ThomasHL

The fundamental reason for the dissatisfaction is because there have barely been any games that show off the power of the PS5 yet, and if people start targeting a Pro, it feels like PS5 owners will have never experienced playing a game truly designed for their platform.

However if a Pro means we get more PS5 targeted games, I'll make my peace with it.

I've had a lot of fun with this game. The characters who grabbed me most turned out to be the ones I knew the least about - Nico, Magik

It's caught my attention now, I shall follow its release with interest

@Art_Vandelay the big worry I have about Microsoft is a bunch of the studios they bought will get shuttered when they change their minds.

This has happened before. They're good owners whilst they're interested, but corporate winds shift and when they do you get things like Ensemble Studios being shut down, despite making great games.

Yes, the business argument for Gamepass was it would dramatically expand the playerbase. That just hasn't happened.

If anything the people who buy subscription services are even more enthusiast than the existing game audience as a whole. I could never imagine a grandparent who perhaps had a Wii but nothing else subscribing to gamepass.

I've found myself buying games that I could have subscribed for. Pay £10 on a sale for a game I'm definitely going to play and will always own feels better than subscribing for a few months and being under time pressure to complete it.

@NomNom in my opinion this is the kind of thing that shouldn't get patents. It's not some crazy technical leap, it's a product specific engineering solution.

@throwmeaname Genshin has effectively a single player campaign that continually gets updated with new DLC / expansions. You're not expected to (and almost certainly won't) collect all the characters, but collecting lots of characters is a big draw. You can also grind particular mission types to get levels etc. If you think about a game like Skyrim, lots of people play it beyond the main campaign.

Its very similar in structure to a non-sandbox MMO, just without the other players.

I never thought the rumour was true, but I understand why it existed. Vaan is so superfluous to the story it feels like he was crammed in last minute.

@Max_the_German it's just Square Enix. Other Japanese range from the hyper stylishness of Atlas, to the cohesive grim of FromSoftware

I'm definitely waiting for the review. We've seen so little that I'm worried it's going to turn out to be quite unambitious

I'm going to need to wait for the reviews. Nothing has looked bad but I haven't seen a 'reason to play it' yet.

This is an incredibly petty nitpick but I haven't liked the look of the UI in a Final Fantasy game for well over a decade now.

The last time Final Fantasy games had a really standout cohesive art style was FFX and FFXII. Ever since then they've had quite a plastic-y production line aspect that other AAA games don't.

Currently isn't gripping me, but it's hearing it during the game that really makes something click or not

@JohntheRaptor I don't think it's that as much as the writing in FW just isn't as good as ZD generally. Every character is weaker compared to the first game, especially the villains.

Probably the best written character was Zoe, and Aloy's slightly territorial reaction to Zoe moving on Varl.

EDIT: Actually I'm being a little harsh. Hekarro, Kotallo and handful of the side characters were decent too. But it was a game with some interesting intentions and very middle of the road execution.

The Utaru capital was the best city in Forbidden West. It was the way it had the working fields around it and felt like a functioning part of the environment.

I'm waiting for the series to step it up yet another level now.

@nomither6 that's part of the problem. Discoverability doesn't mean 'put everything on the front page', it's about getting the great indie games highlighted. Otherwise people switch off and dismiss the great alongside the mediocre.

I don't exactly regret buying a PS5, but the experience has been very mediocre when it comes to games.

I really should consider switching to PC next time round. The mods alone are massive.

@FenIsMightier E3 are in much closer contact with the publishers than either of us. If the publishers wanted a trade show, they'd tell E3 they wanted a trade show and it would have happened.

I just think it's very spurious to suggest that the publishers really want to do something they've shown no indication of prioritising. Every publisher who has pulled out of E3 has retained the media event aspect of the event. They have not retained the trade show aspect. So I'm not convinced that the bit they valued is the bit that they haven't retained.

@FenIsMightier the proof is in the pudding. If that really was what E3 was about, the publishers will show up on the trade floor. But if they don't, then it will be clear that that wasn't what they valued about E3, and that's it's just another one of many theories that's been generated by the outside community over the years.

@Monstermash40 I used my DualSense on a Samsung yesterday and it worked for me

I've been enjoying what I've played so far. Will definitely buy the full game at some point

I'll put my internet pride points on March 2024

@somnambulance Nintendo sunk down because Pokemen Violet / Scarlet was a technical disaster and Switch Sports was a big miss.

Nintendo only had one truly outstanding game this year (Xenoblade Chronicles), everything else (Bayonetta 3, Splatoon) had asterisks' mostly because the technical quality and online set up was poor.

@B-I-G-DEVIL your system would have a massive bias towards games that had more reviews. If a publisher put out one big hit and ten shovelware titles, their overall score would look identical to one big hit.

I can see the merits of that system, but I certainly can't see why that's the 'proper' way to do it. If I had to pick between the two, I'd pick Metacritics method over yours.

Square Enix getting absolutely slapped about this year, ranking alongside the shovelware publishers

The new WWE game looks great. They've turned things round from the total mess it was before. It's amazing what even a years break can do

The extra time they spend on it is just throwing money away. Accept the sunk cost and move on

DONTNOD don't always make great games, but they always make interesting ones. The concept of Vampyr, and the beginning where you're walking around the hospital uncovering everyone's secrets is great. They're one of the true AA studios out there.

Things that are bad flop.

The original Saints Row games were already some of the best out there for acceptance. You could be whatever Boss you wanted, big, small, fat, thin, male body female voice, w/e, and the game would go along with your personal chaos.

The new Saints Row didn't recognise that and tried to chase a young audience they didn't understand, with bad characters and removing the anarchic soul of the series. 'Trendy' isn't a substitute for good writing and good game design.

I'm definitely on the side of 'just make it a toggle'

@Jey887 Fire Emblem: Three Houses came out in 2019 and was a big hit, 3-4 years later we get a wave of SRPGs. The timeline fits

I don't think they've actually shown anything that impressive, but for some reason I really want this to be great.

In the old days, this wouldn't be crazy for a good competitive game. Get a couple of months out of it and move on. Publishers need to publish games around those expectations, because there can only be one or two games that people keep playing forever.

What a trailer!
"I'm an Olympian, by which I mean to say I became a TV chef, which is all to explain that I'm part of a Hong Kong SWAT team"

DONTNOD are always worth paying attention to. They're always willing to try something

I'll pick it up and play it at some point this year

Live services games are even more winner takes all than ordinary games.

But the thing about most of the recent shut downs is that they were niche games that couldn't generate the publicity, bad games, or targeting the crowded mobile market.

Sony won't have that problem. They have a built in target market, a huge amount of talent at making games, and the ability to generate massive marketing pushes.

I'm sure there's going to be some flops, I'm sure there's going to be some bad games, and I would rather they didn't focus on live service games, but one or two successes won't be a bad thing. Playstation should serve a lot of users, and Sony should dip their toes in a lot of pools.

I'm not optimistic for a God of War show. So much of the game leans into the violence and adrenaline of the action to create it's feel. It would already be difficult to get the balance of that right for a TV show, and my suspicion is they're not even going to try.
The Last of Us, as a story, was a good story wherever it was told (even if the game will always tell it best). You remove the game from God of War, and I'm not convinced the story will hold up in the same way.

Very happy for them to change the combat up to be more action oriented. Combat in DA2 and DA:I was on the of the worse aspects of both.

Origins had good combat, but not so good that I'd ever replay it for the combat. If anything it's a bit of a barrier for a replay because some of the micromanagement gets tedious.

@The_Moose if you remember that the game development has been effectively rebooted three times now, that fits with the development of the Mass Effect timeline.

Apart from anything else, Switch physical games are much smaller than PS5 physical games. That's genuinely why I'm much more cautious about buying a physical PS5 game over a Switch one.

Also Switch games rarely get good sales (and as a result keep their resell value better). It makes more sense to buy it physically and potentially sell it on. I don't see the PS5 ever seriously challenging the software chart, even when it's install base gets much higher.

I picked up OW2 and I've been loving it. It's the first competitive multiplayer game to grip me since Rocket League.

Ranked is a lot less fun than QuickPlay however, and the experience of a newcomer getting ranked is utterly miserable. We started off with something like 7 defeats in a row with no idea of the level of our opponents and if the matchmaking was adapting. And you have to play a lot of QuickPlay games to even unlock it.

If the core game hadn't gripped me so much, my friend and I would have noped out of rank before we got our first win - weeks before we could see our actual rank.

I tried the game recently but ended up dropping it very shortly, it didn't click with me.

I will say I expected very little of the different backgrounds and the Corpo intro provided less than little.

The lack of people in the demo was a major turn off. It felt very artificial, like a world map which a collection of very video-gamey challenges in discrete points. That's not what I come to games for.

Put this down in the 'demos might hurt sales' camp, because I was relatively curious about the game before.

Mines been horizontal for 2 years, no issues. On the other hand the vibration and resistive triggers in the controllers sometimes feel like somethings gone wrong.

@Jmerbaugh I was genuinely disappointed when I learned Persona Strikers wasn't a football game

@Sam_ATLUS For me Arise it did everything well and nothing brilliantly. Combat is pretty fun, world is pretty beautiful, story is pretty straightforward but with something to work with.

I'd say it's easy to have fun with, but also not worth prioritising if you've got something interesting in your backlog.

Thanks for allowing me to not only not vote 5, but to put none of them at the top. I've only played 3 games on the list this year, and none of them felt worthy of Game of the Year

@Party_Cannon I love how everyone who uses the word snowflake is using it because they're annoyed that someone is getting criticised by others. The guy posted something on twitter, its totally valid for people to respond to it. If he doesn't want to hear the response, don't post on Twitter.

The game dev was thin skinned and has taken mild criticism of his game badly (Days Gone wasn't getting slated, it was getting called middle of the road at a time when we were tired of zombie games), other people called this dumb. Nothing about this warrants a lot of attention

Cal's fashion sense has improved