gaston

@MagisterMagi that would be a bit disappointing. But it still saves a click

@KillerBoy yes, a physical release would be very cool. A digital complete addition just saves one additional click (unless the extra material is unique to the complete addition, that might interest some people) ...

@Fyz306903 The reality is that a lot of people play WoW, cod warzone or how it is called, destiny, genshin impact, FF14, GTAV online, etc. . This seems to be a huge market and produce a lot of revenue from in game purchases. "Nobody" understands why, but it seems to interest a lot of people.

Assuming there will be a physical release, good to have a version with most of the bug fixes.

@number1024 IF You just use stock models and use the out of the box templates, I suppose You can quickly put something together. But If You try to create something according to your vision i.e. something that does not look like the stock assets and does something "unique" it is work, and a lot of work because of all the detail that needs to be taken care of. Yes, modern tools make it easier. And that is why it only takes 5 years to make a AAA game and not 15. Anyway there does not seem to be a single game studio which mass produces one visual spectacle after the other. Most struggle to get out a single game in twice the time compared to the preceding title. It is unlikely that all devs just got lazy and greedy, I would say. if it was as simple as You depict it then there would be more "ground breaking" indies.

Not even a tiny vr mode for the remake ? snif

@number1024 if studios would still make exactly the same games as 20 years ago then the better tools would allow the devs to make the same games faster. But they do not make the same games. More detailed, more complex graphical assets with more realistic lighting, and just more. Richer sound environments, more complex music scores, more complex haptics, more complex game systems. more complex animations, more complex game worlds. I suppose also it gets more complicated to manage these large teams. So, I guess there is some efficiency loss. But other then that I doubt that the development teams got lazier over the years, but it is just that the more fancy tools allow for more ambitious projects. If You just look at a single character. Nowadays they are full of tiny little details.

It seems that the market gets flooded with these types of games which are presumably taking over Your live. Hard to believe that putting out three of such games does not cannibalize the company's own market.

I just hope that these consolidation attempts turn out not to be beneficial and make companies like embrace, tencent, MS rethink their strategies.

@Beerheadgamer82 Already the zenimax acquisition was more than what playsation spent ever on all acquisitions combined (may be with the bungie acquisition ps evened that out, but presumably not)

@Godot25 10 or 15 years ? Anyway gives MS some time to prepare the take over ....

@Martsmall there are probably ways around that. Anyway there must be a reason why MS has chosen ubsisoft other than pleasing the CMA.

Hahaha. And in a couple of years, MS will buy ubisoft. Given the much smaller volume compared to the ABK deal, this will pass through without any scrutiny. Money wins.

For me it is a much better game (now?) than it is reviewed here.

I am in the process of playing through on ps5. I should be close to finishing the main campaign. It is certainly not a perfect game but a very serviceable game. London looks fantastic, the soundtrack is great, I actually like most of the cast and am also mostly fine with the dialogue. Sometimes the dialogues are even very good in my opinion (but maybe not being native plays a role here). In general I enjoy the story and story bits. In terms of game play, I very much enjoy the spider-bot stealth game play and platforming, the stealth game play in general. The, driving around while listening to the sound track, enjoying the scenery and taking a lamp post here and there is also not too bad.

I don't like so much that it is typically possible to play the first part of a mission either stealthy or guns blazing, but in most cases in the second part, when trying to escape an area, one needs to be armored, and have fighting power. I was often overwhelmed by the number and firepower of the attacking guards and drones. I would not exclude that is due to my lack of skill. I would agree that it would have been nice if the abilities of different operatives would play a larger role (a skilled driver could handle the cars better, a hitman could have a steadier aim or scope with zoom, some operatives could have a better chance of not being detected i.e. less suspicious, and there could be larger differences in hacking capabilities. And why not bring multiple operatives to a mission? Anyway lots of unexploited opportunities. But maybe that was all tried and turned out not be fun?

I also did not like that it is impossible to retry a mission or part of a mission. Also many mechanics feel underutilized. Driving mostly serves to get from location a to b. There are few interesting car chases. Also the road blocks are hard to use effectively. That was much better in WD1, if I remember correctly, which had road blocks, allowed to explode gas pipes and control traffic lights. But again maybe I just lack skill and there is fun to be had with auto drive and hacking into the surrounding.

But all in all, I quite like watch dogs legion. Obviously a VR mode would make it even better. But somehow I still think up to now the best in the series is still WD1 besides its ridiculous story, and besides the main character trying to portray himself as the good guy while mass-murdering half the population, because it had the most tense atmosphere. It is very possible that this is just my memory and because it was the first game with such mechanics and it might pale now in comparison to the more modern iterations.

In my book not a bad game, and better than average.

Sounds like the only thing that is missing to turn this into an absolutely outstanding game would be a vr mode.

I hope other studios have a look at what capcom (and polyphony) does and add a VR mode to their existing games.

Very well curated show with good pacing. Obviously no surprises, but not surprising if a show is announced as a no-surprise show. In my opinion the opening was very funny, since it depicted half the reactions to this sop.

Personally, there was nothing in there that would change my mind. The only flat game of those I will likely play is ff7 (looks awesome) but I don't really need a trailer for that (or maybe I needed a reminder?). Same for the Re4 VR mode. Ghostbusters still does not pique my interest. Presumably I would play most of the other games if any of those added a VR mode. But that is not going to happen.

Anyway I am not disappointed by this sop. I would call it certainly good if not very good, because of the pacing, despite not containing any enticing, new announcements.

I got it on sale and I really like c-smash. For me it is the VR arkanoid I always wanted. I haven't checked out the update.

@Amin1998 Maybe because Sony's first party games are hit by delays as it was rumored ?

A physical complete addition with all DLCs is great because it would contain the majority of bug-fixes, I am definitely interested in that.

Concerning the PC port, I would be more interested in a VR mode even if it is just a VR camera and the game would play identically to the flat version. Also most PC ports do not seem to run all that great. But, then most games seem to get reasonable VR mods on PC. Maybe one day I will have a PC compatible headset and a powerful enough PC that I would be able to play those in VR with these mods? So, yes there are benefits of PC ports. Also in terms of backwards compatibility, it is more likely that a PC version would still work in a few years time then that the PS5 version would work on PS7.

Why would one want to play death stranding on a phone ? Or does one get a decent experience when connecting an iphone to big screen ? But of course there is the untapped potential of billions of people just owning a phone.

Personally I can only think of: listening to the songs using the in game player, or reading the story told in emails.

I guess nearly as good as a psvr2 in cinema mode

I buy it once there is a psvr2 mode

@NeonPizza Yes this part of resident evil village was truly amazing.

Concerning 90fps, I personally do not mind the ghosting from reprojection much. I'd rather have that than quest2 graphics at 120Hz. If there is a pro model, the easiest would be to just bump up the resolution.

@Mythologue I cannot say anything about ultra. I only played firewall zero hour solo when it was on ps+ and that is not much fun I agree. The "fun" seems to come in multiplayer matches from the tension of not knowing where the opponents are and how they secure their position, and the strategic part i.e. planning how to achieve the objective.

@NeonPizza Clearly psvr2 is a compromise. Still there is no headset + compute unit combo on the market and will be in the near future which will give You the image quality of psvr2 and its feature set at that price point. It depend pretty much on what is more important to You. Is free movement more important than everything else ? Is image clarity more important than a complex image (i.e. texture detail, high poly count objects, number of objects on screen, lighting, effects) ? Is price not a deciding factor ? Are audio and advanced haptics also important to You to be fully immersed ? Is HDR important to You ?

• PSVR2: If eye-tracking assisted foveated rendering is used: high detail, high resolution complex HDR images; advanced haptics in the controller and headset; if the PS5 ssd is used: many high resolution textures and no load screens; if PS5's tempest engine is used: advanced 3D audio. But a PS5 is not a 4090, and to get the price, weight, form factor down sacrifices have been made to the lenses and screens. And reprojection is used in many cases to improve the framerate (at the moment it is not fully clear whether the quality of the reprojection is limited by PS5+PSVR2 hardware choices or purely software i.e. may improve over time, given the variations from title to title it is likely mostly software).
• Deckard is not out, has no release date and the feature set is not known (it might be awesome, it may come out soon, but it may be expensive (apple vision pro?) and only release in a couple of years).
• Quest3 standalone will produce ps4 level images (?) or most likely below since images need to be rendered at much higher resolution (compared to ps4 at full HD). Has no HDR, can only do pseudo foveated rendering i.e. render a higher resolution in direction of the head but not exactly at the position which is looked at; memory and storage solution will limit the resolution and number of textures and world complexity. Quest3 standalone will likely have a clearer image, better sweet spot and no mura, but won't have HDR, the image complexity will be much below ps5+psvr2 (if the power of ps5 is exploited), and there are no advanced haptics and most likely the audio quality will be lower (less processing power to produce sound).
• Quest3 + PC + 4090: much more expensive, image quality lowered by compression artifacts and additional latency from encoding+wifi streaming+decoding. There are solutions in the PC space which would allow to stream data directly from an SSD to the GPU vram, But there is no solution which would stream and decompress on the fly. Though likely the PS5 IO solution can be outperformed by even faster SSDs + more ram + vast GPU processing. Anyway You don't get this for free, but You pay.

So, any VR solution will be a compromise in the foreseeable future. Pick and chose what You can effort and what is important to You.

@SgtTruth Glad that You are happy about not having invested into PSVR2. But, maybe it is not DOA and there actually will be titles in the future which may change Your mind? Who knows? In the end whether PSVR2 is a worthwhile investment or not, depends on everybody's preferences. Some people prefer to play games on a tiny screen on their phone. Some people prefer to enjoy games in their multi speaker dolby atmos home theater. Some people prefer to be surrounded by the game.

I personally would disagree with everything You wrote, Re village and gt7 are, in my opinion best played in VR and for me it would be very worthwhile to play them again in VR (though again is presumably not something I would use when playing GT7). There are fantastic exclusives (recently Synapse!). Most ports are best played on PSVR2 (e.g. Star wars: Tales from the galaxy's edge). Sometimes, it would be nice to have the extra freedom from a wireless solution e.g. quest. For example beat saber would be such a candidate, but to me it looks so much better on psvr(2) (also the rumble feels better) that I would rather take the extra fidelity than the extra freedom. Yes, there are also not so great games, but there is a constant influx of new quality games. Given the track record of capcom with re7 and re8, I am pretty sure also Re4 will be best played in VR. But yes it is a nearly 20 year old game (and who would possibly want to play that again?). Vertigo 2 looks intriguing . And the situation with No Man's Sky may indicate, that it takes developers some time to create a version that looks and plays really well on PSVR2. So, to declare a new product DOA after 6 months, because there was no last of us part 2 day one, feels premature. Anyway You have Your opinion I have mine. And that is perfectly fine.

@Perryg92 I am also mostly playing story driven games, and I spend an embarrassing number of hours in NMS. Though, I would dare to say that one presumably has to look quite a bit for an engaging story in NMS. There are stories and the latest expansions, which I have not played, may have even better stories. But, the majority of the gameplay is resource management and exploration. The procedural generation has its advantageous and disadvantageous. One hand it allows to create the billion planets which all look different. On the other hand the generators are not as sophisticated as developers, and the generated planets appear in the end very similar. It is still a fascinating game which pulled me in for a quite some time. I quickly looked at the latest update, and it plays really well on psvr2. But, I also was fine with the state it was in a month or so ago.

I did not know that ubisoft was a relevant player in the streaming market. ... [ redacted ] ... Weird, MS dictates the price and ubisoft (in addition to MS) can chose which platform is allowed to stream (but not digital distribution) ? Or does this just mean that MS will snack up ubisoft next ?

Looks awesome. If it plays as good as the dojo of the first vader immortal, then I would be interested. Though, I could imagine that it feels a bit lite on content.

Most people presumably would not care, but if there was only a single platform there would for example not be advanced haptics in the controller, no VR, no dockable handheld.

And presumably games would still be played in VGA resolution with 16 colors and on a device with 640 kB of RAM.

@LtSarge xbox is not buying publishers left and right because they want to prevent ps from making marketing deals. Xbox could just do the same. Content is needed to feed gamepass. I don't really know how xbox is trying to bypass the android and apple store, but I could imagine that they want to put gamepass on mobile to attract 200m new customers (which then can play candy crush for "free")

@VRjunky I am also pretty happy with the sound quality of the momentum 4 when using aptX over bluetooth. And the battery life is fantastic. I do not have any comparison with "high-end" wired headphones. But wrt. the headphones I had before they sound very good (parrot Zik1?, momentum 2, ear plugs). The negatives are the price, they are a bit bulky and do not fill well together with a psvr2 headset (it works but not super well), also the sound over the analog input when not switched on is very disappointing (the momentum 2 did much better in this regard).

@JohnnyShoulder It is not tempest over atmos. It is more stereo, dolby 5.1 or 7.1 over atmos. Tempest is a stripped down gpu tailored for general audio processing. It can handle up to, if I remember correctly, 1000 channels and it can render 3D sound. But it can be used for much more than just mapping channels into 3D sound. Atmos can mix up to 128 channels with spatial information and map it onto the speaker set it typically does not have the processing capabilities of a tempest engine, there might be additional filters etc. an atmos system can apply, but it is not programmable.

[edit: it seems the sound format used for games which is send over hdmi to an atmos system only supports 32 channels]

@Northern_munkey T2 enabled the port to "modern" platforms. I would not call this "not showing any respect". Personally I neither see enough value in the quake 2 remaster at 8 quids, nor in the RDR port. Though, quake 2 can be played on many platforms, where RDR could only be played on XB360, ms' xb360 emulator and ps3. In that sense there might be more value in the RDR port.

@Cashews Still the effort of the quake 2 remaster and the RDR port are very likely not the same and the RDR port was likely much more tedious (There are all kinds of ports of quake 2. For example nvidia made a version with raytracing in 2019).
I am not defending T2's price and I am not interested at that price. But I would say the same for a game from 1997 at 8 quids (despite the upgrade to 4k etc. it still looks very much like a 20 year old game. In comparison RDR looks like a 10 year old game — and a very good looking one).

@nessisonett fully agree, concerning play length and fun !

But it also does not make any sense to compare the effort of porting a game that was already ported to many platforms to a port of a much more complicated game that was only released on some more or less exotic platforms.

@thefourfoldroot1 fair point concerning play time, and clearly one cannot ignore the player base. But a lot of people were hoping for more AAA games. Not necessarily because there is not enough to play, but because there is not enough choice.

I would agree that read dead redemption seems overpriced.

But just by play time the price can be justified. According to howlongtobeat:
| | Quake2| Read Dead Redemption |
| | (h) | (h) |
| Main Story | 8 | 18 |
| Main + Extras | 10.5 | 26.5 |
| Completionist | 9.5 | 46.5 |
| All Styles | 9 | .5 |
(apparently a completionist playing quake 2 is more skilled than the average quake 2 player ... ). So, a completionist has 4.9 times longer fun with RDR than with Quake 2 , ignoring the infinite fun people may have with the multiplayer ...

Moreover quake runs on everything including your pocket calculator where RDR was only released on "exotic" hardware x360 and ps3. So, I am pretty sure that the port was much more work than the port of quake2.

@thefourfoldroot1 "loads" is certainly very subjective, but clearly the number of quality games releasing for psvr2 compared to ps4/ps5 games is small.

It is interesting to see how narratives are always moved around. During the last gen cycle people were ogling DF frame rate graphs, picking the version of a game on the platform with highest resolution, have not missed a chance to point out how much less tera flops ps4 pro had and how much less blades of grass the ps4 pro rendered wrt. the competition, and people were boosting about how much better games look on PC due to more tera flops. Now apparently power i.e. higher resolution and frame rate does not matter anymore. One somehow has the impression that this has something to do with which platform is going to have the "power lead". Or maybe it is just that people think that they cannot afford yet another expensive toy and are jealous of the people who can.

I understand that business people are not thrilled about more platforms to support, since it requires more work, and people would have bought the game anyways on one of the target platforms. So, a midgen refresh likely does not generate extra revenue for the publisher. But from the enthusiasts point of view, I would say, more power is always better, even if it is just used to even-out frame rate dips. In the past Sony's argument for the ps4 pro was that too many people would leave PS for PC. I suppose this has not changed.

Whether it is worth the price is for everybody to decide, and it certainly is good for people who upgrade to the current generation after the midgen refresh. I personally do not care enough about a little bit of higher resolution (maybe about more stable frame rates in VR, though), and in my point of view gaming hardware is supposed to be reasonably "cheap", which contradicts a midgen refresh (which kind of doubles the price).

@thefourfoldroot1 @Sequel
"Loads of games" is a bit of a stretch, I would say, but there is good mix of psvr1, quest ports and new releases. Personally I really enjoyed Synapse (awesome game, nearly as good as returnal), I also really liked the c-smash demo (but the full game feels a bit pricy), I am currently re-enjoying the room vr and moss (and beat saber). I also really liked Hubris and red matter 2. Then in the next weeks green hell, crossfire sierra squad, and firewall ultra will be released. So, there is constant influx of good games. But, I would not mind if there were a few more AAA games with VR mode like resident evil village or gt7 and the only announced game on the horizon is resident evil 4.

It such a pity that they discontinued dreams before there was a ps5 + psvr2 version ...
It has so much awesome VR content which is now locked to psvr1

Weird support for a haptic suit without VR ...

Very nice interview!
The game sounds cool, but I am not yet sold on the visuals. Maybe it looks better in the headset but to me it looks like a blend of a low poly 3D world with 2D effects.
Up to now, I am cautiously interested.

@Discol76 for me just the ability to look around and being surrounded by the artificial world elevates a game in VR over the flat screen version. Also the 3D sound is better synchronised with the visuals in VR.
I like VR AF games i.e. motion controls with lots of interactive elements, and prefer motion control aiming over thumbstick aiming, but for example hitman 3 on psvr was perfectly fine for me. Playing e.g. hitman 3 with a gamepad is different from playing such a game with motion controls, but it is still much better playing it in VR, and playing with a gamepad is more relaxed.
I would say options are king.

Shame that synapse only has a barely longer play time than fracked despite being roguelite, and so little enemy and environmental variety. Though, not that surprising. In the end I rather play a good short game than a long game with too much filler content or which is less polished.

Hopefully enough people will buy the game despite its high VR tax. Then, ndreams might have enough budget for a future game which is closer to a flat title in scope. They do not seem to lack talent.

@Spanky84 1) the final real world performance of the quest3 is to be seen, but compared to psvr1 it will need some of the performance to drive a higher resolution and eventually also some performance for the hand-tracking assisted controller tracking (as far as I understand how the controller tracking works). So, I would be surprised if the visual fidelity would exceed that of psvr1 games. Higher resolution, yes, but not better lighting, higher resolution textures, more effects etc. . Also not clear whether the memory bandwidth will achieve psvr1 levels.

2) PSVR2 is still the only < kEUR headset with eye tracking which enables foveated rendering and gives the PS5 + PSVR2 an additional boost over the nominal performance.

3) The quest3 will likely not have anything comparable to the haptics of PSVR2.

The quest3 will have some advantages over PSVR2. But it won't be a clear cut. PSVR2 still will have unique features which will be unmatched. In most cases it will be a matter of personal preferences i.e. room scale vs console level fidelity, image clearity vs HDR oled colors, mixed reality vs VR only, controller rumble vs sense and headset haptics.

Personally for me the biggest shortcoming of PSVR2 is that there is so little AAA content. I'd rather have a last of us VR than pan cake lenses, for example, and I presumably also prefer the oled colors over a no-mura display. It is not clear what kind of visual fidelity developers will extract out of the PS5+PSVR2, but at the moment it still seems that a bit more raw power would still do wonders. So, I would say that a quest3 is still too far away from what would be more important to me. Also, I would not be thrilled to give meta/facebook my data (Of course also Sony collects all kinds of data, but it is not their main source of revenue).

@HonestHick Concerning exclusivity deals. I have no idea how the exclusivity deals come about, but I am pretty sure that it is not Sony looking at about-to-be released content and pressures publishers in releasing exclusively on their platform. I think in most case the publishers want to share the risk and ask for money upfront. They will pitch games to the platform holders. which decides which games to "fund" for the benefit of some kind of exclusivity. Nothing stops MS from doing the same. It is only more expensive for MS since they have to compensate for a larger number of sales the publisher will miss if the content is exclusive to one platform. Anyway MS also had timed and permanent exclusive content. Not sure why MS seemingly had worse such deals. Is it just that their market position is too bad and publishers are just not interested or maybe MS does not offer as good payment as Sony ? Who knows. Anyway MS apparently can buy the biggest publishers so they could also pay more than Sony if they wanted to. For me this argument "Sony gets all the exclusive content and we poor MS don't have a chance to get similar deals. The only chance for us is to buy the entire publisher" does not sound convincing. But what do I know of the cut throat negotiations behind closed doors. Typically it is about money and MS has more. So MS should be able to get good deals.

I am personally mostly interested in VR and I see VR as one big area of innovation. It is a shame that MS removed one of the biggest VR content produces, Bethesda, from the free market One extra reason not to like MS for me. Also in my view VR is an innovation in the gaming space which is rather sabotaged by MS than boosted. But one can of course also see cloud streaming as a big innovation, which is likely faster driven forward by MS. Though, with cloud streaming one still plays exactly the same games just with compression artifacts and with input latency or fake inputs. Which does not sound like innovation to me.

Anyway, I enjoyed the conversation.

@HonestHick At first glance gaming everywhere (TV, PC, pad, cell-phone) sounds great. For some games this may work out well. But, do I really want to continue elden ring on a phone while waiting for the bus, rather than enjoying a cinematic view on a big screen surrounded by audio from a nice set of speakers ? Or do I want to play candy crush on a 4k TV with THX sound ? Anyway the play anywhere strategy means that content has to scale from big screen, good controller down to small screen with flimsy controls. So, games will be graphically less detailed, since the detail would likely not look good on small screens or cannot be deciphered and the control scheme has to be simplified.

Concerning cloud gaming, I am quite skeptical. For movie streaming at least latency is not a problem so content can also be streamed from data centers further away. For game streaming content cannot be distributed so much since it has to be close to the player. Also compression is likely less efficient since frames have to be sent as quickly as possible and cannot be compressed in bunches. More computing power is needed than for movie streaming. But who knows maybe it will work greate in the future.