theheadofabroom

@andy24king seems pretty simple, implement an allowlist (aka whitelist) of available games on the console which is updated every time you're online. If you put in a disk that's not on the list then it tells you that you can't play it, and if you're offline it prompts you to connect to the server. The whole thing could be implemented in the part of the OS which deals with installing and launching games without being active at any other time.

While toying with the idea as a thought exercise I considered allowing an entry with a date in the future when it becomes available, but without verifying against a server then it becomes vulnerable to people messing with the system clock. As proposed it would still be vulnerable to people with hacked consoles, but you'll never fully deal with that, and people who haven't installed the update that added the allowlist feature.

It sucks that it forces you to connect to servers to play a physical game, but you should be installing firmware updates anyway, and you can play anything that was released prior to the last time you connected without issue.

@Pokemaniacal why's that?

I'll give Heavenly Bodies a go, but Nioh isn't the sort of thing I generally get along with, and I'm not even claiming the Lego TERF game

I think I saw something online saying the first Witcher game is getting a UE5 remake, which could be cool

https://twitter.com/witchergame/status/1585270206305386497

Can't say I'm a fan, I'd prefer they find other ways of making things one-way, like ledge drops.

If the devs say it's not to hide loading though, I'll happily believe them

@Steve30000 to be fair I haven't missed seeing any of their views since I added them to my ignore list a while back

@EquiinoxGII one imagines they're doing it for Xbox but including PS5 because they want the CMA to let them have ABK

@UltimateOtaku91 that's how it has worked for all my other physical games that got upgrades: Mafia Remake, CP2077, Fallen Order, Borderlands 3, etc etc

@UltimateOtaku91 the good news is that the second hand market is flooded with copies at this point, and the PS4 version is regularly on digital sale, I picked up the GOTY after playing a bit for free because I wanted the DLC and I paid < £20, about 2 years ago

@UltimateOtaku91 I mean it's free with the PS5 Collection, so if you have ps+ you own it already. If you don't, then why do you expect to get a free game for nothing?

The update I was is for Sony to allow custom models from mods, the availability of mods for PlayStation is so much lower than other platforms.

@UltimateOtaku91 @ShogunRok It says on the link at the bottom of the article that it'll be a free upgrade.

Emphasis mine:

Prepare for the future: A next-gen update is coming to Fallout 4! Coming in 2023, this free update will be available for Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 and Windows PC systems, including performance mode features for high frame rates, quality features for 4K resolution gameplay, bug fixes and even bonus Creation Club content!

Someone call Sony and let them know that 68% of this poll's recipients are happy to buy a £3000-5000 games console.

I was about to comment that as long as you can maintain fidelity I'll take the highest stable frame rate you can manage but honestly some games are far more relaxing to play at 30fps than 60fps. Others feel like crap at anything under 60fps. Anything is better than an unstable frame rate.

Console gaming has never been able to keep up with PC but it's a helluvalot cheaper over the period of a generation, and much more convenient. If you don't like the tradeoffs then PC is right there, and nowadays you can even buy a graphics card.

Someone mentioned Vampire the Masquerade - Bloodlines so I'm taking a break from AC: Valhalla to play that again. The 00's jank is real, but it's just such a good game with such a well realised world and characters, I don't think there's much that comes close, let alone doing things better, and I really hope the sequel delivers whenever it resurfaces (I was going to say when it sees the light of day, but let's not)

@KidBoruto ah, good to hear it was temporary, who would have thought that Apple stuff wouldn't "just work"?

(It me: I've been forced to use a load of their gear professionally and it has given me a deep seated loathing for their software)

@rjejr heh, as someone who's body is falling apart in myriad ways, accessibility options is my first port of call in any game - glad I could help!

@rjejr huh I haven't got round to Miles Morales yet, did it not give an option under Accessibility?

I could see Spidey as a Spring release and Wolverine in the Autumn

@Netret0120 it has already been replaced by FIFA, at least in the UK. It's good to see people buying it anyway.

@3Above I'd guess so, pretty sure it's supposed to be a launch title. I can hope it's DLC, but Call of the Mountain is more likely

@KidBoruto I can tell you that both Android TV on my Bravia and my partner's Fire Stick have all the features, sorry to hear that Apple TV is lacking.

@KidBoruto for at least Prime Video, Netflix, Disney+, and all the UK free streaming services, you just need to log in on another device and all your watchlists and history will still be there.

Years of life is kinda meaningless for a peripheral. The total number of hours of use is more useful, while the number of button actuations or sum total angle of movement of each stick axis, while impossible to accurately track, are the actual useful metrics.

I have a launch day console, and put about 1000 hours into the controller that came with it, then bought a midnight black controller when it released, relegating the original controller to be player 2 or a spare, and put about 800 hours into that until it developed stick drift. I RMA'd it and the replacement has about 1200 hours on it, still going strong.

On the one hand it's actually pretty impressive that ⅔ of the DS5 controllers I have owned are still pinpoint accurate with over 1000 hours of use, but in the other hand, when the controller that failed did so, it degraded pretty badly, pretty fast. On the first day of drift it was fine to just press the reset button with a pin. The next day I needed to set dead zones in HFW, but it was still usable. On the third day it was unusable and I had to switch back up my launch day controller while I arranged the RMA.

I've not had a controller on PC develop stick drift since the 90s, although they've all had much larger dead zones, while the 90s controllers, which needed calibration every time you reconnected them, never showed that sort of rapid progressive failure.

At £210 I would want an incredibly long and comprehensive warranty otherwise I'm far better off modding the standard Dualsense, especially once aftermarket hall effect modules become available like they are for the Switch and the Steam Deck.

Not £210 much, for that I can buy 3 standard controllers and afford to break 2 of them trying to DIY the improvements.

@sanderson72 I don't really want to have to buy a new thing - the cost and the energy involved in manufacture probably aren't worth it for the period until I move house. I'd also have to juggle HDMI ports again to make things simple for the less tech savvy members of my household.

Gah! My TV's All4 app is part of YouView so needs an aerial (we only have a satellite dish, which is fine for Freesat but YouView won't let you set up without being able to scan for channels), so I frequently use the PS5 as a media box so I can watch everything on one device. I guess I'll have to get used to switching away for anything other than All4, and look forward to having an aerial when I move house (which is taking ages)

I have a bunch of trophies, but no points, and the only way I can see if getting points, is by buying games I don't want.

It's not costing me anything though, it's not hurting anyone, and it's not causing me any inconvenience, so "Meh".

Hopefully it improves, but if not I'll just forget about it and not be any worse off

@SirRealDeal I can't see it being a huge issue, a lot of VR doesn't have static UI or menus, and it's also less likely to be used for 8-10 hours at a time, so a lot less potential than monitors and TVs, where the issue has been somewhat overstated

Still plugging away on AC: Valhalla which is fine, I just have continual issues with traversal controls doing the wrong thing and a few instances of falling through the world. Got the St George gear and a load of stuff from Nifelheim, but I should probably get back to the main story at some point

@djlard generally you'll have estimated the work involved as much as possible in advance, and base your release date on how long it'll take to complete that work with the team you forecast having over the duration of the project.

Old school folks might have a Gantt Chart, while more modern practices might be using Kanban principles, but nobody is going to get far into a large project without having some forecast of how long things will take when money is on the line.

The estimates generally aren't all that accurate on an individual feature level, but over a project things generally shake out (I've had features that were expected to take a week take anywhere between 2 days and 3 months, but things generally averaged out to week, and missing a release date was fairly rate)

@Titntin @Hengist is this just knock-off Civ, or is it more like Empire Earth where it did something original (in this instance, reimagined Civ as an RTS)?

If folks don't like the way English people use the English language, maybe come up with your own?

@Snake_V5 my phone has a 21:9 aspect ratio, so in landscape mode it shows with the full screen height, but black bars to either side, rather than stretching the image (which is 16:9, so it fills about ¾ of the screen, i.e. ~⅛ of the screen is blank to either side). To me that's preferable to the alternatives (either cutting off the top and bottom, or stretching things 30% horizontally), especially on an AMOLED screen where the borders are true black rather than glowing grey a la LCD displays

I was about to reply to Snake_V5 but it looks like everything has already been said. I just wish the quality would go up to 1440p or 4k HDR if your phone and network hardware are up to it. The 1080p encoding/decoding performance is impressive (at least using an Xperia 5 II with a decent network setup, my PS5 connects to the same switch as my wireless access point and I had a reliable 300Mbps with single digit ping)

@C25CLOUD didn't you know that every third person 3d action platformer is a Tomb Raider remake? And every FPS is a Wolfenstein 3D remake? There's nothing new under the sun, apparently

@WCB I would expect that it counts, and just excludes things like DLC, demos, and getting access via PS+

@AstraeaV Huh? I've had a PS5 since launch day?

I don't get why you think I hate Sony, I have an Xperia phone, a Bravia TV, and Sony noise cancelling headphones, and I subscribe to PS+ Extra. I encourage people to be realistic and make considered purchasing decisions rather than being loyal to brands, but that pragmatic approach keeps having me buy Sony products.

They're all loyalty schemes. This is a UK site so I'm not sure why folks are surprised that it's written in British English?

@Royalblues I can't see things having been affected much. The PS5 is basically a PC built around a Ryzen 4700S with a 6700M GPU sharing RAM. The recent Ryzen 7##0X chips show a fair uptick in performance per Watt and include graphics hardware (although not as powerful) so I could easily see a Ryzen 8300S being about right next year or the year after (likely comes to consoles before it's available to buy on shelves). The issue could be cost, but who really knows?

@Royalblues it's about power density: as hardware gets faster then even if things don't use any more power, (which often they do) the components consuming that power get smaller, and the main way that power is released its in terms of heat. Transistors get less efficient as they get hotter, and if they get hot enough, degrade, so you need to efficiently get all that heat away from the chips, which is generally done with huge heatsinks and fans. I think something like ⅔ to ¾ of the volume of the launch PS5 is made up by the heatsinks and the fan assembly.

The good news is that technology marches on, and with that, performance per Watt improves, meaning soon enough there will be a processor that can do the same work as the one in the launch PS5 using a lot less energy, at which point it'll need less cooling, and they can make a PS5 slim out of it. If this rumour is accurate then that could be as soon as next year.

The new, more power efficient, chips are likely to require a new fab line though, which means that to maximise capacity Sony are likely to keep producing the full size version for a while until they can meet demand without it, when they'll retire the current versions and only produce the new ones. At that point they might look into a Pro model if it's not yet time for a ps6

@NeoTokyo404 fee…ling's?

I mean, is this her taking off her heels?

Similar accessories made the experience playing shooters on the Wii much better, so if I get the PSVR2 I could easily see myself picking one up

@nomither6 African American Vernacular English

@nomither6 if it's too much then I'm sure mouse and controller would work, through the magic of the Steam Controller Overlay?

I can believe that it'll release in December, partly because Firaxis have form for releasing things in a very rough and unoptimised state. Waiting until Q2 next year might be a good idea either way

I'm making my way through Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, and honestly I currently feel like the alternate game where you're a Viking who isn't being controlled and connected to the Assassins would have been better.

@Grimwood the reason is that it's a lowest common denominator for MFA, with all the issues I mentioned in my post. Not to mention the fact that they're abusing MFA for a purpose it wasn't designed for.

@nomither6 to be fair it's the mouse that's a serious advantage for aiming, the keyboard is just its natural pairing. I'd recommend using something like Portal or Superhead to get your eye in before playing more time critical competitive stuff. You'll likely end up slowly increasing mouse sensitivity as you build the instinct for "when my arm/wrist/fingers move like this, it moves my viewport like that" until it becomes something you no longer have to think about.

@nomither6 for me as a keyboard and mouse player since the 90s the difference isn't even funny, although gyro aiming in Deathloop helped me get about halfway there

Seeing as people (including a lot of product managers and developers who implement them, including at institutions that should know better like banks) don't seem to get the point of multifactor authentication, and I've spent time working on security focused systems, here's the deal:

A factor can be:

• Something you know (like a username or password)
• Something you are (think biometrics like face recognition, fingerprints, iris scans)
• Something you have (your phone, a ubikey, a smart card)
• Somewhere you are (this could be from GPS or a combination of nearby access points, or a whitelisted IP address range associated with a known site)

2-factor authentication requires that you use information from two of these categories (multifactor authentication requires at least two, but up to all 4, depending on configuration).

An email address only be verifies that you know the credentials to access that email address, so doesn't provide any additional factors on top of a user name or password.

SMS verification is intended to verify that you have possession of the SIM card associated with that phone number, however due to numerous issues that allow a SIM to be cloned or for your SMS inbox to otherwise be accessed (I can get into mine by logging into my provider's website) it is also not any better than a username and password.

An obvious second factor from my point of view would be the primary console or PC that you use to access your account (probably more specifically the MAC Address of your primary network interface, or a motherboard serial number, something like that). You nominate hardware for your account, and that hardware needs to be used to generate an access code to add other hardware to your account. You can move which is your primary device, but only if your account is in good standing, and you can only have any one device associated with any one account at a time. It gets inconvenient if you share a console, although you could maybe have sub accounts where any one account cheating bans the whole group, but it means cheaters rapidly run out of devices to cheat on unless they keep buying new hardware.