ThomasHL

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.

Definitely Cairn, great start to the year. 2XKO dashed my hopes very quickly

I'm surprised and impressed. I guess it's one of those games that sells well but doesn't enter the online discussion much

They've done well to outlast a major rival, but in that context, these sales figures aren't amazing.

Xbox sales have been almost non-existent this generation but Sony haven't managed to expand their install base much beyond what it was when they were a competitor.

@themightyant the secret of those games is they all already had large player bases who wanted the game to succeed too.

We like the idea of the redemption arc being "the game fixed its flaws, and then it became successful" but it's more like "the game was successful, it fixed its flaws and then it got praised for its success (and had further success)"

This game already feels like a forever game for me.

There's something so zen about carefully making your way up a cliff face handhold by handhold. It takes up my whole attention.

A single route takes up a perfect chunk of time, to feel like you accomplished something.

I was surprised how many things there are to explore and see too. I could spend hours on a single section, trying out all the routes looking for different secrets.

And in terms of simulating the experience of climbing, this is no contest, the best game to ever do it. Real life bouldering knowledge is directly applicable.

It's a bit grim that only one point separates this and Cairn. Cairn has soul, unique mechanics, and achieves what it tries to do.

Highguard has some parts which are good if you squint, and entire chunks of the round set-up that feel superfluous.

@Sakai the gap between the number of games released on PC versus console is massive these days.

It's almost standard practice for a smaller dev to release on PC first and only think about porting much later.

Ready or Not had sold millions on PC, and it still took 2 years to come to console

I dislike it when something you bought hassles you to buy something else. Unfortunately it's crept into absolutely everything these days.

Apparently they didn't pay for their slot. The Game Awards people gave it to them for free.

I believe the speculation that they were intending to shadow drop the game at the Game Awards, and a delay forced them back. That would explain why Geoff was so high on it

@PuppetMaster I loved how your worked in part of the message of LiS1 there

Not everything needs a sequel. Life is Strange, and Beyond the Storm were great. Now let it end, these aren't stories that need revisiting.

New Vegas is one of the greatest games ever made

Cairn is the game I'm most excited for.

I'm sure some of these AAA games will prove to be great, but I'm in a wait and see mode for pretty much all of them.

Whilst I enjoyed E33, I think this is also perhaps a sign that Sony's open-world-cinematic-story formula is getting a little stale.

If Ghosts of Yotei was released a few years ago, it would have cleared house in this vote.

I might try core keeper. I'm surprised they don't have bigger names for the first PS+ for people who got it as a Christmas gift though

@somnambulance it was a very niche year. Some people got served very well, but I don't think it was the kind of year where Game of the Year lists struggled for choice for #1

I was interested in a co-op fighter, but I hadn't realised the other player is just sitting around waiting to be tagged in

Persona 5 revolutionised turn-based menus and button presses. Any game which doesn't copy it (coughpokemoncough) is badly out of date

I definitely don't feel the same about E33's art direction. It's got a strong asset flip quality, where most of the scenes aren't arranged in a meaningful way and there is almost no environmental storytelling. They took their handful of assets and just ctrl+z'd them everywhere.

There is also a lot of massive jank, particularly in some of the side games which often don't even have working animations. And the direction even works against the gameplay - there's lots of insivible walls, but also environmental exploration jumping puzzles and it can be very unclear when you're meant to explore and when you're meant to stay on track.

It uses some very strong lighting effects, that look good in some places, but you visibly watch the game transition between lighting effects in a very abrupt way that pulls you out. It's particularly funny if you backtrack and the lighting switches back to "sombre" after the mood is meant to have passed.

It's got so little chance next year. Game awards have strong recency bias

Positions 2 to 4 are the most indie aesthetic indie games I've ever seen on a list like this

@Metonymy possibly thinking of The Finals?