ThomasHL

He's a brilliant actor, so if the series is in a bit of trouble, he could save it. I'm shocked the producers can get him, he must be asking for a lot.

He probably doesn't have the perfect look at this age. Normally I judging actors on how closely they look like the character they're adapting is a game for mugs, but the visual is a big part of Kratos' impact. I still think Batista would pull it off, and he'd nail the fatherhood stuff

All that stock money that people wasted on this washed up semi-scam

@Orpheus79V we're going to get some incredible jank. Eyelines not matching, lighting not quite matching, shot reverse shots that don't match...

How does this company still have money?

The idea that Sony have 4D Chess'd this and have no risk is as ludicrous as anything else.

Apple have a lot of lawyers and an even bigger reason to preserve their closed platform, and they failed.

It's not an open and shut case, Sony have defences they can argue, but they will have to argue them and they absolutely can lose, just as Apple lost.

@ThorsHammer John Gonzalez is back at Obsidian? That's a game changer

EDIT: Josh Sawyer was the project director of New Vegas and the lead designer. Gonzalez was the creative lead and lead writer

Don't love the sound of this, particularly as Japanese devs have a habit of working to what they believe Western audiences are like rather than what they actually are like, and end up stripping useful nuance.

But I don't know what the changes actually are, and either way it probably won't prevent me playing the game.

@get2sammyb they've got a lot of work to do on the store and even less incentive to do it. They don't need to provide convenience or good prices to the consumers if the consumer literally cannot purchase games by other means.

We are starting at the best case scenario: pre-monopoly - a bad store and games that are significantly more expensive than the second hand market.

The idea that it's going to get better post-monopoly is going against everything we know about how large corporations behave.

If there was any generation to make their store better, it was this one. Every person they convinced to buy digital instead of physical this generation was a large profit saving for them. It also furthered their long term goals of switching to digital only.

The number of cool PC games which don't reach Playstation for years, if ever, is now huge. And mods have always been an immense selling point.

The thing that always prevented me, was I want to play with a controller, I don't want faff, and I liked Sony exclusives.

They're beginning to fix the controller and the faff. And nowadays you miss as much being on PS5 as you miss not being on it.

For a while though, I think I can just stick with a PS5 and wait for PC prices to eventually fall. I've barely felt the improvement of upgrading from PS4 and I rarely play cutting edge games now. The PS5 can last me many years

It would sell terribly, but if any game should be desigend around a truly brutal permadeath system, it should be SAO. I'm talking MMO with permadeath level stuff

@Grapeshot this is the world we live in now.

None of Elon Musks public companies have ever achieved the long-term targets they set, but they've got truly barmy stock prices because surely they're going to hit the next ridiculous overinflated target.

It's been 20 years and Tesla aren't even the best selling electric car company, never mind the best selling car company, never mind better than all the other car companies combined together - which is what their shares value them that.

Money goes to the companies that can spout the stupidest *****.

Or more cynically the shareholders know these figures are not credible, but they think they're the ones who will get out just before the crash

This was unfortunately entirely predictable.

I said Microsoft would end up shedding loads of people and studios when they were buying up Activision. Anti-trust agencies aren't bold enough.

And this is a long-term Microsoft pattern of changing strategies and shifting commitment to gaming.

The Steam box seems like a sounder investment in the long-run. A more expensive initial purchase, but cheaper games, mods and a much wider selection of games.

This is much less of a big deal to me, as you'll be able to access other storefronts. PCs already don't have physical games and this is a rebranded PC.

But jf you buy a console without other storefronts and no physical games, you are completely at the mercy of the publisher. They have no incentive to lower prices. They have no incentive to give you backup options if they close the store (Steam does have a backup)

I don't think Obsidian have been reaching the heights they hit with games like KoToR2 / New Vegas / Alpha Protocol / Tyranny.

But they're one of those studios which is always trying new things, and I would be gutted if they went

The biggest consequence of this error will be years in the future when courts force Sony to allow rival stores on their platform

The biggest console subsidy Sony have ever done was $300 off the base price. If it takes $1,000 to put together a PS6 then retailer fees alone are going to put it above $1,200 (and thats pre-tax for us Brits who do prices properly). Sony selling an $800 console is a pipedream.

There is an upper limit to what subsidy is possible. Remember a huge proportion of console gamers just play COD. Sony is not making hundreds per year off them.

Here are two reasons why we might not got a subsidy even close to PS3 prices:

1) The PS6 has the same architecture as a PC (unlike the PS3). If you sell it at a $300 loss, the tech companies buy up every copy and jam them into data centres. This already happened on a smaller scale with the PS3.

2) A high subsidy gives Sony no margin if component prices continue to rise. They can't subsidise based on the maximum loss they can afford, because they might quickly end up losing even more

The PS5 Pro is selling for $900, and that price probably doesn't reflect what it would cost to make a PS5 Pro today because Sony locked down a lot of the components before the AI boom kicked off. Even with efficiencies of scale, I don't see how you can get to under $1,000 for something much more powerful than the Steam Box.

Especially as more powerful tech was not getting cheaper even before the latest craze.

And the component shortage won't clear up any time soon, because it takes multiple years to build a chip fab, and the companies are all slow rolling their chip fabs because they don't want to get caught short if there's a market crash.

The good news is, if there is ever an AI crash, we'll all get screwed over by the recession, but hardware will get really cheap really fast

@8th_Observer Sony can definitely put out a console for cheaper than Valve. They have more pull with manufacturers, and can subsidise.

But Valve's Steam Machine is running PS5 level hardware. Saying Sony can put out a PS6 for $1,000 is already pricing a discount in.

@PuppetMaster FF12 has a great dub

@Luigia I think we're past COVID now. This is a general industry slowdown, and the de-professionalisation of the Western game industry. It happened in Australia first - they used to have a lot of developers, and now it's mostly hobbyists.

A handful of older games now dominates everyone's time. The younger generation spend more time on mobile than PC or console. Games might be following films and becoming more local - Chinese people play Chinese games etc. And finally wages in the West make developers very uncompetitive compared to countries with a lower median wage.

I called this when Microsoft bought them. The company isn't capable of consistently nurturing studios because gaming is such a small part of their revenue. They keep changing strategies, and when they do, they shed studios.

That's why, before the latest acquisition, they'd gone something life half a decade without making a GOTY game.

I hope that focus on realistic art style goes away. The trailer was really rough

Co-op is a big selling point

@get2sammyb I tried introducing it to a friend who doesn't know what extraction shooters are over the free week, and it was an eye opening experience.

First, the core gameplay loot does not work when you start off and you have no idea what the dozens and dozens of items are. I'm meant to loot? Ok, but the backpack is the size of a pickle jar, and I have no idea what is junk and what is valuable. Each trip feels totally pointless. You open up a crate and it's baffling and now you don't have space for ammo. They just stopped looking for loot.

But more than that, they just did not understand that you don't always engage. They went into everything guns blazing because that's what other shooters do, they died, and then that death didn't teach them that they should have held back, they just thought it was a rubbish game.

I'll go against the grain and say I don't like the tone or the green. We've got grim settings for days in games. The vibranct Persona style was what made it stand out.

That was the world's most generic trailer. But I guess it didn't need to do more. As a sequel players already know if they're going to love it.

@MathiasBS this was a trailer from the antagonist's point of view. She hates whimsy, and hijinks and dicking around marrying your chickens or whatever it is Fable protagonists do. And that's why she hates you, the player.

Some FfXIII inspiration in the music perhaps? I loved that soundtrack

Most mecha games, this one included, fail to sell the scale of a mecha. And they end up with a toy / diorama look.

This one's got me hooked.

This looks great. This is going to be the latest fighting gamer to convince me to buy it, only for me to remember I can't play fighting games.

Why do Lara's arms look way out of proportion for her body? She's got noodle tubes for limbs

Oof, May 2024 to September 2025 was such a rough period.

I disagree that Sony have been unlucky. They've had plenty of good wind and wasted it

• The pandemic was a boom time for gaming, not a bust. Many people had a lot of money they'd normally spend on other activities and nothing to do but spend it on games. Sony were supply constrained because the demand was up.
• Sony's main competitor completely gave up. That's millions of Xbox sales that went to Sony instead. They had access to a much bigger pool of console gamers than any time before

Sony's sales have been weak because they prioritised profit margins over subsidising hardware, got outflanked by both the Switch and Valve in the third-party space, and wasted billions of capital on a live service failure. And most of all they have had no good strategy to bring console gaming to younger generations.

I'm looking forward to this one

I'm glad we know that Persona 6 will involve Japanese kids who go to school

My first read of the title was "booting up the game is just the beginning"

Bungie is dead. I don't see how they get through this. Truly terrible decisions by management to get to this point

If it's good, Sony should do 'closed' betas, with more and more people, Valve style. Let people think they've stumbled on a secret. Let them whisper it on the web "Break In is actually fun".

If it's not good, no amount of marketing will help

I'd love to see a LOTR RPG made with the kind of skill Warhorse makes their RPGs. That's a dream game.

...but I've got no interest in playing a LOTR game with first person melee combat. Particularly not the Kingdom Come style combat

I'm always a fan of more data, but I suspect this top 10 isn't going to show a whole lot

This game has maybe the worst start of any game I've played in years. The characters are unbelievably annoying, every cutscene (and there are a lot at the beginning) feels like it takes multiple minutes to say very little, and you have to wait for any animation to play out before you can skip text.

There's been a mission with a story for ten years olds about stealing tomato juice and being nicely behaved on social media, and another mission where you move very very slowly through a photography studio and they 'spookily' make some of the walls disappear.

The buildings I've been in so far are mostly those MMO buildings where every room is a massive stretch of empty space designed for a hundred people to stand in.

The Y (but not X) axis of the camera controls is ridiculously oversensitive, and the camera lock-on struggled a lot during boss fights, who all love to stand around in the air (they do have a few interesting patterns though)

I've had one mission bug out because the boss fell off a tower. Another challenging on map mission I was a couple of hits away from defeating when I hit too many trash cans or something and the enemy teleported out and was replaced by police. I moved maybe fifteen yards away from the static police and they disappeared and came back and the enemy had been restored to full health.

I just want to get to the management sim parts! Why do I have to click through so many menus that change which button does what every time you change screen or click? Why do I have to listen to so many boring characters drone on, before they give me permission to the bits that sound fun?

Law of Gacha: The longer a gacha game exists, the more it's character designs resemble any other gacha game. This is independent of how unique the original concept was.

i.e. These ZZZ designs aren't urban fantasy anymore. You could stick them in Honkai or Genshin and no-one could tell the difference.

I really enjoyed Greedfall 1 in all it's Eurojank glory. Its a shame they couldn't build on it.

You can't believe a developer talking about their own game. They poured years of their life into it, of course they believe it's great.

And you definitely can't trust a developer who says a project was 80% done. Infamously the last 20% takes 50% of the time.

It was a mistake for Xbox to get rid of exclusives in the first place, it absolutely neutered their ability to influence hardware in the future (which is strategically important for Microsoft, more than just making money).

I don't know if they can put the genie back in the bottle now though. People will assume they'll just fold and flip flop again later.

The power of exclusives is the loyalty and trust you build up over a long period of time. People will buy a Switch 2 even if it has no games, because they trust that Nintendo will come out with exclusives they like eventually. Sony built up their studios reputations for high quality exclusives over years - and it tides them over even in the rough patches of releases.

Its even funnier now. Someone at Capcom really cares that these guys are related, and was not willing to budge.

The PS store is truly terrible so to my mind, pretty much anything would be an improvement.

Tags in particular would be amazing. The fact you can't easily search for a co-op game on the PS store is neolithic.

And whilst I get the auto playing being annoying, easy access to trailers would be great. It's so many button presses at the moment.

As would some text describing the game. The PS store even makes that hard at the moment. Most of the description for a game is filled with quasi-legal text

@PuppetMaste if every single of those 6.1 million people paid $80 for Stellar Blade, that's still not close to Nikke's total revenue.