viktorcode

Technically, Returnal is very hard to port to Windows. Taken as is the requirements for configuration will be pretty high. So they will need to create a lower tier mode for the game to be comfortably playable on lower end machines. A lot of new code will have to be written just for that.

There are videos on YouTube going deep into technical aspects of the game. Making it run on Steam's average gaming rig and not looking ugly will be a real challenge.

@Goober1 I've been a PC gamer my whole life, until I bought a PS4 for no good reason. Never looked back. Finally I felt myself free from the necessity of micromanaging every tiny aspect of setting up games, only to repeat it some time later when I see a frame rate drop. Now I just enjoy the games.

That's why you can't review games on technicalities. Charm adds a lot. Novelty too.

The game is simple. maybe it's not great but it's good. It's adorable. It gives good time to player

@JohntheRaptor Small team? They had around 800 people working (their own plus Activision owned studios helping them) and it still wasn't enough.

Whatever Bungie's problem is it isn't the lack of people. Maybe lack of talent?

@MKD88 @JudgeDredd @OrtadragoonX @RobN Clean it with a contact cleaner. There's no way the stick assembly which is the same as on PS4 dual shock could have worn out in that period of time.

I fixed the drift by opening the casing and spraying the contact cleaner into the stick assembly. That's it. No drift for more than a year since then.

@JJ2 It very well may be that the next generation PlayStation will have an Arm chip.

Let's put the separating line here: No Man's Sky is a live service game, while what's listed there is either "pay to skip the grind" or subscription-based games.

@neitan Do what I did, just clean it. I used "wd-40 specialist contact cleaner". After fixing the drift it still works without issues, for more than a year.

@BReal DualSense rocks. My first one that came with PS5 developed some drift in about 3 months, but I fixed it with a spray contact cleaner (had to open the casing a bit to get there). That's all there is to it: dirt causes drift, as it takes years of active usage for stick assemblies to wear.

What kind of question is that? Obviously, Bloodborn remake would make everyone excited!

With the battery life below 2 hours in those games it's no Vita 2.

If they'll add raytracing as a separate "quality" mode that will be struggling around 30FPS, then it'd be as useless as it gets.

@ED_209 PS Plus in the current form is a success, judging by the number of the subscribers. So the real question is how many current PS plus subscribers will upgrade their plan to pay more.

Me and many others won't be comparing that PS++ to some GamePass. We will be comparing it to the current subscription.

@Lavalera All fair points about lack of accessibility modes, but personally I'm against several difficulty settings in all games.

First, the game will be much harder to balance, and inevitably it will show in some encounters. The overall balance quality will suffer as the result, unless the game is developed and tested with one core mode all the way through, and additional modes are added later. But that's not how games are designed. Many modes? Design and test them all with the same size QA team. Adjusting difficulty in one of them leads to shifting neighbouring difficulties etc.

Second, as a player every time I have to somehow predict what difficulty is the right for me. Granted, I can switch it later, but then the nagging feeling that I didn't pass some part of the game on the same difficulty stays. When there's no difficulty I know I can accept the challenge.

@Spiders It's very naive to presume that those reviews on Metacritic were written by people who played the game. I repeat it once again: any rating counting scores from anyone (and not only from those who made the purchase) is just a hype noise measurement.

@LiamCroft Any idea if there will be the first day patch?

Unlike films I never found an aggregate review site for games that works for me. That's why I'm on PushSquare, their review scores are most of the time match the experience I get playing those games. But other sites can be way off. If I would take an average, then the score would be skewed too much.

So yes, for PlayStation I get my reviews from just one source (and watching some gameplay), and I'm better off for it.

@EVIL-C Review bombing is mitigated on platforms that require you to purchase the game before reviewing. One of the problems with Metacritic is that people use it as a popularity context: upvote something you root for, downvote something you don't like.

@Spiders If you trust reviews on sites that allow you to score a game without purchasing one, how do you know which one was review bombed?

@mucc To be fair, Xbox guys have Starfield coming out this year, so they need just to wait till holidays.

@TheRedComet Regarding the melee. I only started playing Horizon Zero Dawn this weekend. I'm not far into the game, but playing on very hard difficulty I find melee more efficient than ranged. Maybe I'm a poor shooter, but anyway. It is working on anything I encountered so far, except the corruptor and sawtooth: basically the machines that can perform frequent wide area attacks.

Would love to work there. Sadly, my skillset doesn't match lol

Nope. Never bought the game and don't feel inclined to do.

@nessisonett I wouldn't compare to No Man's Sky. From my perspective that was the case of eager gamers expecting different game from what've been released. And later Hello Games just added features to the robust core, without communicating with "gaming community".

Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't have robust core. Its open world model is shallow and lacking basic mechanics players came to expect from years of playing GTA. That's wobbly foundation to build on.

@elvisfan1 You'll have to make screenshots and then later compare them pixel by pixel to see those increased details. Or, you just an eagle-eyed person with somewhat high tolerance for frame jitter.

Hahahahaha no. I'll stick with 60 FPS, thankyouverymuch. This is the new gen experience, not the amount of details at 30 FPS with useless native 4k.

P.S. YouTube compression is the worst among major video hosting services. It is also the only major video hosting which does not support HEVC compression, which is de facto standard for hardware support.

I guess that was a part of Activision / Blizzard deal: we publish wherever we want.

@awp69 I understand that some developers may want to unlock higher frame rates due to VRR, but personally I think that's a very bad choice for following reasons:

1. Games are designed around frame budget. Say, you want 60 FPS, so you know exactly how much time in milliseconds you have for rendering, simulation, physics. You can manage it, more or less, for every frame. That's how locked frame rate is achieved. And now some manager comes up and says "screw that, let's remove the cap". And frame time starts swinging all other the place. It is a bad experience for the player, not having the predictable pace, even when it's masked with VRR. It might be good, eventually, when your FPS never dips below 120. But we are far from achieving this.

2. Many players won't have VRR for many years due to TV. For them stable frame rate is necessity. And that's why game developers worth their salt carefully managing frame budget, instead of relying on technology to mask their poor work.

@IonMagi I guess the reason is the same as why PlayStation 4 got HDR support much later in its lifetime: it takes time to implement, and higher priority features get worked on first.

@IonMagi PS5 HDMI bandwidth is limited programatically. And VRR doesn't require more bandwidth.

@awp69 VRR does not make games run faster. What it does, is improving average FPS value, which I consider a misleading metric. The precise metric should be the time to render a frame, and it should have max value to indicate how far console is falling behind the expected result.

When a console isn't able to render a frame in an allowed tome slot, the next frame will be delayed. And that's where VRR comes into play. Without VRR the next frame will be delayed for a set period of time, even if it is ready before that. With VRR the next frame will be rendered almost without a delay, thus making frame drops less visible. Average FPS goes up due to less waiting, but the actual time to render frames never changes. If your console struggles, it keeps struggling.

Could they be doing just what Apple does: having more than one supplier of the same technology at the same time?

@BoldAndBrash Exactly right. In years when I was playing first Destiny, I skipped all the other games.

How the spell casting mechanics work? Is it you spend more time on a spell - spell does more damage kind of thing? Is there some sort of mana?

For me that's the thing that will make or break this game

Going to wait for reviews. Price is secondary.

@Kang81 Exactly. Destiny stopped being good the moment Bungie decided to go Eververse and Seasons route, instead of just selling content in form of DLCs.

@OneWingedAngel It's dropped from 160k avg concurrent Steam players initially to 50k now. Yes, it is popular, but it's an old game that will keep losing players. DLCs effects on reversing the trend are only temporary.

Maybe will start caring about Destiny when Luke Smith (current game director) is fired from his position.

The one thing Sony should learn from Bungie is "how to NOT ruin your game and loose goodwill of your player base". I highly doubt people who knew how to make a new game that will hold players' interest for a long time still work in that studio.

@BadPlayerOne Their best year as independent, which is worse than what they had under Activision. I'm basing that solely on player number, which can be inferred from Steam charts. Also, from Activision quarterly reports it can be seen that the financial peak was reached at the start of Destiny 2 sales. Year after that Activision became "disappointed" in the results and decided to dump them. I cannot frame this story as any kind of success.

@BadPlayerOne They went free to play. You can see on Steam charts how their PC popularity declined from the initial peak.

This is overpriced. Especially with headcount like that. Bungie in 2014 and Bungie now are two very different studios. It is impossible to ignore severe game quality degradation that went before our eyes. Bungie of old invented game mechanics, genres, and built worlds. Bungie of today is a clueless upper management, trying to shove what was created before them into a free to play grindest, while proudly wearing old developer badge.

For me it is the worst studio purchase by Sony.

I have the rule to not get freebies that I wouldn't otherwise play, be it because of quality or genre. As the result in the last half year or so I got only a couple of games from PlayStation+. So, February is just month as usual, continuing the low point of catalogue.

I will wait for patches. I just know I must. And then I'll play.

I read the subtitle as "mandatory movie ticket"

GamePass on PlayStation will be profitable for Sony. I hope we all understand that whatever game subscription service is there, it has to pay the cut to the platform owner.

Remember how even Fortnite pays its share of revenue to Sony for micro-transactions conducted outside of PlayStation (depending on what platform the spender plays the most).

Answered "continue doing what they are doing" but I think they should slightly adjust overall strategy. Namely, pay more attention to their console store and maybe open a PC store, if they are set to release significant number of games there. Making their console more welcoming to indies wouldn't hurt.

@Rural-Bandit There's a difference: Apple and Google own the stores but not the game studios. The closest to game making they are is investment in form of Apple Arcade and Google Stadia.

@Integrity That reliable profitability of a publisher evaporates at the moment when the new owners start dictating which platforms they may publish on (no PlayStation) and which subscription scheme they must participate in (GamePass).

We can only guess at the moment what Microsoft is planning to do with their recent purchase.

An international investor potentially could swallow up EA. Softbank, Embracer Group — those guys. Or even Disney. If Microsoft tries to it will be the cause for government intervention. If Tencent tries, it still may be blocked due to the optics of Chinese buying american assets.

Everyone else simply don't have money or desire.