The mistake Microsoft made was thinking the industry still cares about any of its franchises. Gears and Halo all peaked in the 360 era.

There’s some revisionism going off in these comments because this game is utterly balls.

They're clearly trying to sell off the brand. That's why more developers must go. It has to be profitable for a potential buyer.

It still sucks though.

We'll end up with another cross gen palava where all the big PS6 titles come to PS5 anyway to make back their dev costs.

With western games Devs on the wane and Japan in ascendency again, they'll build for the Switch 2 first and port later. The PS6 remains, at least in home console form a rather pointless and expensive endeavour from Sony.

So why bother? Only more games, not more power will stop Nintendo continuing to eat their lunch.

WipEout is too long forgotten. Howabout offering it to the Galactic Racer studio? A campaign like that would be really good!

@carlos82 context. The mass murder of innocent bystanders in GTA or any other game isn't ok really.

The mass murder of the infinitely respawning minions of hell is fine.

@Citrus_Architect The thing is we've long been above all this as a medium. The era of gangster games is largely over. GTA was once edgy and satirical but it now just seems immature and puerile, like a PS2 era game designed to appeal to teenage boys.

Id much rather we have gaming protagonists like Laufey and Aloy than something ridiculous like Pyra and Mythra from Xenoblade.

Putting the live service push to one side for a minute, I don't get the criticism of Sony at all. Eradication of physical media was always on the cards for gaming. As file sizes balloon and disc manufacturers shut down it would only have been harder to source.

The long term issue has always been digital preservation and the lack of laws allowing extraction of purchases. None of that is Sony's fault (actually 1980s Apple) and they shouldn't be burned for making that move.

The gaming community as a whole should have been pushing for changes to the law but instead they're as fractured as ever, putting it's effort into a pointless weeklong PSN blackout when they use monthly figures to calculate usage numbers or arguing about the attractiveness of the protagonist of a game nobody is forcing them to play.

The vast majority of gamers are already download only.

Wrong spelling.

S. K. I.....

And people play in first person, making them largely pointless!

@kuu_nousee They should have let the hardware team make more inroads over the next few years. The games industry needs to slow down into a 10-year cycle of hardware refreshes or all we're going to see is another wasted generation.

Given how well Forbidden West ran on the PS4 there are few games on the PS5 that sells the idea of 'next gen'. Now maybe GTA6 and ReVeIIation might be the exceptions but we're only just starting to see the benefits of the PS5 6 years on from launch.

The PS6 will just end up plagued with cross-gen releases dragging it down because cutting edge titles will be too expensive, the user base will be smaller and the console with the most mass market penetration in 2 years time (the Switch 2) will be the benchmark everybody aims for.

The underlying thread from the whole Xbox debacle is the sunsetting of western dominance on the games industry. US publishers only really survive replaying the same hits over and over again. My point is that Japan is back being the centre of the gaming universe and Nintendo are, whether we like it or not the goalposts.

In this economy they'd be stupid to launch a new console before 2028. The PS5 has plenty of owners and life left in it. Unless it's Dev team are chomping at the bit for more power they need to keep

Funny how history repeats itself.

Bizarre Creations, once the toast of the Xbox development community who developed a brilliant racing series got folded into Activision and promptly folded.

The same thing may happen to Playground. You might think it's impossible given the popularity of Forza but PGR was once in the same shoes and I credit Bizarre with making the greatest game ever released on the Xbox platform (Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved)

I mean it's great the vaulted content is coming back. It would be nice to play through the whole D2 story from scratch again.

But be careful what we wish for. Listening to fandoms only gets you Rise of Skywalkered.

Really?!

I wish they were done with Destiny, and I say this as someone who enjoys it. The game has become an absolute bloated mess. Epic have the brains to burn down their entire game every 3 months; Bungie just pile more on, mistaking complexity for depth.

Appreciating the irony of the placement, comments sections and chats across the internet should all be turned off and banned. Theyre all at some point a cesspool.

If you want a community open your own forum and build one.

I would argue they make the EULA as obtuse as possible so nobody reads it and thus nobody knows they're just buying a licence.

If I were in court I would point out that an MP3 can be downloaded, backed up and burned to disc. Games should be no different.

@JustMyOpinion Something different I guess. I've not really enjoyed the series since Vice City. I don't think they've ever come up with a better protagonist nor better plotline.

Outside of this if you've dicked around in one GTA game (getting the biggest police chase etc) then you've dicked around in them all.

I mean for most people GTAV on a bigger map with more stuff to do is probably enough, right?

I'm not here to knock what is obviously a very detailed, technically accomplished game I'm sure millions of people are eager to play.

But it does nothing for me. It looks like every other GTA game going back to 3, only prettier.

@Sunzy98 The licence transfers from the disc to your account but is revoked if the disc gets used on another console. It essentially lets you digitise a physical collection but protects the Xbox from them all being resold later on (like you can after ripping a CD)

@Deadlyblack There were rumours Sony was going to do a similar program with the PSP Go but nothing ever materialised.

Sony tracks engagement metrics based on average monthly use. Shutting a PS5 off for just a week won't mean anything.

@Slayer25c I tire of just fighting things. I wanted Horizon 3 but instead Sony in their infinite wisdom decided to tell their best Dev team to make a live service game instead that they're now not going to release.

Not releasing the single player games everyone craves seems like a poor way to monetise the users.

I can only imagine Ghost Babel being ill-suited for playing on a TV. For what's it's worth it's brilliant on the Gameboy. The VR missions are a great way to kill a bus ride.

Had they have poured all that money into developing Horizon 3 and got that out next year there would be no price I wouldn't pay for a PS5 just to play it.

That's how bad it is.

Given Sony calculates metrics based on monthly active users this isn't going to send any sort of message

Makes me wonder if John Hare can score a bargain and buy back the rights to Sensible Soccer once they shutter Codemasters.

None of this is important. Sony should be lobbying the US government for a change in copyright law so that customers can extract the files from defunct storefronts for personal enjoyment. There is absolutely zero economic arguements as to why this shouldnt be allowed.

If we've ascertained one thing from the relative cold reception to the PS5 Pro and the success of games like Stardew and Balatro is that gamers care a lot more about technical competence than graphical fidelity.

With this in mind there is very little reason to even bother with a new generation of consoles at this point. Lowering the specs would even be a better idea.

Who knew Gunpei Yokoi would still be saving the games industry so long after his death?

@Dman10 An MP3 can be enjoyed on numerous devices or burned to disc because it contains no DRM (largely due to Steve Jobs leaning on the music industry at the time)

There is no logical reason why the filetype used by a console should be anything different. Licencing and DRM are plainly anti-consumer. I'm not advocating for ways to circumvent piracy laws. Companies should be able to charge for their IP. But once the stores close down and there is no way of exchanging money for software then it should be fair game for emulation and so on.

The irony of course is that if Sony bought PPSSPP and properly licenced it by integrating the PSN so you could download (say) all your old PSP games to play on mobile and PC theyd actually continue to make money from those old titles. Devs might use it as a way to lower their costs and treat it as another storefront.

What an utter waste of time. The fractious nature of gaming as a hobby means we will all lose out because they tried to find a different answer instead of asking a better question, namely what should digital preservation look like in the 21st Century.

Discs and carts were always going to go. That much is inevitable. Gaming drove the internet and digital distribution as a medium in the first place. We should be happy physical media is finally dead.

But instead of PlayStation owners petitioning Sony, gamers at large need to be joining forces to petition state actors to change their outdated copyright laws to allow for file extraction from defunct storefronts.

That's the war we should all be fighting.

This is only a good idea if I can connect an external disc drive to my Xbox Series S!

@Llamageddon 100%. It’s all conjecture on the part of the writer until the game comes out and we get to play it. If people are put off, just replay the original.

You had me at “no modern day sections”

The issue was never physical discs but software DRM. I’d put money on most of the people complaining about the lack of discs not having a CD collection anymore. But this is because you can rip a CD and do what you like with a purchased MP3.

@Oram77 Gaming is big enough that you have other options. If you’ve always been a PS gamer pick up an Xbox 360 and suddenly your games are all physical and £2 each. If you miss experimentation then grab a Gameboy emulator handheld and go nuts on itch.io most of which is largely free.

The problem isn’t the lack of physical media but the software licensing terms of digital purchases. We should legally be able to archive goods we have exchanged good money for once their host platforms become void.

There is no real argument as to why I shouldn’t be able to download the roms of PSP/Vita/3DS titles I have purchased once the consoles have gone under. Nobody is losing any money. And before they chime in with continued access, I’ll point out Sony’s recent movie licence massacre.

The right thing to do is petition the EU. They might be a little reticent to go after US companies at the minute but Japan has no political leverage in its favour.

The fact is that modern games don’t fit on a Blu-ray so nearly always need an additional download after installation. Should those servers go offline one day it means that the disc game will be useless.

What players should now be campaigning for is for games to be $5-10 cheaper now they no longer need to be burned to disc and shipped.

All very ironic given this is the first game in history that doesn’t need any marketing

I mean, it could be a new WipEout

So you still won’t be able to play co-op with your kids without first invading their privacy by making not one but two online presences for them to play something as simple as split-screen?

Modern gaming really is a big mess isn’t it?

The reason for this is you can’t set up local accounts on Xbox like you can on the PS5. Every account on an Xbox is automatically a Microsoft account, an annoying holdover from the Xbox One I can assure you. Rather than create a different protocol just for PS owners they’ve kept the same requirements.

It sucks on both levels

We’ve not even hit a performance ceiling on the PS5 yet. It’s best looking game is still Forbidden West and that was held back by its PS4 origins. Nobody, and I mean nobody is asking for the PS6 in the next 4 years.

@RatmCky This was in the original P4 so should be in the remake

@1970sGamer I think a lot of it stems from people wanting gaming to step out from its cliched past as overly violent murder simulators which is hard when the poster child for the entire industry, and indeed entertainment as a whole is Grand Theft Auto.

It’s a two-edged sword really. There will be millions of lapsed gamers who will end up buying a PS5 just for this game and the amount of money it will make is probably more than the entire output of Hollywood this year alone. And yet the cliched image of teenage boys playing violent games will persist as a result.

I’m sure the end product will be really good and people should enjoy it as they wish.

I mean it probably plays well enough but you’re selling nostalgia with a game like this and some things have to be exactly as you remember them. All of those actors are still prolific and should have been recast.

I bounced off more than 2 decades of FF games for many reasons but 16 pulled me right back in. It wasn’t the combat (every FF has different combat. 10 vs 12 vs 13 anyone?) but the commitment to being a Final Fantasy game: ridiculous bosses, melodramatic plot and a protagonist not out the save the world but just his Brother. Clive Rosfield isn’t just the best acted protag in the series but probably the most well-rounded as a hero and a wonderful exploration of modern masculinity.

Maybe you couldn’t control his friends but I actually gave a crap about Jill and Cid and Gav and Joshua which is more than I can say for Prompto, Gladiolus, Fang or Vanille.