Sweetz

PSSR was a mistake - anything that requires developers to go out their way and develop something specifically for the Pro was a mistake.

Pro should have simply been a faster PS5 where they could crank up the settings a notch or two.

I'm a Pro owner and disappointed in the relatively small raw performance increase over a base PS5. How much R&D was spent on PSSR that has to be funded through the console sales that could been sunk into getting faster chips or more memory for the same retail price?

Anniversary is probably my favorite of all of Tomb Raiders; old school vibes with good controls. Sadly, emulated PS2 version would be among the worst ways to play it.

Man the character just isn't the same without Michael Ironside's voice.

So I just finished this, and I kind of hated it. I probably would have given it an even lower score. Meanwhile I also just 100%'ed Death Stranding 2 after 126 hours.

In regards to my prior comment about repetitiveness - I still stand by that. So many games are inherently repetitive and still enjoyable. DS2 is obviously insanely repetitive, yet I put 126 hours into it and enjoyed at least 100 hours of that ; meanwhile getting through 8 hours of Hellblade 2 felt like torture. I think the problem with Hellblade is not that it's repetitive, but that it's repetitive and it "feels bad".

The combat in that game is so overly concerned with being cinematic that sometimes it barely feels like you're in control. I've Platinum'ed Sekiro and beat numerous Souls-likes and yet I could not come to terms with parrying mechanic in the game. Also as soon as you beat one enemy, you are immediately thrust into a fight with another. You have zero control over enemy engagement.

In Death Stranding 2, when you're not watching a cutscene, it makes no pretense about being a mechanics driven, video-game-ass video game - much to it's benefit. You also have freedom to engage with that game in many ways.

My other main problem with Hellblade is that it's linear to a fault and the tone is so dour and unrelenting. You barely ever get a chill moment to "decompress" or absorb the nonsense you just witnessed. I couldn't take playing it for more than an hour at a time.

I played Hellblade 1 back on PC when it came out and I remembered it fondly. I bought the PS5 deluxe edition which included Hellbade 1 and replayed that first and while I did not remember it as fondly as I once did, I still liked it a whole bunch more than Hellblade 2. Again I find it hard to put words all the little nuances as to why. Ultimately, saying Hellblade 2 "feels bad", in all respects, is the most concise way I have of saying it. Most disappointing purchase I've made in a long time...and I say that having bought Star Wars Outlaws this year too

The only cheat I need is for the stupid flipping minigames like the squats game. Unfun, tedious, tied to valuable rewards. Give me something to skip those, not actual battles!

@PuppetMaster Last of Us show came out a few months shy of 10 years after the game and that seemed to do ok.

I mean would you want to watch an anime that just retells the story of the game immediately after playing the game?

Note to dev: When 15 people on Reddit say they'd love a multiplayer game set in the same universe as your story heavy single player game that appealed to a somewhat an older player base - they do not represent a sizeable portion of your audience.

Don't know WTF they were thinking. A lot of people who liked Control are exactly the sort of gamers who will never want to touch a multiplayer game. I'm one of them.

I'm a little perplexed. This same reviewer gave Death Stranding 2 a 10. I'm 80 hours into that game and at 90% completion according the home screen progress tracker. While there's a certain zen chill to that game I enjoy punctuated by the nonsensical story, if you want to talk about repetitive games, holy heck is that one. At hour 80 I sure am effectively doing a lot of the same stuff I did at hour 10...

I replayed Ghost of Tsushima recently (this was a very big mistake because it killed any excitement I had for Yotei) and that started to feel like a chore around the 20 hour mark.

I mean all video games are repetitive by nature, but every modern AAA action game being a 40+ hour open world game has really given that new meaning.

Odd that a 6 hour game with a simple combat system would wear out it's welcome more than a 60+ hour game of literal FedEx quests.

I liked Hellblade 1. I'm up for short spectacle for a change of pace from formulaic open world games or yet another flipping Souls-like.

First of note that we are reading a translation from voice answer given during a Q&A section of a shareholder call.

"For Q1, the live-service ratio was about 40%."

Ratio of what? Sony's overall revenue, the gaming division revenue, reoccurring revenue?

Do they consider PS+ a "live service"?

Does this include whatever percentage they take from sales in other live-service games through PSN? Because that statement does not explicitly state that it's from just their live service games.

Really too many unanswered questions on an off-hand statement to take anything from it.

@themightyant Personally, I don't agree that Forbidden West is the better game. Even on the gameplay front, I came away less enamored with Forbidden West than Zero Dawn. At some point Forbidden West actually kind of felt like a chore to play and I had to push myself to finish.

All modern open world action games are formulaic and repetitive by nature and it may be a victim of genre fatigue in my case, but sometimes less is more. Like I ended up using most of the weapons in Zero Dawn, at least situationally, because it wasn't really daunting to learn most of them. In Forbidden West there were so many that I kind of had opportunity paralysis and I got sick of managing the weapon wheel, so ultimately I ended up using less weapons, just sticking with the regular bow and one or two elemental bows. It's kind like in an FPS with 6 weapons, you'll use all 6, but in an FPS with 30 weapons you'll probably end up using 3.

Also they ramped up the "intensity" of combat, so you spend so much more time getting knocked around by the bots and that's 1) annoying and 2) removes whatever tiny shred of immersive realism the prior game had when Aloy is constantly getting knocked 50 feet in the air by a giant death machine and shakes it off with a few berries.

That's really a problem with all these open world games. You're expected it amp it up in the sequel, it's expected to have more...and then it frequently ends up feeling unfocused and overstuffed. I don't really know how you iterate on them and yet keep them feeling tight. If they're too much like the original, people will not like it, if they add too much and it becomes unfocused, people will not like it.

Outlaws is the kind of the most mediocre game I’ve ever played; nothing is great, but neither is it outright terrible. I found the plot and character very boring though and neither the combat nor the stealth are varied enough. I feel like if they focused on combat, they could have made a far better bounty hunter game.

I bought the Ori games on PC, but I've since switch to gaming entirely on my PS5 and would happily rebuy those games on PS5. Despite Microsoft now putting out their games on PS5, I'm worried we'll never get the Ori games purely due to the bad blood between Microsoft and Moon Studios

Early access opinions on No Rest for the Wicked were not glowing. I'm not sure what state it's in these days, but after seemingly every other game coming out being a Souls-like, I'm read for some non-frustrating games again and not super pumped for it.

I'm replaying it right now, but I'm afraid that's a mistake. It's a beautiful game, but I'm already burning out the repetitive nature. Even when it originally came out, formulaic open world games where kind of overdone and things haven't let up since then, and Ghosts extremely formulaic. I'm worried Yotei won't be different enough and spoiling my chances of enjoying it, but I'm like 70% though Tsushima now, so I have to finish it out.

I would have given the first game a 5/10. The combat simply did not get varied enough to support 12+ hour game and I found the Detroit map/"police work" parts quite tedious. Enjoyment is entirely dependent on you whether you're wearing Robocop nostalgia goggles, and it's not a property I ever had much love for even though I did always think the ED-209 design was cool. That said, I've enjoyed some quite bad Star Wars games simply because of my love of that property and I don't think bias being a factor in one's enjoyment of a game is necessarily a bad thing.

Had the game been pruned down to like 8 tight hours, I think I would have enjoyed it more, but sadly the rest of the market doesn't seem to accept short games anymore.

"Personally, we’ve never advocated for curation, because inevitably there’ll be some great games that end up slipping through the cracks."

That's the price you pay to avoid a race to the bottom.

If you look at any unregulated market in the entirety of human history this is what happens. It's not just digital market places, all market places. Good physical products are getting increasingly crowded out by low quality crap due to China and Amazon. It happened with food decades ago, which is why civilized countries now have government regulation like EFSA to enforce quality and safety.

You want an open marketplace, put your game out on PC. Console manufacturers should be doing more to guarantee a bare minimum level of quality for games on their closed platform. If that means a few obscure but good indie games that <1000 people would be into don't make it onto the platform - so be it. I extend this to even to things like buggy AAA games. Mindseye and Cyberpunk 2077 should have never made it onto the Sony store as released.

Hmm the only obvious bug I've run into on PS5 is the music dropping out occasionally - most often during battle.

The first few times it happened I thought it was a stylistic choice to make a more battle seem more serious (silence in a game with constant orchestral background music is eerie), but then it happened in a couple of trash mob fights with no serious threat and also while running around the map in a few areas and I realized it was a bug.

I would think the PS1 ports of these games surely has to be among the worst ways to play them, except for maybe like the 3DO version. Myst got ported to practically anything with a CD-ROM drive back in the day.

The one in the game has black thumb sticks and I'm slightly annoyed that they didn't take this opportunity to correct that.

Scalpers bought up so many of the original that they outpaced demand. I ended up getting one from a scalper for like $3 more than the original retail price by just waiting a bit. It still kind of makes me upset that a scalper made any money off me, but at least it was barely enough for a coffee.

Difficulty options are great. Gatekeeping over Souls game difficulty is obnoxious.

I just finished Lies of P last month after picking it up on sale and I must say I didn't especially enjoy it. Bosses are either pretty high on the difficultly side relative to other Souls games IMO - or nearly trivial if use the the NPC summon. The "true" end boss (for which you can not use a summon) was more frustrating than just about any Souls game I've played and I ultimately had to resort to "cheese" tactics to beat it.

If the easy difficulty makes the boss fights harder than when using a summon, but not quite as punishing to mistakes (or bad character builds) as the default difficulty, that would be great.

Even so, I personally don't really need to play more of that game. I didn't think it did anything that was especially entertaining or novel compared to other games in the genre IMO. I didn't find the world design especially memorable and the story devolving into vaguely Lovecraftian nonsense was a disappointment.

Aspyr is an absolute garbage company and it's one of the bigger tragedies of the modern game industry that they hold the rights to a lot of these older Star Wars games. I have some personal beef with them as the creator of the missing sounds fix for the Steam version of Force Unleased, which still hasn't been fixed by them after 15 goddamn years. Their ports are the most bare bones, barely functional ports possible.

Trust me that you do not want the version of KOTOR they'd put out on consoles. Better to get the old PC version and then at least you can mod it.

I remember the opening of the game being extremely tedious because you have so little capacity on ammo, fuel, etc. I remember it being painful to walk the bike around when it ran out of gas and it being frustrating not being able to take out zombies. You really need to mainline the story for a bit and once you start getting upgrades, then it’s pretty fun. If you try to go off and explore right out of the gate, you will not have a good time.

I wonder if this now enough of a known quirk of the game that people can now approach the game in a way that leads to a more enjoyable experience than when the game was new

@Fighting_Game_Loser On a basic level true, but at least in the modern era, in a photorealistic AAA game there's now an expectation of facial performance capture and quality actors that a cartoony game wouldn't have. So even if the effort that went into creating art assets was equivalent (but it definitely is not), realistic games have a huge talent cost than cartoon/stylized games do not.

I just played that Robocop game since it was on PS+ and the facial models are fairly detailed and compare favorably to most AAA PS4-era games, but there's no performance capture and it's crazy how old and cheap it made that game feel in cutscenes.

I never played the Resistance games despite being a huge fan of Insomniac from Spyro and Ratchet & Clank. I had a PS3 during it's time, but I also had a gaming PC, and I didn't really go to the console for first person shooters.

I tried playing Resistance on PS+ and made it maybe 45 mins before bailing. Controls felt terrible in comparison to any post-2010 shooter and the 720p resolution further compressed by streaming plus it being from the really unfortunate "sepia tone makes it gritty" (aka "brown is real") era in gaming...was more than I could tolerate. I saw nothing in those 45 mins that made me want to keep playing. It solidified my assumption that I didn't miss much by skipping them when I had a PS3. So...no great PS+ loss here as far as I'm concerned.

The streaming alone isn't the problem, I revisited and fully 100%'ed Ratchet & Clank Tools of Destruction and A Crack in Time through PS+ streaming and they were totally...acceptable.

I wonder if Sony has data indicating that a lot of people played Resistance 1 & 2 for <1 hour and never came back to them.

You should put Everspace 2 on this list. It's 65% off and is a one of very few space fighter games coming out these days that just so happens to play great on a console and is an awesome game in general.

For people asking what's the point because of the PS4 versions - those PS4 versions are really bare bones ports, not remasters. I tried to play the PS4 version of Patapon 1 and I found it super interesting, but brutally difficult. The timing windows are very demanding, at a certain point the game becomes heavily reliant on maintaining perfect timing chains, and there's no setting to adjust for display lag. I could not get past the half-way point no matter how hard I tried. Difficulty settings and input lag adjustment are extremely welcome.

Question is what's the price? I don't think I'd pay more than $20 total for both games. I played the original via PS+.

@MrPeanutbutterz Yeah but people would buy those used games and then enjoy a publisher's/developer's work with no money going to them. Would the people who bought used have paid full price or waited for a discount if that was their only choice? Impossible to know.

It's likely correspondingly impossible for anyone to ever truly get a reckoning of how much secondhand sales hurt vs helped the market.

I worked at a Gamestop as my part time job in college during the heyday of the PS2 era and we definitely had a lot of games being traded in and sold used during what I would consider their new release window.

Obviously fairly moot at this point since a majority of the market now buys digital. Publishers just needed to wait for the proliferation of high speed internet and a global pandemic to solve the problem for them

@lacerz There is always a chance that they botch the port to PS5 since the PS5's APIs are fairly different than XBox's despite their hardware being similar.

That said, Indiana Jones uses modified id Tech 7 engine, which is also used by Doom: Eternal which already has a good PS5 port.

Forza however, uses a proprietary engine which has presumably never been ported to a Sony platform, so that's less of a sure bet.

> "In fact, all three games have remained somewhat difficult to play internationally on contemporary consoles."

All 3 games have remained difficult to play on their original hardware too...because they're fricken hard

What I'm genuinely curious about is that when Sony announced they had 12 live service games in development, did they actually think all 12 had a chance of being successful or were they already hedging their bets that they just needed one or two massive successes to cover the losses from the others? That seems pretty wasteful of talent and resources.

I mean if you make a single player focused game that's not successful, at least you can keep selling it indefinitely and you'll at least get some little trickle of income from it over time. You have a live service game that fails, it's a total write off.

@LordAinsley Absolutely correct. It's purely nostalgia googles that a Twisted Metal live service game would be successful. There have already been multiple indie/small studio attempts to do car combat battle royale and none of them have found success. I don't think putting a recognized name on it would really make it do better. I think the "Auto Royale" mod for H1Z1 was probably the most successful and even that had barely 15 minutes of fame when the zeitgeist for battle royale games was at it's peak a few years ago.

I bought a Pro because it wasn’t a big expenditure for me and I used to be a PC gamer, but switched fully to console now. Compared to what I used to spend to build a new gaming PC every few years, it’s nothing.

I don’t regret getting it, but I think it is less of a raw power boost over the base PS5 than it should be, especially based on Mark Cerny’s “you don’t have to choose between performance and quality” presentation, which was complete lies because every Pro enhanced game still has performance and quality modes and while performance mode is better than performance mode on base PS5, it’s still usually not equal in fidelity to quality mode on a base PS5.

Mainly it seems to be a testbed to make consumers pay for the “privilege” of being beta testers for their proprietary AI upscaling tech that will be in the PS6.

Don’t say any of this on the PS5 Pro subreddit though. That place is full of the most confirmation biased MF’ers on the planet. The lengths to which people can delude themselves into believing they see “huge” differences just so they don’t feel like they wasted $700 is crazy.

Bottom line, the Pro does give you the best console gaming experience you can currently get, but it doesn’t really give you a 55% better experience for a 55% higher price than the current discless slim model. If you are financially comfortable, get it. If you have to think more than a few seconds about spending that much, stick with a base PS5.

I think PS+ and Gamepass are definitely a factor, I think another challenge AA games face is that due to the ubiquity of digital distribution and the fact that all time classic games are now effectively available indefinitely and being remastered all the time, AA games are having to compete with essentially the greatest hits of the last 30 years of gaming available at the same price point or lower. I mean let’s say I’m a relatively young/new gamer looking to buy a horror game for $40, would I buy Slitterhead or say the Resident Evil 2 remake - a game so well known that it’s part of “cultural consciousness” at this point and I probably would have heard of it before.

Basically older AAA games still being readily available at lower price points, playable on current systems, and still feeling relatively modern due to the unavoidable slowing pace of evolution in both technology and game design as the format matures have taken up the market space that used to be filled by AA games.

@MKD88 They are not “remasters” they are emulated originals, as is the case with all PS+ classics. Controls are remappable via the emulator, but off hand I’m not sure if you can remap analog inputs to things that are button inputs in the original game (which includes stafing and vertical aiming).

@SanukGames A lot of the shovelware is $1-2 games that just give you easy trophies (achievements). The people buying them don’t care about the quality of the game, so demos are not a solution to those.

Part of the problem is that Sony was actually giving rewards points for trophies at one time. They have since stopped that, but seemingly someone out there still cares about trophy numbers enough to still be buying this crap.

I just took a look and all of those “Jumping [food]” trophy games are still on there. Those things are an absolute embarrassment.

It's a shame that the PS2 R&C games haven't been maintained better. There was a HD collection on PS3 that was terrible. I remember there being a forum thread of like 150 bugs specific to the HD port that were noticed by fans. I noticed several myself which is what led me there.

I'd rather play PS2 emulated versions than the PS3 HD collection. Those games pushed the PS2 hardware like nothing else though, so I presume they are some of the most difficult games to emulate correctly.

I replayed PS3 era Tools of Destruction and a Crack in Time via PS+ streaming recently and the streaming experiencing was decidedly...tolerable.

I love the new God of War games, but it took me a few minutes to remember Kratos’s son is Atreus and not just “Boy!”

Ah, blue balls the game. “Erotic” games with no nudity make no sense to me. Give me porn or give me a proper video game. Weak games and weak porn don’t exceed the sums of their parts, I never understood them.

Every generation since I owned a Sega Genesis, I kept my consoles and games until I got into my 30s and realized I am never going to play them again and have just been pointlessly carting around what is effectively just a large, annoying to move box containing nostalgia with no real practical value to me.

Eventually I realized I'm not going to play any of those games again, or if I did it would be as "remasters", and sold it all. This "cured" of the desire to own physical games. If Steam/PSN ever go offline, I will probably be too old to care, or dead, or society will have collapsed and video games will be the least of my worries... I haven't bought a physical game in over 10 years.

Although, I'm still not 100% cured because I did hang onto 1 game: my original PS2 copy of Okami, which is my favorite game of all time. I don't know why or what I'm ever going to do with it (I've since bought the remastered version on multiple platforms and don't have a PS2 itself)...but at least it doesn't take up too much space.

I really wish the PS1 and PS2 era games were available via emulation on PS+, but I'm sure it would be an absolute licensing nightmare to re-release those games due to all the real world aircraft manufacturers involved

@boarderbro88 I recently played the PS2 emulated versions of the Sly Cooper games and Skygunner, which were more recently added to PS+ and they seem fine to me. There’s not too much in terms of enhancements, but they do seem to be well upscaled and have save state and rewind functionality and that’s nice.

@nessisonett The “agenda” of people wanting to play games they paid for? Sure a Windows update broke it, but why didn’t it break other games? Probably because Ubisoft’s launcher, anti-piracy, or anti-cheat measures were mucking around at a low level in the OS that they shouldn’t have been doing in the first place.

Microsoft officially acknowledged the issue and paused the automatic update for any PC which had the affected games installed, but they did not say that they are going to make a change to fix it, they essentially implied it’s up to Ubisoft to patch their games, which lends more credence to the guess that this is due to bad practice by Ubisoft in the first place. It’s likely there was a kernel access security hole that MS patched which Ubisoft was exploiting for one of the aforementioned reasons, hence it’s Ubisoft’s responsibility to fix, not Microsoft’s.

"Sigourney Weaver famously shaved her head for Alien 3, for example; last year’s critically acclaimed Furiosa saw Anya Taylor-Joy sport a similar look"

Not the best comparisons as there are meaningful and unpleasant story justifications for the baldness in both of those.

Alien 3 is set in a dirty prison and the doctor specifically mentions they have a lice problem and recommends Ripley shave her hair. There's also the fact that its a men's prison and a particularly feminine appearance could be dangerous.

Furiosa is in a post-apocalypse, which generally isn't the kindest times for women, and a shaves off her hair specifically due to an incident in her youth where she was grabbed by it.

Both are arguably metaphors for the character having to unwantingly give up their femininity so they could survive in harsh environments.

Who knows if there's a story justification for this character's shaved head or it's just a stylistic choice. I suspect the latter, as there seems to be a trend of making female characters in games intentionally unattractive by traditional standards as an overreaction to feeling guilty about pandering, sexualized characters in games over a decade ago.

I know this only because I too got curious about how people were even doing this and I just looked it up. Apparently you can get to a Google search page in the PS5's hidden internal browser in a fairly convoluted way. First you go to the User's Guide from the system menu, which Sony serves you as a web page on their site via the PS5's hidden browser. From there, there are links that take you tutorial videos on YouTube which open on YouTube's site in the browser, not the YouTube app. From YouTube, following a series of links you can get to Google search page. Once on Google, you can just use the search and effectively get to any website.

Way more effort to get to porn than I'd ever want to go to, but then again I'm not a 15 year old trying to circumvent safeguards on the family PC or my school laptop, LOL.

@Ainu20 It's crappy that console gamers have to be the beta testers for it though. Usually new rendering methods get introduced on a PC first, where you can generally count on such things being an option that can you disable. Once bugs are worked out on PC, then they trickle down to console.

PSSR is seemingly AMD's first stab at doing at an AI upscaler. Making a console the test bed for that was a questionable choice.

Digital Foundry said that when DLSS was new, nVidia was only allowing it to be implemented in games where they worked closely with the developer to ensure it was working correctly - lest a bad implementation by a developer make their new proprietary tech look bad in consumer's eyes.

Clearly Sony/AMD should have had a similar policy until the kinks got worked out. Allowing developers to use what is effectively experimental tech on their "premium" console without keeping a closer eye on their implementations during the this critical early period is really souring the Pro "narrative".

@Jrs1 No. It basically has the worst PSSR issues of any game and they haven’t even put out a patch so you can revert it to the base PS5 mode yet.

I have to say I really don't understand what people see in Dino Crisis.

I never played it originally, but I am old enough that I was in my teens when the PS1 came out. I played it last month when it came out on PS+ and even trying to do my best to judge it from a historical perspective (which I admit is more easily said than done), I just don't think it's a good game. I can only assume that people's feelings about it were tied into lingering zeitgeist around Jurassic Park.

I agree with the 1 and 2 picks. I've replayed Metal Gear Solid recently and can still appreciate it even from a modern perspective. Simply having camera relative controls instead of character relative controls (aka "tank controls") goes a long way towards making it feel modern.

The notable absence from this list for me is Colony Wars. They made a space "sim" feel and play well on a digital gamepad, that is quite the feat.

@SuntannedDuck2 PS1 memory cards are 128KB. The blocks are 8KB - yes that makes 16 blocks. Only 15 blocks are useable because 1 block was reserved for the file system data, not because of hexidecimal...

Called it and this won’t be the last game with PSSR problems. Sony really needs to get out in front of this. Even if developers aren’t doing due diligence in their testing, Sony is giving them a tool that either doesn’t work as advertised or is too difficult to use. They need to put out a statement saying they will work with developers to stop these problems.

@SilentBluntman So from what little I've been able to gather about of how PSSR/DLSS works, the developers use "AI" to create a complex scaling algorithm by feeding the AI a frame rendered at their target internal real-time resolution and an equivalent frame offline rendered at 4k. Do that for many thousands of frames in different areas of the game and the AI essentially "learns" how to create a 4K image from a lower res one by inserting pixels based on precedence more or less. To put it in extremely simplified terms, it learns that if pixel A is next to pixel B in a lower resolution version of the image, pixel X is usually what's between them in the true 4K version. However, pixel X could be entirely different depending on the game and its particular art assets. This is how it can do things like reproduce legible text that is illegible at the internal render resolution - only because it was exposed to the clear version of that text in a 4K render and it "recognizes" the low res version of that text, it can reproduce the high res version.

At the end it spits out a scaling algorithm more complex than any human could create that the developer feeds into the dedicated scaling hardware.

That makes it very specific to each game and while it's up to AMD/Sony to enhance the quality of the training model and make the AI do its job better without hand holding, at some point it will still rely on the developers to make sure they do a good enough job feeding in sufficient source data and tuning the results to make sure it creates a good final scaling algorithm.

As far as I know, it's not something that developers will ever get for "free" - that is to say without putting their own work into it - work that will always be low priority for them because it only applies to a small percentage of the user base.

I got one and I'm pretty disappointed right now to be honest.

Two major reasons:

1. PSSR inclusion was a mistake. That sort of tech might be the future of rendering in general, but it shouldn't have been introduced in a half-step console. The PS5 Pro will only ever be owned by a small percentage of the PS5 user base if it's like the PS4 Pro (which Sony said was only 12% of the PS4 user base). Any new graphical capability that requires developers to go to extra effort to implement vs the base PS5 version of the game is destined to be poorly supported. If said feature can make the game worse than the base PS5 when implemented poorly as we've seen, it should have never been included.

I'm afraid we haven't seen the last of bad PSSR implementations and I may end up actively regretting ever getting a Pro if we continue to see problems. At best, right now I'm hoping developers don't even try to use it if they're not going to put the time into making it right.

Also, even if this is the fault of developers, I'm pretty peeved that Sony hasn't done any of their own messaging about it. It looks extremely bad from a consumer standpoint when Pro versions of games are worse than their base PS5 counterpart. I don't remember that being the case with any PS4 Pro game. Sony needs to get out of front of this problem and say that they are actively working with developers to fix their PSSR implementations and will make sure games with Pro modes go through more stringent approval in the future.

2. Sony's whole presentation for the console was "75% of you use the performance mode in games, so we're creating this more powerful console so you don't have to choose between performance and quality"...and yet every single "Pro enhanced" game has Pro specific performance/quality modes. So we do still need to choose and it completely subverts their messaging for the console. They should have established a standard that "Pro" mode must be 60fps at the highest graphical fidelity they can get away with, period. If you want unlock the framerate of the existing quality mode or make it a 40fps mode on the Pro, then ok, but there shouldn't be Pro specific quality modes. Who the hell is getting a Pro to run games at 30fps?