@Queesh As a person who generally only likes single player games, I really liked it and played it for about 200 hours, BUT I had 3 RL friends to play it with. I tried playing with randos a few times and just couldn't enjoy it.
2 members of our group, including me, eventually had their fill and moved on, but the other 2 have probably put over 1000 hours into at this point. They found other people in their RL friend groups to play with regularly.
I'd imagine there's not a lot new players picking up the game as this point, so it might be hard to find a group of players that don't reject you for being newb. The game is really not intended to be played in single player at all, so don't even consider that.
I figure that at some point Sony will put it on PS+ to inject new life into the game, so it might be best to just wait for that.
One of the few games for which I'll break my own rules and pre-order, as it will be the only way to get ACZero in a modern playable capacity outside of PC emulation.
I know the reason why they can't sell those classic games separately, but it would be nice if they found another "workaround" to allow people to get them beyond a time limited pre-order bonus. I.e. throw them in as a "free bonus" with a wink and a nod on a skin pack DLC or something like that.
GoW 2018 is my current favorite game of all time (with Okami a close second) and I'm still interested, but also a little bit concerned. The dialog and cube character do seem to be pushing a bit further than I'd like into quippy, irreverent territory that has plagued so much modern scifi and fantasy media.
GoW had comic relief, mostly delivered by Brock and Sindri, but it was relatively subdued.
20 minutes of early game footage is obviously not enough to pass judgement on the whole game, but as an indication of overall tone and direction, I'm not thrilled.
Yeah the Souls-like zeitgeist maybe kind of needs to take a chill pill.
I just finished Nine Sols last night which was absurdly difficult. I platinumed Bloodborne and Sekiro and have completed many Souls-likes, but for the first time after beating one of these games I did not feel any satisfaction or even relief. All I felt was regret for having spent so many hours of my life doing something useless that I stopped enjoying somewhere around my 30th attempt. That game crossed the barrier from fun challenging to just punishing.
Annoyingly, it was sunken cost fallacy motivating me, because that game does have a easy difficulty option - but it locks you out of a trophy. I had already struggled and suffered through 4 other very hard boss without changing the difficulty, I felt like it would be a waste to "give up" and miss the trophy because of just the last boss - but little did I know it would take many hours of attempts to beat a single boss. All for what? A stupid digital trophy that ultimately means nothing to no one. I should have just dropped the difficulty and moved on to a better game.
On one hand, that's the fault of my own OCD, but on the other, I feel like what is considered "normal" difficulty in these games is getting a little out of hand due to one-upmanship.
@Accipitridae Article says sale is live in UK and Europe…presumably hasn’t hit Australia yet. Also still not live in US yet despite it being past midnight on the east coast.
For Doom 2016 fans still on the fence about this game, I will say that I liked it better than Eternal. It’s still not as good as 2016, but I ended up liking the parry system. It is extremely forgiving with the timing and the overall pace of the game is nowhere near the craziness of Eternal. My biggest criticism is that some of the weapons feel a little flat, not necessarily weak, but just don’t have the “oomph” feeling that their on screen presence would suggest.
I really don’t understand the cultural weight that GTA still has. I tried playing GTA 5 and found it incredibly tedious and boring due to how much you had to drive around. Not one of my friends actually finished the story missions. I think that series peaked with Vice City… Yet in the PS5 Pro subreddit, you see a lot of people saying they got a Pro pretty much just for GTA 6.
Just finished Pragmata, review is spot on with regard to the story. I was extremely disappointed and can’t believe that’s all there was to it. It’s simple, yet still somehow poorly explained and delivered. I still thoroughly enjoyed the game overall, but yeah it’s not really something that’s going to “stick with me” or that could see myself coming back to once I clear the post-game content. Still, I’m glad to have bought it on release simply to support any new sci-fi single player game that’s more than half decent.
Great game, but I don’t think it’s amazing. I think the number of awards it won is just the result of 2025 being kinda light on notable game releases in general.
My personal GOTY was Death Stranding 2, but that is definitely a type of game that I’d call an “acquired taste”.
I still have yet to play Ghost of Yotei, but how many formulaic open world action adventures have released over the decade? Even though ,ostensibly, every game should be judged by its own merits, in reality we know the “genre-fatigue” absolutely plays a factor in people’s opinion of games.
In comparison to other non-From Software Souls-likes, I quite enjoyed Steelrising (moreso than Lies of P, which I thought was really poorly balanced), but I encountered multiple minor bugs, like a weapon "enchantment" not working correctly between level loads, and several crashes. I played the game via PS+, but I would have considered buying it and the DLC if it wasn't so buggy.
I feel the same about another recent PS+ release: Metal Eden. Cool game, but when it released on PS+ they had just introduced a bug where literally no cutscenes would play and there were "soft locks" related to that. I waited for that to be fixed before I started playing, but I experienced multiple hard crashes and that's just not ok in a console game.
It's weird, I feel like there was a time when indie/small developer games had more care put into them, but it seems like there are lot more of these games that are being abandoned in a buggy state if they're not an immediate success.
@Olskeezy That’s not what it’s doing. You are not permanently losing access to the game. It requires an online “check-in” every 30 days to renew your ability to play the game when the console is offline. Unless you don’t have any way to connect to the internet (even phone hotspot) for more than 30 days while wanting to play a particular game already downloaded to the console, it’s not going to negatively affect you. If your console hasn’t been turned on for years it doesn’t matter, your license will renew as soon as you can connect it to the internet. It’s not in the consumer’s benefit, but practically speaking, I doubt it would ever be a problem that any but an absolutely minuscule number of people would run into in real world use.
That said, I would like to know why they are doing this. What it seems like you could get away before this change is signing into a friend’s PSN account, activating your console as the primary, downloading a bunch of single player games they own and then basically never going online with that console again, and then your friend reactivates his console as the primary and continues as normal. That’s basically what a 30 day check-in would stop…but how many people out there are actually doing something like that? Unless there’s some other loophole I’m not aware of, the benefit to Sony to require a 30 day check-in to keep playing games offline barely seems worth the development effort of implementing such a system.
I'm glad to hear that this has a more traditionally delivered and engaging story.
I replayed Returnal a couple months in preparation for this game and was remind that although I love the gameplay, I absolutely hate the nonsensical story. "It's a metaphor for mental illness" - yeah, that doesn't magically make it good. The story is obviously not critical to the enjoyment of that game, but it's definitely a knock against it.
No modern day is an improvement IMO. That story was a mess because they didn't really have a direction once they wrapped up Desmond's story. The only thing worthwhile about it was the entertainment value of speculating what parts of "Abstergo" intracompany politics were some developer's meta commentary on Ubisoft.
For those talking about Sand Land - that game is very mediocre and skippable. It's basically like an early PS3 era open world game. Very simplistic and repetitive gameplay and the story as presented in-game barely makes sense; I only knew what was going on due to watching the anime. I think the reviews of that game were perhaps a bit positively biased due to Akira Toriyama's passing which happened mere weeks before it released.
I finished it because I unfortunately have a compulsion to finish any game I start, but it was a chore.
I bought the original PS4 version of Control, but played the Ultimate Edition via PS+, I really hope that having added the PS+ version to my library doesn't prevent me from upgrading the PS4 version vs having to re-buy it entirely. Wouldn't be the first time I've been screwed over by how they handle this. Games that leave PS+ Extra don't get removed from your library, you just can't play them, and sometimes that screws with your ability to upgrade or buy complete editions.
Ha. I think this is just a scheme to not have to pay the video game equivalent of "extras" for face scans of background characters and avoid using AI generation because the audience rejects any use of AI...at the moment.
Remember Dreams and when "consumer generated content" was next big thing? This is way for them to get free work under the guise that it's a reward LOL.
Next "reward" - submit your readthrough of a NPC telling a character to go fetch some doodad and get your voice in a game!
@hol_up Yeah unlikely that it's cheaper, but same theory applies if it's $1000. A factor of this could be getting people "prepared" for the PS6 price.
FWIW the PS4 Pro was $400 on launch and the PS5 digital edition was also $400. Not apples-to-apples of course, but you were getting a generational upgrade there for the same price.
It's possible that the hardware production costs for the PS6 will actually be pretty close to what they are for the PS5 despite the APU (presumably) having higher transistor counts. I expect memory and storage to be roughly the same tech as it is now, there hasn't been much advancement there.
@LastNorth_16 Developers must specifically implement PSSR in their games. The update can improve all existing games that use the old version of PSSR, but it can't be automatically applied to a game that wasn't programmed to use it.
The PS5 Pro does have a system level option to enhance PS4 games, but it's basically a pretty simple sharpening filter and it notably causes problems with a few games.
@Andy22385 > The 2.0 seems to have eliminated them
I mean, we hope that's the case. Right now we have a single game for evidence. I am still shocked that Sony actually did the work to build out system level upgrade option for existing games and didn't put the burden on developers to patch their games yet again...however, right now, we don't actually know how well that's going to work. Fingers crossed that it's good.
I've owned a Pro since release day and I find it very odd how some people in the community are hyping up what is basically on the level of a GPU driver update.
PSSR "2" basically seems like what PSSR "1" should have been on release, had Sony not been cool with making both customers and developers their beta testers for a year.
Although I would still buy a Pro given the choice again because it does generally give you the best experience you can get on a console and is far less than I used to spend on gaming PCs, it do still think it is a disappointingly small upgrade over a base PS5 in terms of raw horsepower.
That said, with the way that SSD prices have shot up, the price difference of the Pro is now a bit easier to justify purely on the basis of the extra storage.
In short, PSSR itself has a performance cost, right now it's basically a constant cost per frame. This update aims to make PSSR itself dynamically scaling in terms of quality so that in performance intensive situations, the "traditional" rendering quality doesn't need to be nudged down as much or drop frames in service of PSSR. Essentially keep internal resolution higher and tone down the PSSR quality to maintain a consistent framerate instead of knocking down internal resolution and making PSSR upscale a very low res image.
I'm super pumped. I hope it's good. I'm tired of open world racing games. A game where you select from a menu a race and don't have to worry about collectable hunts, your car's power level, and other bull-poodoo will be a breath of fresh air.
I predict not only will the sex minigame be removed, but also all nudity, even monster nips.
I really would prefer if they did not remake the games. Just give us PS5 native ports of the HD collection. I replayed through 1 & 2 via the PS+ streaming of the PS3 HD collection versions and still enjoyed the games as they were despite that being a very compromised way of playing.
The original are campy games - in a good way. A lot of stuff from the originals would feel out of place with more realistic graphics and higher production values. I do not think they are games that would really benefit from a modern reimaging. I wish they'd just make something new.
Yeah it's crazy to this day that the only way to get the PS4 port of AC5 (calling it a remaster is a bit generous) was to pre-order AC7.
I know that it's due to licensing, but if they could release as a pre-order bonus with a bit of a wink and nod, let's be real, I'm sure they also could do something like release it as a "free" bonus with a $10 digital deluxe upgrade or something like that.
I pre-ordered AC7 so I don't have that problem, but it's real shame that people who maybe just weren't in the PS ecosystem at the time don't have a good modern way to play that game outside of emulation.
@MeatyVeg Rendering at a higher resolution and then down sampling to a lower resolution is one of the oldest and still best ways to do anti-aliasing if you have the horsepower to do it: supersampling anti-aliasing
The real question is why you'd need or use PSSR do that. The whole point of ML (AI) scalers is that they can "intelligently" fill in missing pixels when *up*scaling an image. Do things like reproduce legible text when the text isn't legible in the source image because it "learned" how to recognize the text at a lower resolution. There's absolutely zero reason you'd need ML scaling techniques for downsampling, where you are just averaging pixels together from the higher res source image, which can be done quite well with "traditional" algorithms. Using PSSR to downsample sounds nonsensical.
I'm less concerned about her appearance and more concerned that Sophie Turner has the charisma and acting abilities of a wood plank. Did no one see those X-Men movies?
That said, I also don't think I would watch a Tomb Raider show regardless. Is there really enough meat on those narrative bones to make something interesting? I mean a 2 hour campy action movie sure, but a series? Nah.
Fallout works because there's a relatively rich universe in which they could create their own plethora of characters and tell their own story.
"Adventurer who hunts down supernatural artifacts" is a great basis for a video game (multiple game series in fact...) and a few movies, but not enough for a long form show...and obviously not exactly original at this point.
After 60fps has become more or less standardized on PS5 (thank god), I think it would be very difficult to go back to 30fps PS3 games.
I recently bought Katamari Damacy Reroll, stupidly without bothering to lookup any info about it. It's locked 30fps and I've become so accustomed to 60fps, that it almost feels broken to play and I can't enjoy it. Play a ton of it on PS2 back in the day and it didn't bother me then, but standards have changed. We Love Katamari Reroll thankfully runs 60fps; I'm pretty annoyed they didn't go back and update the original with 60fps support.
Ironically the PS3 games I think I'd be likely to replay are PS3-era remasters of PS2 games - the God of War collection. GoW is my favorite series of all time, both the old ones and the new ones. Maybe MGS4, but at some point in the last few years I weirdly lost all patience for games with stealth mechanics, so I'm not sure I'd even like it anymore.
I played Hellblade 1 and 2 back-to-back and I reasonably enjoyed playing Hellblade 1, but it was an absolute chore to play through 2 and it's one of those situations where I have a somewhat difficult time identifying why since the games are obviously quite similar on paper.
I think they attempted to amp up the "intensity" of combat in 2, but it actually just ended up making the game worse to play. Like you shouldn't try to make a game difficult when it's also "cinematography focused" and has (at least what feels like) unresponsive controls and gives the player no agency in when to engage in said combat.
Hellblade 2 also has what feels like an interminably long section where you're wandering through a dark cave at an unbearably slow pace. It's tense, but not in a good way and feels tiring.
I absolutely loved DmC though, and I think that game got less love than it deserved. The "news" level in the game remains one of the fun and inventive things I've ever seen in a game. So if they're going back to more video game in their games - I'm for it.
@StopBeingTribal It's very stylish and kind of funny at times, however as a person who came to it more as an action-brawler fan than a rhythm game fan - I did find having to time my button presses while still moving my character and watching for enemy attacks a little more tedious than I'd like.
If you put it on easy difficulty, the timing is very lenient and the attacks always come out on the beat regardless, so it will still look and sound cool even if your sense of rhythm is crap. Though it does the whole DMC/Bayonetta battle-rating thing and you will never get a good rating which does kind of make you feel like ***** even when you're not "losing" at the game.
I played through it once and enjoyed it well enough for its relatively low price.
@Balaam_ This gen has basically been giving us roughly PS4 levels of model and texture detail at 60fps and higher resolution. It's no small thing to double framerate with the same level of detail, so you have been seeing what current hardware can do, it's just that devs decided to focus on making games run better at roughly the same level of detail rather than going for "wow" factor...and I'm quite happy with that.
I really, really do not want to go back to 30fps and lower resolutions just so they can push more polys or ray tracing effects that you'd barely notice.
I'm fine with this generation going on for a few more years.
The effect on the PC industry also means all gaming markets are going to be targeting roughly the same level of graphical fidelity for a few more years.
Maybe Unreal Engine games will actually be decent by the end of this generation with the improvements they've finally gotten around to making.
I just hope that they don't have first party games in the works that were targeting PS6-level hardware and end up coming out as 30fps games on PS5 (Intergalactic for example). Going back to 30fps games would not be welcome. Luckily I think most of the market would balk at that at this point.
@WhoderMan A lot of the port work they do is either terrible or extremely bare bones. I have a fairly personal beef with them:
They ported the PC version of Star Wars: Force Unleased. The Steam version of that game has some corrupt level files where sound effects don't play on the last two levels. I bought a disc version of the game, which did not have the bug, and created a "patch" which basically just consisted of replacing the bad level files with the disc version files, which I posted to the Steam forums (RIP) back in the day. I emailed this info to Aspyr - their solution was to direct people to the Steam forum thread where I posted about the fix. To this day, the Steam version of the game still has this problem and people still need to seek out my fix.
Separately from that, all PC versions of the game have a bug when using 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound setups where music only plays from the front left speaker. Aspyr was also directing people to my forum thread for that issue even though it was a completely unrelated issue, so I had a bunch of people telling my fix for the music didn't work 🙄
There are a few other ports they did during this era with massive bugs that were never fixed.
I don't get a sense that their company culture has changed in the intervening years and it's a travesty that they somehow still have the publishing rights to a lot of classic Star Wars games.
Devs are still duplicating data for better loading times from mechanical hard drives on PC? Last time I had a mechanical drive in a PC was over 10 years ago.
Who the heck has a PC capable of playing Helldivers 2 that still has a mechanical HDD in it?
I mean I played 3 Ratchet and Clank games on PS2 and 3 on PS3 and loved all of them (as well as the more recent games). All of them after the first game were relatively small evolutions on the formula...they were also all 12-20 hour games.
I think the problem is not sequels by itself. It's formulaic open world bloat + sequels. When I play 60+ hours of something that is inherently very repetitive, I'm not so keen to do that again. And now of course, a lot of these games are very similar.
The problem is, you can't really do a game like Horizon with "levels" and creating an open world without a checklist of side activities to do feels weird. Like that was basically Mafia 2 - an open world with discrete missions, not much freedom of exploration, and no side activities - and I do not think it worked.
@Anthony_Daniels "doesn't the player form her personality same as commander Shepard?"
It's kind of window dressing in both games to be honest, but especially so in Horizon. At best, you get to choose the tone of your final statement to NPC but all the dialog up to that point and everything about the story plays out the same regardless. In Mass Effect there are at least a few moments with more significant ramifications where you just like shoot a guy instead of talk to him.
In Horizon, I didn't particularly feel like I had any agency over Aloy's character because I chose the slightly more empathetic final response vs the slightly more cold or angry final response to some NPC who I would never talk to again after the end of a quest line.
I just replayed HZD last month and one thing that stuck me this time around is that Aloy can be very sarcastic in a lot of her dialog in that game and sarcasm is almost never an endearing quality...unless you're like Alan Rickman, then you can get away with it, LOL.
I absolutely loved One back in the day, but have not played it since then. It is short, but it's basically an entire game of what would be scripted "set piece" moments in a modern action game.
I guess I'll soon find out just how rose tinted my nostalgia goggles are.
@Almost_Ghostly Yeah, but also it was Sony who decided to make it a test bed for their proprietary "AI" scaler and turn both developers and consumers into their beta testers for PS6 tech.
Pro should have just been a more powerful PS5 where developers could crank up resolution or other settings a notch. Making developers have to go out their way to implement a whole new finnicky scaling technique to get the most out the console - a console that by its very nature would only ever be owned by a small percentage of the market - was a dumb move.
I preordered a Pro based on their initial announcement video for it (stupid move) and I've been disappointed that its raw power boost over the base PS5 is so small. It's a shame that it requires quite a bit of extra effort on a developer's part to make the best use of it and there's been several games with Pro specific problems as a result. This was not the story with the PS4 Pro, which basically was just a faster PS4.
So yes, while the direct blame for bad Pro implementations lies at the feet of developers, the direction that Sony chose to take with the console doesn't exactly make it easy for them to make good Pro enhancements.
As far as I know Sony is not mandating that developers makes a Pro version of their games, so I really wish these devs who clearly don't have the time, resources, or motivation to put into making the Pro version good just stuck with making a decent base PS5 version. If they use dynamic resolution, Pro users will automatically benefit.
PSSR is clearly not "plug and play" so I really do not understand why they would even go to the trouble of implementing it if they're not going to tune it appropriately.
@Rich33 "boost mode" is just absurd marketing speak for the GPU has a higher clock speed. That's it. Calling it "boost mode" makes it sound like they're doing something at the software level - they are not. Games that were GPU bound, the Pro runs slightly better simply because it has a slightly faster GPU. So games that were not able hit their framerate target consistently may hit it more consistently and if they use dynamic resolution and they may run higher resolution more often. It's purely due to the fact that with the way games are written these days to do dynamic scaling, if you've got a little extra GPU performance, they will automatically use it.
@PuppetMaster Several of the male characters you mentioned are anti-heros. People may think they are bad asses, but they are definitely not portrayed as aspirational protagonists.
Off hand, I can't think of a female anti-hero protagonist in gaming or much modern media in general. Playing Femshep in Mass Effect as a Renegade is about the closest I can cite off the top of my dome. Perhaps Atsu is one? I haven't played Yotei yet. I think this is very much an effect of the Galbrush Paradox where a female character is still read to be something of a statement on women in general, while a male character is just a character.
@janineking I mean, why stop there. Not playing video games at all would conserve even more power, right? What's the appropriate ratio of sacrificing the quality of your personal entertainment to conserve power usage? When is enough enough?
PS5 already uses notably less power than a high end gaming PC. Who's to say we're not already doing our part just by being console gamers?
I haven't bought it yet, but the only reason is because I made the terrible mistake of replaying Ghost of Tsushima like 2 months ago and proceeded to burn myself out on that style of repetitive open world game. Yotei looks very similar, so I need a bit of a longer break. I'll probably up playing it in January next year.
Yeah I'm pretty perplexed by this feature as well. The only thing I can think of is that the PS5 running in low power mode will be roughly equivalent to the performance of their upcoming handheld and it's basically for developers to start making games that can target their handheld without having to wait for dev kits.
I guess making it available to users just gets you some environmentalism brownie points even though I doubt even 5% of the customer base would ever use it.
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Re: 'We Are So Back': Helldivers 2 Dev Lays Out Plans to Improve Game
@Queesh As a person who generally only likes single player games, I really liked it and played it for about 200 hours, BUT I had 3 RL friends to play it with. I tried playing with randos a few times and just couldn't enjoy it.
2 members of our group, including me, eventually had their fill and moved on, but the other 2 have probably put over 1000 hours into at this point. They found other people in their RL friend groups to play with regularly.
I'd imagine there's not a lot new players picking up the game as this point, so it might be hard to find a group of players that don't reject you for being newb. The game is really not intended to be played in single player at all, so don't even consider that.
I figure that at some point Sony will put it on PS+ to inject new life into the game, so it might be best to just wait for that.
Re: Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve - Journal of an FCU Pilot in Training
One of the few games for which I'll break my own rules and pre-order, as it will be the only way to get ACZero in a modern playable capacity outside of PC emulation.
I know the reason why they can't sell those classic games separately, but it would be nice if they found another "workaround" to allow people to get them beyond a time limited pre-order bonus. I.e. throw them in as a "free bonus" with a wink and a nod on a skin pack DLC or something like that.
Re: 'That Looks Like Sh*t': God of War Creator Predictably Tears New PS5 Game to Shreds
GoW 2018 is my current favorite game of all time (with Okami a close second) and I'm still interested, but also a little bit concerned. The dialog and cube character do seem to be pushing a bit further than I'd like into quippy, irreverent territory that has plagued so much modern scifi and fantasy media.
GoW had comic relief, mostly delivered by Brock and Sindri, but it was relatively subdued.
20 minutes of early game footage is obviously not enough to pass judgement on the whole game, but as an indication of overall tone and direction, I'm not thrilled.
Re: June 2026 PS Plus Essential Games Available to Download Now
Is Grounded worth playing single player?
Re: Mina the Hollower (PS5) - Masterpiece for Many, But Not for Me
Yeah the Souls-like zeitgeist maybe kind of needs to take a chill pill.
I just finished Nine Sols last night which was absurdly difficult. I platinumed Bloodborne and Sekiro and have completed many Souls-likes, but for the first time after beating one of these games I did not feel any satisfaction or even relief. All I felt was regret for having spent so many hours of my life doing something useless that I stopped enjoying somewhere around my 30th attempt. That game crossed the barrier from fun challenging to just punishing.
Annoyingly, it was sunken cost fallacy motivating me, because that game does have a easy difficulty option - but it locks you out of a trophy. I had already struggled and suffered through 4 other very hard boss without changing the difficulty, I felt like it would be a waste to "give up" and miss the trophy because of just the last boss - but little did I know it would take many hours of attempts to beat a single boss. All for what? A stupid digital trophy that ultimately means nothing to no one. I should have just dropped the difficulty and moved on to a better game.
On one hand, that's the fault of my own OCD, but on the other, I feel like what is considered "normal" difficulty in these games is getting a little out of hand due to one-upmanship.
Re: PS Store Days of Play Sale Live Now with 2,000+ PS5 Game Deals
@Accipitridae Article says sale is live in UK and Europe…presumably hasn’t hit Australia yet. Also still not live in US yet despite it being past midnight on the east coast.
Re: 'Every Detail Matters': Sony Drops New Promo for $900 PS5 Pro
Does the presence of actors feigning wonderment in this ad work for anyone?
Re: One Year Later, DOOM: The Dark Ages DLC Is Nowhere to Be Seen
For Doom 2016 fans still on the fence about this game, I will say that I liked it better than Eternal. It’s still not as good as 2016, but I ended up liking the parry system. It is extremely forgiving with the timing and the overall pace of the game is nowhere near the craziness of Eternal. My biggest criticism is that some of the weapons feel a little flat, not necessarily weak, but just don’t have the “oomph” feeling that their on screen presence would suggest.
Re: PlayStation Urges PS4 Players to Upgrade to PS5 for GTA 6
I really don’t understand the cultural weight that GTA still has. I tried playing GTA 5 and found it incredibly tedious and boring due to how much you had to drive around. Not one of my friends actually finished the story missions. I think that series peaked with Vice City… Yet in the PS5 Pro subreddit, you see a lot of people saying they got a Pro pretty much just for GTA 6.
Re: Pragmata (PS5) - Brilliant Combat Is the Star of Yet Another Capcom PS5 Hit
Just finished Pragmata, review is spot on with regard to the story. I was extremely disappointed and can’t believe that’s all there was to it. It’s simple, yet still somehow poorly explained and delivered. I still thoroughly enjoyed the game overall, but yeah it’s not really something that’s going to “stick with me” or that could see myself coming back to once I clear the post-game content. Still, I’m glad to have bought it on release simply to support any new sci-fi single player game that’s more than half decent.
Re: Poll: One Year Later, Did Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Deserve All the Praise?
Great game, but I don’t think it’s amazing. I think the number of awards it won is just the result of 2025 being kinda light on notable game releases in general.
My personal GOTY was Death Stranding 2, but that is definitely a type of game that I’d call an “acquired taste”.
I still have yet to play Ghost of Yotei, but how many formulaic open world action adventures have released over the decade? Even though ,ostensibly, every game should be judged by its own merits, in reality we know the “genre-fatigue” absolutely plays a factor in people’s opinion of games.
Re: Steelrising, GreedFall PS5 Dev Spiders Is Reportedly Soon to Close
In comparison to other non-From Software Souls-likes, I quite enjoyed Steelrising (moreso than Lies of P, which I thought was really poorly balanced), but I encountered multiple minor bugs, like a weapon "enchantment" not working correctly between level loads, and several crashes. I played the game via PS+, but I would have considered buying it and the DLC if it wasn't so buggy.
I feel the same about another recent PS+ release: Metal Eden. Cool game, but when it released on PS+ they had just introduced a bug where literally no cutscenes would play and there were "soft locks" related to that. I waited for that to be fixed before I started playing, but I experienced multiple hard crashes and that's just not ok in a console game.
It's weird, I feel like there was a time when indie/small developer games had more care put into them, but it seems like there are lot more of these games that are being abandoned in a buggy state if they're not an immediate success.
Re: PS5 Confirmed to Be Affected by Game Expiry Issue, Sony Still Silent on DRM Worries
@Olskeezy That’s not what it’s doing. You are not permanently losing access to the game. It requires an online “check-in” every 30 days to renew your ability to play the game when the console is offline. Unless you don’t have any way to connect to the internet (even phone hotspot) for more than 30 days while wanting to play a particular game already downloaded to the console, it’s not going to negatively affect you. If your console hasn’t been turned on for years it doesn’t matter, your license will renew as soon as you can connect it to the internet. It’s not in the consumer’s benefit, but practically speaking, I doubt it would ever be a problem that any but an absolutely minuscule number of people would run into in real world use.
That said, I would like to know why they are doing this. What it seems like you could get away before this change is signing into a friend’s PSN account, activating your console as the primary, downloading a bunch of single player games they own and then basically never going online with that console again, and then your friend reactivates his console as the primary and continues as normal. That’s basically what a 30 day check-in would stop…but how many people out there are actually doing something like that? Unless there’s some other loophole I’m not aware of, the benefit to Sony to require a 30 day check-in to keep playing games offline barely seems worth the development effort of implementing such a system.
Re: Saros (PS5) - Housemarque at the Peak of Its Powers with Its Best Game Yet
I'm glad to hear that this has a more traditionally delivered and engaging story.
I replayed Returnal a couple months in preparation for this game and was remind that although I love the gameplay, I absolutely hate the nonsensical story. "It's a metaphor for mental illness" - yeah, that doesn't magically make it good. The story is obviously not critical to the enjoyment of that game, but it's definitely a knock against it.
Re: Metal Slug Classics Are Dirt Cheap on PS5, PS4 Right Now
@BennyTheCat If you would only get one, personally I’d say X, which is actually a remake of 2.
Re: Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced Is a Huge and 'Faithful' Remake of the Pirate Classic, Out on PS5 in July
No modern day is an improvement IMO. That story was a mess because they didn't really have a direction once they wrapped up Desmond's story. The only thing worthwhile about it was the entertainment value of speculating what parts of "Abstergo" intracompany politics were some developer's meta commentary on Ubisoft.
Re: 8 PS Plus Extra Game Removals for May 2026 Confirmed
For those talking about Sand Land - that game is very mediocre and skippable. It's basically like an early PS3 era open world game. Very simplistic and repetitive gameplay and the story as presented in-game barely makes sense; I only knew what was going on due to watching the anime. I think the reviews of that game were perhaps a bit positively biased due to Akira Toriyama's passing which happened mere weeks before it released.
I finished it because I unfortunately have a compulsion to finish any game I start, but it was a chore.
I bought the original PS4 version of Control, but played the Ultimate Edition via PS+, I really hope that having added the PS+ version to my library doesn't prevent me from upgrading the PS4 version vs having to re-buy it entirely. Wouldn't be the first time I've been screwed over by how they handle this. Games that leave PS+ Extra don't get removed from your library, you just can't play them, and sometimes that screws with your ability to upgrade or buy complete editions.
Re: Warhammer Copies Vampire Survivors' Homework in Brand New Bullet Heaven PS5 Game
I think the name for this genre should be Auto-Shooting Swarm games. 😉
Re: Opinion: Sony's 'Playerbase' Is a Weak and Weird Way to Celebrate PS5 Fans
Ha. I think this is just a scheme to not have to pay the video game equivalent of "extras" for face scans of background characters and avoid using AI generation because the audience rejects any use of AI...at the moment.
Remember Dreams and when "consumer generated content" was next big thing? This is way for them to get free work under the guise that it's a reward LOL.
Next "reward" - submit your readthrough of a NPC telling a character to go fetch some doodad and get your voice in a game!
Re: Feature: PS5 Price - Why Does It Cost So Much in 2026?
@hol_up Yeah unlikely that it's cheaper, but same theory applies if it's $1000. A factor of this could be getting people "prepared" for the PS6 price.
FWIW the PS4 Pro was $400 on launch and the PS5 digital edition was also $400. Not apples-to-apples of course, but you were getting a generational upgrade there for the same price.
It's possible that the hardware production costs for the PS6 will actually be pretty close to what they are for the PS5 despite the APU (presumably) having higher transistor counts. I expect memory and storage to be roughly the same tech as it is now, there hasn't been much advancement there.
Re: Feature: PS5 Price - Why Does It Cost So Much in 2026?
I wonder if, on some level, this is actually about trying to get people prepared to accept the PS6 price...
I.e. let's PS6 comes out at $800 - previously, the market would balk, but now they can say is $100 less than a PS5 Pro while being more powerful.
Re: 'A Great Showcase for PSSR 2': PS5 Pro's New Upscaler Continues to Get Rave Reviews
@LastNorth_16 Developers must specifically implement PSSR in their games. The update can improve all existing games that use the old version of PSSR, but it can't be automatically applied to a game that wasn't programmed to use it.
The PS5 Pro does have a system level option to enhance PS4 games, but it's basically a pretty simple sharpening filter and it notably causes problems with a few games.
Re: PS5 Pro Sales Explode on the Back of PSSR 2 Hype, System Sells Out in Some Stores
@Andy22385 > The 2.0 seems to have eliminated them
I mean, we hope that's the case. Right now we have a single game for evidence. I am still shocked that Sony actually did the work to build out system level upgrade option for existing games and didn't put the burden on developers to patch their games yet again...however, right now, we don't actually know how well that's going to work. Fingers crossed that it's good.
Re: PS5 Pro Sales Explode on the Back of PSSR 2 Hype, System Sells Out in Some Stores
I've owned a Pro since release day and I find it very odd how some people in the community are hyping up what is basically on the level of a GPU driver update.
PSSR "2" basically seems like what PSSR "1" should have been on release, had Sony not been cool with making both customers and developers their beta testers for a year.
Although I would still buy a Pro given the choice again because it does generally give you the best experience you can get on a console and is far less than I used to spend on gaming PCs, it do still think it is a disappointingly small upgrade over a base PS5 in terms of raw horsepower.
That said, with the way that SSD prices have shot up, the price difference of the Pro is now a bit easier to justify purely on the basis of the extra storage.
Re: PS5 Pro Upgrade Details Spotted, as Sony Patents PSSR 2.0 Tech
There's been no indication whatsoever that this update will include frame generation or that the PS5 Pro hardware is even capable of that.
People are pulling that out of thin air here because of a bad summary by the author of this article. Here's a better summary: https://tbreak.com/ps5-pro-pssr-2-update-fps-fix/
In short, PSSR itself has a performance cost, right now it's basically a constant cost per frame. This update aims to make PSSR itself dynamically scaling in terms of quality so that in performance intensive situations, the "traditional" rendering quality doesn't need to be nudged down as much or drop frames in service of PSSR. Essentially keep internal resolution higher and tone down the PSSR quality to maintain a consistent framerate instead of knocking down internal resolution and making PSSR upscale a very low res image.
Re: Star Wars: Galactic Racer Seems Like an Exciting Mix of Burnout, MotorStorm, and WipEout
I'm super pumped. I hope it's good. I'm tired of open world racing games. A game where you select from a menu a race and don't have to worry about collectable hunts, your car's power level, and other bull-poodoo will be a breath of fresh air.
Re: Fans Are Already Debating Whether God of War's PS5 Trilogy Will Cut the Series' Sex Minigames
I predict not only will the sex minigame be removed, but also all nudity, even monster nips.
I really would prefer if they did not remake the games. Just give us PS5 native ports of the HD collection. I replayed through 1 & 2 via the PS+ streaming of the PS3 HD collection versions and still enjoyed the games as they were despite that being a very compromised way of playing.
The original are campy games - in a good way. A lot of stuff from the originals would feel out of place with more realistic graphics and higher production values. I do not think they are games that would really benefit from a modern reimaging. I wish they'd just make something new.
Re: Rumour: Ace Combat 8 Online Beta Test Inbound, Pre-Order May Include a Whole Other Game
Yeah it's crazy to this day that the only way to get the PS4 port of AC5 (calling it a remaster is a bit generous) was to pre-order AC7.
I know that it's due to licensing, but if they could release as a pre-order bonus with a bit of a wink and nod, let's be real, I'm sure they also could do something like release it as a "free" bonus with a $10 digital deluxe upgrade or something like that.
I pre-ordered AC7 so I don't have that problem, but it's real shame that people who maybe just weren't in the PS ecosystem at the time don't have a good modern way to play that game outside of emulation.
Re: God of War TV Show Recruits Its Thor and Odin Actors
I half expected them to just keep Richard Schiff to play Odin, he's done plenty of live action acting and was fantastic in the game.
Re: Marathon's Slick Sci-Fi Visuals Will Look Particularly Crisp on PS5 Pro
@MeatyVeg Rendering at a higher resolution and then down sampling to a lower resolution is one of the oldest and still best ways to do anti-aliasing if you have the horsepower to do it: supersampling anti-aliasing
The real question is why you'd need or use PSSR do that. The whole point of ML (AI) scalers is that they can "intelligently" fill in missing pixels when *up*scaling an image. Do things like reproduce legible text when the text isn't legible in the source image because it "learned" how to recognize the text at a lower resolution. There's absolutely zero reason you'd need ML scaling techniques for downsampling, where you are just averaging pixels together from the higher res source image, which can be done quite well with "traditional" algorithms. Using PSSR to downsample sounds nonsensical.
Re: Here's Your First Look at Sophie Turner as Lara Croft for Amazon's TV Show
I'm less concerned about her appearance and more concerned that Sophie Turner has the charisma and acting abilities of a wood plank. Did no one see those X-Men movies?
That said, I also don't think I would watch a Tomb Raider show regardless. Is there really enough meat on those narrative bones to make something interesting? I mean a 2 hour campy action movie sure, but a series? Nah.
Fallout works because there's a relatively rich universe in which they could create their own plethora of characters and tell their own story.
"Adventurer who hunts down supernatural artifacts" is a great basis for a video game (multiple game series in fact...) and a few movies, but not enough for a long form show...and obviously not exactly original at this point.
Re: Feature: 15 PS5 Predictions for 2026
After 60fps has become more or less standardized on PS5 (thank god), I think it would be very difficult to go back to 30fps PS3 games.
I recently bought Katamari Damacy Reroll, stupidly without bothering to lookup any info about it. It's locked 30fps and I've become so accustomed to 60fps, that it almost feels broken to play and I can't enjoy it. Play a ton of it on PS2 back in the day and it didn't bother me then, but standards have changed. We Love Katamari Reroll thankfully runs 60fps; I'm pretty annoyed they didn't go back and update the original with 60fps support.
Ironically the PS3 games I think I'd be likely to replay are PS3-era remasters of PS2 games - the God of War collection. GoW is my favorite series of all time, both the old ones and the new ones. Maybe MGS4, but at some point in the last few years I weirdly lost all patience for games with stealth mechanics, so I'm not sure I'd even like it anymore.
Re: Hellblade Dev Plotting a More Gameplay Focused Successor, Presumably for PS5
I played Hellblade 1 and 2 back-to-back and I reasonably enjoyed playing Hellblade 1, but it was an absolute chore to play through 2 and it's one of those situations where I have a somewhat difficult time identifying why since the games are obviously quite similar on paper.
I think they attempted to amp up the "intensity" of combat in 2, but it actually just ended up making the game worse to play. Like you shouldn't try to make a game difficult when it's also "cinematography focused" and has (at least what feels like) unresponsive controls and gives the player no agency in when to engage in said combat.
Hellblade 2 also has what feels like an interminably long section where you're wandering through a dark cave at an unbearably slow pace. It's tense, but not in a good way and feels tiring.
I absolutely loved DmC though, and I think that game got less love than it deserved. The "news" level in the game remains one of the fun and inventive things I've ever seen in a game. So if they're going back to more video game in their games - I'm for it.
Re: You'll Soon Be Able to Own Former Xbox Exclusive Hi-Fi Rush Physically on PS5
@StopBeingTribal It's very stylish and kind of funny at times, however as a person who came to it more as an action-brawler fan than a rhythm game fan - I did find having to time my button presses while still moving my character and watching for enemy attacks a little more tedious than I'd like.
If you put it on easy difficulty, the timing is very lenient and the attacks always come out on the beat regardless, so it will still look and sound cool even if your sense of rhythm is crap. Though it does the whole DMC/Bayonetta battle-rating thing and you will never get a good rating which does kind of make you feel like ***** even when you're not "losing" at the game.
I played through it once and enjoyed it well enough for its relatively low price.
Re: PS6 Could Be Delayed Due to RAM Price Chaos
@Balaam_ This gen has basically been giving us roughly PS4 levels of model and texture detail at 60fps and higher resolution. It's no small thing to double framerate with the same level of detail, so you have been seeing what current hardware can do, it's just that devs decided to focus on making games run better at roughly the same level of detail rather than going for "wow" factor...and I'm quite happy with that.
I really, really do not want to go back to 30fps and lower resolutions just so they can push more polys or ray tracing effects that you'd barely notice.
Re: PS6 Could Be Delayed Due to RAM Price Chaos
I'm fine with this generation going on for a few more years.
The effect on the PC industry also means all gaming markets are going to be targeting roughly the same level of graphical fidelity for a few more years.
Maybe Unreal Engine games will actually be decent by the end of this generation with the improvements they've finally gotten around to making.
I just hope that they don't have first party games in the works that were targeting PS6-level hardware and end up coming out as 30fps games on PS5 (Intergalactic for example). Going back to 30fps games would not be welcome. Luckily I think most of the market would balk at that at this point.
Re: Star Wars Racing Games Are Back in Galactic Racer, Out for PS5 in 2026
"Anyone with fond memories of PS1 classic Star Wars Episode 1: Racer"
Episode I Racer was an N64 classic Liam.
Re: Deus Ex Remastered Delayed Indefinitely Following Fan Backlash
@WhoderMan A lot of the port work they do is either terrible or extremely bare bones. I have a fairly personal beef with them:
They ported the PC version of Star Wars: Force Unleased. The Steam version of that game has some corrupt level files where sound effects don't play on the last two levels. I bought a disc version of the game, which did not have the bug, and created a "patch" which basically just consisted of replacing the bad level files with the disc version files, which I posted to the Steam forums (RIP) back in the day. I emailed this info to Aspyr - their solution was to direct people to the Steam forum thread where I posted about the fix. To this day, the Steam version of the game still has this problem and people still need to seek out my fix.
Separately from that, all PC versions of the game have a bug when using 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound setups where music only plays from the front left speaker. Aspyr was also directing people to my forum thread for that issue even though it was a completely unrelated issue, so I had a bunch of people telling my fix for the music didn't work 🙄
There are a few other ports they did during this era with massive bugs that were never fixed.
I don't get a sense that their company culture has changed in the intervening years and it's a travesty that they somehow still have the publishing rights to a lot of classic Star Wars games.
Re: Helldivers 2 on PC Sees Massive Reduction in Install Size Thanks to Sony Studio Nixxes
Devs are still duplicating data for better loading times from mechanical hard drives on PC? Last time I had a mechanical drive in a PC was over 10 years ago.
Who the heck has a PC capable of playing Helldivers 2 that still has a mechanical HDD in it?
Re: The Ascent Dev to Announce Its Next Game at The Game Awards
> Going by the teaser image, it looks like Krafton will publish Neon Giant's next game, instead of Curve Digital.
Krafton bought the studio in 2022 Liam...so yeah it would be published by them.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/krafton-acquires-i-the-ascent-i-developer-neon-giant
Re: Talking Point: Does PS5 Have a Sequel Problem?
I mean I played 3 Ratchet and Clank games on PS2 and 3 on PS3 and loved all of them (as well as the more recent games). All of them after the first game were relatively small evolutions on the formula...they were also all 12-20 hour games.
I think the problem is not sequels by itself. It's formulaic open world bloat + sequels. When I play 60+ hours of something that is inherently very repetitive, I'm not so keen to do that again. And now of course, a lot of these games are very similar.
The problem is, you can't really do a game like Horizon with "levels" and creating an open world without a checklist of side activities to do feels weird. Like that was basically Mafia 2 - an open world with discrete missions, not much freedom of exploration, and no side activities - and I do not think it worked.
It's a tough problem to solve for sure.
Re: Horizon Sales Update Cements It As One of Sony's Strongest Franchises
@Anthony_Daniels "doesn't the player form her personality same as commander Shepard?"
It's kind of window dressing in both games to be honest, but especially so in Horizon. At best, you get to choose the tone of your final statement to NPC but all the dialog up to that point and everything about the story plays out the same regardless. In Mass Effect there are at least a few moments with more significant ramifications where you just like shoot a guy instead of talk to him.
In Horizon, I didn't particularly feel like I had any agency over Aloy's character because I chose the slightly more empathetic final response vs the slightly more cold or angry final response to some NPC who I would never talk to again after the end of a quest line.
I just replayed HZD last month and one thing that stuck me this time around is that Aloy can be very sarcastic in a lot of her dialog in that game and sarcasm is almost never an endearing quality...unless you're like Alan Rickman, then you can get away with it, LOL.
Re: One of PlayStation's Best Developers Marks 40 Years of Incredible Games
No mention of Rings of Power, their actual first console game? I guess they're trying to memory hole that for a certain reason...
Re: As Sony's PS Plus Premium Expands Slowly, Another Dev Announces PS1 Emulation Plans
I absolutely loved One back in the day, but have not played it since then. It is short, but it's basically an entire game of what would be scripted "set piece" moments in a modern action game.
I guess I'll soon find out just how rose tinted my nostalgia goggles are.
Re: PS5 Pro Is Definitely Not the Best Place to Play The Outer Worlds 2 at Launch
@Almost_Ghostly Yeah, but also it was Sony who decided to make it a test bed for their proprietary "AI" scaler and turn both developers and consumers into their beta testers for PS6 tech.
Pro should have just been a more powerful PS5 where developers could crank up resolution or other settings a notch. Making developers have to go out their way to implement a whole new finnicky scaling technique to get the most out the console - a console that by its very nature would only ever be owned by a small percentage of the market - was a dumb move.
I preordered a Pro based on their initial announcement video for it (stupid move) and I've been disappointed that its raw power boost over the base PS5 is so small. It's a shame that it requires quite a bit of extra effort on a developer's part to make the best use of it and there's been several games with Pro specific problems as a result. This was not the story with the PS4 Pro, which basically was just a faster PS4.
So yes, while the direct blame for bad Pro implementations lies at the feet of developers, the direction that Sony chose to take with the console doesn't exactly make it easy for them to make good Pro enhancements.
Re: PS5 Pro Is Definitely Not the Best Place to Play The Outer Worlds 2 at Launch
As far as I know Sony is not mandating that developers makes a Pro version of their games, so I really wish these devs who clearly don't have the time, resources, or motivation to put into making the Pro version good just stuck with making a decent base PS5 version. If they use dynamic resolution, Pro users will automatically benefit.
PSSR is clearly not "plug and play" so I really do not understand why they would even go to the trouble of implementing it if they're not going to tune it appropriately.
@Rich33 "boost mode" is just absurd marketing speak for the GPU has a higher clock speed. That's it. Calling it "boost mode" makes it sound like they're doing something at the software level - they are not. Games that were GPU bound, the Pro runs slightly better simply because it has a slightly faster GPU. So games that were not able hit their framerate target consistently may hit it more consistently and if they use dynamic resolution and they may run higher resolution more often. It's purely due to the fact that with the way games are written these days to do dynamic scaling, if you've got a little extra GPU performance, they will automatically use it.
Re: Sep 2025 USA Sales: Ghost of Yotei PS5 Boycott Fails, Sequel Sells 'Great'
@PuppetMaster Several of the male characters you mentioned are anti-heros. People may think they are bad asses, but they are definitely not portrayed as aspirational protagonists.
Off hand, I can't think of a female anti-hero protagonist in gaming or much modern media in general. Playing Femshep in Mass Effect as a Renegade is about the closest I can cite off the top of my dome. Perhaps Atsu is one? I haven't played Yotei yet. I think this is very much an effect of the Galbrush Paradox where a female character is still read to be something of a statement on women in general, while a male character is just a character.
Re: You Could Now Play Death Stranding 1, 2 with Worse Graphics on PS5
@janineking I mean, why stop there. Not playing video games at all would conserve even more power, right? What's the appropriate ratio of sacrificing the quality of your personal entertainment to conserve power usage? When is enough enough?
PS5 already uses notably less power than a high end gaming PC. Who's to say we're not already doing our part just by being console gamers?
Re: Sep 2025 USA Sales: Ghost of Yotei PS5 Boycott Fails, Sequel Sells 'Great'
I haven't bought it yet, but the only reason is because I made the terrible mistake of replaying Ghost of Tsushima like 2 months ago and proceeded to burn myself out on that style of repetitive open world game. Yotei looks very similar, so I need a bit of a longer break. I'll probably up playing it in January next year.
Re: Demon's Souls PS5 Patched to Take Advantage of Power Saving Feature
Yeah I'm pretty perplexed by this feature as well. The only thing I can think of is that the PS5 running in low power mode will be roughly equivalent to the performance of their upcoming handheld and it's basically for developers to start making games that can target their handheld without having to wait for dev kits.
I guess making it available to users just gets you some environmentalism brownie points even though I doubt even 5% of the customer base would ever use it.