Could PlayStation Do More to Promote Green Packaging?
@Zuljaras
“I am physical exclusive gamer except on PC.“
You’re also a massive hypocrite. Hope you’re ok with that.
Re: Feature: Could PlayStation Do More to Promote Green Packaging?
My PS4 games tally reads as follows:
Physical: 4
Digital: 118
And one of those 4 came with the console...
That’s not me trying to save the environment. That’s just me going where the bargains are. The bargains aren’t in manufacturing and distributing redundant things. That costs money.
PlayStation have reacted to this by releasing a digital only edition of their new console, which I’ll obviously be getting. I’m not sure they can do much more than that when it comes to eliminating waste.
Ultimately, I don’t understand who this packaging is for. Biodegradability is only a desirable quality in disposable things people throw away. If you’re admitting this stuff is heading for a landfill, why manufacture it at all? If it’s for collectors and posterity and future generations, don’t they want packaging that lasts, like 90s Sega, rather than packaging that disintegrates, like 90s Nintendo?
Re: Feature: Could PlayStation Do More to Promote Green Packaging?
@Wormold
That would really only make sense if physical media was also constantly on sale with savings of up to 95%, like digital games.
Which to the best of my knowledge, they don’t.