gaston

gaston

Every game is better in vr

Comments 555

Re: Microsoft Dealt Major Blow as UK Blocks Activision Buyout

gaston

@nomither6 Not sure how much of a wake up call that would be. Sony would be forced to create COD competitor (which they are probably trying anyways). But that would not force sony to create innovative games. An amazing, innovative hellblade or ever wild would be a much better wake up call.

Re: Microsoft Dealt Major Blow as UK Blocks Activision Buyout

gaston

@Fiendish-Beaver Maybe MS is not not loved because of them being market leader but because of their EEE business strategy (for example they nearly locked down an open standard to IE6-html) ?
I doubt that the next console will be 800-1000$ (unless there will be a super-inflation). I think even evil sony understood that one needs a player base, and you won't get that if the entrance fee is far too high. On the other hand there is psvr2, and it still needs to be seen whether the VR entrance fee is lowered after the enthusiasts opted in, and once there are enough games to offset a loss of hardware sales.

Re: Soapbox: PSVR2 Already Feels Like It's on Course for Failure

gaston

Anyway, I hope PSVR2 will be a success. I think like always success will depend on the catalogue. The hardware is good enough, there are good demonstrators. Now, developers have to follow suite. I could imagine that it takes a bit longer than everybody is hoping, because AAA game development takes longer and longer it seems, and it will take some time until bigger developers jump on the VR wagon.

I enjoy VR much more than playing flat games. So if VR dies off I might stop playing games. Also, when ever I was playing a VR game, I was thinking that it would be so much better in VR (even if it is the exact same dual sense game in third person. I guess a lot of people will disagree, but personally, I preferred to play in VR pretty much every single dreams game which allowed to be played in VR, even if it was a bit janky).

Re: Soapbox: PSVR2 Already Feels Like It's on Course for Failure

gaston

I find it weird to compare a headset launch with a console launch in terms of sales and lineup (at least I have the impression that is what is kind of done in the article). Yes, psvr2 is more expensive than the ps5, but VR will still remain a niche market. If psvr2 sells better than psvr1 e.g. 10M lifetime sales. That would already be an achievement.

Since the VR market will remain relatively small, one cannot expect as much budget for psvr2 titles as for the ps5 titles. The best one can hope for are indie titles similar to the psvr1 catalogue and more AAA ps5 titles which also provide a VR mode. I think it is illusionary to expect more vr only titles like call of the mountain or even bigger ones. But who knows maybe the new unreal or unity tools allow for such titles even within a relatively small budget.

Concerning announced titles: there are also very few playstation titles announced for ps5. Why would you expect that bigger hitters are announced for psvr2 than for ps5 ?

Re: PSVR2 Sales Off to a 'Slow Start', New Report Claims

gaston

@NEStalgia I think it will sell with the software. At the moment there is presumably only gt7 which convinces some people to purchase a headset (excluding vr enthusiasts) If there are more such titles. It will sell (But obviously it is very unclear what titles will appear in the future) And, certainly if it appears in stores at some point il will sell better.

Re: PSVR2 Sales Off to a 'Slow Start', New Report Claims

gaston

Wasn't the projection 1.5M-1.6M by the end of the year or fiscal year i.e. 1.6M/9 months or less then 200k units per month in average. So, 300k for the first month seems ok, I would say. Nobody is expecting psvr2 to sell as good as a console. It is of course possible that 300k is all the VR enthusiasts which are left. But, I would say it is far too early to call it a vita. And one has to wait and see whether more big PSVR2 games will join GT7, village and call of the mountain. Or whether that is all that is planned.

Re: Microsoft Thinks It Hasn't 'Pulled Any Games' from PS5, PS4

gaston

The saddest part about the Zenimax and ABK squistiions is that this also means that there will not be any VR versions of deathloop, ghostwire tokyo, skyrim, doom and COD. Maybe that was never ever a thing. But deathloop and ghostwire tokyo really look like VR games. Maybe MS will also provide a VR headset at some point in the future. But since they discontinued all the AR/VR projects and they focus on providing the same experience on all platforms down to cell phones. It is very unlikely. Anyway, this only concerns this niche of VR enthusiasts. Everybody else will be happy to play COD and the other remaining franchises competitively with touch controls on cell phones, or maybe even on your apple watch.

Re: Microsoft Thinks It Hasn't 'Pulled Any Games' from PS5, PS4

gaston

It is a shame that MS will get through with this. They will be praised for improving the working conditions. Nobody will talk about the golden parachutes, xboxers will be happy until they realise that instead of getting more games they get less games, because there is not more but less competition.

Re: C-Smash VRS Release Date Announced, Playable Demo Available Now for PSVR2

gaston

I really enjoyed the demo, although I sucked. I tried to create something similar in dreams but I did not manage to tweak it in such a way that it was actually fun and not just frustrating. I would be interested if it is not overpriced.

Not sure whether it is due to the choice of colours or my bad eye sight, but I had a hard time to judge the distance of the ball once the ball was close.

Re: U.S. Senator Says Sony Has 'Monopoly' on High-End Japanese Game Market

gaston

@StylesT "...not just upgrades of existing games or tacked on vr modes...."
What is wrong with "tacked on" vr modes? GT7 and village are in my opinion very worthy psvr2 games. I rather have games in VR with AAA budgets (i.e. games which can also be played in flat) than games with 1/10th of the budget or less (i.e. a budget according to the player base).

Re: Ubisoft Helps Out Its Writers by Implementing AI Tech to Do Their Job for Them

gaston

As long as the AI ghostwriter is reviewed by a real author and it is not used for the entire script e.g. mostly for side quests or ambient "noise", I do not mind. It may give more time to the team to work on the main story line. For example in watch dogs most of what NPCs say does not matter, but is only there to give the the illusion of a living world. I could absolutely see an AI ghostwriter to be useful in such situation and improve the illusion.

Re: Poll: We Want You to Rate Your Favourite PSVR2 Games

gaston

Strange, I do not see a submit button.
Anyway:

  • I love call of the mountain, village (despite not being a horror fan) and gt7. They are in my book all excellent games. Are they perfect ? No (e.g. there is room to improve the graphical fidelity of GT7, I dare to say; I don't understand why there is no free combat in call of the mountain, the story feels more like a side quest, and the smooth turning could be smoother; the world could be more interactive in village and I am not a big fan of the melee combat. But, If You look beyond these issues. They are all excellent. GT7 has a very addictive game loop, and is so much better in VR than in flat. I don't understand why anybody would prefer to play village in flat (excluding nausea). It looks fantastic. And call of the mountain was one of the few games I could not stop playing (it is presumably more an uncharted game or tomb raider than horizon, though). So, far I only have finished call of the mountain, and I just had my first "run" through the castle.
  • kayak mirage looks beautiful, but I only have limited interest in its gameplay. I got it for the visuals.
  • I like pistol whip, but besides the head haptics which are excellent, it is not so different from the psvr1 version, which was already very good.
  • swordsman plays certainly better with sense than move controllers, but I still had the most fun with VR "sword" fighting in the dojo of vader immortal 1 on PSVR1
  • after the fall plays much better with thumb sticks, but I still miss a better motivation (something which makes me want to explore the world e.g. a better story).
  • I am undecided concerning runner. I was a bit disappointed by the soundtrack. I really liked the soundtrack of the trailer, which was the main motivation to actually buy it.
  • I played the demo of tales from the galaxy's edge. I think I will like it besides its flaws, but it feels a bit pricey to me.

Re: The Last of Us Co-Creator Sparks Developer Debate As He Declares Linear Games Are Easier to Make

gaston

shocking! I personally think that some of the ubi-soft games are actually very enjoyable. Having said that, I enjoyed the most the more linear sections e.g. the opening of syndicate, the battle at the light house of Alexandria in origins, or in days gone the saw-mill quest. In these sections the local maps are designed in a more interesting way, the enemy encounters are more surprising, the dialog bits seem to matter more. I suppose, It is just too difficult, or better said too time consuming, to fill an open world in an interesting, meaningful way (either manually or with the help of sophisticated algorithms).

Re: Horizon Fans Can't Believe How Short Aloy Is in PSVR2

gaston

@Bricktop33 In the headset the game looks better than horizon zero dawn on ps4 to me, and better than shadow of the tomb raider or jedi fallen order. It clearly surpassed ps4 quality in my opinion. Though, the background (images) are a bit washed out. Not sure whether that is an artistic choice (e.g. to make the foreground stick out), or whether that is to avoid aliasing.

Re: Reaction: Sony Continues to Fumble the State of Play Format

gaston

I would say it was a solid show, nothing ground breaking, though. But there cannot be something ground breaking in every show.

  • synapse: the n-dreams title looked certainly cool, though it might be a bit shallow
  • foundation: this looks very interesting, though it is difficult to judge from the trailer
  • the ninja storm title looked pretty good, although presumably not a game for me.
    And then we have new trailers for already announced titles but still:
  • Re4: Maybe people are not interested anymore in a Re4 remake. But, if there is Re8 like VR support ...
  • tchia: looks very charming
  • before your eyes: maybe not a title with mouth watering graphics, but certainly something very unique.
  • humanity: also seems pretty unique, but it is hard to judge how it plays.
  • green hell: to be seen how good it will look on psvr2, and maybe survival games are not everybody's taste

Re: Reaction: Sony Continues to Fumble the State of Play Format

gaston

one nearly has the impression that there was some kind of pandemic for 2 years which delayed titles. Or that there was a beloved humble trillion dollar company which by bringing games to more people buys up the entire gaming industry, which somehow, surprisingly leads to less announcements on certain platforms.

Re: Bobby Kotick Says Sony Is 'Trying to Sabotage' Microsoft's Activision Bid

gaston

I presumably have no idea of how business works. But, I do not see how playstation will continue to do business in the same way as before with the remains of activision. I obviously have no idea since when sony knewn about the deal, or whether all of this is just some theater for the judges. But, I would say, sony will stop pumping money into cod (people call this typically "money hatting" i.e. paying for exclusive content). Either MS will take over sony's share, or the quality of cod will go down. Since there are contracts cod will stay on playstation for another few years. But, confidence is lost and cod will play a lesser role on playstation. Whether players will then move over to MS, or whether there will be an interesting enough alternative is to be seen.

Re: All PSVR2 Launch Games

gaston

It is really difficult to satisfy people:

  • "no psvr 1 backward compatibility" -> "What? I cannot play my old games on my shiny new (incompatible) hardware. Deal breaker!"
  • a list with a lot of great old titles -> "What ? who wants to play these old titles on psvr2, i can play all of these elsewhere. Deal breaker!"

Re: All PSVR2 Launch Games

gaston

All the haters and pessimists completely ignore that this is not the lineup for the next 3 years but for the next 1-2 months. Of course it is possible that nothing but quest ports will be released after that. But, village and likely GT7 show that it should be possible to port flat games to PSVR2 without too many graphical downgrades. According to the reports Village looks identical or even better on PSVR2 than the flat version. Thus, from a technical point of view there should be little reason not to complement flat games with a VR mode. Whether that is economically interesting for developers is a different question.
Then there were COVID and the supply chain issues (presumably also impacted dev kit distrubution), which certainly delayed the developments.
Clearly if there is nothing compelling on this list. It makes sense to wait and see whether psvr2 will be supported. On the other hand if nobody buys the headset, there is also no reason for developers to support it.

Re: Gran Turismo 7 on PSVR2 Is the Full Game, Except for Split-Screen Play

gaston

@Titntin in case You try again, in my understanding, You should not force it, but stop immediately once You feel a tiny trace of nausea. If this works well i.e. the nausea disappears quickly, try again after a long enough pause (day), and again and again. Some people manged to condition their brain in this way from surviving a couple of minutes to enjoying full length gaming sessions. But, it does not seem to work for everybody. And of course choose the games wisely. Best are presumably higher budget, simple games in which You walk around physically and move (games like beat saber). I only got a bit of nausea while playing xing. So, I am presumably not the best source for recommending good games to get started.

Re: Atomic Heart Sure Looks Sick on a Superpowered PC

gaston

@themightyant "Partially true, but it's not linear so a 1/3 power GPU will do FAR better than 1/3 detail, resolution, frame rate etc." That might be true. Though by raw numbers a 4090 is nearly 10 times more powerful, seems to have a better ray tracing support, and games meant to show off PCs are typically not very much optimised for consoles. In the end it presumably depends much more on the developer's effort to optimise for a certain platform than anything else.

Re: Atomic Heart Sure Looks Sick on a Superpowered PC

gaston

@themightyant that is true. I just wanted to say, that the image is already upscaled when using a top of the line NV GPU. So, with a PS5 which has less than (?) 1/3 of the power, there cannot be more than 1/3 of the detail and resolution i.e. before upscaling the resolution is likely much lower than 1080p or less frames per second.

Re: 60 Most Anticipated PS5, PS4 Games of 2023

gaston

I'am mostly excited about psvr2. Though, at the moment I am only really interested in call of the mountain and resident evil village. The cinematic trailer of Behemoth looks enticing, but the actual game could be far from that. I am still hoping that there are a few more exciting announcements concerning psvr2 titles in the pipeline. But who knows, maybe I am buying this peripheral for two games ?

Other than that Pragmata peaked my interest, but the trailer has not told me anything about the gameplay. I never played FF7 before the remake, which I liked a lot. I might pull the trigger on FF7 Rebirth.

But, whenever I play a flat game, I always think how much better it would be in VR. With PSVR2 it seems possible to match the visuals of the flat version. Therefore I am really hoping that PSVR2 will take off and there will be many flat games also fully playable in PSVR2, even if the adaptation is relatively simple like resident evil 7 or hitman 3. If that is going to happen, those are likely the titles I would be interested in.

Re: Days Gone Director Blames Woke Reviewers, Programmers for Critical Reception

gaston

I played it on PS5 and performance was good. So, no complaints in this regard from my end.
I really liked the atmosphere and sound design. That is what kept me playing, I think. Presumably also the overall world design.
Many of the more unique game mechanics did not work that well for me e.g. trying to escape a horde while making use of the various obstacles in the sawmill, or trying to lure hordes into bandit camps. So, in that sense besides the atmosphere, I did not find anything special. But which game in the past few years really surprised by introducing interesting, new game mechanics ?
Also, in my opinion, the story and characters were not really the strongest point here. I was interested in the mystery around NERO, but I was a bit disappointed how it all panned out (did they have to short cut to an end ? )
Overall I really liked the atmosphere. They nailed that, in my opinion. For me it was a good game, but t I did not play the initial version. Anyway I think nowadays many , maybe even most, reviewers do not try to make an objective review, they just seem to seek attention and focus on a few negative points which are blown out of proportion. There is always something negative to find, which does not make everything else bad as well. Often I have the opinion that reviewers get paid for one or the other opinion> Could also be the search algorithms which lead to a certain behaviour of reviewers. This site typically gives games a fair chance, I would say. Obviously, everybody has an opinion which cannot be suppressed completely.

Re: Microsoft Invites Sony to Sign Its Own 10-Year Call of Duty Deal

gaston

@Fiendish-Beaver what You are forgetting is that although Sony has a very strong position, they do not own half of the publishers. xbox already had strong studies before they started there buying spree, but with the acquisition of bethesda and soon activision blizzard king, they remove quite a big chunk from the free market. Athough they claim that they increase competition by bolstering their position, they reduce the number of competing partners. So competition is reduced not increased. Moreover as You can see that they managed to get already deals signed with Valve and nintendo, they already have quite some leverage on the market, which will increase even more once the acquisition goes through. It is hard to believe that that is very beneficial if the market is dominated by so few players.

In my opinion, for the market it would be much better if xbox would take their billions, take a risk and develop something new, rather than removing companies from the free market. Or event if they would just snatch up smaller companies and grow them. But that is not what they are doing, they just take power over a chunk of the existing marked by using their pretty much unmatched financial power.

Re: Report: FTC Could File an Antitrust Lawsuit to Block Xbox's Activision Buyout

gaston

Lets hope the regulators do a proper job and don't just see that as an opportunity to make some extra cash. Anyway, I would guess that the deal will go through.

But, I do not understand why people think that all this consolidation is a good thing (whether it is MS, Sony, tencent, embracer, ....). It just means less choice and less innovations. In particular in case of MS, I don't see how anybody can think that it is beneficial for the consumer if a company which basically has the monopoly over desktops, owns probably more than 1/3 of the world cloud infrastructure, will soon own half of the game publishers. On a short term it will mean to get COD for 1$ per months, but surely not on the long run.