crossbit

No surprise, on countless fronts. More recent developments may have been the final nail in the coffin, but having dipped in and out of it since the Closed Beta on PC, it's a game that never really overcame its "oh crap, Capcom announced Monster Hunter World" panic from way back then, and just seemed to make (mostly) bad decisions to try and re-invent itself.

Please, even his own wording bookmarking that statement makes it rather clear that the AA market didn't disappear, Sony execs just made the conscious choice to sideline it. They were looking for AAA, big-expense-big-profit titles and refused to give anything less the time of day, it's right there.

Sigh, 10 years of hoping in vain that they'll give us a single-player/co-op focused R6 again; as someone who does not generally enjoy competitive multiplayer, Seige can never scratch the itch of what I loved about Lockdown and the Vegas series. I spent so much time across both the campaign modes and Terrorist Hunt and would love to again (unless they flooded it with microtransactions, which modern Ubisoft would be almost guaranteed to do).

Between the current state of WB, and Rocksteady's output from Knight onwards, it won't see the light of day.

A person with no information on the matter yells at other people to remind them that they have no information on the matter.

....Yep, sure, this is newsworthy, right?

I will simply say that after the story of Rebirth, Kitase having confidence in what they've written doesn't give me any. I may pick it up for other reasons still, but for all of the extra plot macguffins, rugpulls, and attempts at plot-twists, the changes to the plot in Rebirth were a hot mess of wasted potential.

@naruball The human cost of committing entire studios to such projects and then rapidly shuttering them in response, however...

@ATaco Yeah, respectfully, this was very much a case of "knowing exactly who wrote this 'hot take' from the headline alone". Other writers fall prey to it too, but... yes.

And in one final flourish, the illusion that they'd for once resisted the urge to mention GTA was shattered.

Honestly, I'd love to still be a physical-copy gamer. If only GAME hadn't wiped out or bought out most of their competition bar CEX and then worsened the instore experience year on year, maybe I still would be.

Once buying games on Amazon ended up being the more reliable and enjoyable option, and with the physical options themselves losing all of the extras (...I miss being able to thumb through a physical instruction manual, and by the time I finished buying physical you'd be lucky to get a single sheet), there just wasn't much of a point anymore to avoiding digital versions. I loved physical games for browsing a wide selection of them and the, well, physicality of it all, and both publishers and vendors completely lost touch with that; a boxed game nowadays is like a good book printed on bog roll, sadly.

@Dalamar ....Would you rather they wasted time updating the demo build instead of putting all possible resources into the current one, or?

I get the scepticism, but if in doubt just wait for reviews. If they have done what they said they have - and lets just say that the developers didn't get so popular with their audience over the years by lying to them - then they used their time exactly as they should have.

I generally prefer ZZZ for the more condensed nature, still - outside of a few hours each weekend clearing out the weeklies, and maybe a few side missions or event things, its nice having the 'daily checklist' being a short, 5 minute stop-in. As much as I enjoyed Genshin and later Star Rail, the more drawn-out daily tasks become tiresome pretty quickly if I just wanted to do them as an aside between life tasks or playing something else.

That said, while WuWa shamelessly borrows a lot from Genshin, the changes that they have made definitely make it feel like more than a simple clone, at least. The additional movement options and tools (particularly wall-running to more quickly navigate surfaces) work nicely, swapping out the usual accessory-hunt for a monster-hunt is an interesting twist on the tried-and-tested formula, etc.

Helldivers 2 attracted many players by being an attractive product, with a clear vision and - a few post-launch misteps aside - a focus on being fun before anything else. A game that works as a live service, but avoided being defined by it.

Unless Hulst gives up on championing 'service first' products, Sony's push on them is going to go as well as it already has - in broad terms, very, very poorly. All it takes is a glance in any direction - Warner and Suicide Squad, Ubisoft and xDefiant/Skull and Bones, Square with Foamstars, and so many more examples in the last few years alone - to realise that this is not the golden goose that the industry wants to believe it is, but one of the most risk-laden design choices available.

(And Hulst should still have been promptly removed from his post for championing Concord so heavily for years, only for it to finally be revealed to a resounding "...eh.")

@Nalodart The vast majority of the ingame community contribute to genuinely one of the best, relaxed and good-natured social experiences that I've found in a game.

Meanwhile the vocal minority that consider themselves to be the "community" on social media, Reddit, etc - and are broadly referred to as such - have been utterly intolerable ever since they "beat Sony" by shouting down the PSN login requirement.

@Thumper Rubin testing lines with the PR department; "Well, you see, we shut down after Season 3 instead, and our discussions about Year 2 may or may not have been 'do we really want one' so technically, technically, I wasn't lying."

@OmegaStriver Well, it's a free-to-play title, and as noted in the article they're offering full refunds for every penny spent on the game. If they're willing to give back everything that players have put in to it, I can't imagine that it even came close to breaking even, never mind making a profit.

No option to repeatedly bludgeon MetaGeoff with a 'Please Wrap It Up' sign; no interest.

Please, let us have LESS of this clown, not more of him.

I might have tried it if not for (a) it being dropped into a month with so, so much competition, and (b) the whole "part of an expanded media universe" part. I'm sure someone thought that would function as a selling point, but...no. No.

The price point was/is pretty reasonable though, and almost made me reconsider at one point.

@ShogunRok I'd argue also that an issue with their use of some North American accents/actors is that they've handled it inconsistently here with regards to franchise at large.

Previously, they followed established rules for the accents based on culture and origin. The American accent belonged to the City Elves and the Dwarves, particularly from the underground (and later the Qunari?), English to Ferelden and the Free Marches, Welsh to the Dalish Elves, French/Spanish/German to Orlais/Antiva/Nevarra, etc. I'm sure there were slips here and there, but it mostly stuck.

For Veilguard, they've thrown the American accent in particular all over, and if you've come from the older games it feels quite jarring for it.

@ThomasHL As others have been saying, yeah, the game can definitely start off with enemies feeling spongey (for reference I've been playing on the second-highest difficulty) but this gets heavily offset over time. Between the skill tree, upgrades to your gear and their passive effects, and companion synergies, by the time you hit the mid-game (and with a clear-ish vision for your build) you can pretty easily melt anything outside of intentionally challenging side-bosses.

In other words, Hermen doesn't acknowledge or recognise that said mindset played heavily into the Concord disaster - that mistake of him and the studio thinking that they had the perfect product for their audience behind the scenes, when being more outward with it much earlier could have shown them what was wrong and given time to fix it.

Sony really, really needs to bench him, pronto.

@Deityjester But... the only limit to how many super credits you can get is how many drop-pods/shipping containers/etc you're willing to crack open.

I'm not that far ahead at 250 hours or so, and I've picked up every warbond and new armour set within a day of release, just by merit of an hour here-and-there running around low-difficulty maps farming them. It's not exciting by any measure, but I've done much more for much, much less on any MMO Rep grind.

I was always going to play Wilds with peace of mind, though.

This, meanwhile, I still won't play at all.

With the bizarre fact that to even be able to purchase it on the UK PSN store, unless it changed in the last day, you need to;

• search for it by name (it's nowhere to be seen in the New Releases, even if you sort by New>Old)
• go into a redundant listing which still marks it as only for Wishlist and makes it appear that is hasn't launched
• from there, switch to the 'bundle' that actually allows you to buy the game, which additionally offers nothing in the description as to what said bundle contains

.....yeah, no, maybe a bit down the line, but they'll need to re-inspire some confidence first, a messy first impression before they've even sold the product is a bit much. Especially with Helldivers there to scratch that itch and a very busy month filled to the brim with very polished games.

EDIT: Well as a quick test, no, it has not changed since launch. Nothing in the release listings, and a search on either the console or app will still display "Starship Troopers: Extermination - Announced" as the only result. It really is baffling that they managed to release a game that you would be almost certain hasn't released if you hadn't read/heard about it elsewhere.

I think one of the best selling points from the demo was just the sheer confidence of it. With this sort of prologue approach, you'd usually expect maybe the opening hour as a gentle tease of the story, and then to maybe be given the option to catapult into a short segment later in the game to see the battle system in full swing.

But the mad ***** just straight up handed over the first 5-10 hours of the game, depending on your playstyle (I spent 12, with a lot of meandering around to see, talk to and loot everything). Plenty of time for people to really get stuck in and decide that it's definitely up their alley, or to find that the formula doesn't quite work for them in one way or another.

After almost 12 hours with my demo save, no further assurance of Metaphor's quality is required.

Currently a split between Darkest Dungeon 2 and the endless torture of a good run being scuppered by an encounter from hell, and the Metaphor demo. The goalposts of "okay, time's almost up" are finally there, but I've been genuinely impressed by the scope of it; the runtime is easily two or three times what I'd expected, and each time I thought it surely had to be coming to an end... nope, it just kept going.

Still not for me personally - I've played it twice in full, and with the time investment involved in that I am not likely to go a third round even with a glow-up - but the pricing certainly saved it.

Let's be frank; any game that released prior to the Pro shouldn't need to be 'fixed' by it. They launched on the base PS5, when it was the only option, and they should damn well be optimised for it.

Sharper graphics in combination with frame rate, sure, the Pro deserves that, but there's really little excuse for games in the last year not successfully targetting a 60FPS performance mode and these statements really do beg the question; "Did you even try, or were you encouraged to hold back to help shift more hardware sales?"

@ATaco To be fair, at least it's now coming before something, instead of shortly after Metaphor, CoD and Dragon Age. Whether they're the general gaming crowd or more specific audiences, there was lots of hard competition lined up for the original date.

Interesting, for changing the first expac to be a preorder bonus and ditching the "early access" as much as anything. Evidently they must be seeing that their years-running approach of making their "Gold/Ultimate" editions more and more expensive with the hope that people will fork out predominantly for those 72 hours just isn't - for various reasons - doing them any favours. It'll be interesting to see how the price of the deluxe editions changes respectively with these things cut out.

No love for Shadow of Doubt on the 26th? When you list an advent calendar as a release, that, sir, is criminal.

@get2sammyb Definitely. If there's truth to this then whatever happens to Firewalk, Hulst really needs to share the same fate - if they're laid off then his metaphorical head needs to roll with them, and if they're reshuffled to support other teams, he needs to be bumped back down to a creative/support role too. If there's one thing that seems to have been made very clear about Hulst in all of this, it's that he's not cut out for that level of executive, financially-responsible role, and likely never was.

A false equivalency with Nintendo's Wii U ports is one hell of a straw man, however you look at it. The defence there, as it happens, has little to do with lack of back compat and much more with the fact that the Wii U was a catastrophic commercial failure - and in turn left most of its titles to a rather small, super-loyal audience. Note the difference in how their fans react; there's often a significant outcry of relief that they can finally get to play it, or that it can finally get the audience and exposure that it deserved, as opposed to the "seriously, again?" that follows Sony's affairs.

Sony, by contrast, is rereleasing games that originally sold well on a console that sold well. That is the difference, and that is the problem.

@PapaGlitch Playing with randoms is generally fine - quite enjoyable even. I can't speak for voice chat as I've opted out of it in every multiplayer game over the last decade, but for the ingame experience, HD2 really surprised me by having (for the most part) a really quite wholesome playerbase. I'd advise anyone playing with randoms to avoid the highest difficulty tier - 7/Suicide Mission or higher - as that's where you're much more likely to run into toxic players, but that's all.

And yeah, even when the game's quiet you usually still have a few thousand players active on each hotspot/objective world, to this day I've never struggled to drop into a squad on a world and difficulty of my choice.

@PsBoxSwitchOwner Is "the same game you played a few years ago, but a bit shinier" really expanding an IP in any meaningful way, though?

The problem here is that, far from "losing our minds", for the most part we're ambivalent. We're not annoyed or angry at Sony, but we're not excited either. We just don't care for or about the product, and that's arguably a worse outcome.

I mean, the developers are jointly owned by Sony and Bandai Namco and mostly publish under the latter, so...

Still, as precedents go, I don't disapprove.

I replayed Zero Dawn in the weeks before Forbidden West launched and it still looked great - hell, better than many PS4 games that followed it. I really can't see the point of this, it just feels like another line to this generation's running joke of "PlayStation; for the remasters". If it's one of those flat £10 upgrades, fair enough, but if this is another Last of Us situation they're just taking the mick.

Looking forward to trying it out later after just dropping in to check the new weaon stats/adjustments last night.

A lot of interesting notes; Thermite definitely sounds like the weapon I always wanted it to be finally, and while I didn't have an issue with the role of antitank weapons before, it'll be interesting to see how the rebalances feel (Spear aside, they were just slight variations on 'line up headshot, fire', so Recoiless seemingly switching to more of a 'get a solid hit on the body, job done' may feel refreshing) and how the other support weapons fare against the bug heavies now.

Not sure if I'll be sold on the gas changes ahead of the warbond, though; I was looking forward to spraying chemical death, where the patch notes make it sound more in line with a chemical flashbang now. I suppose it will distinguish it more from fire weapons, but I'll have to see - I hope it still does a reasonable amount of damage on top of the blind/confuse effect.

@Ludacritz I went a few hours with it and unfortunately I have to agree. It definitely has a unique charm about it, but the "an adventure for everyone, whatever their age or skill level" marketing tagline doesn't stick. Astro-bot gets that, Mario gets that, plenty of other games have gotten that, but between the gameplay, story and over-tutorialisation... no, Plucky doesn't manage it, mostly just coming across as "My First Videogame™". The early nod to Punch-Out put a grin on my face but I just came away from it thinking that I'd rather redownload Tunic, Link's Awakening or Scribblenauts.

@symmetrian In the similiar boat of needing her but just about managing to pull both Qingyi and Jane from this cycle, I'm glad she's up second or I'd have no chance at getting her in time. xD

With Jane being able to trigger her team-up passive with other Anomalies, I can imagine her, Lucy and Burnie making quite the trio in those Phys/Fire matchups.

I would just hope that there's no (or at least minimal) truth to the recent rumour that they won't have much to show outside of third party titles. Not that it would come as any surprise with the precedent they've been setting over the last year and change.

I just hope this doesn't mean that they'll end up optimising Threemake for Pro and/or PS6, and leave it running even worse on the base PS5. I don't personally have any complaints about Rebirth's graphical fidelity (and I played it in performance mode), but given that Sony would've had Pro dev kits out in the wild for some time, it does make me question whether they genuinely focused on pushing the best out of the base console.

@MFTWrecks On that train of thought, an approach similar to the recent Hitman trilogy might have been the way to go about it; the old stays in a static state, while a copy of it is adapted into the new. IO set a decent precedent with that, updating the levels to fit new/adjusted mechanics where possible, while adding new features to the fresh batch. Hell, they even handled the rocky situation of being dropped by Warner pretty well in the "you have to unlock it all again, but it's still here for you" approach to Hitman 1's content in 2 under Square.

Granted, Starbreeze have a lot more to repack and/or reset so that approach likely wouldn't have been as feasible, but even just borrowing from that and adapting the "highlights" of 2 to slot into 3's systems might have led to it all playing out better for them. It says a lot that their immediate response on free content was effectively that on a very small scale - redoing 2 missions from Payday 2 more or less shot for shot.

@Yagami It's pretty well-balanced for it. I played through solo, completed most of what was there and even gave some of the higher difficulties a shot and had a great time throughout. I'll probably dip back in when this launches, this was the location I was most waiting for more of and with all 3 dlc locations in play, it'll be like getting to play 80% of a fresh campaign again.

"Where did PAYDAY 3 go wrong?"

For my two cents, aside from the launch issues, it has less to do with anything that 3 did and just everything to do with their business strategy for 2.

When you spend ten years pumping updates and DLC into a game (to call PD2 bloated nowadays would be an understatement) you can't easily pull committed players away - least of all to a new entry that's starting over again at square one.

For my part, I first played PD2 in beta and enjoyed the first few years much more than the chimaeric behemoth that it grew into, and as such prefer PD3 for the fact that it goes back to basics and mostly improves on the core gameplay... but even I can't help but feel that it's too slim on missions, weapons, etc compared to 2 a year in.

(And as such only bought it in the most recent sale, which put it comparable to early 2 in price.)

@PsBoxSwitchOwner Fair point, I forget that the US doesn't include their equivalent of VAT in any of their pricing.

As far as the UK goes, If they'd converted the price in USD to an equivalent price in GBP, it would still have been fairly pricey for the barebones no-disc option but at least somewhat tolerable.

Expecting us to pay effectively 25% more for it by lazily transferring the price 1:1 though is just obscene, and will kill all interest for the general market.

Like the PS4 Pro before it - nope. These are products for the hardcore fanboys/whales, noone else in their right mind would pay that much for a mid-generation upgrade.

@Westernwolf4 What also gets me with the vast majority of the forced-stealth missions is that they inevitably end up in a forced shoot out. It feels cheap on both sides to punish players for slipping up and then forcing the character to slip up for the plot, and in dumping players who had meticulously stealthed the whole thing into a shootout that they'd worked so much to avoid. I enjoy most of the game, but that's archaic design, through and through.

Also somewhat ironic that it's easier to go in guns blazing and kill anyone with a bell icon over their head than it is to be caught out by an overattentive guard in a corner and end up in a firefight with no line of sight on 90% of the enemies. The "nobody can set off the alarm if they're all dead" shouldn't be a better first-option path for a stealth mission than getting caught in the act.