MrGawain

There are creative people out there in games, it’s just Sony and the triple A brigade shut a bunch of the studios they worked for in favour of sandbox and live service factories.

Nintendo have had some good ideas, but I think Sony really screwed up shuttering their Japan Studios.

Technology should be created to solve a problem, we shouldn’t create a problem to justify a technology.

So far Eiyuden is the only game I was excited about enough to buy day one. Everything else is just more of the same.

I’m about 8-12 months behind being current these days, and I’m quite a bit better off for it.

I’ve not been impressed by the PS5, but I will admit I’ve played Eiyuden and Hi Fi Rush released this year and have just got FF7R to play in the latter part of the year. I can eventually see myself getting Astro when it drops to around £40. I won’t complain there isn’t anything to play this year…

…It was Sony who said it ‘had no plans to release any major existing franchise titles before April 2025’. And that’s the point: PS is focused on one or two exclusive massive budget titles a year, but doesn’t care about the smaller games that add innovation any more.

The PS4 to the PS5 is a reflection of the Wii to Wii U- No real system seller difference, not many games, people sticking playing the old system because they don’t need the extra 5% of power to play their basic games.

If they think copying Ninty, then I honestly think Sony would be better off avoid chasing graphics and make the PS6 a handheld hybrid like the Switch. The amount of people playing this suggests that people want to play off TV.

Seeing the mess of this generation, and the general apathy to it you would think Sony would temper their aspirations for next gen. How many people aren’t impressed or financially capable to move on from the PS4?

Assuming the audience will lap up whatever you do is a recipe for disaster. Just look at Hollywood Movies.

Not a big issue if you’re spending time playing games instead of staring at the Home Screen, but just another thing that Sony is doing to drive away their customers.

The whole reason for this state of play was to show Ghost of Thingy to justify the PS5 Pro. It felt very cobbled together otherwise.

I’ve sort of accepted Playstation is only making a few po faced photo realistic games a year, and what I really want is a bunch of fun but simpler stuff like what Nintendo provides. I will see the generation out, but I doubt I will buy a PS6 if this is what Sony wants to sell us, as opposed to what we want to buy.

The only thing I would say is the reason Nintendo games work so well on Switch is that their games can break up easily into 5 minute experiences. Waiting for the bus you can play a level of Mario. On your lunch break you can do some chores in Animal Crossing. I wouldn’t want to turn on a PS6 handheld game and watch a bit of a 15 minute cutscene only to have to turn it off halfway through.

Saying that, I do think the future in gaming is more about being able to play you want to, not about experiencing the most realistic digital earhair.

I wonder if Playstation or Xbox is making a profit this year? They both seem determined to throw money at massive projects that are ridiculously expensive and out of touch with what their customers actually want. Even popular games that sell 10 million are having trouble making their budgets back. Meanwhile Nintendo is financially responsible and just makes fun little games that people buy, and keep selling for years after.

Remastering games stuck on previous platforms like Demon Souls that are looking their age are one thing, but stuff like Horizon, TLOU and Spider-Man from the PS4 really doesn’t make sense. If we wanted to we would have played them, and we can still play them on the PS5. I doubt there’s 10% visual difference between the PS4 and PS5 versions.

For me personally, I now only buy a select few games at launch that I know I’m going to love (Eiyuden being the only one this year on PS5). I finally got FF16 at Christmas when it was on sale for £30 and my opinion of it was that it was very pretty looking, but it felt a slog to get through and didn’t really feel like a Final Fantasy game with little humour. I’m very glad I didn’t spend £70 on it.

Because I was feeling fatigued by 16, I held back on getting FF7R yet, and it seems I was right to. I have loved a lot of the 2D stuff Square Enix has been putting out, but I feel they’ve jumped on a Western bandwagon to make Final Fantasy like every other Playstation Action Adventure/Open World-ish thing.

I’m not entirely sure, but am I right in thinking there wasn’t any swearing in the original Horizon, even mild stuff?

Or have I forgotten even more about that game beyond the robot dinosaurs?

You don’t need a Playstation, we have one already at home.

Can’t announce anything if there’s nothing close to being ready yet.

PlayStation’s problem is that they are committed to making powerful out of the box hardware to run photo realistic style games, but a new generation of gamers couldn’t care about that. Games like Among Us, Fortnite, and Five Nights at Freddie’s don’t need a PS5 to run. If anything the biggest competition PS5 has is PS4, and let’s not forget Nintendo. If you add mobile and tablet it there is a lot of ‘good enough’ ways to play games these days that don’t cost Four to Seven hundred quid.

Maybe it’s because I’ve gotten older, but at the end of the day the PS5 Pro is something I don’t need to improve on something I have no problem with for an amount of money I don’t want to pay. I’m not angry Sony is offering this, I think the best thing to do is not buy it, and show Sony that we don’t want or need this. If we buy it they will just continue bloating with pointless tech and charging money above what the average consumer is willing to pay.

I would think the amount of people sticking with their PS4’s would already show this.

Am I the only person who didn’t know you could actually chose between the two? Frankly the PlayStation UI is a weird thing to navigate.

Sony is firmly entrenched in the idea we all want shinier, faster, and more lifelike games and are willing to pay for it. At the beginning of this generation they started pushing this boulder up the hill which was very hard and arduous with little to show for. Now it’s reached the top of the hill and has no choice but to set the ball in motion even though the majority doesn’t want it any more. Most people are either playing their simple games on the PS4, Switch, or Mobile, and the flashier games on PC. Triple A gaming is too bloated to react to trends now.

I get the feeling tomorrow we’ll see the reaction from the stock market to this and and Concord as Sony’s share price follows the ball down the hill.

I’m not even convinced I was right to get my current PS5.

Nintendo have a vast library of iconic IP, but the only reason this IP is iconic is because they’ve had a variety of games to put them in. Mario is in different styles of games to Link, who is in different styles of games to Samus, which are all different to Pokemon.

Sony have abandoned Parappa, Buzz, Jak and Daxter, Destruction Derby, Dark Cloud etc… because they don’t make those sort of games any more. To me a lot of recent Sony games have just felt like reskins of others.

How can you produce games that are in fashion when it takes 8 years to make them? Sequels have a natural audience built into them, but when a new game is made to jump on the bandwagon, how can you be sure that will be the bandwagon the audience is chasing in almost a decade gone by?

It feels the AAA games industry is too big and lumbering to be successful any more.

Maybe naming it after a decommissioned plane wasn’t a good omen to start with.

I get this has nothing to do with quality. It has everything to do with a large part of the gaming world asking for something different, and Concord being very familiar to what there is a lot of.

If ‘this’ is a game, what have Sony been doing for the last 4 years?

Because most of us fans have been thinking the same thing.

You wonder what pictures Phil Spencer has of his bosses to be still employed after Xbox being 3rd place; reducing profit by going subscription model, losing ground in Europe and Asia, buying somewhere around $100bn of studios only to close a bunch of them, and then make all those exclusives you paid for 3rd party? At this point I wonder has Xbox listed as a charity to explain the money they throw at it without return.

For the people who like that sort of thing it was a thing people like.

Again there is nothing that looks original or just weird or fun that I like to play.

I'd like to know if Suikoden 1&2 remaster still exists.

I'm likely to play The Plucky Squire and Astrobot on PS5, but I really don't need to see any more spoilers for those at the moment.

Games used to need presentations, now presentations need games.

Let’s be honest what XBox is doing is not about making money now, it’s attempting to force the industry and the customer into a different business model. And it really isn’t working at the moment.

It’s odd but despite the recession if people want to buy two tickets to Taylor Swift for a grand, they will. If someone wants an iPhone 37 for £1300 they will get it. Steamdeck has sold well. People bought expensive new TV’s to watch the World Cup.

The PS5 is an expensive item, but more the point it’s an expensive item that only appeals to hardcore gamers. Families aren’t buying PS5’s to play the next Just Dance or Minecraft or Crash Bandicoot. The big seller last year was the Harry Potter game, because it’s the sort of thing that more casual gamers and kids are interested in. Software sells consoles, and more variety sells consoles to different markets, and that’s something Playstation and Xbox have neglected.

The reason there is so many Soulslikes is because FromSoftware are really good at sticking to budgets and schedules.

In general there isn’t enough innovation in triple A games, Soulslikes included.

I don’t think it’s a question of quality, it’s a question of frequency- it’s aping a lot of other games that people are a little tired of.

Let’s be honest: every trailer or image released for a big video game is to be inspected with a fine tooth comb by at least one person on the internet. I’m guessing whoever put the banner in the game copied it from a picture of this reenactment group thinking it was historic, but couldn’t read Japanese. If you’re fluent in Japanese it’s probably obvious (remembering there are people who translate Hyrulian in Zelda game trailers).

If you think about it, it could have said anything; Swearing, Political comments, Advertising, ‘We will kill everyone’ or ‘We are fond of cheese on toast’. Ubisoft got lucky it didn’t say anything offensive.

The gameplay loop was more Warriors than traditional Final Fantasy. It was fun while I was learning the controls, but at a point I just found myself doing the same list of stuff to win. If the game was 10-15 hours shorter I doubt it would have been so noticeable.

Plus the story was pure waffle.

I was part of a whole generation who bought the original Bubsy because they saw very impressive static pictures in a magazine and read about the voice acting. Then we played it and realised our mistake.

Any subsequent generation has no excuse in a world with YouTube and comment sections.

In any business you have to offer a product that will cost less than it will make so you turn profit. The truth is the audience for video games isn’t growing exponentially, and the audience who wants to spend $70 to sit and play a AAA game for 70 hours is dwindling. They need to find a sustainable product that will appeal to these people by cutting down budgets.

Stuff like Fortnite and Roblox is popular, but that market is saturated, plus it relies on the game lasting a long time with people constantly paying into it to turn a profit

. It doesn’t take a video games expert to figure out Nintendo is popular at the moment and they are making mid tier games that don’t cost $300m, and cut costs by changing art styles and being sensible on cutscenes, voice acting, and excessive NPCs and scenery. Even PlayStation must of noticed this when Astro Bot was more popular in their State Of Play than anything else combined. I’m guessing a game like that didn’t cost the same as Spider-Man 2 or Horizon to make.

Tom Holland has a 6 picture Sony deal.

Sony has a recognisable bankable franchise that you could get any room full of monkeys with typewriters to develop in a weekend.

Bish. Bash. Bosh. Bad film that people will go to because of the star and the title.

I took it as that he adores the PS2 and PS4, but the PS3 and the PS5 don't live up to what came before. The PS1 is a great console, but it was improved upon by the PS2.

@get2sammyb

IGN video on ‘where you will be playing games in the future’. Also including Michael Pachter….

https://youtu.be/KHf5avkORyc?si=heVXUBycyuzZfrPp

Layden was on IGN’s panel about the future of gaming, and said he thought the greatest console of all time was ‘any even numbered Playstation’.

Obviously he isn’t too impressed of what’s happening with this generation.

Despite having lots of new games, I do think there is something inherently broken about Xbox’s business strategy. I don’t think they will ever hit the subscribers they need to make gamepass profitable. And let’s not forget they canned Tango Gameworks amongst others. The truth is Xbox has a lot of coming soon games and few customers and Playstation has lots of customers but few coming soon games (I like the look of Astrobot but not enough to buy it at £60-£70). It’s in both companies interest to work together for the meantime.

I think we can figure out the rule of porting to other systems is-

-If it’s a true green XBox game like Halo, Gears, or Fable there’s no chance. They couldn’t have these games fail to perform elsewhere, and Xbox fans wouldn’t like it.

-If this franchise is proven on other consoles it’s getting ported (COD, Doom, Fallout). Big money is big money.

-If this game failed to reach expectations on Xbox it’s fair game. Might as well get something back.

-When it comes to hype machines like Starfield or Indiana Jones it won’t be happening day one to keep Xbox owners happy, but if they drop off after a year or two they could be ported.

Facing a very big precipice of irrelevance, Microsoft did what they had to do and show games. It made their fans happy. I don’t think it will radically change their fortunes as people won’t rush out to buy an Xbox, but I guess they’ll have a bit of an uptick on PC gamepass, then find a drop again because that’s how people use streaming services.

Playstation just doesn’t have any more games ready at the moment, but that doesn’t mean more aren’t coming in 2025. If we’ve seen anything with Astro Bot recently it’s that players would like some variation in the types of games Sony puts out.

@Cutmastavictory

Are we getting originality from Triple A at the moment? Aside from graphical textures and lighting we’ve never seen before? To me it seems more of the same but slightly better detail in facial expressions.

Indie games and Nintendo are keeping their budgets and development times in check, and those business models are a lot healthier. It’s nice to make art, but they still have to produce a product enough people want to buy so they sell more than they spend. How can you tailor a game to a console if it takes longer to make the game than the console?

Fans have been criticising this development model. Journalists and Gamer Commentators have been criticising it. Now people who work in the system have been talking about it.

The question is do the people who make the decisions force a change? Or are they so blind or worried that this is the only way to get customers attention by super sizing their game? And if there is a change will we see more sensible budget games before the PS6?

It’s an advert, just like State Of Plays, just like Nintendo Directs. The problem with that is there wasn’t enough to sell for the advert. When there is 2 or 3 tentpole titles firmly planted you can get some goodwill for the other announcements, but triple A gaming is dead at the moment and having a big party with no jelly and ice cream is just reminding us how bad gaming is at the moment.

I wonder if this would be £70 if it had positive reactions in the State Of Play? Or has Sony lost faith in the £70 RRP in such a hard time?

Curious to see what they price Astro Bot at.

I enjoyed SMT 5 for 70 hours. Unfortunately I played it for 90.

And I think that’s what’s really happening to the triple A gaming landscape. At a certain point you’ve played enough of COD or Spider-Man or Assassin’s Creed or whatever and it turns you off of that gameplay loop. Sequels tend to be more of the same and you become tired of it.

I liked the game, I just never want to play that gameplay ever again.

The fact barely any of these games or patches will be out before the Christmas period means we don’t need to see an announcement live.

The only real reason to watch these things is if you like mocking a developers facial hair or to see how much importance an executive places on social media numbers connected to their game dressed in a suit jacket and jeans.

To be honest it’s easier to exceed expectations when you’re taking over a bad business than a good one. Of course time games take to make, we won’t really know how good or bad they are doing until about 5-7 years in.