ThomasHL

Now we know why Ghosts of Yotei got a release date

I feel like I'm missing a piece of information. Is the US price adjusted for tariffs? Has there been wild inflation in the supply chain? Have sales slipped below some threshold which means they don't get efficiencies of scale?

I just don't understand how Microsoft would charge more for a lower power console. The must still prefer someone buys an Xbox, right? Someone who owns an Xbox is more likely to get Gamepass than someone who owns a PS5.

That two minute trailer is a minute too long

@GeeEssEff Loads of currencies is such a turn-off these days. Don't make the game look like an accountancy project

Fortiche have really started a new movement with their Arcane aesthetics

I'm up for it, but it's got to have an edge to it.

A generic XCom clone isn't going to suck me in. Show me why it's cool that it's Star Wars

Bungie makes good games, and I've never played an extraction shooter, so I'd like to try it out.

But I can't but something to 'try it out' so it's going to depend a lot on what other people say once the game comes out

Chris Avellone was easily Obsidian's best writer. I know there are a lot of Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2 fans out there, but to my mind Obsidian haven't topped Tyranny in a long while.

And if you look at the things he's been involved with since (admittedly, not as the creative lead) - Divinity Original Sins 2, Prey, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Jedi Fallen Order ... those are good stories

@Puketapu this isn't really the same genre as rivals. It's an extraction shooter - so more focus around sessions of co-op based PvE but where you risk encountering other players DayZ style

I don't even know what I'd want from a Minecraft movie?

I think something Lego Movie / Barbie movie esque - about creativity and the way people interact with each other in Minecraft.

But it's not like the Mario movie where just seeing the visuals of Mario is pleasant enough, or Sonic where you have actual characters to tell stories about

I don't enjoy weapon durability except where the game is literally designed around picking it up, bashing a few times, and then grabbing something else (The Last Of Us style).

This sounds like the worst. I hate the busy work of repairing weapons midfight. If I'm struggling against a boss I don't want to also think about my weapon durability.

If I can keep a weapon long enough to grow attached to it, don't take it away from me. It's unpleasant timewasting

@themightyant it's sad that Red Faction Guerilla is still the benchmark to beat on destructible environments. That's a 16 year old game!

I rarely buy games on release so it doesn't affect me either way.

Companies can charge what they like for games. I've got something like 40+ high quality games on my wishlist. I can wait and I'll buy it at a price I feel is good for me.

Pentiment isn't a particularly console game - being so test heavy.

I enjoyed it, and I loved the stylism, but it did the LA Noire murder mystery structure which I hate - where you know there is a bigger figure behind the murders (and I knew who it was one from early in Act One) but you can't do anything about it and are forced to ignore it until the end of the game.

This is going to go under the radar if they don't show off more

...and if there isn't more to show.

I'm excited for Cairn - the next game from the makers of Haven, focused on physics based rock climbing

It's probably coming out in 2029. They're not going to announce a later game before an earlier one.

I don't want TLOU3. I'd be happy with another Uncharted, I don't really mind who the protagonist is. My preference would still be for a new game over a sequel

@Northern_munkey Ah sorry! Thank you for the patient reply

@Northern_munkey if you read the article though, the actual detail of the article is interesting here.

He wasn't saying games shouldn't be long, which is mostly what I took away from your comment.

He was using it more in the sense that the time you spend in the game should be challenging and meaningful. And that's good right? RPGs have always had too much filler. But he's also saying repeating levels isn't meaningful and that's where I'm not so sure. Then again Persona traditionally mixed repeating levels with One Hit Kill attacks from random mooks, which was very *****.

Also Metaphor has one of the most time wasting features of the series: that you can regen SP by grinding in dungeons (very slowly). That's the kind of time wasting I could do without.

@Northern_munkey you were very passionate for someone not actually talking about the article. I think what Goto is saying is interesting because it's about more than just length - it's about battles feeling difficult enough to be interesting but also not repeating whole dungeons like early Personas.

The first bit I'm definitely on board with, but im not sure either way whether repeating battles is the sweet spot, or repeating one level of a dungeon.

@Northern_munkey Does the rewind feature on Metaphor genuinely bother you this much?

Or was this just a kind of general topic, less about what Goto was saying here. Because he's not saying people want short RPGs - Metaphor is not a short RPG.

I'm not convinced Goto is right though. The souls genre is also the most popular thing around at the moment, so it's not like people are afraid of repeating things.

@Boxmonkey if Tencent are putting a billion into the new company, they can't be that mad.

My guess would be that this company is 25% owned by Tencent and 75% owned by Ubisoft (as it's still an Ubisoft subsidiary). If that's how it works, Tencent basically own 62.5% of the new company.

In which case maybe Tencent initiated the move, because they don't want to invest a billion into the sinking ship - just the valuable stuff.

I think I've only played two PS5 games this entire generation that were actual current gen only games.

Elsewhere they've also got breakdowns of platform splits and physical media versus digital media.

The majority of their sales for The Witcher are on PC (43%) followed by playstation (38%) in 2024. You can see the absolute collapse of Xbox - they had 23% of Witcher 3 sales in 2015 and only 8% by 2024.

When the Witcher 3 launched in 2015, 21% of it's consoles sales were digital. When Cyberpunk launched in 2020, 75% of it's consoles sales were digital.

Three caveats to the last one 1) It was 2020, so COVID, way less people going to stores 2) This doesn't count people who bought second hand copies 3) Console sales were terrible generally at launch because the game ran terribly

Haven is one of those games that has stuck with me long after I played it.

It had a really lovely atmosphere and it was so good at capturing a really sincere relationship. Skating around the world to that music never got old.

Development costs = staff wages * man hours to make the game.

People look a lot at the second bit of that (time to make game) but not so much at the first part.

Warhorse Studios pays their senior artists $20,000 a year - and that's fine because $20,000 is a nice salary in the Czech Republic. If people's salaries are 7 times lower, the game costs 7 times less to make.

Japan's salaries have been pretty statistic for a long time, which has helped keep Japanese development costs lower.

I suspect similarly, you'd find development costs in the UK haven't risen nearly as much as the US.

Even CD Projekt were helped with their start by much lower salaries in Poland back in the day

In the end, it might be uncomfortable for studios in the richer nations, but globally we're going to see more and more companies in less rich regions make great games. Tech skills are universal now, you can make a great game anywhere.

Children of Morta complete edition is £5.50.

This is a beautiful co-op roguelike that's my go to game with a friend. The co-op is offline based, but that's even better because with share play you can play it online even if only one person needs to own a copy.

Fun combat, great characters, heaps of heart

(it's already on Extra if you have that. But I found I was only using Extra for Morta, so it was cheaper just to buy it)

I recommend checking out the full interview. They've got a really interesting perspective. They talked about how dangerous it is to work directly on tie-in games (because the film directors/producers can and do kill the projects if it doesn't fit their taste).

They mention how clueless execs can be (a WB exec asked for some bullet points explaining the plot of Lord of the Rings - even though LotR was one of WBs most successful properties owned).

And they talked about how important it is to keep teams together and how hard that is. She says she actually stepped down when WB asked her to make a second round of redundancies because she wasn't prepared to do it again. And they used the distraction of her stepping down to delay the redundancies until WB got out of the tight spot and didn't need to make them.

@themightyant just to be clear, what I was implying is that it's crazy to make such a big outcry over a game before it even came out.

I agree that we don't know sales figures and it's fine to wait on them, but the fact of the matter is some people declared the game a failure before anyone had even played it, and that was silly then, and it's silly now.

Maybe we could start a new tradition where we actually wait for a game to release before we declare it broke.

@lazarus11 that's mostly just wages though. The average household income in the Czech Republic is $11,700.

In the US it's $80,600 dollars. If it costs 7 times more to employ someone, the game is going to cost a lot more.

(Incidentally 60 million times 7 is 420 million).

Warhorse studios pays a senior artist $20,000 a year. No-one in the US is going to accept that.

That's why more and more game development is getting offshored to countries with lower wages.

Every Saints Row game was a mess, but some of them were hot messes

I didn't know the writer of Metro 2033 had to flee Russia. Massive respect to him for sticking to his morals even when they can literally get you killed

There are already plenty of great games about faith and religion. I'm definitely up for it.

A lonely game? Not quite so up for it. Naughty Dog have been on a bit of a downer streak.

This is all about the details. Consoles already are 'essentially PCs'. The question is all about exactly what they do that is more PC like.

Running windows would be big. But even then how locked down is it? What's the interface like? Is this the only 'Xbox'? Are they going to do time exclusives?

There are variations of a "console for your TV" that I'd be very interested in. But if so I want access to Steam and mods, and it has to work well with a controller.

I don't think it's that weird that Skylines 2 would struggle to run over other games. Comparing it to Kingdom Come is apples and oranges. It's a super detailed simulationist game, that will push CPUs as hard as it can.

The total number of NPCs KC is running AI for at any one moment would fill like half of one street of Skylines. They're doing different things.

In an ordinary hack and slash, if you want to free up power you can just drop some pixels or cut some NPCs and it doesn't make a difference to the core gameplay. In the skylines the game is the NPCs route finding, you can't drop it.

I know generally longer games sell better, and a lot (most?) people like their value, but I'm firmly in the wrap everything up in 30 hours camp.

An 80 hour game will literally take me more than a month to complete.

Shouldn't it be easy for other scoopers to confirm or deny this? If Infinity Ward have devkits, loads of people will have seen them.

What a weird decision to add a third person shooter to a Twisted Metal game.

But I'm like the other comments - some kind of massive deathmatch Twisted Metal actually sounds fun

I'm a little burned because I bought Veilguard full price. But objectively it's a much better month than they normally have.

Not everyone is going to enjoy Veilguard, but hopefully this is a chance for the people who would enjoy it to give it a try. It's not a top tier RPG, but there are plenty of game not at the top tier which are still enjoyable.

Quidditch flopping doesn't get talked about enough. Warner Bros were talking about needing to focus more on the core-st of core IPs, and focusing on live service over single player.

But their live service game with their most valuable IP still flopped.

People want very specific things from franchises. People want to go to Hogwarts, not play a sport game that was never meant to be a workable sport. You can't just slap an IP on something, and force a particular type of games and expect it to work.

I've really enjoyed Veilguard. I can see it's faults, but it's so far away from the trainwreck that it's made out to be. There is some cheesy and middle of the road writing, but there are also some great moments. Emmerich in particular is a top notch Bioware companion.

Tips for anyone playing it: the start is slow and the weakest part, once you recruit the Warden companion it picks up. If I played it again I wouldn't do as many side missions before I'd got everyone unlocked

I didn't realise they had Gail Simone on it. I'm doubly disappointed now

@ShogunRok thanks for the answer. Sadly that rules it out for me. It's what killed off my worlds play through. At least you've saved me some money!

@ShogunRok do you need a certain level of story progress to play co-op with someone? Can you play a level later in the game that your friend is at but you haven't reached yet?

Is it possible to play the game co-op only? Are you going to have to do single player at some point?

@Batesy125s I feel 3 and 4 had better stories than 5. 5 nailed the UI design and battle system (also I appreciated that it was a bit more forgiving with calendar management)

@MrPeanutbutterz resolution only makes a difference if your TV had the pixels and is big enough for you to see them. You can already get a stable refresh rate on a base PS5

The diminishing returns are hitting hard. You really have to have an expensive TV to make the PS5 pro worth it. And even then, I couldn't tell you at a glance that the game is being played on a pro.

With the PS4 pro you might get it for the 60 FPS alone

I give zero ***** about whether Assassin's Creed has a canon either way.

I don't make choices in RPGs because I believe I'm scripting the games official events or anything. I make choices because the act of deciding is interesting.

Even with games with bigger consequences, I don't mind if the developer wants to make some route canon in the sequel. I'd rather they tell a good story in the new game than hamstring themselves by only being vague about the past.

This always the trick to when a publishers says they're "hands off" "leaving them their independence" etc. There are more subtle ways to change a company than laying down the law. You can let your desires be known and people will try to match them. You can make sure the hiring choices for the top posts are people who want to do what you want.