StrickenBiged

So many commentors don't seem to realise that ND stopped doing "crunch" after TLoU2 came out (see the Grounded 2 documentary). Several of the most prestigious game studios try to crunch as little as possible now, as otherwise your best talent will walk to a studio that offers them a better work-life balance. This may go some way to explain why AAA game dev in general is taking longer these days.
If ND is imposing a short period of crunch, as opposed to being in perpetual crunch like they used to, then that's normal in several industries. Its in the nature of deadlines.

Excellent. More please.

@Number09 @LifeGirl I think there's some confusion here, which is what I think Straley is trying to get at when he points out that you cannot say "the most advanced AI companion" anymore without people assuming generative AI has been used somehow.
Traditional game AI, like pathfinding, decision trees, finite state machines, etc, is algorithmic. It’s deterministic and designed by programmers to simulate intelligence in NPCs. This is what Straley appears to mean when he says “AI programmers” and “NPCs are AI.” It’s been part of games for decades; the behaviour of the NPC paddle in Pong would have been controlled by such an algorithm.
LLMs like GPT or diffusion systems that learn patterns from massive datasets and generate new outputs (text, images, audio) rely on statistical inference, not handcrafted logic. A recent example is machine learning used by the developers of ARC Raiders to program the movement of the ARC robots.
Using AI as a blanket term is probably unhelpful these days. Straley's right to note there has been a shift among the public in their understanding of and use of the phrase "AI" though. Maybe the terms we use need to update with the times.

@themightyant They say everyone gets their day in court...

I suppose it does show that PlayStation people read the site, and probably these comments. I feel sorry for the poor intern having to read some of the things we post below the line! XD

@KoopaTheGamer Go read Sony's legal complaint (you can read it here: https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/SONY-TENCENT-CLONE-SUIT.pdf ). It wasn't about the gameplay, it was about Tencent ripping off the Horizon 'look' to create confusion in the market and benefit from goodwill built up in the Horizon IP.
It's not about whether Motiram had mechanimals (as the lawsuit puts it) or not, its that their aesthetic for those mechanimals adhered so closely to Horizon's version.
It's a completely different situation from Pokemon and Palworld, where the dispute is about patent infringement (and I think Nintendo should lose, because it seems to me to have been negligent of the patent office to grant the patents in the first place based on prior art).

Fair play to Sony, but I’m disappointed we won’t get to the juicy parts of the legal proceedings, like discovery, where previous lawsuits have provided so many interesting internal documents.

I'm betting 2026 is going to be a good year, just like 2024 and 2025 were.

Great game, and a fantastic first effort. I look forward to seeing how far they can push the systems forward in a sequel. My wishlist would be:
1. a proper school experience, with a timetable, a la Bully. (Maybe the Time Turner could make an appearance for when you need to be in class, but also somewhere else for a quest.)
2. deeper combat, maybe with summons or other CC options.
3. less of a "chosen one" storyline - I just want to be a regular Joe Schmoe.
4. Deeper character creator so I can really put myself and my family members in the game, not just get somewhere in the ballpark.

@Andee Don't sell anything unless it's literally impossible to reposition them while you rearrange them. As you can rearrange buildings freely, you shouldn't need to sell up!

Yes, it's indie.
On the technical definition, Sandfall is still a free agent. Kepler published the game, but Sandfall is "an unaffiliated [game development] company" - it's not owned by Kepler.
These days, I think "indie" in the wider gaming discourse means "this game was made by people who were free from publisher interference in their creative decisions". So a game with a publisher can still be "indie" if the key decisions were made by the dev team, rather than their publisher. Maybe that's more of a vibe thing, and of course there will still be devs that appreciate and need advice from a publisher on some aspect of the game.
Maybe it's more of a negative definition: "a game that would never be made by a team that is owned by a large publisher".

@Andee Don't over-stress on the base building, you won't have enough gold to dig out the whole area until the late game anyway, and you can't really optimise the layout until you've maximised the space. The layout can be changed whenever you want too.
A good early game setup though is to try and box in your resources with other buildings so that your characters are repeatedly bounced over them whenever you farm, which should maximise yields. If you're ever stuck for what to build, you can't go wrong with more economy/resource buildings.

@Andee How far did you play BallXPit? I agree, the first few rounds were repetitive, but once you get down the pit a few levels and unlock some of the more game-changing buildings, it goes totally bonkers. However, I wouldn't call it grindy at all: it had that very satisfying loop where everything you do in the pit gives you something to enhance your base, and everything you do in the base makes your next run more powerful.

@Nyne11Tyme I agree, but they redeemed themselves (to an extent) in my eyes by showing me some of the better synergies and ball evolutions that I hadn't thought to try yet.

That song just gave me diabetes, I think.

First I'm hearing of this, but hell yes, day 1 for me. And the Warhammer 40k Survivors-style spin off if that comes to PlayStation consoles at some point too.

Focus on the end product with this GenAI stuff. Things being equal, good games will sell regardless of whether they use these tools, and bad games won't. Teams that care enough will make sure that their use of the tools improves the end result, rather than detract from it. Teams that care less will give you the slop.
Specifically, I think Larian has more than earned the benefit of the doubt when it comes to this stuff.

Yep, I got this plat too. Fantastic game. I fell into it hard, I played it at release and didn’t play anything else until I had unlocked all its secrets, including all those audio logs and the hidden hexagon media things, which I watched fully. I remember sitting with graph paper and pencils to figure out some of the harder puzzles. Loved every second of it, it’s one of those games that I wish I could forget so that I could experience it fresh a second time.

I’m glad, personally. After the first few I got that Atsu had a fantastic family before the Night of the Burning Tree. I didn’t need any more motivation. Taking players away from the core gameplay to give them a nerfed player character can get old real fast: see also the Peter Parker & Harry Osborne sequences in Spider-Man 2.

I just hope that the creatives at Nintendo are watching this project very closely. Knowing how careful they are with their IP gives me some faith that this might turn out alright.

I don’t play anything on mobile. I don’t like the platform for gaming: I find it imprecise and you can’t see what’s happening because your thumbs are in the way. I also probably wouldn’t attempt these games on PS5; they’re not the sort of thing I’m into.

I think it’ll be more of a problem for Xbox than PlayStation. it’ll be a cheaper alternative to what Microsoft is trying to do with the PC pretending to be a console thing. Except that Steam Machine (I prefer Gabe Cube as a name) runs Linux, so it’ll probably run a lot better without all the Windows bloat under the hood.
Still, I hope it does well, PlayStation could use the competition to keep them honest.

Wow, I don't think a pause button has ever been a selling point before.

Mobile is a big no from me. I try to look for ways to interact with the damn thing less, not more. It could be the best gaming experience I'll ever have, I'm still not doing it on mobile.

Thanks all, I get the idea now.

How does locking the language and region lead to such a dramatic price cut? My layman's guess would be that this is just a software issue, and that it would be cheaper to just have one operating system for the PS5, with all supported languages available, rather than have to maintain separate operating systems for multiple regions.

I'll probably watch, but I do hope the writing improves in Season 2. Season 1 didn't make a tonne of sense if you stopped to think about it.

That gameplay trailer is unrepresentative: it doesn't show my fat thumbs obscuring half the screen.

Who're all these other lombax? Lombices...? Lombaxes?

Everything aside from the main story is better in Yotei. I replayed the PS5 version of Tsushima recently and found I really enjoyed Jin's struggle between the honour system of samurai culture and the more effective tactics of the Ghost. While I'm fully behind Atsu's quest of vengeance - who doesn't love a good revenge plot? - it just doesn't have the same depth of character development, IMO.

I don't think it's completely out of the question that Sony would delay PS6 slightly to allow GTA6 to sell-through a few more PS5s for them, but given everything is backwards compatible these days, I don't particularly see the need for that either.

Honest question, because I've never played Destiny, but how would people have handled ending the main story differently so as to retain more of the playerbase?
As an outsider, it seems fairly obvious to me that once the story had finished, you'd see the playerbase drop off significantly.

I’m just laughing about these delays at this point. It’s comical.

Sure the game will be great in the end though.

Chris Raygun did it again…

Those old graphics have such an unmistakable charm, don't they?

Looks like they hired the same artist that draws all the characters for the travelling fun fairs. XD

@LifeGirl I've heard Disney described as a law firm that just happens to make movies, it has that many in-house lawyers.

Interesting side-note: that whole thing in the 2010s where the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse started turning up before the films in anything put out by Disney Animation Studios was an attempt to establish the character as a trademark (where he'd enjoy ongoing trademark protection for as long as it was used) and in anticipation that the copyright was going to run out. They failed in that attempt in the end, and you can now use Steamboat Willie's version of MM for whatever you like, but it was a good try.

Wow, big nostalgia vibes from the promotional videos. But I've only just platted BALLxPIT and need a wee break from this sort of thing before I jump in again.
So many good roguelites coming out in a bit of a flurry at the moment.

Depends. There’s so many other great games to play. I’ll be waiting on reviews and performance results.

All depends on how it's used, in my view.

Personally, I'm kinda hyped for the first game on the scale and depth of BG3 that uses something like Ubisoft's Neo NPCs. Imagine a fully fledged RPG where you can have natural conversations with every NPC, not just select between 2-3 pre-scripted lines.

Edit: Oh yeah, and this AI announcement shouldn't come as too much of a shock: they'll be those intended costs savings that EA's buyers will be interested in. That slipped my mind.

Sounds like something a AAA, multi-format publisher would say. Xbox is a publisher now, that just happens to make a console too, not the other way around.

@TBubs311 The latter. At least according to their latest filed accounts. All these content drops generate positive word of mouth and articles like this one, and they get another spike in sales.

Graphically, I don't know where we go from the PS5; from across the room on a massive 4k screen, many games look amazing and run well. But surely there's a direction to go in with increased computational power and being able to simulate more things at once. Imagine being a soldier in a battlefield with hundreds of other soldiers, but the others (aside from the one's you're expected to fight) aren't just props carrying out pre-scripted animations, but NPCs reacting to one another in real-time that you could go and interact with - maybe an RTS game where you could possess any individual character and take part in the fight. Or more realistic physics and fluid dynamics engines enabling more realistic destruction or interactivity with the play space. Or entire ecosystems could be modelled and messed with - what happens in a survival game if you hunt the apex predators to extinction, etc.

Shu's imagination may be limited by what has come before. Now that games are basically photorealistic, it's maintaining that while pushing for bigger, more dynamic games that can literally do more that will be the next step, and may even lead to the creation of new genres.

This game's dangerously moreish. I was playing on Saturday night, in my head I thought it was maybe midnight, but I hadn't looked at my watch in a while. It was, in fact, 2:30am. Yikes.

Powerwash Simulator 2 baybee!

I’ve been looking forward to that one.

Nah, too expensive for what it is.

If you’re into this sort of game, grab Ball X Pit which came out this week. It’s cracking, and will scratch your PvZ itch very nicely.

Commendable, at least, that they haven't embargoed reviews until the day of release, like so often happens when the publisher knows its got something underbaked to sell.

It's kinda weird that an XBox studio is re-releasing, on PlayStation, a game made by a PlayStation studio. Funny how things work out.

That new-manual, freshly printed smell to this day knocks me back to my childhood, sitting on the bus riding home from town, excitedly opening up a game I've just bought from EB with my summer-job money, and reading the manual cover to cover. Tempted to pick this up as GoY is worth it.

Cracking month for me, all 3 will not just get added to the library, but actually downloaded in readiness to play.

I don't know what everyone's complaining about. That little trailer has cheered me up no end. XD

XBox've basically put themselves in a situation where the least profitable place for people to play their games is on their own platform (using Game Pass) so it's no surprise to me that they might be questioning whether they even want to bother researching and developing a physical device when they could just bung everything on the cloud.