Kinda torn here. I originally beat the game on Expeditioner (normal) at launch but admittedly dropped it down to Story for Clea and Simon. Goofing off in Story difficulty, it was immediately apparent that it was much more forgiving with the parry and dodge timings and overall damage. Adding 40% more to the parry/dodge windows will almost take away any challenge from Story mode whatsoever, outside of the hardest encounters that is.
Originally the plan was to create a set of free game creation tools under the name Everywhere that was going to be a more robust "Roblox for adults" kind of thing. In tandem, Build A Rocket Boy (with supposedly over 400 employees in four locations at the time of the interview) was working on a premium episodic triple-A game that was going to be added within that user creation framework. That episodic game was MindsEye. Benzies' original plan for MindsEye was to create a bunch of different triple-A concepts linked together with some kind of underlying thread. The game that people are playing now is little more than what the first "episode" of the original project was supposed to be (Benzies admits the first episode is 'cut scene heavy' and the footage Eurogamer is shown is stuff from this release).
Since that interview, Everywhere seems to have completely died off. The last YouTube update for the project was 8+ months ago. They had a creator beta program last June that they quietly and unceremoniously shut down. They scrubbed the website and redirected the domain to the MindsEye game page, they removed it from the BARB official studio website's list of projects, and they integrated one of the core components (Arc-adia) into the PC version of MindsEye.
Everything about this smells of a project that was hitting a deadline or running out of funding and they had to piece together what they had to get something out to market to save face. Or at least try to.
Did people have this same anti-remaster energy when the Nathan Drake collection was released on PS4 a meager 8 years after the first Uncharted came out on PS3 (and a mere four years after Uncharted 3 released)? A graphical remaster package that they charged full price for and stripped multiplayer out entirely? That collection basically charged you $20 per game to 'upgrade' to a version that had a major component stripped out of it!
If you didn't complain about that, then shut the hell up about a $10 remaster upgrade for a game that will be 7 years, 8 months old when it releases. I see people in here asking for yet another remaster of the Uncharted trilogy and all I can do is laugh. Do you not realize that would be the exact same thing people bitched at Sony about regarding TLOU? They released TLOU, then made a remaster for PS4, then a re-remaster for PS5. They made a remaster collection for Uncharted for PS4 and people want them to do it again?
Remasters bad, or remasters good? Pick one. Part of me wants to buy the HZD remaster just to spite all the irrational haters the game has.
@Jamesblob I disagree. If even half of everyone who was interested in this game subscribed to Ubisoft+ to play it, finished it in a month, then unsubscribed from the service, Ubisoft would lose so much money that they'd end up having to reconsider their day one release stance, just like Microsoft has had to do with Game Pass. That doesn't sound like they'd be "winning" to me. Remember, the Ubisoft+ version is the $130 Ultimate Edition that you could rent and finish (not the DLC, obviously) in under a month for a little over one-tenth retail price.
Concord reminds me of the era of the MMO rush when everyone was trying to bring out big budget MMOs to be the next "World of Warcraft killer". A new MMO would come out, people would flock to it for the first "free" month, realize it really wasn't new or innovative, or they'd question why they should abandon years of progress in WoW to play a new game, and gradually just flock back to WoW, leaving each of these MMOs decimated and looking for new ways to survive.
GaaS games like this are suffering the same fate. It doesn't do anything special or innovative so people are just going back to the games they're already established in. Why would I want to pay $40 for Concord and have to start all over collecting cosmetic unlocks when I have literal years of unlocks in Overwatch, which plays very much the same?
As the MMO gold rush companies found out, there's only so much time and money to go around and once people get invested in one place, it's very difficult to get them to drop it and go somewhere else.
I'm getting a good chuckle out of the obvious Twitter/X bots trying to spin the player count as a positive. "Player count on PC doubled on the first day of open beta!" Going from 1100 to 2300 isn't the flex they think it is. Not reaching 10K for a completely free open beta of a supposedly high profile first party Sony game is abysmal.
I got a beta invite code (currently don't have PS+) so I got to play all last weekend. Since this open beta doesn't require PS+, I'm currently giving it a try to test out the added mode, but my expectations are low. I was less-than-impressed after last weekend.
Concord's conundrum, especially on console, is this: Sony wants me to pay $40, plus maintain a PS+ subscription, to play an inferior Overwatch 2 when I could just download Overwatch 2 and play completely free without a console subscription needed.
Why?
What's the hook that would make me want to spend the money on Concord? Because after last weekend's beta and the open beta thus far, I'm not seeing one. Everything about the game has been sterile, generic, derivative. Nothing about the characters or the "story" or the gameplay makes me want to run out and spend $40 and resubscribe to PS+ just to play it. If it had a stand alone PVE mode at launch, that would differentiate it from its competitors and make it more compelling — but it doesn't.
If Ragnarok comes this year, it's safe to say Sony is no longer making PS4 games at the end of 2022. After Ragnarok, the only cross-gen title Sony will continue to make will be MLB The Show.
Sony can't control if third-party publishers continue to make their games cross-gen.
"Hard to focus on the beat"? This hasn't been my experience at all, in fact I've rarely needed to even look at the metronome and I'm 3 worlds in. Some of these special stages are high BPM and it takes a few to pick up the rhythm, but that's literally the entire point of the game. Picking up the beat in this game is easier and a lot more forgiving than Crypt of the Necrodancer or even Cadence of Hyrule over on the Switch.
"Often feels chaotic" / "Repetitive"? Maybe dungeon crawlers just aren't the reviewer's forte then because these two criticisms could be levied at any dungeon crawler, whether it's Diablo, Path of Exile, Warhammer Chaosbane, or Soundfall. That's the nature of the genre.
"Weak story"? It's an indie game with an interesting twist on a genre. Did the reviewer expect it to be Diablo 2?
Soundfall rates up there with the original FreQuency and Amplitude for me, and that's pretty high praise.
Seems a lot of people commenting here are confusing the PSNow stacking loophole that got closed with what's actually going on here. From what I've been able to gather on Reddit and Twitter, the people who did the PSNow stacking are unaffected by this, it's only people who stacked original PS+ subscriptions.
This is a ridiculous move on Sony's part — they're effectively telling their most supportive fans, the ones who would buy PS+ subs years in advance, that they have to choose between all or nothing. Either they upgrade it all or they upgrade nothing at all. That's just stupid and then they rub salt in the wound by removing/requiring the payback of historical discounts? Insane.
The model was right there with Xbox's Game Pass system: Limit people to 12 month subscription conversions, then limit the total number of conversion purchases to 2-4. Anyone who had more time than that would keep their unconverted time as "Essential" with the ability to upgrade it later as their originally upgraded time lapsed.
If Sony doesn't address this when the service goes live worldwide, media will have a field day with it similar to how they raked Microsoft over the coals in 2021 for attempting to increase Live Gold subscription pricing.
Comments 10
Re: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Patch 1.300 Out Now on PS5, Makes Big Balance and Difficulty Adjustments
Kinda torn here. I originally beat the game on Expeditioner (normal) at launch but admittedly dropped it down to Story for Clea and Simon. Goofing off in Story difficulty, it was immediately apparent that it was much more forgiving with the parry and dodge timings and overall damage. Adding 40% more to the parry/dodge windows will almost take away any challenge from Story mode whatsoever, outside of the hardest encounters that is.
Re: Hands On: MindsEye Is a Boring Mess
@ShogunRok "Would love to know the inside scoop on this whole project."
It's already out there but takes some digging to find. Once you read up on the development history, it becomes clear why this is such a mess.
There's a 2023 Eurogamer interview with Benzies about his ambitious project. For the sake of brevity, I'll distill it down to a shorter version:
Originally the plan was to create a set of free game creation tools under the name Everywhere that was going to be a more robust "Roblox for adults" kind of thing. In tandem, Build A Rocket Boy (with supposedly over 400 employees in four locations at the time of the interview) was working on a premium episodic triple-A game that was going to be added within that user creation framework. That episodic game was MindsEye. Benzies' original plan for MindsEye was to create a bunch of different triple-A concepts linked together with some kind of underlying thread. The game that people are playing now is little more than what the first "episode" of the original project was supposed to be (Benzies admits the first episode is 'cut scene heavy' and the footage Eurogamer is shown is stuff from this release).
Since that interview, Everywhere seems to have completely died off. The last YouTube update for the project was 8+ months ago. They had a creator beta program last June that they quietly and unceremoniously shut down. They scrubbed the website and redirected the domain to the MindsEye game page, they removed it from the BARB official studio website's list of projects, and they integrated one of the core components (Arc-adia) into the PC version of MindsEye.
Everything about this smells of a project that was hitting a deadline or running out of funding and they had to piece together what they had to get something out to market to save face. Or at least try to.
Re: Nixxes Dev Refers to Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered as 'First Big PlayStation Content Project'
Did people have this same anti-remaster energy when the Nathan Drake collection was released on PS4 a meager 8 years after the first Uncharted came out on PS3 (and a mere four years after Uncharted 3 released)? A graphical remaster package that they charged full price for and stripped multiplayer out entirely? That collection basically charged you $20 per game to 'upgrade' to a version that had a major component stripped out of it!
If you didn't complain about that, then shut the hell up about a $10 remaster upgrade for a game that will be 7 years, 8 months old when it releases. I see people in here asking for yet another remaster of the Uncharted trilogy and all I can do is laugh. Do you not realize that would be the exact same thing people bitched at Sony about regarding TLOU? They released TLOU, then made a remaster for PS4, then a re-remaster for PS5. They made a remaster collection for Uncharted for PS4 and people want them to do it again?
Remasters bad, or remasters good? Pick one. Part of me wants to buy the HZD remaster just to spite all the irrational haters the game has.
Re: Star Wars Outlaws Boasts Ubisoft's Biggest Ever Marketing Budget, Strong Launch Expected
@Jamesblob I disagree. If even half of everyone who was interested in this game subscribed to Ubisoft+ to play it, finished it in a month, then unsubscribed from the service, Ubisoft would lose so much money that they'd end up having to reconsider their day one release stance, just like Microsoft has had to do with Game Pass. That doesn't sound like they'd be "winning" to me. Remember, the Ubisoft+ version is the $130 Ultimate Edition that you could rent and finish (not the DLC, obviously) in under a month for a little over one-tenth retail price.
Re: Concord's Free Open Beta Is Performing Abysmally on PC
Concord reminds me of the era of the MMO rush when everyone was trying to bring out big budget MMOs to be the next "World of Warcraft killer". A new MMO would come out, people would flock to it for the first "free" month, realize it really wasn't new or innovative, or they'd question why they should abandon years of progress in WoW to play a new game, and gradually just flock back to WoW, leaving each of these MMOs decimated and looking for new ways to survive.
GaaS games like this are suffering the same fate. It doesn't do anything special or innovative so people are just going back to the games they're already established in. Why would I want to pay $40 for Concord and have to start all over collecting cosmetic unlocks when I have literal years of unlocks in Overwatch, which plays very much the same?
As the MMO gold rush companies found out, there's only so much time and money to go around and once people get invested in one place, it's very difficult to get them to drop it and go somewhere else.
Re: There's Already Concern Over Concord's Player Count as Open Beta Begins
I'm getting a good chuckle out of the obvious Twitter/X bots trying to spin the player count as a positive. "Player count on PC doubled on the first day of open beta!" Going from 1100 to 2300 isn't the flex they think it is. Not reaching 10K for a completely free open beta of a supposedly high profile first party Sony game is abysmal.
Re: Poll: Are You Playing the Concord Open Beta?
I got a beta invite code (currently don't have PS+) so I got to play all last weekend. Since this open beta doesn't require PS+, I'm currently giving it a try to test out the added mode, but my expectations are low. I was less-than-impressed after last weekend.
Concord's conundrum, especially on console, is this: Sony wants me to pay $40, plus maintain a PS+ subscription, to play an inferior Overwatch 2 when I could just download Overwatch 2 and play completely free without a console subscription needed.
Why?
What's the hook that would make me want to spend the money on Concord? Because after last weekend's beta and the open beta thus far, I'm not seeing one. Everything about the game has been sterile, generic, derivative. Nothing about the characters or the "story" or the gameplay makes me want to run out and spend $40 and resubscribe to PS+ just to play it. If it had a stand alone PVE mode at launch, that would differentiate it from its competitors and make it more compelling — but it doesn't.
It's just Dollar Store Hero Shooter: The Game.
Re: Looks Like Sony Will Stop Making PS4 Games by 2025
If Ragnarok comes this year, it's safe to say Sony is no longer making PS4 games at the end of 2022. After Ragnarok, the only cross-gen title Sony will continue to make will be MLB The Show.
Sony can't control if third-party publishers continue to make their games cross-gen.
Re: Mini Review: Soundfall (PS5) - Not Music To Our Ears
I couldn't disagree more with this review.
"Hard to focus on the beat"? This hasn't been my experience at all, in fact I've rarely needed to even look at the metronome and I'm 3 worlds in. Some of these special stages are high BPM and it takes a few to pick up the rhythm, but that's literally the entire point of the game. Picking up the beat in this game is easier and a lot more forgiving than Crypt of the Necrodancer or even Cadence of Hyrule over on the Switch.
"Often feels chaotic" / "Repetitive"? Maybe dungeon crawlers just aren't the reviewer's forte then because these two criticisms could be levied at any dungeon crawler, whether it's Diablo, Path of Exile, Warhammer Chaosbane, or Soundfall. That's the nature of the genre.
"Weak story"? It's an indie game with an interesting twist on a genre. Did the reviewer expect it to be Diablo 2?
Soundfall rates up there with the original FreQuency and Amplitude for me, and that's pretty high praise.
Re: PS Plus Members in Asia Irate As Sony Wipes Discounts on Tier Upgrades, Demands Upfront Fee for Stacked Subs
Seems a lot of people commenting here are confusing the PSNow stacking loophole that got closed with what's actually going on here. From what I've been able to gather on Reddit and Twitter, the people who did the PSNow stacking are unaffected by this, it's only people who stacked original PS+ subscriptions.
This is a ridiculous move on Sony's part — they're effectively telling their most supportive fans, the ones who would buy PS+ subs years in advance, that they have to choose between all or nothing. Either they upgrade it all or they upgrade nothing at all. That's just stupid and then they rub salt in the wound by removing/requiring the payback of historical discounts? Insane.
The model was right there with Xbox's Game Pass system: Limit people to 12 month subscription conversions, then limit the total number of conversion purchases to 2-4. Anyone who had more time than that would keep their unconverted time as "Essential" with the ability to upgrade it later as their originally upgraded time lapsed.
If Sony doesn't address this when the service goes live worldwide, media will have a field day with it similar to how they raked Microsoft over the coals in 2021 for attempting to increase Live Gold subscription pricing.