ThomasHL

@wiiware their media is as violent and gory as any. Compare Battle Royale to The Hunger Games. The western version is much more censored and less bloody.

It does seem like this level of censorship is true of videogames in Japan though - not just an Assassin's Creed thing.

@graymamba for Microsoft though, it was Gamepass or get out of the games industry altogether.

Nadella had no interest in spending a huge amount of capital and resource just to stay in an industry with a lot of competition and limited growth potential.

Now they've spend over a hundred billion, they'll probably stay in gaming if just to recover their investment, but if Nadella knew Gamepass wouldn't go anywhere, he'd have just axed the whole division

Give us Avowed!

Still going through Dragon Age: Veilguard. I'm in to photo modes now, so I keep stumbling on random NPCs who look great and spend half an hour snapping them

The line between ordinary game development and 'AI' is already pretty blurry. Making a tool that makes things that go in your game.

Assassin's Creed games where you spend more time on your horse than climbing don't feel like Assassin's Creed to me.

I'm not particularly hopeful about this one, but I'm ready to be surprised

Shame about no new game+. I'm quite interested in trying a different class and background

@Andee my tip is to not get too bogged down at the start. The story really begins to open up when you get all of the companions.

It'll be interesting to see what the PS6 can do that will even need exclusivity.

Unless they way up the RAM or do something very tricky with AI, I can't see many games requiring the extra power (even if the PS5 has to settle for 30 FPS 1080p)

I could tell you nothing of what this game is about. I don't know the hook, I don't know the genre, I don't know the story, I don't know the setting

I'm enjoying Veilguard a lot. The biggest problem is the beginning is very very slow, and low stakes. Once your recruit the Warden and start unlocking the major party member side missions the game really gets on a roll. The Dragon Age lore, and everything Solas does in particular is fantastic.

If you can find half a million words in a week, you weren't counting properly in the first place.

I've never really enjoyed the "Batman planned everything from the beginning" stories. Especially as it's usually something super high tech.

I prefer the idea that he's an incredibly smart man on the street level, picking up clues, reacting to the situation and planning on the fly - like a detective not a super scientist.

I always figured the story about Batman being prepared for the Justice League turning evil should have been about understanding their characters and planning based on that instead of supersonic bullets and magic neurotoxins

In the demo, I realised the most optimal thing (resource / calendar conservation) wise when you run out of SP, is do switch to mage and mindlessly grind out lower level enemies for a bit until it's recovered.

Does the game ever give you a better solution? SP was always unrecoverable in Persona.

This is the kind of thing companies shouldn't be able to patent. It's too broad and Sony probably haven't done the work to make this an actual reality.

The demo was great. Really living up to the idea of affecting the flow of a whole battlefield

47th for as Star Wars game is terrible.

I intend to play it one day, but I've got no urgency about it. The longer I wait the better the sale

Anyone able to confirm if the mobile gacha game Path To Nowhere took some inspiration from Freedom Wars setting?

Calling the characters "sinners" in a post-apocalyptic setting is making me wonder

Still going through Dragon Age: Veilguard, the story started slow but I'm into the good bits now.

I love how these games sway me into opinions I didn't start out with. I was very sympathetic to Solas in Inquisition, yet as I've played through, I've come to realise my Rook feels totally different

You get a similar affect with discounts. Valve talked about how a game going on discount could boost sales after the discount ended.

Lots of people buy the game during the discount. If it's good they talk about it to their friends, and their friends buy it. It makes sense.

Thing is there can be some subtle longer term effects. If I know games cycle in and out of discounts ~every 2 months (which is true), then after a while when my friends recommend the game, I'll just wait until the next discount.

@ATaco that is a much more interesting comment. But I mean Life is Strange one was super progressive. I can't really agree that the series has pushed much harder in that direction (because there wasn't much space left to go).

Out of interest, which games in the series did you drop off at? I can't say I felt a change in the politics, but I do think the writing and magic hasn't been the same since Before the Storm

@ED_209 that's sad news. And I can't imagine I'll play a NetEase MMO so it might be even longer before I get to see his work

@ATaco it's always the exact same comment copy pasted everywhere without a smigeon of interesting thought put into it.

Like this is a comment designed to be put on a new IP that flopped. And you've gone and added it to a franchise that has sold 20 million copies.

"Those people don't play games" the person says about a game series that has outsold even things like Space Marine.

Your meant to think about the situation and come up with a take that fits it. You can't just ctrl+c what your saw a thousand other people say before and expect it to make sense.

It's Robot Dinosaurs. That's a film I'd watch by itself. You don't even need to add "post-post apocalypse" to make it cool.

For the series itself, I still maintain that Forbidden West was a big downgrade in writing quality.

My belief is that John Gonzalez, the lead writer of Fallout: New Vegas and Zero Dawn is a genius at world building, and him leaving early in Forbidden West's cycle was a big loss.

Sadly he moved to a new Spanish studio who we've heard zilch from since.

@GymratAmarillo it's well known that one of the biggest problems in the world is we all have too much money. We're helplessly forced to buy games that we don't want to even see, never mind play because it's too painful to let all that money pile up. Also little known fact, Horizon is the only videogame series available to be purchased

The reviews turned me away. Which is a shame because I loved Before The Storm.

I'm more excited to see what DONTNOD do with their upcoming game

Kudos to Cyberpunk for being on the long-lifer list

Apparently a single legendary tier skin in Overwatch costs £50,000 to produce these days. 4k assets take a crazy amount to produce and animate.

Mugen Train made half a billion dollars in cinemas. They don't have to improve on that much to be a cinematic event.

Fully off unless I'm charging the controllers or downloading a game.

It's less power used and the PS5 is lightning quick to boot.

I've got zero interest in trophies, and I think it makes most sense to play games because you'll enjoy playing the game.

But some people do like the achievement hunt, so I think Sony should make it possible for devs to edit their platinums if a game goes offline, and devs with sincere intentions should use those features.

Love this, the story in Horizon: Zero Dawn is fantastic. Give me a Thunderjaw on screen and something like ZD's plot and I'm there.

If this is Cyberpunk: Edgerunners again, fantastic. But if it's a middle of the pack anime, I don't see what about Ghost's setting that would make it worth watching.

It's hard to judge, the studio and director have basically never made an anime before. On the other hand, the writer is one of the greatest - Madoka Magica, Fate/Zero, Psycho Pass

GameStop is an awful company that's awfully run, and it's baffling that as a society we've given them a free $2 billion from newly issued stock which they've just stuffed in their pockets instead of doing anything to try and save their failing company.

The only thing they reinvested in was an attempt at a NFT scam

The PC experience is getting way more plug and play. We're maybe a couple of years away from some kind of SteamOS box you can plug into your TV.

The PC marker has grown hugely, and there are regions of the world now where PC gaming is the default core gamer experience. Even Japan is getting more PC friendly.

PC gaming offers

• Cheaper games
• More games
• Mods (much better than you can get on consoles).

In the old days a lot of the arguments in this thread held true - and they still mostly do which is why I have a PS5 and not a PC. But I'm not convinced they'll hold true by the time a PS6 rolls around.

Ten years ago you'd have said "I get a console because they have more games in the style I like", outside of Nintendo that's a 100% not true now. Every indie and AA studio releases to Pc first. Every developer who avoided PC now releases on PC eventually.

In 5 years time, it will be as easy and intuitive to play on a PC on a TV in your living room as it will be on a console. And then they'll start taking bites out of Sony (Sony will still be around because they'll have a cheaper initial product, but there going to get pushed)

I don't have a twitter account, anyone happy to share those runners up?

It's between meh and not good. I don't think I'll play any of the games, but I could see myself checking out some on a rainy day if I'd played everything else already

I'm more into the PS3 era of Sony. Motorstorm, inFamous, Uncharted. Give us an Infamous 2 remaster

The one thing I'll say about Wuthering Waves is at least they're less coy about making their characters sexy, and the characters (mostly) look at little older.

Genshin has so many of those awful sexless-sexy anime designs where they've got massive tits but look and act like they'd blush if they held hands with someone.

@TedLassoNikes which is why I'm going to be very skeptical of getting a PS6.You need competition to keep prices down, and physical second hand is the only competition Sony has (and that is getting weaker by the year).

Nintendo have shown a company can keep their game prices high when there aren't other markets.

It's not really review bombing if the game is actually broken. I don't want to buy a game that doesn't work, whoever broke it

But it is a good example of how keeping software running isn't actually free. It's why game preservation is an uphill battle

I download every big gatcha game that comes out, but I'm beginning to develop a revulsion reflex to gacha UI.

As soon as they send you to that shop screen where there are ten tabs, with two mini tabs in each, and every single one has it's own currency, with a bunch of 'sales' and per month capped purchases, I'm out.

I love the PushSquare moderation. You guys find the exact right line to draw here

> it does re-confirm that the Rockstar release will have absurdly detailed visuals.

When will we learn? We'll know what GTA6 looks like when it's actually running on someone's hardware.

Pixel counting trailers a year before the game is even in a state ready to be released is a recipe for disappointment

The only category this year with truly top tier games from platinum through to bronze

"IP" is one of those business terms that shouldn't have leaked into the real world as much as it has. I don't play "intellectual property" and I don't watch "content".

I play game series, I like characters, I like stories, I like worlds.

Anyone got any suggestions of some other indie games that should be in the running in the category this year?

Nice to see Unicorn Overlord get some praise, it's such a great game

@MaelysLeFleau I've come across it quite a lot as a complaint about fantasy stories. Some stories chuck a lot of meaningless names at you without doing the groundwork to imbue them with meaning first.

"In the gogg'ark keep of Nazeroth the tweelibs guard the Omenspectre from the Zortle hordes"

Some stories can pull it off. Dune loves throwing proper nouns at the reader without explaining them, but Dune had a mad genius that made it work.

Even the PushSquare editorial team don't sound satisfied with the selections this year. A weak year for videogames and an especially weak one for open world games.

I don't think Metaphor's art direction is that brilliant. It's a big step down from the style, boldness and pop of the Persona games. And that makes the design of the 3D environments and dungeons more prominent - which are very generic and flat out ugly.

If we didn't have the history to know how much pedigree their art team has, Metaphor doesn't reach 2nd on this list.

I agree with other commenters that Zenless Zone Zero deserves a place. The game may have its issues but the art direction is top notch. Unicorn Overlord is another good shout