cuttlefishjones

I don't see how it can be a surprise that DA:FailHard didn't make the numbers. It was awful, but if they had released it under a different name like CheeseAge:The Therapy Sessions then it might have done OK.

And 1.5 million user engaged doesn't equate to 1.5 million sales. It taking into account anyone who played a demo or expressed an interest, or got a free copy woth a pack etc. And it doesn't account for refunds and returns - those would have been player engagements. My guess is that the real sale figure, copies in the hands of players who paid for it and didn't refund it are way south of that.

They should deliver a Day Gone remaster, increasing the size of some of the hordes, to tide us over. Hopefully that would generate enough interest to get a sequel in the works. Never going to happen I know but it would be good!

I enjoy using mine, Call of the Mountain was really cool imo, and the metro game. But I also got the PC adapter and use it in Steam where it's a really good headset for PC games as well. Half Life Alex looks amazing.

Well that's great. Crap on a whole series of games, screw your studio over, deliver a terrible game and then jump ship. Hope they're happy. Does anyone know where they are going so we can avoid any other games they get involved in?

It's s shame they couldn't pull Godfall back from the brink, it was (is) still quite an enjoyable fantasy romp.

I predict Sony will partner with Valve and make Steam available via PSN with Proton adapted to run under BSD. Meanwhile Valve will take MS's lunch and eat it in a the mobile space with the launch of SteamOS for all mobile platforms. Suddenly people will realise that you don't need Windows for gaming, SteamOS is faster, more intuitve, and cheaper. The market will converge with Sony, Valve, and Nintendo being the big players.
Meanwhile Sony will finally catch up with the delays caused by Covid and SAGAFRA and we'll finally get some first party bangers launching on the PS5. The Pro will get to fully flex it's muscles as developers get used to the hardware.

The entire Witcher series is about Ciri, Geralt and Co were just supporting cast who happened to be used as main line characters by CD Projekt in a game adaptation. Ciri was always going to be the focus of newer games in the series.

There are some legitimate lore based questions around Ciri being a full blown Witcher though; No girl has ever survived the Trial of the Grasses, her Elder blood also excluded her from the Trial, her age going into the Trials, etc. Without undergoing the Trials she couldn't consume Witcher potions like Cats Eye. What has become of her Elder Blood powers? No jumping between realities, no teleporting.

Did she lose her powers fighting the White Frost? Did that enable her to survive the Trials, did she trade her powers to become a Witcher? Hopefully they'll have some good explanations for these that still fit the lore rarther than Ciri is a Witcher now because stuff.

Just as with DLSS PSSR needs time to evolve. It is a shame that it doesn't work straight out of the box and it does take Devs to change some of the ways they work their pipeline. But later iterations will be better anyway and by the time the PS6 hits the shelves I fully expect PSSR to be on par with DLSS or FSR (if that gets much better - the latest veriosn using AI may have the same issues to start as DLSS and PSSR do or did).

But overall I am very happy with my Pro anyway, the additional benefits it brings to table more than make up for some minor shortcomings.

Ignoring the first set of 'reviews', I'll wait for the ones coming in the following weeks. From people reviewing the game who don't care about upsetting publishers and getting pushed to the back of the queue for review copies.

I get a feeling Pure Xbox isn't as much of an outlier as just an honest viewpoint and review.

I got the pc adapter as well. It's really good when playing half life alyx. That game is the best looking vr game I've ever played on pc. I got Arizona dreams 2, Metro, Call of the Mountain, and star wars on the PS5. All of which are really good fun. I do still get a little motion sickness if I play for too long though.

Not only is it a blatant rip off of HZD but the section where they are flying on a giant insect comes right out of Warframe, Velocipods in the Cambion Drift.

@MrPeanutbutterz - The PS5 Pro was connected to an M32U 4K monitor and is now connected to an Odyssey G9 OLED, both of which show very good colour accuracy in other games and on my PC(s). HDR has always been a bit of pain to get the balance right (which is why I swapped to the G9). But either way the colours are brighter and less washed out with the Pro than they were with the OG.

I've not encountered any issues with Star Wars yet. In fact the difference between my OG PS5 and the Pro has been night and day. On the OG the image was always soft and had that vaseline look, the colours were washed out and the game felt unresponsive. On the Pro the image is sharp, colourful, and has none of that vaseline smudge. The whole game feels way more responsive as well.

The only graphical weirdness I have seen so far is some shimmering on the edge of textures in Veilguard. Especially where objects intersect with water.

@Gunnerzaurus - I've been really enjoying mine. It's made a night and day difference to some games. Star Wars Outlaws is no longer a washed out janky, smeary mess that feels sloooow. Now it looks sharp, bright, and responds well. Other games have exhibited a nice uplift too like Veilguard, Warframe, etc.

I actually quite liked Haze- yeah it was a bit janky and the story was a bit basic. But it was fun to play. Shame it killed the studio though, I wanted more Timesplitters

Didn't they give up the Killzone series because they (the studio) didn't want to be stuck making the same type of game ovber and over again?
I would leap at the chance of replaying a remastered Killzone series (I'd even no get annoyed at Rico for being a ****) or if Insomniac threw a remastered Resistance series at us. I mean I like HZD, it's a pretty cool series but aren't they just getting stuck, and labeled, as the HZD studio now?

@Hoodie718 But it's not a choice. If you want the 'good' ending you have to simper and agree with all the crap spewed forth by some of the characters. There is no choice to disagree with them, there is no choice to truly ignore them. In this game choice boils down to being forced to agree with them. Which is no choice at all and definitely removes the RP from the G. And in this case the G is pretty dire as well.

Anecdotal evidence is suggesting that it sold well to start with, that then got trashed by the number of refunds asked for. The Steam numbers are abyssmal even for a DA game, which this is only in name.
It's live service origins are evident all the way through, especially with the amount of useless tweaks to your appearance you can make.
Gone is the dark and gritty DA play, replaced with a disneyfied imagery and amusing sidekicks. The RPG element is just not there, it's a paint by number approach, any attempt at player choice is gone. You are forced to tread the path the writers want and nothing else. And the writing is dire in most places.. They seem to have gone out of their way to make some of the characters just unlikeable.
Mostly it just plays like a the writers decided to record a couple of their therapy sessions and turn it into dialogue. And I am not really interested in some strangers issues with their parents.
It's one of those games that I'll complete but never replay. And now it's not even worth re-sale as the price has tanked since it got into the hands of real players.
In a world where developers like CD Projekt and Larian exist there appears to be no room for Bioware. Not that they seem to be even trying to be honest.
I would be very surprised if this is not the beginning of the end for them, if they screw ME up as badly as this they are done.

Neither of the Horizon games use PSSR or FSR. Guerilla invented their own rescale - reconstruction tech just for those games. Shame it couldn't be used for anything else unless, somehow, the tech can be transferred into the PSSR workflow.

@DragonSlayer1759 Ordered my from Sony Direct.

@Titntin Thanks for the reply. I've bought a new 4TB for the Pro, my OG has a 2TB in it. So I'll just do the manual transfer.

So it's arrived and I'm setting up. Downer is that it isn't transferring anything from my NVMe in the OG PS5, only from the internal drive.

Does anyone know if I can just plug my old nvme in and copy everything from that to the internal drive in the pro?

Mines on the way, just a couple of stops. Guaranteed I'll be in the middle of some meeting when it arrives... I ordered an Odessey G9 OLED as well to complement the Gigabyte M32U that I currently use for my PC and PS5. I'm going to give the PS5 Pro sole use of the M32U when I get it all set up. Though I might need a bigger desk... It's getting a little crowded (3 laptops, 1 desktop, 2 monitors and my PS5)

I have a new WB Black 4TB ready to put in the Pro when it arrives. Does anyone know what will happen to games already installed on external drives? Will they need to be re-installedor can the drive just be transferred over? I'm guessing the answer is no but am hoping it is yes (I have 4Tb external drive thaat is full of PS4 and PS5 games)

I completed the game with a character from each house. I just loved that the stiry and outcomes of some situations changed because of that. I was really happy it did so well especially because of the faux outrage, and feeble attempt to get it cancelled, during its launch

@Rich33 - for marketing purposes they could have plumped for the FP16 33TFlops but, realistically, the majority of calculations peformed in the GPU pipeline will be FP32 for the greater precision. So it would have been a little disengenuous for them to have used the lower precision TFlop value.

@Rich33 The OG PS5 had 512Mb of DDR4 for the OS to work in, the Pro has 2Gb of DDR4 for the OS. This is what allows them to claim some more of the precious DDR6 for games. I'm assuming the size of the increase has something to do with PSSR.
The GPU is dual issue, so it can work on two FP16 chunks at the same time hence the ~33TFlops, FP32 chunks are processed one at a time hence the ~16TFlops. This is common with AMD GPUs, they have 1:2 setup whilst NVidia is a 1:1 setup.

And he's the one that ended killzone. Booooo

Wasn't the release of COD on Gamepass a litmus test on how MS could drive players away from Sony to them? With the expectation that players would jump ship. As that, clearly, hasn't happened then this is a bad news day for GP and its future. But it might also have a positive impact on the release schedule for other Xbox games on PS.

I love how the armchair experts bang on about 'not pushing the limits of the hardware' when it's obvious they're clueless about the whole thing. How are these measurements made? Who has made them? By what criteria are you measuring the scope of the limits you are talking about? Just becase a more powerful piece of hardware gets additional features doesn't automatically mean that the base model is being ignored. That's just a dumb perspective.

I'd be happy if they just brought the titles that were always going to be multi-platform to Playstation. Instead of trying to force people into their eco-system, they could actually just let it stand on its own. But this is MS and all they want is to starve the competition so players have nowhere else to go and then they can harvest all that lovely information we provide to fuel their AI expansion. It wouldn't be so bad if they actually had any interest in gaming itself and not just the data it provides.

Microsoft have never really cared about gaming, about what it means culturally, about anything to do with it really. They only ever cared about data mining and trapping people into an ecosystem they can milk for profit.
They had some measure of success during the 360 era, even though the PS3 still managed to outsell it by the end, but that was purely down to Sony screwing up with the PS3 design and launch.
It seems, sometimes, that their only real contribution to gaming has been bringing toxicity into the gaming world.
When they, finally, realised that just throwing boxes into the market wasn't going to work they created Gamepass in an attempt to destroy the traditional gaming market by controlling what gamers had access to and ensuring that they could never own their games so they were subservient to the subscription model.
But even that didn't work so the final genius idea to ooze out of Xbox was to buy all the biggest publishers so they could try and starve any competition. But that didn't work out either. Yet. They're still working on that one.
The ideal world for Xbox and MS is one where no ones owns a console, all publishers are forced onto Gamepass, and they control all the streaming rights to games and players are forced to pay them a fee if they want to play anything.
But that world hasn't arrived, as much as they have tried to make it happen, and now they are doing the sensible thing and retreating from the hardware market, why lose more money on that? The best outcome is that they spin Xbox off as a stand alone company and Xbox becomes a publisher-developer. Leaving the market open for some real competition to rise against Nintendo and Sony.

These are the kind of games that Sony needs to have, even if they aren't performing well. They are glitz and glamour, the shiny things that show off the graphical finesse of the hardware. Most games wouldn't warrant a pause to stop and watch unlike this.

I bought, and stilll have, my OG xbox just to play Halo. I then bought a 360 just to play Halo and was dissapointed with Halo 3 that I gave up on the franchise, though Reach was good.

It would have to be more like the old school Halio to reignite my interest but I can see where a WarHaloFrameDestinyDecendant might be of interest.

They should start remastering all those killer PS3 and PS4 titles for PS5 and Pro. All the Killzones, Resistance Fall of Man, Uncharted, etc

See the haptic feedback is finally getting some use

I think most people have nailed it here, a far smaller user base exhibiting no growth, Gamepass makes putting any effort in pointless, two SKUs - one of which is drastically underpowered. a far more complicated dev environment, and a souless submission process.

And as people have also rightly pointed out, Sony is in a 2 SKU position now. But in a way more balanced form. And they've been here before with the PS4 so everyone knows what to expect.

With the PS3 Sony got what they deserved. They handed the 360 the market by being a year late and to difficult to develop for. Luckily for MS they didn't have to actually do anything to succeed in that otherwiise they would have found some way to screw it up.

Which they did with the Xbone, by thinking they actually get gaming, they ended up handing it back to Sony. Big style.

And now they are on a pay to win streak because they still are incapable of understanding what gaming means to players. Honestly the market would be so much better off without them, leave room for someone else who actually is about games and not data aquisition to rise to the challenge.

@IOI - You could argue that XBox is already irrelevant, in terms of hardware anyway. This is two generations they have failed to make any progress with and, with this generation, they have actually lost market share.

If XBox were a stand alone company they would be pretty much on the rocks now. It's only the vast pockets of sugar daddy M$ that is keeping them afloat.

At best I see them just becoming a mega publisher in the future and dropping out of the hardware market entirely. Which may have an impact on Sonys pricing structure but probably not in the way people think.

PS5 Pro pricing is a reflection of the state of the world, weak yen, increased fab costs, conflicts, sanction war with china, and more. Pretty sure those kind of things will have more of an impact on pricing in the future too than the removal of an underperforming opponent who was never really a threat in thhe first place.

I just checked and the only difference I can see is a border affect on the background of the game that is currently paused (Star Wars). There's no additional advertising or anything anywhere.

If Sony produce a handheld with the same ergonomics as the Rog Ally (which I love), with a 1080p1440p OLED screen, capable of remote play as well as local installs to complement a full fat PS6 console then I would be all in.

What would be really neat is if they found a way, a la Proton, to integrate steam within the PSN ecosystem giving you access to platform exclusives and the steam catalogue.

Banishers is a great game. I bought it at release after wishlisting it as soon as I could.

Jusant landed on Gamepass so that was never going to show them much of a return.

It's reassuring to see a publisher behave this way, this industry is way too engrossed in the money side of things and has seem to have forgotten what gaming is about. It's also the kind of thing that Sony used to do; take risks on new IP from smaller teams. When that happens it enriches the whole environment. I wonder how many main stream games have borrowed ideas from small indy games that would never have got a chance without this kind of altruism?

Playing quality mode @ 60fps is going to be such a huge improvement on how the game feels, never mind how it looks having all the settings maxed out as well.

So many good looking games ended up feeling like treacle this gen, and the drop in quality was always a disappointment in performance mode. That's why I bought a PC a few years ago, to replay the games I enjoyed on PS but at a higher framerate and better quality, and that cost me >£3k.

Being able to just stay in the PS world to play the games I love at higher framerates and best quality is worth every penny of what they are asking for the pro.

But gaming is how I unwind and relax, and that hasn't changed since I was feeding 50p's into Gauntlet and Golden Axe in the arcade...

If they are going to remaster stuff then where is Killzone or Resistance? Hell at this point I'd even jump on a Haze remake...

Though everyone is calmmering about the price of a premium electronics gadget being too high without stopping to think about why, beyond the repetitve greed argument.

It looks like it's not really stopping people from looking like they are going to buy it, if the sudden unavailability of the external blu-ray drive is anything to go by.

That thing is out of stock everywhere all of a sudden.

@PerpetualBoredom - I know right.If only the Ally or Legion used SteamOS they wouldn't be so hobbled!

I'll be buying one, I've just ordered the external drive and a additional 4TB SSD in preparation.

Gaming is my hobby of choice. I have a fairly high end PC (5900x, 6900XT) but I prefer the ease of use of consoles, though I do like both my Rog Ally and Legion Go (more than my Steamdeck) - just a shame they're crippled by Windows.

As a hobby it's an expensive one for sure but, at the end of the day, 700 quid for a premium electronic gadget of any kind is to be expected given the state of the world right now. Besides it's going to cost you 3x as much to get an equivalent PC experience and even then you would be missing a stack of features like the XDNA hardware and RDNA4 level RT units.

I'm quite interested in seeing what they do to improve the PSVR2 experience with the Pro, I'm liking it on the standard PS5 but anyting that can improve the image quality will be a blessing.

Price is a little steep but compares favorably against getting the same performance from a PC.

I'll be pre-ordering one and putting my regular PS5 out pasture with the PS4, 3, 2, and 1. I'm collecting anyway!

What would be really cool is if this was just the first point in an unholy triangle of games to come to PSVR2, the other two being Resistance and Killzone... Come on Sony!