ThomasHL

It was $50 off on Black Friday, which was a hefty chunk of the price, but it wasn't something craxy like 90% which is what I was expecting with this sales data.

I tried to get into Destiny but the new player experience is comically miserable. I hope they structure Destiny 3 in a way that allows you to rerun campaigns.

Shadow dropping works if people don't need to see the game before buying it. They shadow dropped a game people have literally already played and loved. It might work for sequels from good studios too.

My guess is it works best for cases where the developer doesn't want people looking too hard at their game first.

The visual of fighting the boss under the reflection of the world beneath your feet is fantastic

Those faces are uncanny valley, I don't love it.

@dark_knightmare2 I agree with you. I love Expedition 33, it deserves to win best soundtrack three times over, but it's visual design is essentially "store bought asset flip" - random props scattered everywhere, with little attention paid to their meaning.

For a while I tried to make sense out of the environmental storytelling, why is this here, what does this corpse mean - and then I realised the environmental storytelling doesn't exist.

I think they made some smart choices in setting their game in a world where things didn't have to make sense, and they do some fun tricks with the tools they have (the sequence of lamps lighting themselves). They also make smart use of cranking up the lighting effects to 11 in interesting ways.

But it's not the best visual design. It's far from being the best visual design in an indie game from this year even.

If it was £200 more, I'd probably make that back in a few years on how much better Steam sales / PC prices tend to be.

I'm not downgrading from a PS5 to a weaker PS5 though. Particularly if it doesn't have proper streaming apps.

Netflix get to say they're competing with TikTok. Nintendo could say they're competing with TikTok.

You don't get to say you're competing with TikTok, when you're already struggling to compete within your own industry. Microsoft would love to be in the world where Gamepass growth hadn't flatlined despite spending $70 billion dollars and they could have honestly said they're competing with TikTok, instead of EA and Steam.

It doesn't mean much. PS cycles through sales every month or 2 months or so. And whilst it's on sale, it will usually be on sale for the lowest price

That cloak is amazing

I'll always play the third person mode, even if the third person animations look terrible. Third Person cameras are the first mods I install on a PC game.

Something about my mind makes me feel disembodied in the game world, or like a floating TV in first person.

The PS4 is going to get releases when the PS6 is out. I guess this is the PC world now, if your game isn't AAA graphic pushing, why not support the old hardware?

@J2theEzzo they don't commit hard aesthetically. Look at this character. She's got a flower bikini, okay on theme, she's got a manacle on her hand (?), plus gloves, she's got ogres powers, and she's got pole dancing moves.

She doesn't even have consistent colours. Her powers are blue, her outfit is mostly yellow (if you can say it's mostly anything).

If you showed me this character, I would guess it was made in a character creator. I don't think I'd be able to guess she was meant to be Madagascan or even African. If you told me she was a dancer from Hawaii, that'd make about as much sense.

Modern Tekken character designs look really ugly to my eyes. There's no consistent themes or distinct silhouettes, or any kind of stylisation.

They don't look like real life fighters, but they also don't look like videogame characters.

They look like a random guys Sims character

I bought Expedition 33 in August. I'm still in Act 2. Time just disappears so quickly. A handful of games will easily keep me busy in a year.

It's why Day 1 Gamepass was doomed. Games aren't films, I can't consume one in an evening and then look for my next fix. Why rent 100 AAA games when I can't play them anyway? I might as well buy the one AAA game I'm going to love rather than the one Microsoft happened to make.

@get2sammyb I've got friends who've got their film onto Amazon Prime. Getting onto a streaming service isn't the same thing as Netflix giving your show a push

Large mergers shouldn't be allowed full stop. Massive corporate consolidation is never a good thing.

The current system is absolutely barmy where we allow behemoth companies to employ armies of lawyers to argue that basic economic theory doesn't exist, and make promises they immediately break after the merger goes through.

I think the IGN article is way off the mark with the content of the stories. "Grief" and "Revenge" are way too broad brushes.

But there is a similarity in style and delivery between many Sony games that is a little too common. I.e. Mocap driven linear stories, which are fairly serious with a bit of banter dropped in.

Astrobot is exactly the kind of thing that breaks this mould and I wouldn't mind more of that level of difference.

Not just in goofiness, but let's have civilisation spanning grand stories about kingdoms clashing, or world-building obsessed space operas.

It's not a big deal, but there was a point in time where God of War, Horizon, and Naughty Dog games were beginning to blur together.

IMO Ghosts of Tsushima was a welcome change of pace with it's attention on Japanese films and artistic backgrounds over and above the in-house Sony mocap.

I love the Aloy and Atsu art. This is a great tradition

I don't think I even spend $360 a year on games that I get to own.

I found the demo very frustrating, so I'm sad to hear that it doesn't shake off some of those problems as the game goes on.

I don't understand why so many Japanese games / anime feel the need to continuously reexplain the plot to you - even for the kids - the explanations are often more confusing and nonsensical than the initial event.

Cairn is a pinned down purchase on release for me. They've got something special with that climbing system. (Also Haven was top notch)

Great trailer, but the dev could have sold that so much better. Maybe it's part of the indie vibe? But like a five minute conversation could have made it so much snappier.

Why are you telling people that you can activate the shield with L2? How is knowing it's on L2 convincing people to buy your game?

If you're going to talk about the shield at all, tell me what's cool about it, tell me the strategy, tell me how they've combined that ability with another ability in a smart way, tell me it's one of many other ways to play out a run...

I wonder if Xbox sales have tanked so badly that they've lost efficiencies of scale.

Being able to bind to gyro is very cool

Zombie games are the Isekai of our medium. It doesn't matter how many exist, or how popular they seem to be online, hordes of people will always consume them

People talked a lot about this killing Overwatch, but it's Steam daily player count is already only twice that of OW2 (after being 15 times as high 6 months ago), whilst OW2s is the same as it was 6 months ago.

If they had sense they would actually do the Modern Warfare plotline.

As they don't, it will join the list of middling videogame adapations that were "just an X movie" which did middling well. I guess it's fun to have another war movie.

I dug the theory - not that it would be released as a Mega Man game, but that there would be some deep lore in game suggesting that it kind of was

HyperBitHero has been doing some Fear Effect retrospectives. What a strange franchise!

I'm amazed at how poorly some game trailers are edited, given how much it costs to make a game these days.

Battlefield has got them scared

The PS5 is the first Sony generation where I don't feel over the moon about buying in. I don't regret it exactly either, but what I got was a mild upgrade over the PS4 and basically PS4 games that ran a bit better.

I'm sure a PS6 will sell fine, but I'm going to wait a bit and maybe even see how SteamOS goes. PCs have access to a lot more games these days.

I'm intrigued but I know as soon as I download it and boot it up, I'll get ten different currencies on the screen, five ads, and five sets of daily busywork that look like every other gacha game, and all my interest will drain away.

The trailer was mostly good, but why would you ever put "You can have emotes" in your trailer? Sell the dream, not the in-game store.

I remember commenters telling us that tariffs wouldn't lead to price increases. It just sucks the whole globe is being dragged down along with the US

It looks great, but I was struggling to distinguish between the main character and the NPCs (and sometimes the background), they're all the same flat grey

That's a pretty sad Top 20 all in all. There's only been a handful of good games this year so far and most of them have been indie

I still can't get over how much Pixar fumbled the ball on animated films. Sony routinely puts out animation now that makes Pixar look flat, stodgy and dated. That would have been unthinkable 20 years ago

If I want to find a good co-op game, I'm better off going to another website and then coming back to the PS store. It's really bare minimum functionality

I'm surprised Ready or Not didn't even take second. It's a game with incredible sales figures, but people don't seem to talk about it much

The PR blitz for Battlefield 6 is just about the best EA have ever done.

They see a serious gap in the market now CoD is Fortnite, and they're gunning for it.

I doubt they could actually fix Starfield's problems in a serious way, but it'll still sell like gangbusters

Another reminder that all the money you stick into an online game could vanish one day, if you aren't willing to upgrade an entire console.

The factory building is a pretty bg change on the formula, but I'm pretty much done with grinding for pulls. It's so nice playing Expedition 33 and just enjoying the game, instead of needing to do homework to unlock something

I thought I had misunderstood Stains. It seemed weird that Thermal Transfer had no downside

I'm pretty sure most games follow the curve of a massive player count at launch and a big drop off after. That's how people consume entertainment

@Lowdefal I bet people used their wallet and didn't preorder the game

There's only room for Great now (or Great In It's Niche). I will probably never even play all the great games on my wishlist now. You have to do something really special to get played

I'd subscribe just for a Mass Effect show. That's a universe with so much you can do with it