@Nei What surprises me, though, is that industry heads and veterans are astounded by generative AI at all. When you get right down to it, the results are usually rote and prosaic. Ironically, visible turns in RPGs might actually be more exciting.

I just can't get that 'hands-off' motorcycle section out of my head. It's wild that such a thing even exists, especially for a game of this budget and price.

I really think Rocksmith has spoilt me. It's hard to get excited for around 60 songs when I've got access to tens of thousands.

Then again, it wouldn't surprise me if this game ends up with a dedicated modding community.

@GirlVersusGame Going by the 'original' definition (at least in terms of technology), it initially referred to clever programming tricks (not even necessarily what we call hacking today; it wasn't a malevolent thing but simply slang for ingenious solutions).

By today's standards, it depends on how you view it. Personally, I don't even use the word 'hacker' or 'hacking,' because it seems to me an oversimplification, and it's exceptionally ambiguous (not to mention, I still like to use the word 'hacking' to refer to clever programming). In the above example, 'cyber trespassing' might be a more appropriate term to use.

To the point; since it originated as a reference to programming, I would personally continue to use it as such. But, like I say, I think people need to move away from the word, because it can be confounding when discussing social engineering tactics.

@Dogbreath I mean, it is the logical choice, to follow up with her. The fourth game set that up pretty clearly. It would be like if the follow-up to God of War wasn't Ragnarok.

@Dogbreath That doesn't make any sense. We didn't know anything about Nathan Drake when the first game released, either.

Sony could work on a new PS Home, or an avatar / mii equivalent, or a gamerscore equivalent, or fixing broken wishlist items, or improving the UI, or implement displayed trophies.

Alas, Sony are Sony; ergo, they'll always make the 'Sony' decision.

@dodgykebaab Make cheaper and shorter games. What did I win?

@MFTWrecks Maybe I just play games much more quickly, I don't know. But I see the base game as being about 70 to 80 hours; Heart of Stone being something like 20 to 25 hours; and Blood and Wine being maybe 30 to 35 hours. Add in gwent, and that's maybe an additional seven to ten hours.

That's my personal experience, anyway.

@MFTWrecks Witcher 3 is big, but there's no way that it's 200 hours long, unless you're going for multiple playthroughs.

Sony has always been a corporate entity, but it was fun when we and they could pretend that they weren't.

I think Dreams could have done much better if it had just released on PC and garnered a dedicated modding base.

MM is good, creative, but I just have an inkling that a life sim type game might be a step back.

It's a good game that's maybe several dozen hours too long. It really drags towards the end.

In spite of being bitter about the direction PlayStation has taken recently, I can sort of understand the logic behind the decision here. I don't think DeaS really made waves, and these projects do seem to be overtly frivolous and (with respect to budget) particularly bloated.

I finished Zero Time Dilemma (again) but finally got the platinum. I don't know what I plan to play now. Maybe one of the Arkham games...again.

Resident Evil is a strange franchise to me, because it feels like the sort of thing which should have had at least one good film based on the premise alone.

I just don't get how they keep stumbling over themselves. I mean, the film material is already there from VII, Village, and Requiem.

It's unfair, I suppose, that there are so many presentations these days, that most of the announcements are spread pretty thin. We could do with maybe three for each major platform (four counting Steam), and then maybe one or two for indies.

That's all you need, I would say.

I beat the peak Reanimal and wanted to go through it all over again. It's short, but I think that's what makes it great. Focused, intense, and jarring in how abruptly it ends. Certainly getting the DLC once they all release.

After that, and really just early this morning, I beat Oxenfree again. Spooky game with less horror.

I've no idea what I'll be playing now. I've been jumping from game to game, but just haven't been impressed by any of them.

@RawnDawn With triple A studios, probably, but not with indie studios. It's just that a lot of creative games end up getting buried because now everyone's talking about the car stealers game.

My opinion on the game has soured somewhat recently. Now that I'm thinking about it, weren't the Stuntman games great because the fictional films would pastiche analogue franchises? I don't know if actually having the real world films themselves will work quite as well.

This is an easy one, since I wasn't planning on buying either of those anyway.

We did it, guys. We found the second PS5 exclusive.

I get that this is a company and that profits will always come first, but I'm simultaneously cognisant of the fact that an open platform offers better depth and breadth.

To put it simply; I'm glad that Sony finally pushed me towards accepting PC gaming fully. I'm feeling more and more like the PS5 might be my last PlayStation, and possibly my last console in general.

@ButteredCrumpet I don't think it's the £2.74 that bothers me, more the seven years part. I couldn't ever imagine paying something off over the course of a whole seven years, even if it was only the cost of a coffee per week. Unless, of course, it was essential.

My point is that a one off £1,000 payment is not the same as a weekly or monthly subscription service. I wouldn't personally break it down the same way because I don't believe they're comparable.

@ButteredCrumpet I think you're trivialising things a bit here.

@Mr-Cage There are worse things than social media. The problem is that they're all on social media themselves.

Guaranteed that this game is about to flop. AI will only ever be 10% (at maximum) the value of a human creative author or auteur. I hope people come to understand this, sooner rather than later.

Corpo greed just ruined absolutely everything good, valuable and pure about gaming. The people dominating the market probably don't even play games themselves.

I sometimes wonder what happened to the Sony of the PS4 era, and then I remember that they didn't command a monopoly during the eighth gen, and actually had to pretend to care.

At least PC has options. Stupidly expensive, but probably worth it at this point.

Impossible challenge; AI bubble burst OR games market crash.

You're only allowed one.

@zebric21 I would argue that logic itself dictates that it won't. Supposedly the biggest gaming release, potentially in gaming history, would, by way of proportion, have to release as the greatest game of all time. What are the chances, really?

I don't think I've read a singular Rockstar article in recent years that's reflected well on the company.

I find that the whole achievement / trophy system has gotten a bit stale. It was a fun novelty for a long while, but I feel it's sort of worn off now.

I don't know if the physical thing is Sony's singular concern here. The PS5 is a far cry from the PS4, the latter being one of the greatest consoles of all time to rival the PS2, and the former being a damp squib and merely a shadow of what PlayStation used to be.

The physical media, live service, Bungie and Crunchyroll stuff...that's only really the tip of the iceberg.

looks inside

"Amazon"

looks away

nods knowingly

@species I think you're conflating shutdown servers with disabled games. The Crew is unplayable currently (although you can still play it on PC with TCU) because it was a purely always online game. If we want to get technical, this was a software, not hardware, shutdown.

I'm not aware of single player physical games (or portions of games) being disabled on a console. At least one of the examples you listed (Final Fantasy XI) is still playable; others (like Final Fantasy XIV) are online games.

I platinumed Dangerous Driving, but I mostly enjoyed it for how completely broken it was.

Wreckcreation is basically anaemic Burnout Paradise; lacking the city and general charm. Takedowns in the game are terrible (you nudge a car and it seems to just sort of decide to crash for you). It doesn't enjoy the benefit of being as janky as its predecessor, and it sort of paradoxically suffers because of it.

Dangerous Driving was wacky fun, but Wreckcreation just felt like a chore. Even so, I won't say no to more. I'd just like to see how it turns out.

"Did you put the fire out yet, Sony?"

"No, but we did fill the house with accelerant and barred the door with dried boughs so the fire can't escape."

@sanderson72 It's one of the core reasons to go PC. Besides Steam and GOG, dedicated servers with free online play, modding, tweaking and customising, enthusiast communities, etc., you also get "backwards compatibility" running all the way back to the genesis of home consoles (Pong and Magnavox) and arcade machines (MAME) to almost fully functional seventh generation emulators (360, PS3, and Wii). And of course, there's everything in between.

One of the universal problems I've had with emulators is that they tend to suffer from a sort of "entropy." By that, I mean games on emulators can be rife with bugs. On PCSX2, this is rare, but certain games (like Stuntman) just don't really work as expected. Something to do with physics calculations, I think.

As for RPCS3, it could be good, but I tried it a little while ago and it seemed to completely break apart (playing Motorstorm Apocalypse). I imagine it's been updated since then. I'm looking forward to finding out how it runs given recent updates.

@Dogbreath A more apt comparison would be to call an MJ game Spiderman. Wolverine (X-Men) is a separate IP as far as I'm aware (or at least it started that way); Laufey is one of the most essential components of the entire God of War reboot.

@Jacko11 It's pretty simple: it covers more than only PlayStation games, including subscriptions, hardware, and PC sales. If you get 1% of physical sales out of it, you know that the math isn't mathing.

@Marquez Setting the debate itself aside, I think it might just be a reference to the fact that games "going gold" will be a thing of the past for the PlayStation specifically, and that the terminology might die with future consoles (and games). End of an era, I guess.

This looks like those mobile game ads where the animations don't actually show the real game.

The enthusiast fan base which, from what I've read ad nauseam, are the only people actually reading about this story. The only people who know about it, apparently. Those are the people they're relying on?

Are you sure?

@naruball In the sense that this is a PlayStation enthusiast site that has shown serious interest in switching to PC.

Your analogy would work if it was PC Gamer or maybe Eurogamer, or some likewise equivalent. But this is a PlayStation site hosting a poll that suggests almost half of them are now moving to PC.

@naruball Isn't it more like going to a town in Washington and finding that a population which voted something like 90% Biden has suddenly become 45% Trump?

@Sweetz @AdamNovice That's a lower than 2% margin of error. It's roughly six times greater than a conservative estimate for necessary sample size when searching for statistical significance.

@DennisReynolds More than 80% of PS5s sold were the physical (disc-based) edition.

I don't think they'll reverse the decision, but, in a way, that's helpful for me. I wasn't seriously considering the PS6 as an option before they made the announcement, but the announcement itself sort of sealed it. It'll probably be PC for me, unless Xbox makes their platform more enticing...somehow...

So, whether it's a win or lose for Sony, it's a win for me. It just makes the decision-making process easier.

PC is the superior platform, setting aside cost. Its biggest downside is how painful accessibility can be, as well as exorbitantly priced components.

Those by the wayside, I just can't really see any negatives. It's basically an omni-generational multimedia machine.