StrickenBiged

For me, Sekiro has to go on top as From Software's best game. That combat was just so dialled in, it had a story that you could actually follow, and because it focussed on a single weapon your options for cheesing hard fights were more limited ('git gud' actually means something in Sekiro).

Bloodborne is second - the setting and trick weapons were incredible.

Not sure where I'd place everything after that. Probably Dark Souls 1 is third for the interconnected world.

Great advert. Loved all the little in-jokes.

Will probably pick this up at some point.

Sounds spiffing, wot wot.

It speaks to something existential in my core, seeing all those post-it notes...

Ooooh, hellooooo. Wishlisting this for sure.

Saber Interactive have been killing it lately.

Laughed my ass off at that trailer, will have to give this a look. I love that they seem to be playing the story really straight against all that comedic carnage, it only makes it sillier.

Also "We Deliver" makes me think of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN74u6UQ79s

I am astonished that there's an in-game challenge in today's world that didn't get beaten within a few hours of release. It must be really tough and/or very well hidden.

Some absolute bangers in here. Anyone who hasn't played Supergiant's back catalogue really needs to get on that though, they are all superb.

The Vita version of this game was one of my very first platinum trophies. I tried the other games in this franchise but bounced off them. If this is a remake/reboot of the first game I'd happily dip in again.

@aj21009 the Bloons games are great, I agree!

80 hours... eeeeeehhhhh...

I enjoyed playing Mirage last year, but I had platinumed that after around half of this estimate. 80 hours seems far too big.

I really regret this larger RPG version of AC, and that some of my most anticipated settings for AC games (Ancient Greece, Vikings, and now Feudal Japan) have been wasted (from my perspective) on this format of game.

Since getting my Portal, I love it when Mrs wants to watch a show that I have zero interest in, and I can say "that's fine honey, I'll just noodle about on my Portal".

They've nailed the use case with this ad as far as I'm concerned.

But no way am I just handing over a game in progress to some idiot kid to screw up for me. My saves are mine, get your own.

@PrincessPeach11 No need to go into the store to test for stick drift. You can test your controllers with various apps on your phone. Pair the phone with the dualsense via bluetooth and a diagram of the controller on the phone screen will tell you which buttons you're pressing and where it thinks the sticks are (which can be useful for diagnosing drift).

On iOS the one I use is called "Game Controller Tester Gamepad". https://apps.apple.com/us/app/game-controller-tester-gamepad/id1497587957

I spotted this on the PSN store a couple of days ago while browsing. And the art looked eye-catching. But then I saw "Free" and thought "ah, not for me then" and scanned my eyes elsewhere on the screen.

I love Powerwash Simulator for chilling out in the evening while listening to podcasts or an audiobook. Will definitely give the second one a look.

Well I bought two of those! Amazon lost my first one, so I had to go to HMV of all places, which still had some in stock!

Awesome. Here's hoping we go up against some Tau for a bit more ranged gameplay - some use of vehicles would be nice - and Emperor's Children would be cool for the heretic faction, and are a bit more into melee and swordsmanship than the Thousand Sons are.

I refuse to believe that there isn't some amount of money which would be fair compensation to licence someone's voice to use with AI.
The VA get's a reduced paycheck compared to giving all the lines their personal touch and the benefit of the performance, while the studio benefits from reduced overheads.
But importantly, the VA gets their time back to go and do more lucrative VA work, for the studios that are interested in an actual performance, and not just having words read off the page.
It should go without saying that this should require a bespoke contract covering the use of someone's voice with AI. I don't think it's moral or fair for studios to train AI models on voice recordings which were not made for that purpose.

This looks great, I'm looking forward to learning more.

Would other manufacturers be able to make an Xbox for under the TV too then? Like how Dell, Sony, Lenovo, etc, make PCs today?

Now that could be interesting, if Xbox effectively became a user friendly back-end that automatically scaled the experience in the background to run best on whatever version of an Xbox you have under your telly.

Let's face it, "early access" release day is the true release day now, and games cost c. £100 or whatever they charge for these "early access" versions. And what was formerly the release day is now the day on which you can buy the game at a discount.

The publishers just found a way to increase the retail price of games beyond the new-normal of £70 without most people noticing or getting upset about it.

Colin, if you’re reading this, did you get got?

Only reason I’m not playing it yet is that Amazon was uncharacteristically late with my delivery and my copy isn’t here yet! 😠

This would only make sense for short term rentals. Anyone looking at the 3 year option would do much better to explore buying the console on credit.

But to get hold of a device cheaply without a long term commitment, to blast through a particular game like GTAVI or something when it comes out, I can see there maybe being a market for something like this.

It's a shame that it's fallen to Epic to do this. I dunno about the USA, but here in the UK those would be criminal allegations. With the vast majority of crime being online these days, law enforcement really needs to get with the times.

And when are people going to get the message and stop re-using passwords and enable 2FA.

Fine by me, as long as the campaign co-op still works.

It would make sense for XBox to try and get a head start. They forwent a mid-gen 'pro' model this time, so don't have a model on the market which is the new-hotness. But if they do launch something next year, it won't be meaningfully different from the PS5 Pro without being dramatically more expensive (assuming they don't want to make it a loss leader).

With millions more PS5s on the market, one has to wonder to what extent developers would support any higher-end features that the NeXtBox would offer, or whether PS5 would remain the standard SKU targeted by developers looking to release on console.

The unblinking eyes...
The creepy writing on the wall...
Are we sure this guy doesn't have dead bodies in his basement?

@Th3solution Brotato is a fairly decent little roguelike autoshooter actually. Don't throw it in with the likes of "The Jumping Pizza" and all those single button easy platinum games.

The Arkane Collection - everything they’ve released from Dishonored to Deathloop - for £32.50 is a huge saving and is well worth picking up for any fan of immersive sims.

I played Worlds and got hopelessly addicted. Sleep, then work and relationships suffered. So I’m staying away from Wilds for my own good… but that siren’s song is calling…

One of my eyebrows became firmly cocked when I saw the list of who they consider to be 'experts'. No one who's tastes I'd trust, and several who I know do not align with my own tastes.

But good luck to the project. I agree there's a big problem with game discovery so it's good to see someone trying to take that on.

I have no experience with Patapon and found this hard to follow... It looks cute!

@Markatron84 It depends on what they were trained on. For instance, ask ChatGPT to produce an image of a glass of wine filled all the way to the brim. It can't do it, because the vast, vast majority of images of wine glasses are either completely empty, or only filled to a normal-drinking amount. ChatGPT will even tell you that the image shows a glass of wine filled all the way to the brim when getting this wrong.

In the case of hands, it's because hands are very complicated bits of anatomy, with lots of variation in poses among the training data and individual elements. These models don't understand what a 'hand' is, they just know they look sort of like this. But they have no concept of how many fingers a hand should have, or where the bones go and how they function, that the fingers typically only bend in one direction, etc.

Didn’t this studio sell itself to some weird NFT outfit, only then to monetise the game out of the wazoo and kill player sentiment?

I hope the devs walked away happy with whatever they sold the studio for and it was all worth it.

Generative AI is just a tool. What will separate good developers from bad ones is how that tool is utilised.

But this is EA so you just know that, while they'll let you play with whoever you want for free, they're looking into ways to make you pay a subscription just to have friends.

I look forward to future comments sections becoming flame wars over the correct use of these terms now. XD

I love PlayStation's Japanese ads. That actually did a better job at getting me hyped than the recent State of Play. What wonders a soundtrack can achieve.

What's the difference, to the players, between AA and indie any more?

Sifu, Hades, Kunitsu Gami, PoP: The Lost Crown, Stray, Kena, Hollow Knight, Concrete Genie... I'd put all these in the same bucket of "smaller but still substantial titles". I think Shuhei is right that, from the consumer's perspective, there is not really a difference between a good indie game and a smaller project from a large scale publisher.

And from Sony's perspective, they don't just think "will we make a profit if we spend our development dollars here?", they also have to think "... but would we make more profit with the same development dollars if we put them over here?". And when you ask that second question, being in the "AA" space doesn't really make sense these days.

I suspected Colin would get Shuhei on the show given how profligate the latter has been with giving interviews since leaving PlayStation, and their old friendship. Looking forward to listening.

Ew, yuk. Fingers crossed that they removed this information from Steam because it is out of date and doesn't reflect long term plans to gouge their fans, but something tells me that's not the case.

Hrmmmm, reads to me like @get2sammyb wrote this on his XBox.

It had pacing issues, but I enjoyed Days Gone. The hordes were great once it got going. Might pay the upgrade tax to try and convince Sony there was something here worth building from.

Not my bag. I liked the traditional AC. Played Mirage last year and really enjoyed it. (The story was forgettable nonsense, but the old-school AC gameplay was there in spades. No stupid enemy levels, and a paired down weapon and armour upgrade system with transmog, plenty of cool outfits. Highly recommend.)

Some of those will be people who bought the game on separate console generations. But even assuming (for the sake of argument) that everyone who is interested in GTAV has triple dipped on the 7th, 8th and 9th generation versions of the game, that would still be something like 70 million unique players.

How big this behemoth of a franchise is truly boggles the mind.

Leave Batman to rest for a while, IMO. They nailed it with the Arkham games, and those are still very playable on modern hardware.

Explore some other DC characters. Green Arrow has some name recognition after the TV series. Cyborg was in the JL movies, and provides an obvious route into RPG upgrade mechanics.

Or just move away from the traditional superheroes. Go more adult. Preacher is a DC imprint, and has a wider fanbase thanks to the TV show. John Constantine is another (albeit it's been a while since that movie). The Sandman is probably a no-go given the allegations against Gaiman... Watchmen is pretty well known at this point too.

Ideally, let the Rocksteady that exists today take some time to brainstorm and pick what they want to work on next. If that's Batman, then so be it, but I'd personally see that as a missed opportunity.

I wonder what would happen if WB Games just let their studios come up with something original, rather than having to stick to established intellectual properties. There's no reason these days why their cross-media strategy couldn't go both ways.

I don't think 8 is too bad when I've only played the 2016 Remake and Rift Apart.

@Rangers420 Oh mate, Blood and Wine was fantastic. Shorter than Witcher 3 overall, but on its own is comparable to many RPG-action games that release as a full game.