ThomasHL

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.

@PuppetMaster fair enough, I won't say it's a side project. Its a great game, they're clearly really proud of it and put in the love.

But when it comes to how they're in a position to buy another studio it's because of the game that's made them $800 million, not the $80 million one. And I bet they have a lot more staff working on the $800 million game.

@PuppetMaster Nikke literally makes that much money every 4 months

@PuppetMaster they run one of the biggest mobile gacha games around. It makes them $20 million -a month-

Stellar Blade is just a side project.

The UK is getting screwed there. The EU and US prices are roughly launch price + inflation since launch + 10 to 20 bucks. That UK price hike is a lot larger

@Reyzore the Xbox Series have already had prices increases. They did it earlier when the RAM issue kicked off.

The Switch 2 will probably take a little longer - they set their price more recently so inflation hasn't eroded it so much yet. But I'd bet on a price increase next year if we still have a RAM shortage

Inflation is a compound effect. 5 years of high inflation is much worse than just adding those 5 years together.

Here is why it's probably true:

500 euros in 2020 is worth 630 euros today.

There's every chance that with RAM taken into account (and Iran inflation), Sony will still be making a loss, or just breaking even at 650.

Most of us don't remember living through a period of high inflation. We don't realise how big the hits are

This is close to a guaranteed purchase for me. Even if it turns out to be flawed, I'd still want to see how they did it

The Expanse is some of the best sci fi out there

If you want proof that last year lacked big hitters, there's only two publishers on that list with a game with a score higher than 90 that's not a port or remake. Blue Prince (Raw Fury), and Split Fiction (EA).

Annapurna at #23 is another publisher facing a massive slide

@Flaming_Kaiser Yeah and, if you see my second comment, it was Jeff's idea to do OW2 as both PvP and PvE instead of keeping OW1 as PvP and OW2 as PvE.

We got to play the PvE mode Kaplan created after many many years of working on it. It was released, and it was very boring and people stopped playing within a few weeks. If they wanted a PvE game, he should have taken the suggestion to make a dedicated PvE game instead of cramming it into a multiplayer combat system.

@somnambulance Kaplan was offered to have a separate team to.make a dedicated PvE Overwatch game whilst another team continued to update Overwatch 1 but he didn't want that either. Instead he spent years trying to do two things at once, and as a result failed to do either.

@nomither6 it was Kaplan who had the disastrous plan of devoting their resources to a PvE mode instead of focusing on the core Overwatch game.

They were based in the UK. The name of the game for remakes now is contract work, somewhere where labour is cheap.

This is another (very small) step in the Western games industry de-professionalising

I put "maybe" because I think Sony might communicate why the PS6 is getting delayed if it's getting delayed, which technically counts as talking about the PS6.

The Helix announcement was just chucked out to bolster the new CEO. This wasn't a strategic announcement or a change in the status quo of what Xbox are doing

For all of Expedition 33's game of the year awards, it's core message hasn't connected with people. Uncharted 4 was an amazing ending. Let art die

Make new IP, for those who come after!

I'm in the camp that Freya would have been an easier sell to me.

But Faye is still a bit of a blank canvas, so they've got plenty of room to do something fun that will get me onboard

I don't want it to be Kratos or Atreus, because to me Kratos' story is kind of done now.

But I also don't have much faith that they'll be able to create an interesting protagonist in their place.

Even without Steam machines and Nextboxes, PC was already becoming a major rival to Sony. Without this, I would have probably jumped ship next generation.

As it stands today, PC gamers have by far the best to games.

Phil did a plenty good enough job at sunsetting Xbox by himself.

I really liked the concept, but for a musical game that trailer didn't have great music

The barrier to entry for new multiplayer games only gets higher. But the indie space shows innovation is still possible.

In every new generation we've seen the previous generation get increasingly bad ports, and fewer titles as people focus on the new generation.

It's not just case of "don't buy one" the longer it takes the PS6 to exist, the more games PS5 owners get that are specifically tuned for their hardware

Co-op is terrible to have as unlockable because it means you have to play through the experience to dive in.

If it was a single player only challenge mode, fine, no problem making it unlockable

Meteorological spring starts on 1st March and is the superior spring.

Astronomical seasons would tell you that "Midsomers day" is the first day of summer.