Weez

It's sad to see Team Ninja's fall from grace - they were a legitimately innovative studio. Nioh shows they can still make good action gameplay, it's just everything else that's gone to sh*t. Visual fidelity, optimisation and certainly business model.

@Northern_munkey Agreed. The only thing I found lacking, post 2.0 patch, was enemy variety which they've made a point of addressing in the sequel.

@Yor-sama What exactly am I distorting? MGS2 was called a bait and switch at launch. Nero got a lot of hate when DMC4 dropped. People are still salty about Ryu playing second fiddle in NG4. This isn't a new or surprising development.

@PuppetMaster You get one chance to make a first impression. Fail to adequately convey your product, and you often don't get another chance. People disengage. That's basic marketing.

Clear titling (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) or title cards ("from the world of..." etc) are common for this reason. If Laufey required more context, for whatever reason, the developer segment included in the announcement trailer was ideal. Instead, it's referred to as "the next core game in the series".

If you haven't gathered, I'm not encouraging negativity. I'm annoyed that entirely predictable negativity wasn't better managed. While I have mixed feelings on the game, I have no desire to see SMS suffer.

@PuppetMaster Unless you really enjoyed the announcement trailer, or have time to kill, chances are you're not going to seek out developer interviews. I say annoying because it could have been avoided with a single title card in the opening 10 seconds of the trailer most would see. Either way, no biggie.

Finally, something wholesome

@PuppetMaster I think you overestimate how much free time the average gamer has, and how many spend it watching developer interviews for games that have already lost their interest. Personally, I only saw the reveal trailer, in which Barlog referred to it as the next core game in the series.

@PuppetMaster To be fair, a number of those received similar backlash. People get attached to franchises, and Kratos was God of War for two decades. Add in the seeming tonal shift, and it likely rubbed some people the wrong way.

Annoyingly, it could have been avoided by better communicating that it was a spin-off.

@Oram77 I'm guessing they're using Unreal 5's MetaHumans; It's a bit like a character creator on roids - allowing small/inexperienced teams to create "realistic" characters, but often without the time/skill required to make something not squarely situated in the uncanny valley.

Dunno, I think it might just work for a horror game...

First-person makes sense for anything inherently subjective - reviews, retrospectives. Third-person objective is a better fit for news - so long as the content is neutral. Objective framing is only an issue when authors use it to push their opinions and biases.

Maybe just separate the two? Concise news, followed by an opinion paragraph/section. Your opinions, in regards to an industry you've spent years/decades in, obviously add value. As for Gemini, it's contrived at best and hallucinates more than Leary.

Ghost in the (Stellar) Shell. Sweet.

I used to think development was better entrusted to humans; Then they decided to include a talking gelatinous cube as a sidekick in one of my favourite dark fantasy franchises.

Roll on, clankers.

I'm conflicted. The combat looks good - what I would have liked to see in the Norse saga. Against that, they've finally succeeded in turning God of War into a Disney attraction. I really wish the infantilization of mature properties would stop.

@Rich33 The service verifies identity via your cell provider, which in turn verifies via your payment details. It's effective in deanonymizing you, which is why it's an option to begin with.

@Dogbreath I'm not disagreeing with it being in Sony's best interests, only that those interests align with my own. Sony isn't some plucky underdog; They're a massive, multi-national corporation better positioned to resist policy than you or I. Every "understandable" or "acceptable" implementation of digital surveillance is further normalization - paving the way for those which are not.

@Dogbreath I have to disagree. A negligent parent will just authorise the account for their kids. As will many good parents. It's a moronic notion of "safety", entrusted to a government that has repeatedly demonstrated itself the most unfit of guardians. It's a foot through the door, argued on a basis they know is sympathetic.

The Outer Worlds... Wasn't that the satire of corporatist greed and incompetence?

@Hyena_socks Mid-size studio, big world, UE5. I don't think you're paranoid. The PC requirements where quite high, as well, but fingers crossed.

@11001100110zero
> I like to avoid being overly complicated in replies.

> PS5s 8 core cpu could easily make it work. Just need a "lite" translation layer like proton for Linux. That's it.

Simple's great until it's outright misleading. The way modern systems are fast (cache friendly, branch predictable, IEEE-compliant instructions with implicit caching of coherent shared memory) is orthogonal to how SPEs where fast (branch hinted, relaxed IEEE-compliance vector processing on local scratch memory, with explicit DMA, semi-deterministic timing and hardware synchronisation mechanisms that just don't exist on host architectures). PS3 emulation has to address those differences - often at significant cost.

Sony, on paper, has opportunities RPCS3 doesn't. Hardware DMA, a fixed platform with kernel-level scheduler control and impressive memory bandwidth. I think the fact that Sony hasn't delivered, despite demand, is telling. Whether it's hardware limitations or the engineering difficulty of providing a consistent quality floor in light of them, it's certainly not easy.

@TheDudeElDuderino I wouldn't say Sony killed it. GPGPU just succeeded it for compute tasks, while modern CPUs with wide registers, deep pipelining and out-of-order execution are considerably better suited to sizable sequential workloads while being easier to develop for. There's only so much you can vectorize, after all.

The tiny local stores on SPEs, even with good buffering, are severely dependent on bandwidth. Clusters only worked for a small subset of computing (very high compute-to-data ratio). Your fridge, sadly, was never going to give you a FPS boost.

@Skinny-Pete Hindsight is fun like that. It allowed for some great games at the time though, and helped inform the co-processor design in the PS5, so that's cool.

If you've got a relatively powerful PC, emulation handles most PS3 and good number of PS4 games really well. It's already the best way to play Bloodborne. RPCS3 has seen some major improvements recently, and will continue to improve; We'll have emulation, it might just take a little while.

@11001100110zero Proton for Linux isn't emulation, it's a software compatibility layer. Windows games expect windows functionality; Proton translates calls to these, allowing games to work on Linux. There is the Proton ARM emulation, though ARM and x86-64 are conceptually similar architectures, making emulation practical.

@Skinny-Pete It's less a matter of power, and more a matter of architectural alignment. Processors execute a set of instructions in a particular way. SPE's operate entirely differently to modern CPUs, an intentional engineering choice, but one that makes them brutally inefficient to emulate.

@cainhurst94 I felt the same way with Eternal - the lore is uninteresting and the emphasis on story feels out of place in a Doom game. 2016 was a nice balance.

@kcarnes9051 Your argument is predicated on cultivation theory, and treats conjecture like fact. That's why I replied.

The idea that sexualised characters shape real-world interactions, based on the flawed assumption that we passively absorb content, is disputed in traditional media. Evidence is weak correlation with questionable methodology - no proof that it originates in media consumption, plenty of paradoxical findings against it. In games, results are less compelling still - it's not a passive medium. Regardless, cultivation theory is consistently the basis of censorship campaigns because people assume it fact.

My response was general because "poor mental health for both", and arguments in that vein, are not limited to Stellar Blade; That failed assumption, and the reactionary response that follows, influences a lot more than character design. It's why games like VTMB (sexism, sexualisation, racism, problematic portrayals of mental illness), Morrowind (xenophobia, caste systems, colonialism, institutional slavery) and any number of iconic games wouldn't be made today. Those are all from critics, arguing real world harm using the same logic.

Then there's dysphoria. Concern assumes that reduced self-value is a healthy response to clearly stylized, fictional pixels. It's not, and those with good self-concept clarity, the majority, do not experience it. For those who do, it's a symptom, not the cause, and "fixing" videogames will not change that. The sad irony is that psychological resilience, which overreaching "sensitivity" undermines, is one of the proven means of guarding against self-perception issues - including unrealistic body standards.

Thanks for the concern, but I'm quite conformable with my viewing. I don't use fictional entertainment to inform my perception of reality, I simply see it as fiction. I'd imagine Stellar Blades sizable female player-base does the same.

@kcarnes9051 That's a lot of conjecture in there:

• Cultivation theory in interactive media is a theory. Established by questionable research, subsequent attempts have struggled to replicate it/noted paradoxical findings.
• Recent polling and studies demonstrate that the overwhelming majority of men and women (84+ %) favour attractive / idealised protagonists over "average" ones
• Body positivity is a minefield; Individuals with high self-concept clarity are unaffected. Those with low SCC are vulnerable - in games, IRL, everywhere. Studies that demonstrated a non-negligible decrease in dysphoria where unrealistic and fleeting - total social media isolation, exposure only to media devoid of any emphasis on appearance.

We're constantly finding new ways to constrain escapism and sanitize fictional worldbuilding based on hypothetical worst-case scenarios or ideals rooted in the real world; We then complain about the lack of creativity/identity/verisimilitude or simple fun in those fictional worlds. Rather than stifling creativity on the off chance that it's beneficial, would effort not be better directed at the cause, not the symptom?

Outsourcing oppinions isn't a good idea, but it's also not a new development. A large part of the audience now just looks to streamers, rather than traditional media, to form them.

As for promoting biased oppinions, it hasn't even been a day since PushSquare published their last hitpiece; And I legitimately consider them to be less egregious than most in that regard. So, glass houses, and all of that.

Live service, passing resemblance to Horizon, derivative gameplay, stylized hambeasts as characters. Sorry Guerrilla, I've been with you since Killzone, but this is a definite no.

@LiamCroft Boris Vallejo and Frank Frazetta are widely regarded as two of the most influential fantasy illustrators of all time. The idea that Sword and Sorcery in a similar vein has no market, or is inherently embarrassing, is silly.

If you don't like it? No worries. Hit-pieces masquerading as news, on the other hand, are just trash.

What about the writing and world-building? A VtM:B game can be a lot of things; Toothless isn't one of them.

Yeah, no thanks. Why anyone would allow Adi Shankar within a mile of their IP baffles me.

@Flaming_Kaiser Except AI, and even Generative AI are broad descriptors. You're assessing the potential of a whole field of research based solely on your exposure to a small subset: prompt-based diffusion models. You're then claiming that experience is evidence as to why something fundamentally different, in it's infancy, shares the same fate. At the very least, that's endlessly pessimistic.

There are legitimate concerns - advancements in traditional rendering stagnating, quality being paywalled behind hardware capable of neural rendering, differences in the final image when each vendor has its own implementation. That's not to say it isn't worth investigating when traditional rendering is proving itself incapable of the next visual leap alone.

@Scribedby It's legitimately impressive how far Sony's come in just two generations, and I'm stoked to have quality upscaling on my PS, but there's still work to be done. PSSR 2 falls behind even older versions of DLSS in all arenas - stability, image quality and performance. Here's to hoping subsequent generations continue to close the gap.

@zebric21 Overlooking hardware differences between pro and base, AMD hardware is used throughout the console market. I can understand Sony choosing to dedicate resources to tech that'll only benefit their platforms moving forward.

@Dogbreath I wouldn't read too much into the 2 x 5090 claim. Over-allocating resources during tech demo's is the norm, and "development" neural networks are oversized as a result of over-parameterisation.

Before release, unnecessary connections are pruned, knowledge is distilled into a smaller network and weights quantized. It's not uncommon to see a 10x reduction in memory usage. What the final requirements will be - I can't say. Given that it was advertised as for use on a single card within the "5000 series", not on the 5090, I wouldn't be surprised if it comes with quality presets not unlike previous DLSS versions.

@ElkinFencer10 Yeah, I understand the concerns and criticisms - I love the medium and don't want to see it reduced to generative slop, nor do I want to see people lose their jobs. It's an industry I worked in for quite some time. But it's sad to see promising technologies rejected solely based on misunderstanding and classification errors.

An interesting, little discussed use that is starting to see adoption, is Neural Physics. Complex simulations need a lot of iterations to converge on the "right answer". By "guessing" the outcome in the initial iteration, one can solve the system in drastically fewer iterations, allowing for simulations that where otherwise impossible in real-time.

@somnambulance I don't think it will. DLSS saw similar negativity when it first released, and it's now a staple.

@Flaming_Kaiser There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding in regards to how upscalers work. Both existing upscalers and DLSS 5 effectively create details that don't exist based on generative AI - it's why DLSS 4.5 can produce stable, faithful output from as low as 240p input.

Unlike diffusion models like midjourney or stable diffusion, which effectively guide randomness towards coherent patterns using prompt weightings, all generation is directed by the games rendered output - current and historical frames.

Previous upscalers "guessed" missing high frequency details to increase resolution. DLSS 5 goes further, inferring surface dynamics (cloth sheen, subsurface scattering, eye specularity, etc.) and lighting phenomena. It doesn't make "generic" characters, because it doesn't modify their assets. Any perceived inconsistencies are either the result of lighting changes or unintentional artifacts - a product of this being an early developer preview of a first generation tech, achieved by hastily retrofitting it into existing titles. The AI filter look is a matter of poor integration and refinement, not a limitation of the technology.

What is affected in a scene, exposure and color grading preferences and the general "style" - that's all developer configurable. It doesn't undermine art direction, because in future releases, it will be part of the art direction process - much like existing post-processing stacks.

I understand the instinctive backlash - the promotional material was pretty jarring. With that said, much of it is misplaced, and Playstation will inevitably be adopting neural rendering moving forward.

• This is literally the first commercial implementation of holistic neural rendering, done by retrofitting existing games with it. DLSS5 has extensive developer controls and results will improve rapidly. This will become part of the pipeline, with assets and integration tweaked to produce the intended art direction, not undermine it.
• Artistic intent and output differ and modern high fidelity games are already impossible/impractical to make without extensive machine assistance. Photogrammetry for geometry and micro-expressions, procedural generation, projected micro-displacements rather than hand detailing, mocap, and yes, AI texturing). There are limits to what one can do by hand, especially given production deadlines, and so the industry adapts to meet gamers demands.
• Traditional rendering approaches have major fidelity constraints - pixel/fragment density and the limitations of microfacet models. For "photorealism" or Pixar-quality stylized results, you have to super-sample, render considerably above normal resolutions, with more expensive shaders and higher texture resolutions than is feasible. The industry has moved in the opposite direction, with sub-native internal resolutions given the massive computational cost of a lot of shading techniques (e.g real-time GI).
• DLSS5 is an implementation of neural rendering. It will progress, and others will be developed. There's nothing to say that integration won't be considerably less prominent - compensating for little more than the limitations of traditional rendering.
• Much of the uncanniness comes from the juxtaposition of high-fidelity character rendering alongside lower quality animation and dynamics. The look of the skin isn't a limitation of the technology, it's a product of training data and biases.

I'm interested to see where it goes in time. There are major hurdles to improving fidelity, and this is one way over them.

@Nnfyrbsnss Yeah, maybe I have to see it in motion, but to me, it's about as "gorgeous" as a Jackson Pollock. Lots of visual noise, and random world objects are given the high-contrast treatment. Looks visually confusing more than anything, which is a weird choice for the genre.

@RoomWithaMoose They all feature millenial culture. Later games, the reboot most egregiously, feature millenial writing (in the derogatory sense)

That's what happens when you take a millennial sized dump on a franchise.

9.5 - complaints only with some optimisation issues and the Katana engine showing its age. Excellent game.

@crossbit I felt much the same - used the sword a lot in 2 and losing stances felt off to begin with. Once I started using it for positioning and tool deployment, treating it more like a separate stance, it plays incredibly well. If you're looking for ideas, I found this quite useful.

@KundaliniRising333 The open area in the demo is apparently quite representative of performance. The full game is downloading as we speak, so I'll be able to comment more later.

As for whether it's worth it, I'm admittedly biased. I slept on Nioh, tried 2 and didn't see what the fuss was about until I saw high-level play and poked around trying to figure out how to replicate it. Combat is very different to other soulslikes, with the depth of any 3 of them combined, and is at its best when you play aggressively as opposed to opportunistically. Nioh 2 now has one of my favourite combat systems of all time, with 3 looking to improve on it.

Just look at what people are already doing with it

@KundaliniRising333 4080 and 14700k at QHD/120fps. Having tried it on PS, it plays better on PC so long as the framerate's locked, but it's more demanding than it should be. Try the demo, and play a good bit of the open world - performance seems to vary drastically based on CPU.

@Rich33 Yeah definitely, and not all that surprising for a TN port if we're being honest - Nioh 2 was worse at launch but ultimately shaped up pretty well. I'll give the demo a try on the PS tonight and pick it up there if everything is alright, double dipping when they get the PC version sorted out.

Despite their technical shortcomings, I adore Team Ninja combat.

@Rich33 I tried it on PC, and can confirm there are some issues - notably, a stutter when playing with an unlocked framerate. I'm playing locked 120fps and its smooth, but it gets fairly demanding in terms of CPU usage once you reach the open world. Older hardware might struggle a bit at that point. Noticed a bit of a slowdown during one of the particle heavy crucibles as well. I'll be doing a PS5 playthrough this weekend, so can't speak to its performance just yet.

Really can't wait for this one.

Calling Nioh 3 a souls-like is reductive. It has some of the meta elements (corpse runs, checkpoints, stamina-influenced combat), but the combat is closer to a character action game. If you play it like a souls-like, you're diminishing your own enjoyment.

There are legitimate concerns with how things are - access journalism, embargos, the four-point scale and how a number of reviewers are incapable of compartmentalising personal sentiments unrelated to gameplay when scoring a game.

This addresses none of them, and is a terrible idea. I'm not sure what the answer is; While following reviewers who's tastes you agree with works on an individual level, it doesn't help the industry when outlet scores guide executive decisions.

@nessisonett Kratos is an original character, designed by Charlie Wen. Voice and performance actors where chosen for characteristics they wanted in the character. TC Carson, Brandon Molale and Joseph Gatt suited the original games. Christopher Judge and Shad Gaspard where chosen for the more grounded Kratos in the Norse era. No actor owns the character, or has any bearing on his explicitly Spartan ancestry.

@TheGreyandTheRed Agreed, he was really good in SoA. Kid actors are always a wildcard, and this isn't an easy casting.

@Frmknst I'm legitimately interested in why you think 2 is amongst the best of games?

Personally, I'm of the mind that games that attempt to replicate film are at a disadvantage. A real-time camera system can't hope to match the expressive potential of a well designed shot-list. Environments have to be practical and intuitive, placing significant constraints on design and lighting relative to film sets. Sound design has to be systemic - even at its most curated, responding to triggers in a linear game, it's still limited compared to film, where sound design and scoring is done over finalised scenes.

Games have their own strengths - interactivity, agency and increased embodiment as a result. To me, it was an interesting exercise, and a remarkable achievement in terms of presentation, but largely failed to exploit the format beyond the length/depth games allow for. That is, I'm glad it exists, and that people are experimenting with the medium, but don't see it as an exceptional use of it, if that makes sense.

@BionicDodo That's the critic score, audience scores where lower at 7.4. It saw some attention, owing to it launching on GamePass, but quickly dropped off, with only about a third of players completing it. Steam performance was dismal. I'm with Sammy on this one.

It's a lovingly made niche game - some enjoyed the interactive experience, many wanted more gameplay in their game. Personally, I'd be interested to see if they can keep the strong visual direction while working in their action pedigree.

@PuppetMaster Psychological horror is a genre that many games fit into. The Evil Within 2 includes psychological horror, clumsy combat, symbolism, an otherworld and grotesque monsters - but it's not Silent Hill. It lacks the tone, dream-like quality, sparse exposition, subtlety and specific lore that made Silent Hill unique - similar to Silent Hill: F.

Silent Hill had a distinct identity. Before Short Message, everything tied back to the location (2, Downpour, Shattered Memories), the cult (1, 3, Homecoming), or its rituals (SH4). There was a central mythos. It also had an established tone, and the further games strayed from this (i.e. early western-developed entries), the worse they were received. Post-Short Message, it's the "Silent Hill Phenomenon" - any place with collective trauma gets fog and monsters. SH:F muddies this further - from mental illness and hallucinogenic capsules to Shinto gods in a conflict that may predate the phenomenon, to the original "powerful land" trope, and lazy allusions to vessels and White Claudia. Allegories are now spelled out in objective messages. Visual metaphors are explained through verbose monologues as they play out. My issue isn't F's premise - it's with shoehorning its disparate tone and unrelated ideas into an established franchise, undermining both. Just make a new IP. Konami won't though - corporate concern for the franchise is exemplified by Silent Hill pachinko machines.

"Actual gameplay" refers to the game loop. Stamina is a vague notion - battle royale and horror games both use it. How it interacts with mechanics, in part, determines the character's capability and the combat framing. Stamina is present in earlier entries, though more subtly and always to punish. In F, alongside perfect dodges and other ARPG staples, stamina establishes a combat flow more consistent with that of an action game, allowing aggressive play and extended attack chains with a little skill. Enemy frequency further reinforces this. Konami makes no pretences here - they explicitly stated that they sought to introduce "thrilling" action combat to appeal to younger audiences, selecting Neobards partly due to their history of producing action games.

As I said, it's a good enough game, but good enough to stand on its own - not to further dilute an already mishandled property solely for the sake of marketing convenience.

@PuppetMaster I don't think they should remove the fog; It just draws superficial comparisons, and if removed, I feel there is very little in tone or execution to tie it to the main series. That's my point.

1-4 are rooted in individual psychology - just not always the protagonists. SH1 is a manifestation of Alessa's personal hell. 4 is a projection of the antagonists psyche. Tangible though, possible due to the town and cult. F does bear superficial similarities to the series, but departs significantly, lacks all subtlety and has no direct connection to the property. Silent Hill is now just fog and monsters.

Stamina had little impact on actual gameplay in the originals, and perfect dodges (or stamina meters) didn't push it into action game territory. SH3 also had magical girl transformations and "sexy beams" as unlockable mechanics - maybe not the best indicator of intended tone. Combat simply wasn't foremost, and on higher difficulties never felt empowering. Being good at souls-likes, I was unstoppable from the outset in F. In subsequent playthroughs, I did no-damage boss runs on hard. The frequency of combat coupled with the action-oriented gameplay undermines the atmosphere the setting succeeds in establishing. I mean, play/watch a Kyubi boss fight and tell me your first thought is "Silent Hill".

The series has tried different things, but while maintaining a common style. Ambiguity, the eerie uncanniness, sparse dialogue and weird delivery, atmospheric story telling, trusting the audience to understand it. F changes nearly everything, all at once. Why force it into the franchise, other than marketing?

@PuppetMaster Silent Hill F is an interesting one. It's a good enough game; I just think if you removed the fog, and released it under another name, no one would have thought to call it a Silent Hill clone. And while I disliked the wolf-arm, that has very little to do with it.

Gone is the trauma rooted in an individual in favour of collective trauma. Gone is the desperate or clumsy combat in favour of perfect dodges and stamina meters. Gone are the motifs of decay, replaced with growth. Gone is the Lynchian storytelling and execution, replaced with wordy, explicit J-Horror.

The last point is likely why it'll never feel like a "proper" Silent Hill game. That IS Silent Hill, at least to me.