RoomWithaMoose

More interesting if ya don't, I reckon.

People need to learn to accept IPs adapt, go dormant, and sometimes end. Kratos has had two thematically appropriate endings already (I think, still haven't played Rag), I doubt there's much sensible left to do with his character growth. The world might be ripe for exploration (...ehh), but if the character isn't just let them rest.

Love that cold "Yes" in response to Abu's excessive enthusiasm.

Mmm, guess I won't pre-order, then. I'll wait and see how much of that AI was replaced by human work, then buy accordingly.

Still really want the game. And I can appreciate 80% of games probably have similar AI use despite not disclosing it. But still...pretty lame.

@JohntheRaptor Kratos hasn't been the God of War for 7 games.

Meh. Fine as an update for games we already knew about, but nothing crazy announcement-wise.

Rayman's cool, but I need to know if there's a ton of new content before I get interested. Stuntman is neat, but I never cared about the franchise. Until Dawn 2 will almost certainly be worse than the first. So...I'll just stick with the first, I reckon. GoW looks great, but I'm not too into modern GoW and it looks like more of the same (positively puzzled why people who presumably love modern GoW seem perturbed by it. Not enough manly man sweat, I guess...?).

The Toy Story Collection from earlier honestly beat all of these rather effortlessly. Shrugs

@AhmadSumadi I mean, I wouldn't say this article provides much nuance. If its contents are meant to dissuade sentiments of contemporary PlayStation sucking, saying the output is weaker, they don't actively support interesting indies, the end of the PS4 was generally stronger, and everything costs more now doesn't really say much that the contextless Internet wasn't already on about.

I think the claims of shilling — which I don't really agree with — comes more from the tone and seeming intent of the article. That being an attempt to downplay a notable decline in sales and declining to bluntly say it's a failure on Sony's part. It's still fairly open about Sony's failings, though, which kinda makes the specificity pointless in my opinion...

@1UP-HUSKY I dunno why so many PlayStation fans push against this. I mean, this model has been proven successful time and time again.

Just look at Hollywood. Obsession and Backrooms are poised to make a s***ton compared to the massively more expensive Masters of the Universe. Hollywood had an entire Renaissance of cheap, focused movies. Or look at Nintendo. Tomodachi Life surely costs a fraction of every Sony 1st-party effort in the last 5 years, yet probably already brought in more revenue and has longer legs than 90% of them.

Cheap productions with heavy artistic expression, mass appeal, and/or novelty trend to do great when banal affairs with bombastic budgets are boring audiences. I don't think any company is more 'blockbuster Hollywood' than PlayStation right now, so maybe they should throw out an Easy Rider and see how it does.

So the context is PlayStation is worse in a multitude of ways?

I mean, that does explain the declining sales, so... Yeah.

@CottonModem Playing Origins through Xbox back-comp, it is a tad blurry on modern displays.

Still looks completely fine, but it would definitely benefit from a resolution bump.

This isn't what I meant when I said Rayman 2 remake, Ubisoft.

I'm down with Origins, though.

@Skinny-Pete Don't think "PC" is the right term to associate with AI outrage.

Also, I prefer the banana. This short at least feels like it has artistic intent despite being generated. But...not a great time to show such enthusiasm for the tech.

@TimeDelayedGamer Charity? Probably not.

God's gift to gaming that always has gamers' best interests foremost in mind? Definitely.

Valve is cool and all, but a lot of their fans really excessively idolize them. I would think it was just a joke if I haven't had several real life gaming friends say they're amazing and care deeply about their customers.

You know, I don't think any group of Internet gamers annoys me more than the Gabeies convinced Valve is overtly pro-consumer because their CEO said it's not morally reprehensible to steal other companies' games.

Maybe this is help then realize all for-profit companies are basically the same. For-profit.

@Bluemoon2008 It would be pretty fair to say this'll actually be Modern Warfare 7. Hell, if we wanted to retroactively say Advance Warfare and Infinite Warfare were entries in the Modern Warfare sub series — a la Black Ops Cold War — we can really say this is Modern Warfare 9.

@JB_Whiting To be fair, everyone got really angry when they tried for anything else. Ghosts and Advance are still regularly considered two of the worst entries. Infinite is one of the most downvoted videos in YouTube history. WWII and Vanguard were kinda ignored.

You could argue that's more to do with the state of the franchise at that point. But MWremake and Black Ops...uh whichever one was considered a return to form definitely inspired more hype and sales than any of the others.

Warfour is a masterstroke, though.

Considering Acti threw Tryarch to the wolves to buy IW time to make this year's entry, I hope it's good.

I mean, I don't really care, personally. But I'd rather fans get a solid game, and would prefer not to suffer another round of discourse misremembering Advance Warfare as a classic.

@Blacksmith1985 You catch monsters. You fight monsters.

It's like a party-based RPG, except the central gameplay mechanic is building your party out of enemies.

@Dalamar The hope is that backwards compatibility will continue from this point forward. So just one more rehash phase, then we're good.

Regardless...that IS accessibility. I can't play DQ8 on any modern console, making it less accessible than otherwise.

Speaking of underrated 007 games, it always bothered me no one talks about Agent Under Fire.

EorN is treated like the gold standard from that era, but I was far more impressed by AUF.

@Dalamar I say remake all of the main series so they're actually accessible.

@Grumblevolcano Kinda doubt they'll have any platform-specific ports announced here. Maybe some platform exclusives...predominantly for the Switch, if anything. But doesn't feel like the time for appeasing port beggers.

Is it wrong that all I really want is Fortune Street?

Would physical collectors be mad if companies gave them an option to pay $5, or something, to exchange their disc with an updated hardcopy a year after release?

I don't know exactly how much it costs to manufacture a disc, but I imagine it can't be more than $10 — ignoring the costs of development that was already recouped with the initial sale. So I think it could work for developers; it would really be extra income for them. But I feel like collectors would still be angry about this.

@species Poor man's Tears of the Witcher Creed might be more accurate. And maybe try fitting Elden Ring into that amalgamation, as well.

@ShogunRok You could do like SwitchUp and do little 'update reports.'

In general, I think it would be nice if more outlets reviewed post-launch updates.

@XenonKnight Definitely not a side game. Definitely a full-blown successor.

It's fine if you want another Jin game, but Yotei is a sequel to Tsushima.

@Yor-sama "Worst" doesn't have to mean 'bad,' right? I mean, if I had to rank each PlayStation generation, 5 would probably be at the bottom (3, 2, one, 4, 5, I reckon). But that doesn't mean any of them are wholly bad, or anything

@XenonKnight I'm a bit afraid to ask, but Yotei is Tsushima 2, no?

Not considering it as such is fairly arbitrary. And hoping SP just has another 5-year dev cycle Ghost game at the ready isn't very realistic.

Interesting that I'm usually the sour grape about PlayStation things, actively hated Forbidden West, yet still have a significantly more graceful opinion of this game than seemingly the majority of the site userbase.

I'll have to check my gaming email when I get home, but I'm hoping I get in. I probably won't ever buy the thing, but I genuinely wanna try it out.

@PSXB I guess not...

The questionable approach you cite IS what's stupid.

If Sony just went with Helldivers II, one new studio GaaS (Concord, Fairgames, or something else), set up another studio to do post-launch support for the cancelled Factions and upcoming Horizon, and DIDN'T buy Bungie, I think it would've been a pretty successful initiative all around.

Does this mean I never again have to tell anyone else how stupid PlayStation's GaaS push was?

@datamonkey Yes and no. We don't need to know their earnings, but having it publicly available encourages new investors.

The important thing is that they control their earnings reports. If, for instance, Bungie accomplishes nothing on a year and was a waste of money, they can really lighten their language around it and focus on the positives.

If it behooved them to release accurate sales info on a monthly basis, they would. It's a lot cheaper and easier to obfuscate if that info is compiled on a yearly basis and accompanied by a bunch of other stats.

@Juic3B0x I really liked Returnal and its general difficulty. But I could only stomach a few instances of hours-long run progress being lost before I shelved it.

I could barely handle it in Hades, even. I'm really not sure why people like rogue-likes so much. They have amazing replay value, sure, but at the cost of 90% of a normal playthrough just being the same content over and over again.

@datamonkey Controlling public perception and marketing.

Also, there's no real reason any of us need to know this stuff.

@Swandivetotheasphalt Probably because those Microsoft titles were pretty back-to-bsck, while Saros is just kinda...it for Sony.

But still, it hitting #9 in the USA in it's first month is probably about the best it could've hoped for. And, like you said, I doubt it had that crazy of a budget.

I reckon they could do a top 10 with and without projected digital sales. Even better, one of confirmed physical, one of confirmed digital, and a combination with projected digital.

But even then, I really wouldn't doubt their estimations. Especially considering how, "yep, looks right" these results are. Good for Pragmata, though. And Nintendo is killing it this year; although I doubt any of their Summer games will make a comparable splash.

@Oram77 I'm cool with remakes. Some feel pretty unwarranted, but they can still exist.

I was pretty frustrated with TLoU Part 1, though that was mainly because there were 100 other games I'd rather Sony gave the remake treatment.

@Oram77 Didn't a bunch of people on this site, including me, just get hyped for inFamous remakes?

Also, @Yor-sama basically just said the Demon's Souls remake was better than Mario Kart World and Bananza — and those other two Nintendo games I explicitly haven't mentioned.

EDIT: Also-also, I think the Sony-based remake scrutiny is more about which games they're remaking, not the practice itself. Plenty of people do indeed feel the same about Star Fox, but I wasn't really arguing quality

@Oram77 I really don't read that as him saying Ghost of Yotei sucks and doesn't count. He's saying there a general lack of solid 1st-party output, which, like, half of this site agrees with.

I'm just saying, quality is subjective, but Nintendo is absolutely not missing when it comes to quantity.

@Oram77 It's not that you don't personally like those games. It's that you're dismissing them on the basis that you dislike them.

@Oram77 So now games that you haven't played don't count unless you personally approve of them? Kinda dumb, mate.

I also somehow forgot Donkey Kong. So that, too.

And, like I explained in that other article, I was trying to get off.

@Oram77 Yoshi's about to come out. Star Fox next month. Rhythm Heaven and Splatoon the month after. Probably Fire Emblem before October. Poktopia just came out. Mario Kart, Air Riders, Metroid Prime 4, and Age of Calamity in the last half of last year. And I'm probably forgetting a few.

...I dunno, mate.

@wildcat_kickz I'm actually similarly not offended by this article. I do see how people could be, I suppose, but personally don't really care. I just wanted to be clear with OP on why people might cite journalism in a critical way on this site.

I just mean it's semantics to differentiate between who counts as a journalist and who doesn't. I agree that Push Square doesn't necessarily count as journalism, but wouldn't say the definition of 'journalism' is of much practical importance. They report on news; that's enough for most to call them journalists. Similarly, why we wouldn't hold non-journalists to equatable ethical standards as journalists is pretty arbitrary.

And I totally agree about op-eds. I wouldn't mind heavily inflammatory writings of they're labeled as the opinion pieces they are. I'm a little torn, as I think adding that subjectivity to an objective news story adds some nice flavor to proceedings. But it's a delicate balance between colorful reporting and aggressive fluff.

@Kiltedhaggis Maybe I'm just trying to get off, man.

@Kiltedhaggis Ignore me, Daddy.

@wildcat_kickz I don't at all disagree with that assessment. However, it really just devolves into a semantics argument at that point.

Regardless of if we're talking legitimate journalists (actively finds a story), influencers (glorified vloggers), or aggregate news reporters (glorified bloggers), there's a popular sentiment that professionalism is expected of anyone profiting off reporting on news.

@Atreus97 I think it was more the wording of the title OP was criticizing rather than the nature of the article itself. But that might just be me projecting.

@Atreus97 Because the writers are journalists.

You can argue games journalism shouldn't be held to the same standards as real journalism. Which, you know...I would. But still, there's a certain level of professionalism people expect from that title. Usually, when people bring up journalistic integrity, it's less that they don't like an article, and more that they feel it's somehow unprofessional.

@get2sammyb APPLAUSE

@8th_Observer shrugs

It'd just be nice to keep up with gaming news without the occasional article that literally triggers me.