wildcat_kickz

@Propaperpusher I don't even know what you're referring to with "iPhone GOW."

I agree that PlayStation has really fumbled this generation. I personally love single-player games and probably spend more time playing them than multiplayer games. But PlayStation has obviously not abandoned single-player games. This generation, we have gotten Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Spider-Man 2, Returnal, God of War: Ragnarok, Ratchet & Clank: A Rift Apart, Lost Soul Aside, God of War: Sons of Sparta, Horizon: Forbidden West, LEGO: Horizon Adventures, Ghost of Yotei, Astro Bot, Death Stranding 2, and more. This doesn't even mention the slew of remasters and remakes that have released as well.

I get it. You don't like multiplayer games and you don't like Marathon. But you are not everyone.

You mentioned VR, but that has been a colossal failure, in terms of revenue and engagement, so that's an abysmal example to bring up.

Would I like a Marathon campaign? Yes. Duh. Of course I would. Would that have helped Marathon sell more copies? Yes, definitely. Should Marathon have been an exclusively single-player game? Absolutely not. Especially because that's clearly not what Bungie wanted to do. They haven't made single-player-focused games in like 25 years.

The reality is that Sony doesn't make a ton of money on single-player games. They may sell a decent amount of copies, but in many cases, the initial sale is the only money that is generated per customer. Games-as-a-Service (which is such a loaded and useless term nowadays) allow the publisher to further monetize the game after release, making more money. This is really simple stuff. Is that greedy? Yeah, I guess. But it's also just capitalism. Sony is a for-profit company. They exist to make money.

BUT, a game being a GaaS does not mean the game is necessarily predatory. In Marathon, the only things you can spend additional money on are cosmetics. There are no guns, maps, XP boosts, etc. offered that change the experience. It's allllll cosmetic. I haven't spent a dime more than the $40 I paid for the game and feel no reason to. If you're upset that you're spending a lot of money on games after release, than you have your own poor impulse control to blame.

If you want a complete collapse of the video game industry, so no one has any fun, then yes, please continue to wish for games to fail.

Ok, this is getting weird now.

I understand regional pricing differences. I understand PS Plus discounts. I'd even understand discounts based on which tier of PS Plus you're subscribed to.

Per-person pricing without any disclaimers or reasoning feels really dystopian and gross.

@Artois2 I honestly don't know why people think live-service is the problem. Live-service is synonymous with multiplayer. Multiplayer games dwarf single-player games in revenue generated, so that clearly isn't the problem.

With Marathon, I think it's a combination of a few things: divisive art style, very hardcore mechanics, niche genre, and a vocal hate campaign against it.

Really sad to see Marathon underperforming, but I guess it's not entirely unsurprising; just very disappointing. It really is an excellent game, but is incredibly hardcore.

I've said it before, but if Bungie wants a relatively easy cash grab to keep them afloat, I'd love to see a Destiny 1 remaster. 4K, 60FPS, improved lighting, no new content. Just rerelease everything that was available through Rise of Iron.

I've been playing through the Destiny 1 campaign recently and even though it's super campy, it just hits.

Great game, especially after all the updates. In my opinion, Lies of P is the superior game, but LotF is definitely worth your time if you like Souls-like games. It's not the easiest in the genre, but it's also nowhere near as difficult as the Nioh or First Berserker games.

Ooof. Definitely a bummer. I bet the Marathon haters on Push Square will be having a field day.

@LowDefAl Maybe. The closure could be an internal issue at the studio, but we don't know anything about what actually happened.

Yikes. What a series of blunders. We don't really know how much Hermen Hulst has to do with all these failures, but someone is really screwing the pooch. If not Hulst, someone(s) needs to be shown the door.

@RoomWithaMoose I think we're basically on the same page. The Roblox model doesn't work, anyway. I'm pretty sure they lose money hand over fist, too.

As I've said in other posts, I don't root for games to fail, but I also don't like how much market dominance a small handful of games have. If what Epic is doing now results in a smaller, but stable footprint for Fortnite, I think that benefits the industry at large.

@RoomWithaMoose Oh, certainly. It's definitely not business as usual. Things are definitely not going according to plan, that's for sure.

I guess the point I was trying to make is that just because things are trending down now doesn't mean that it will ultimately spell doom for Fortnite. It may plateau at a new normal, which might be sustainable with all the cost-cutting they're doing. Who knows? Maybe things will grow again after stabilization, but I doubt they'd staff up again like they did before.

@RoomWithaMoose I just don't think we have the data to support that. They've probably passed peak engagement and will have to find a new normal, but saying that it's a "grandiose decline" is putting the cart way before the horse.

The people in the comments thinking this is the end of Fortnite don't really understand what's happening here. Fortnite is not struggling - they're spending more than they are making, but they are making a lot.

I never spent a ton of time playing Hardline, but I do remember liking the campaign, as well as the unique game modes. The mode where the capture point was a car was a really cool idea.

I haven't played Fortnite in many, many years, but do feel for the 1000+ people about to lose their jobs. Maybe it's different in Europe, but for the US, those severance packages seem very generous, though.

@Boxmonkey Seriously, dude. Why are you commenting on every article that has to do with Marathon? You're pretty quick to say people who played Cryo have "no life." There's a metaphor about a pot and a kettle somewhere. Nope nothing comes to mind.

@Zeke68 Well, I'm an American, so I'm sure I'd have some beef with what you describe as the "American way" of doing business, but I certainly don't begrudge anyone for not cheering on corporations. I hate how pretty much every large corporation acts, regardless of where they're headquartered. There's no such thing as a benevolent for-profit, publicly-traded company.

My point was that this being a PlayStation website is not a relevant fact because Microsoft publishes games on PlayStation.

Love your Hunter's Mark icon, btw.

Bummer. I'm a huge sucker for medieval settings, but this gets a hard pass from me.

@Zeke68 I totally get that, but Microsoft is a huge player in the Sony ecosystem now, so I'm not sure it's fair or realistic to ask PS downplay their coverage. This isn't a dig at all, but there may also be a sort of negative confirmation bias thing happening (not sure if I'm using that correctly). This is to say, because you don't like the Xbox coverage, it sticks out more and seems more abundant that it actually is. I'm not saying you're wrong, btw. I guess it just doesn't bother me as much.

@Zeke68 It's the same as having a Square Enix headline or a Sega headline or a Capcom headline or an EA headline. Xbox is just a third-party publisher, who happens to be one of the largest, if not the largest, publishers on PlayStation.

Should they ignore games that are coming to PlayStation just because Microsoft is the company that announced them? Make it make sense.

@TrollOfWar I'm not sure Sega would be confident that their old formats would work for a modern release. People who grew up with those games are middle-aged. I'd imagine that Sega is relying on more than just nostalgia for these releases. Don't get me wrong - Crazy Taxi is one of the most formative games for me and I'd be over the moon for a new one that was just more of the same, but it is a very "time-and-place" type game: arcade mode, time trials, and punk rock.

I'm very interested in the Expanse game. I've never played an OwlCat game, but the switch to an over-the-shoulder shooter has my attention. I've also never read the Expanse books, but the show is freaking awesome. It looks like OwlCat is leaning into the more "grounded" part of the Expanse, too.

@Globo People use "AI" in such a broad way that it's basically impossible to have a realistic conversation about the pros and cons.

I'm still very much against using generative AI in most end-user products, but using AI as a productivity tool is pretty great. LLMs are fantastic and have such a wide use case. For example, having an LLM act as your lore bible repository when creating a fictional universe is so helpful.

The more I think about this, the sillier it feels to me. The PSN name actually has a lot of utility to distinguish itself from hardware. Saying the network is down is much more informative than saying PlayStation is down.

I'd give it a 7 or an 8, personally. The gunplay is rock-solid and I absolutely love the art style. The only things holding it back are my own skill and the game's inaccessibility to more casual gamers. I don't know if it's my new "forever game," but I've put probably 50 hours in so far and have been having a blast.

@Boxmonkey I really don't think they are. It's standard practice to not release a final review of a live-service game until a little bit after release, so reviewers can judge the live environment of the game. This is true for Marathon, Call of Duty, Battlefield, Destiny, etc., and is accepted practice amongst just about any reputable reviewer platform. People posting a "final" review after the game being out for a day are engagement farming.

Push Square has bent over backwards to be transparent about this, too. They posted an article explaining why a final verdict would take a while, then posted a review-in-progress, only to be dragged by people like yourself, who won't be happy with any outcome.

For someone who has no interest in playing Marathon, you're constantly criticizing Push Square over their coverage and also go out of your way to call Marathon "half dead," which is, at best, hyperbolic, and at worst, disingenuous rage-baiting.

Pick your poison, but regardless, you aren't putting your best foot forward.

@Boxmonkey A recent quote from Jeff Kaplan about criticizing games you haven't played comes to mind when reading your comments.

It is a nice shorthand for "Sony's online infrastructure," but ultimately, it doesn't really matter all that much. Acronyms are always fun, though.

Who can forget the "Bi-Angular Directionally-Assisted Stapling System"? /s

@somnambulance @Fluberuper In order for Sony to retain the Spider-Man movie license, they need to release at least one movie every 5 years, so expect many, many more Spider-Man movies in the future.

I'm so wildly tapped out on Marvel movies, but even I'm excited for this one.

@StrifeInMidgar Read his name out loud, haha.

@Divergent95 Some people need to understand that they're impressing absolutely no one.

@RomanRiz Of course that's what you took away from my comment...

@RomanRiz You do understand that rage baiting is one of the lamest, most unattractive things a person can do, right?

@RomanRiz Wow, what an original joke!

Keith David for the win, baby!

If their reveal isn't emblematic of what the tech does, then why on earth did they lead with it? I really hope the tech is better than what they've shown, but the criticism is 100% valid because it's all they've shown.

This is gonna be great for the drunk folks at the barcade. 😂

@LogicStrikesAgain Ah fair deal, I misread the article and didn't see that. My fault! In that case, I'd broadly agree. Nothing worthwhile is free and as the great Goro Takemura once said, "That which is free often proves the most costly." 😋

@LogicStrikesAgain Who's calling it slimy? The article isn't antagonistic and the comments aren't really either.

Sigh. Yeah, I'm one of those people. I'd prefer to not have Premium, but somehow, there's less latency when using cloud streaming to my Portal vs. streaming from my PS5. I don't really understand how that works, but there you go.

I'm sorry, but a potential spoiler is not a good enough excuse to demand an online connection for a game fully on-disc. I hate spoilers, but those are small potatoes compared to being able to play the game at all. I've haven't purchased a single PS5 game on disc, but even I'm not happy about this. This harkens back to the registration keys of yore.

This is completely separate from game preservation, mind you. I've never found that as a good excuse for anything. Game preservation doesn't mean that you need to be able to play anything you want for all time. It means keeping the game in historical context at a museum or an archive or something. There are plenty of things that you can't buy anymore that are not lost to time.

@Stragen8 There are still plenty of free mods, but there are a bunch of sanctioned paid mods as well. Same thing as Skyrim and Fallout 4.

The lighting tech is actually very impressive, but the way DLSS 5 is messing with the character models is quite upsetting, though not in every case. I actually think the characters are markedly improved in Starfield, but the beauty filter look in RE9 just sucks.

This shows promise, but they need a lot of work to make sure the upscaler isn't changing the artistic direction of the game itself.

@Balaam_ @LifeGirl I get why you would want to delete incomplete trophy lists. I have plenty of games that I bounced off of, only to have one trophy popped. However, I did hear a pretty good reason for not having the feature, which is security focused. For example, if someone hacked your account or a family member got into your account, they could delete your trophy data, which would be way worse than having incomplete trophy lists.

@get2sammyb My hope is the Portal has full compatibility with PS6. I feel like people would understandably throw a fit if they made you upgrade the Portal, too.

@Atreus97 fingers crossed

Really hope they add more RTX than shadows. Didn't really add anything to the presentation and was definitely not worth playing the game at 30fps.

Edit: Just give me Witcher 3 with RTX at 60fps!

@Gunnerzaurus "For select usage, we also pay them for the approval to license their voices through text-to-speech for lines that aren't as essential to the immersion of the experience, mostly ping system audio."

To be honest, I didn't really notice/care about the AI voice lines for the ping system, but am glad they're getting replaced all the same. If they had used AI voices for the actual dialog from quest givers, that would have been way too far for me.

@viktorcode Destiny is completely based around multiplayer.