MinervaX76

@Cherip-the-Ripper I didn’t find it hard on Yakuza 7 (like a dragon… these titles are so confusing…) but I dare bet they will tie up a lot of achievements behind grinding on this mini-game.

I have a feeling getting 1000 gs in this one is not going to be a walk in the park….

I was at first shocked Sony beat Xbox at being able to play owned digital games via streaming, but seeing how it’s limited to certain games (reason we get this icon) is likely why Xbox has been dragging their feet. It would be a confusing thing to communicate.

@Kibinaaru that is correct. You can’t attach this new bludrive to the launch digital PS5. The attachment was designed basically as a Lego brick that specifically connects to the form factor of the new smaller PS5. Your only path to “upgrade” is to sell your current console and use that money to buy the new model.

Personally, at this time I don’t consider this too much of an issue. The digital edition costs too much for not including the device so no one in their right mind will buy both things at once (unless the version with a disk drive included is on limited supply) and anyone that bought the digital edition needed internet to use it at all.

So long the bundled version is in high enough supply and does not require online activation it should all be fine. Even if Sony shut down the servers decades from now, I can easily see the preservation mod community figuring a bypass rather quickly.

Have not played it yet and will wait for a sale, but my youngest sibling (by youngest I still mean 40+) has been hooked but still has told me about a handful of progression blocking bugs (like being stuck inside an empty building) they had ro reload to a checkpoint.

As a Puerto Rican, i was disappointed to hear about this. I can’t express how obsessed most of us are with this flag. If it was legal, I would not be shocked if some parents would dare tattoo the thing on their babies buttocks. Seriously, we put that flag on EVERYTHING.

It’s especially puzzling because they went very out of their way to get the correct food on their kitchen, from what I hear. They certainly did an amazing job with the Miles Morales game. I do wonder if this is just the result of someone tasked with producing higher res versions getting the wrong flag online… still puzzled at how it was missed. Again… they paid so much attention to other details that I can’t believe there were no Puertorican eyes somewhere in the dev team.

Buying this game day one on Xbox despite having Game Pass. I have not played older Yakuza games, never cared much for Kazuka, bur Ichiban won my heart. 100% Like a Dragon on Xbox and can’t wait for this entry!

@koverby not really. FC always takes place in fictional settings, that very obviously are analogies of existing ones. Claiming FC5 removed Christianity and conservative political themes is as wrong as claiming Far Cry 6 removed all mentions of Cuba.

I know it’s not a popular opinion but Syndicate is one of my favorite AC entries. In fact… I really should give it another replay….

Service games don’t need emotional cutscenes.

@Ben7982 It might happen. Click-baiter publications rarely get pre-release codes and thrive on giving games scores in the 50s.

I am likely getting this one in a few. Need to finish Starfield, start Mirage and play Mario Wonder. Once that checklist is cleared, I plan to re-play Spider-Man 1 and Miles on PS5, hopefully get the platinum on both, THEN I'll be jumping on this one!

@PixelDragon Console warfare stuff. Any review under 9/10 is seeing as an attack on their favorite box.

This might not be good, especially for sony. The news here is not just about buying a publisher of their own, but to move away from licensing. This would mean no more Spider-Man by Insomniac.

Currently those are my favorite Sony games so I rather that does not stop. I think Disney is better off licensing their IPs, in a non-exclusive form.

I’m looking forward to it, but can wait for a sale. That said, there are some annoying Xbox fanatics out there trying to spoil the game for others and that annoying behavior alone makes me want to just pay for the game day one. For now still on the mindset of waiting.

Huge Assassins Creed fan, it’s my favorite IP, but I am not going to start playing it until im done with Starfield’s main quest. Then I’ll subscribe to UBisoft+ on Xbox (Don’t think it’s available on PlayStation) and play Mirrage.

Decent is all I want out of this game. Maybe not day one, but I’ll certainly be buying this one by the end of the year.

They could at least patch the campaign so it could be played offline… but that would be too pro-consumer.

@themightyant I would had assumed covid delays were the reason 2020 titles didn't ship until 2021 (GoW, Horizon and GT.)

But we will see indeed. The reveal-to-announcement is something I looked at their history, and they seem to have 2 tier of games, following two different paths. Their B tier (stand-alone-dlc like Miles Moraes or family games like Ratchet) would in average be revealed 9 months before launch, but the A tier (Spider-Man, GoW, etc) were all over the place, with some revealed 3 years before launch. Their shortest A game release cycle might have been HFW with 1.7s years, and I assume they were expecting a 1 year cycle but got delayed.

But at this point, I would take it if they simply started porting/enhancing their whole PS3 game lineup. Meh... who am I kidding, even if Sony were doing their best I would still kill for a Infamous 4-game remakester.

@riceNpea its a (kinda) a brand new platform (more of an extension, like Kinect was) but how many of their studios were bound by it? Unless all studios outside of Insomniac were making VR games, that is separate from the topic of game development (the part I, as a customer, care the most about.)

@themightyant IMO: he gambled a successful track record in favor of a fleeting trend by investing so much on GAAS. The year ahead looks barren outside Spider-Man, because of this GAAS pursuit.

Almost reminds me of Don Mattrick. Let’s not forget either than under Mattrick Xbox saw some of its biggest success by pursuing the short lived Kinect pursuit. He sold Bungie to themselves and disrupted operations for nearly a decade with that pursuit, something Xbox is still recovering from, but hey, he was also a great business man and made XBox a ton of money during his tenure!

The timing of this announcement is too convenient for it to be coincidental. ABK merger handling, Service Games strategy reception, absolutely lackluster first party roadmap for the year ahead (as much as I want Spider-Man 2, that’s just one game) completely mishandling the Japanese market… yea I doubt he simply “retired” as much as he was retired.

Bring Kaz Hirai back!

Sadly we are on a time where it takes up to 5 years for us to see the real impact of new management, outside news of acquisitions.

@TheCollector316 demanding Sony allows GamePass on PS to get all future Xbox game studios games on the platform is not the same as them only being accessible via Game Pass, though. I’m sure if GP was ever allowed on PS, it would be pretty much like EA Play: you can buy the games, or play them as part of the subscription. Either way, at that point all, or almost all, games get PS ports. It’s unlikely a PS Game Pass would include anything but Xbox titles on it.

IMO that is a win/win for absolutely everyone.

@Kienda This game is indeed massive, but its like no other.

If you are starting for the first time, you can take advantage of the free trial that lets you play from level 1-70, experiencing the launch game, and 2 expansions worth of story. Thats a gargantuan amount of story.

Unlike most MMOs, this one forces you to play the story linearly. There is where the grind can come in. You cant just level up to the cap via some quick leveling scheme and then do the newest expansion content, you actually have to play the main story questline all the way through. It's a fantastic story, mind you. The last two expansions have been just fantastic storytelling.

Although the first release (realm reborn) is a bit rough, the story starting with Heavensward through Endwalker form IMO the best Final Fantasy story to date.

Anyways, given how much content there is in the "free trial" I would suggest just playing it that way. You can play it casually, you wont need to grind for gear ever. Only reason to grind for gear is if you want to do the current hard-mode end-game raids, and even then, only if you want the best gear.

Lord I love this game... the story just feels so epic... an MMO like no other.

This makes me think that a potential reboot of Red Fall (they claim they wont abandon it) might actually launch alongside a PS5 version. Potentially directly launching on PSNow.

True or not, anyone using their PSN password anywhere else should immediately go change all their passwords. Make sure they are all different.

@Americansamurai1 I think the "problem" (a subjective take) is that both Sony and MS are undervaluing the kind of games the likes of Devlover publishes in favor of bigger titles. I have not been looking too much at the PSN side of things, but many have noticed that MS is going more after bigger titles from bigger studios.

The recent MS leak showed how much they are indeed undervaluing indies and over-valuing big triple-A titles. I think a while back @LiamCroft had made the observation in some replies that he is seeing fewer titles come to game pass, something I didn't perceive because I myself simply get clouded by the bigger titles taking the headlines.

Makes sense as the services grow, they now have the budget to go after bigger games and they start to feel the indies are not worth as much to them anymore. They are at a point where triple A are the ones that will get them new subscribers, not indies, at least not unless they are big names like Silksong.

@Powerplay94

Elden Ring was a massive success but other than that which game have they had that has been crazy popular.

Armored Core 6, Tekken 8 and One Piece Odyssey? All 3 received a lot of positive attention and praise. They do a lot of budget anime licensed games, but One Piece Odyssey is way above that, and it seems the same will be true about SandLand.

People might not talk about Bandai Namco much, but with a market cap of 13.91 Billion USD, its one of the largest publishers in the world (outside platform holders,) and (last time I compared) the largest publisher in Japan.

For comparison:
$32.23 Billion - EA
$23.47 Billion - Take 2
$7.45 Billion - Capcom
$7.15 Billion - Konami Holdings
$4.09 Billion - Square Enix
$4.18 Billion - Sega Sami Holdings
$3.95 Billion - Ubisoft

They have a very diverse operation, from licensed games (One Piece), internal IP (Tekken), exclusive third party publishing (Dark Souls/Elden Rings) and third party development services (Smash Bros), Bandai-Namco is in a very strong market position.

I could see this going either way. If it was just an HD port, it’s likely canceled given the BC 360 versions already run 4k on Xbox series x.

If it’s a port to a new engine, MS might see it as big enough of a revamp to lock it as an exclusive.

The Quake remasters were a gray middle area were they could not really be played on Xbox and were for the most part just ports with some fluff on top. But who knows.

A $250 million figure is mentioned in relation to Mortal Kombat 1 and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, while $100 million would be appropriate for Assassin's Creed Mirage.

I am not surprised about these estimates. Many years ago Phil Spencer stated in an interview (sorry dont have the link for the podcast, but I'll try to hunt it down) that MS usually pays enough to cover the entire game's development. $250 million for MK1 and $100 million for Mirage sound rather realistic estimates to those game's development budgets.

@Jaz007 if I recall correctly there was a patch that made the multiplayer peer to peer, but they can’t warrantee it will work in the future since they won’t be able to push any more patches.

Posted this on pure xnox:

This means nothing until they actually roll back the whole thing. “Changes” might be something stupid as simply re-phrasing what an “install” means.

As far as I care Unity is no longer safe to use regardless what they do unless they do every single one of these things:

• completely roll back this insane install policy
• Fire the CEO
• Make licensing changes (restore them) that specifically make sure no retroactive changes can be forced on developers that don’t agree to them so long they stay on older tools
• Drop the requirement for the SDK to be “always online”
• restore the GitHub to track licensing agreement changes

Even then the trust is gone, but at lest those steps would give room for a developer to use Unity without “trust”, simply continuously keeping an eye on any license changes.

I personally am not going back to Unity regardless.

@IDreamofAugust well, the article was updated but at least as of the time Titntin’s posted, that update had been the opening paragraph so no clue why some continue to act as if it was gamers, unless people are only reading the article title and not even reading the first paragraph.

@Cashews it wasn’t “gamers”. It was an employee. The fact they know it was an employee means they already likely got the person, but are also likely worried there are more disgruntled employees to worry about.

@Titntin this, 1000%.

Motivations are likely all over the place, but this most likely has nothing to do with “gamers”, and more to do with an employee afraid the next move is “downsizing” or panicking over their stock options slowly becoming worthless. Employee morale is likely through the floor right now.

Not excusing the behavior, but sadly it’s not uncommon when companies do stupid things that will shake employee perceived stability.

3 months only this time? That sounds weird given the track record so far between Sony and Square. I would honestly have expected the PC version to be held back at minimum for 6 months.

@BamBamBaklava89 first, it’s on top of any other fees you pay.

The fees also kick in after the game makes 200k, not you. Let’s say you publish your fame on PS, and they take 30%, you actually made 140k.

Let’s say you hired an additional developer (artist, whatever) and you managed to pay them only minimum wage, that’s still likely at least 30k less a year. It all quickly adds up and you might not even make a profit yourself ar the end of all other expenses.

Now, it’s not a “one time fee”, it’s not a per-sale fee, but a per “initialization” fee. They have stared so far this is about initializing the game it actually the install. So, if someone buys a game, installs if, uninstalls it, deletes all save data and re-installs, you need to pay again.

In consoles, every user that launches the game gets its own “initialization”, so a single sold copy might get multiple initializations.

Then there is piracy, they claim they can detect this, but can they? If they can actually detect piracy so reliably, then why the heck does the runtime simply not refuse to run when it knows it’s pirated?

If the game is FTP, in the hope of charging an upgrade fee or earn money via DLC, and you get unlucky, you might have millions of installs but barely any revenue. You can easily find yourself in a position where you barely earn 10 cents per install in average, but now you owe Unity 20c per install.

Honestly, at the end, it’s just best if they take the percentage royalty the way Unreal does on their free license tier, because the royalty will always be just a percentage of your revenue and not ever be higher than your revenue. Even then, Unreal still offers a tier where you can pay per-developer yearly license that results in no royalty payments.

Another horrible thing is Unity wants to apply this to every game made with unity already published. Even if it was published 10 years ago and no longer getting patches. This might make many developers decide to entirely delist games, if possible in ways that prevent even re-downloading, because all re-downloads will result in even more money owed to Unity.

@GamingFan4Lyf lol, as I said, RL got in the way of me just placing another order. Cars are expensive

@Cashews I almost got a 3k PC exclusively for the game... so the tag would be above 1.5k...

"lucky" me, due to part shortages my order got cancelled and due to other RL issues ended up just playing it on my laptop, that has a 3080 so still rather decent experience.

When I hype on a game, I tend to throw quite a bit of money at the thing. With Tears of the Kingdom, I got the OLED switch, Amiibos, and the special edition controller. Yes, I also got the Starfield xbox controller...

It's not often I hype that much. Last two games I hyped on were Assassins Creed Valhalla and Final Fantasy 7 Remake (I ended up buying that game 3 times... The collector's edition that didn't arrive day one, the digital edition so I could play it day one, and later on Intergrade on PS5.)

@GamingFan4Lyf I did buy the full game… twice. I paid $300 for the constellation edition for PC, meaning Steam (same reason I bought the Tears of the Kingdom OLED switch…. Because I’m an idiot) and and also bought the Windows Store $100 version so I could play it across Xbox, PC and xCloud with cloud saves.

As for buying DLC for games in Game Pass, i don’t think is any stranger than buying DLC for physical games you might later sell, trade in or give away.

I’m actually surprised at the #1 ranking for Starfield given it’s on Game Pass, and given how drastically Xbox users tilt towards digital.

At the same time, zero surprise at peope trying to rationalize it and make up excuses why it’s doing so well. Few things are as expected as that.

@Cherip-the-Ripper my FFXIV character.

@Cherip-the-Ripper they don’t care. They won’t care next week even if the full game release somehow hits the #1 spots. (Something I highly doubt since the best selling version will be on steam, GP will highly dilute the sales of the Xbox version.)

It’s all about trying to make others feel they are not actually missing out on a great game and they should stop thinking about the game absolutely everyone else is playing and talking about.

Edit: another thing to keep in mind: everyone that buys this upgrade is also a GamePass subscriber, and for some odd reason still buying a retail code for a game they could had easily paid on their consoles for. If they counted the sales made directly from Xbox consoles, Windows Marketplace or Steam (digitally) its certain it would rank higher. How much higher is anyone’s guess.

This game will be an exception to my “no day one” game list, alongside Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth.

Don't have much time to play, and Starfield is around the corner. I wont have time to play anything for months. So not buying it unless I see it on a big sale.

Even if the game came out on the same day as the PS version, it’s unlikely it would do well on Xbox since it will be head to head against Starfield.

Even with the game still will be earlier on PlayStation, it’s been out a lot longer on PC and even Steamdeck certified. It’s not that big of a celebration, at least based on all the “you can also play that game on PC” opinions that we tend to hear.

Looking forward to play this on my Logitech G-Cloud.