Considering the price premium and hype around the few features the PS5 Pro has which the "PS5 Amateur" models do not, it's genuinely amazing how many games release on it looking and/or running worse than the latter.
I'm starting to think like the regular PS5s, the console is going to be much more useful when it's properly kernel level jailbroken and features that aren't accessible by the user are opened up. Some kind of "simulate regular PS5 for games on PS5 Pro" option in etaHEN for example.
I'll bet the PS5 Pro's slight power advantage over regular PS5s would be useful when running PS4 games unlocked to 60FPS with a patch, too. Time will tell when the exploits and homebrew is released so those so inclined can test.
Point still stands though - five years into the generation and there's still very few big games being released and of those that are, far too many have been rushed through testing/QA stage with a "release now, patch later" mentality. Which means, as has become surprisingly common in the last decade, you're better off waiting a year or so and buying it on sale, paying less for a better experience after a game has been patched multiple times to fix things that should have been working before release.
Very 1984, trying to scrub past mistakes from history. Unlike 1984, doesn't usually work. People do like to archive for posterity.
This smacks of "bad idea era Sony" as far as I'm concerned. Stealing the idea for video game concerts from veritable industry icon Tommy Tallarico (his mother is very proud) is usually a sign you're out of ideas, when the idea should be simple, should be what it used to be and worked fine.
Drop console prices as generation increases. Make great games, keep them exclusive. Profit and happy fans.
Why that wonderful business model has been junked by people who think they know better, I can't understand.
@Lowdefal SEGA wanted to do that too, as I recall, and while it worked for a few years and they're still here, they lost a ton of market share over time and are a shadow of their former self. I figure if it happened to them, it can happen to Xbox too, another two syllable four letter brand.
@Carnage Fair points but remember, no company is too big to fail. All it takes is enough short-term greed, consumer hostile behaviour etc and it'll bite them later on. Forcing everyone into Windows 11 is already going nicely - it's not common yet but the smarter autonomous sys admins are instead transitioning or planning to with some form of Linux distro which is low fat, less nonsense and allows basic office drone level work to be performed just as well than W11. We'll see.
@UltimateOtaku91 I wouldn't be surprised if they pivot on that as well, lean into their stupid "Everything is an Xbox" (therefore nothing is) marketing and decide not to release a console at all.
It's a shame too, because I can't fault the hardware engineers for what they did with the Series X. It's a decent piece of industrial design, runs quiet, is reliable, can be used for emulators via Dev Mode... it's the lack of quality software and poor management that hurt it the most.
The best thing about this constant pivoting nonsense that is ruining the Xbox brand completely is, the more it continues the more likely that it'll be nowhere, on no platforms, in about a decade. They've taken so many consistent Ls recently they couldn't spell anything else.
Remember Games For Windows? Well it's not quite the same thing but it looks like another Microsoft owned branding that'll be going the way of the Dodo soon enough.
PS5 hardware sales might have surpassed PS3 sales in one territory, but let's be honest, the PS3 has a much, much richer library. Especially if you have a modified, fully backwards compatible one as then that also encompasses the PS2, PS1 and some of the PSP library as well.
Well if you don't get trophy support you're better off emulating. This is part of the reason I have an offline PS5 for JB purposes, it'll run PS4 grade PS2 emulators really well and you can build your own packages for games that'll never be re-released due to licensing issues, like OutRun 2006 with all the Ferraris or anything with a ton of licensed music. Or to hack in 60FPS support for games I've already bought 3 times and refuse to pay for again just for that.
Patching out more bug bounty exploits is what they mean.
Still no feature to alternate what the PS home button on the controller does. I move between PS3/PS4/PS5 all the time and the PS5 having it work backwards is one of the many failings of the default UI along with its unintuitive layout/navigation and ugly grey colour scheme.
More firmware updates this generation than first and second party games. Well done Sony. Nice PS4 Pro Pro, or for those of you whom have the PS5 Pro, the PS4 Pro Pro Pro (except in cases where the developers mess up and make the PS5 Pro version worse than the regular PS5 version which is often).
The vaunted Fallout: New Vegas approach - get the player into the open world as quickly as possible, litter interesting content all around, let the player figure it out.
I was genuinely hoping this generation would have a handful of games that do this rather than a glut of disappointments, but hey, nice to get one at least.
I'll be fascinated to see, in about two decades, a documentary called "When Big Business Went Nuts" that covers those consumer-hostile, moronic greed biased decision era of companies like Microsoft and specifically their Xbox division whom are a poster child for it.
It seems to be a thorough case study into how to do everything you can to completely destroy a once beloved brand. Lying, pivoting, making and breaking promises, raising prices even in spite of dwindling hardware sales, trying and failing to gaslight customers into it being them "listening to their feedback", and wearing big s**t-eating grins while doing so.
After a few years of doing this even the slowest of gamers have woken up and are jumping ship. Funnily enough no-one wants to pay a jacked up price to play decade old games and have a token insultingly small amount of Vbucks thrown their way should they happen to have kids that play Fortnite.
No-one can trust a word they say, and the bare minimum to even making people think Xbox is trustworthy as a brand again is immediate firing of Spencer, Booty and Bond as a team, issuing an apology and hiring someone with the respect level of a Shawn Layden who can actually fix the problems, and quickly.
Sadly none of that is going to happen so those three stooges will continue running what's left of the brand into the ground.
This choice seems to combine a bunch of dumbassery in gaming - another lazy "remaster" which as usual will just be a very glorified cheaply made overpriced port cashing in on older gamer nostalgia, the further erosion of platform exclusivity for anything non-Nintendo (a bad idea in the long run) plus Microsoft in general making stupid decisions and absolutely decimating the Xbox brand.
What a great trifecta that is! A better idea now ABadAvatar is a very viable and reliable softmod - buy an Xbox 360, do that, and retro game happily. For Halo and any other series because seventh gen was peak Xbox, it's all been downhill since.
@OldGamer999 Of course not, I agree. Games offer less value and there's fewer of them yet they cost more, on hardware that this generation has only ever gone up in price. Seems like a lot of money to just lean on the previous gen back catalogue. Backwards compatibility, once a nice to have feature, has now become a crutch.
I'm sure that even the slowest gamers will wise up to this eventually though. People are already starting to flat out walk away from the hobby, and it's not just a case of aging out. It's a case of, it's too heavily monetised and doesn't justify the expense.
It's pretty awesome how committed Sony are to making their products unappealing. PSVR2 died with no games, PS Portal sold well initially but you can find them in droves on Marketplace with "never used" in the description probably due to the lag, and the latest PS5 is kind of an Anti-Pro to remind people their existing PS5s are probably fine and don't need to be upgraded from as there aren't many games this generation anyway.
Wow that's only about a decade too late then. Let's be honest, neither Hulst or Ryan are anywhere near the level of a Tretton, Layden or Kaz. Those guys were a lot more "give the fans what they want" while also pushing for things fans didn't know they wanted. Sure, they weren't perfect but they were solid leaders more often than not.
Same deal with Nintendo, they were a much more friendly and lovable company when Iwata had the reins. At the moment they're in their own version of the Jim Ryan era except worse because they keep suing people and pulling paid for features back with firmware updates, because they're profiteering like crazy. This usually leads to short term gains and long term losses. We'll see.
They're going to have a real problem re-releasing the PS5 library onto the PS6 as the PS5 doesn't really have one, so all I'm seeing right now is a PS4 Super Pro that is a slightly fancier way of playing 5-10 year old games. As a lot of PS4 games still look really good, that holds very little appeal to me. Killer apps are exclusive games.
I'm starting to see why console gamers are trickling away from consoles though. On PC if you own the same games they continue to work when you upgrade, just better fidelity or faster loading etc. Rather than constantly paying for new hardware just to play the same old games.
Wow, Sony really are itching to release The Last Of Us on yet another platform, aren't they? PS3, PS4, PS5 (plus Pro patch) and PC really wasn't enough, gotta mop up some incidental sales on Xbox. Potentially.
The thing is, for all the litigious very consumer hostile stuff Nintendo are doing, increasing revenue by taking features away etc, they are smart enough to know that console exclusivity is the backbone of their business. They know to keep their titles locked to their hardware and rarely put anything on sale. I have to credit them with that; it's the correct model, it's a model that has worked for decades.
Xbox is basically gutted as a brand, it's dead, mismanagement killed it. Sony, if they go for a similar "everything is a PlayStation" strategy, maybe they'll see short-term gains but they don't have the foresight to see the long-term damage. Hulst already looks incompetent as hell, certainly no match for a well-motivated Kaz, Layden or Tretton. Even Reggie on an off-day could do better.
If things continue in that direction for both brands, all it'll take is patient PC gamers to wait a few years, buy the titles on sale and if that holds, the consoles become even more pointless than they have been the entire way through the ninth generation.
It genuinely feels like gaming has stood still since about 2018 and stuff like this won't move it back in the right direction. It's a continuation of the same ***** thinking that based profit projection on pandemic sales, thinking that would continue. Ignoring key factors to make line go up for shareholders. It's unbelievably stupid, worse than making the consoles steadily more expensive even though there's nothing to play on them compared to the two generations before, minimum. They might have gotten away with that this time, but I can't see it working again in the tenth generation.
Console sales are often built on the promise of a few good things at launch, and great things to come. Neither Xbox or PlayStation have delivered on that this time around, but that hasn't kept them from burrowing deeper into people's wallets. It's disrespectful to the consumer and it's got to stop.
Maybe when the profits start drying up because people stop buying up, it will. It's going to be a very interesting couple of years in gaming, that's for sure.
I freaking love Sucker Punch. They wowed me with Second Son on my launch PS4 and it's been fun checking out their earlier inFAMOUS PS3 games too.
All power to them, honestly. Still making kickass single player action games and trying to move the genre forward. Nothing but praise and I can't say that about most publishers and developers.
I hope Yotei smashes it like inFAMOUS 2 did, and I'm almost certain it will.
I think it's a great game but equally a bad sign that a top selling PS5 game is a ported Xbox one, says bad things about both of them. Namely, PS5 doesn't have enough first party, and Xbox is being mismanaged so badly they're moving their first/second party onto other platforms.
Lol I love the first comment that "PS5 is a great pad". First of all the pad is the DualSense, and second no it isn't. It's not durable at all. I have 20 year old GameCube controllers that work better and don't have drift. The idea is if they're built fragile you have to keep replacing them, keeps up the revenue stream in lieu of any actual, you know, games. Most of the advanced rumble gestures etc were never used, Returnal is one of the few that did actually worthy things with it and that came out in 2021.
Basically it's minutiae. If they'd put as much effort into single player games as they did PS5 firmware and controller firmware, ninth gen might have actually been worthy of the investment.
It's nice how "release now, finish it later" also applies to the gaming hardware not just the games themselves, after a generation where prices went up never down overall.
I feel this is a bold step forward for the industry, and in no way smacks of a low effort Sony who don't have a strong direct competitor, greedy management and almost no library built up in the last 5 years who are finding other ways to fleece fans. Not at all.
Right so we have a generation where barely any games were released, and those that were are often crossgen so they're not built to push one specific console to the limit. Now we have one in DS2, it might be revealing design flaws or lack of maintenance or both, combined with heat. Considering the dusty state a lot of people run their consoles in, clogged fin vents are a dead giveaway, I'm not surprised.
This would have come up a lot sooner if there were more games like DS2 released earlier in the generation. I'd bet a lot of failures are in the CFI-10xx launch ones, those also known for HDMI port issues and coil whine.
Sure, Kojima Productions might have messed up the map screen capping as people suggested, but the root of the problem, as ever, lies with Sony. The PS5 is their weakest console for a lot of reasons, mostly for the lack of library but I'm sure the pandemic quality builds of the launch ones (they're the heaviest too) are the issue. I imagine Slim models are fine.
That's cool, so the minuscule library of the PS5 Pro will have some tiny performance boosts for the developers who bother to optimise for it in the first place. Definitely seems worth the £699 alright.
@lazarus11 I can tell from your reply I touched a nerve or five there. Seems like I nailed it with purchase justification cope.
Yeah cos exclusive means exclusive to one platform, that's what the word is by definition. It's a word, it's not something you "grow out of" 😂 yeah I had noticed loads of stuff coming to PC that's why I said they're not exclusive cos some are on PC... good lord.
A decent spec PC can handily outdo a PS5 Pro for visuals as long as the port of the game is half decent. This is common knowledge. So if you don't want the inferior version, you better join the Master Race or whatever they're calling themselves these days. DLSS beats PSSR in a lot of cases.
I'm not angry at all kid, this is more like sport, I guess.
Anyone can own things they can't afford, it's what credit cards are often misused for. See, I can do with the word poor what you did with the PC exclusive thing if you like... oh that tired old chestnut, people don't consider it good value cos they can't afford it cos they're poor, I thought people had grown out of that years ago, there are still some championing that outdated mantra blah blah blah 😂
@lazarus11 Notice you couldn't summon an argument for the rest of it so pivoted to the one thing you could. 😂 I suspect someone bought a PS5 Pro recently and has serious purchase justification cope... don't worry, it'll clear up over time, it's not permanent. It's probably why you've turned yourself into a one-man rebuttal team against anyone saying anything vaguely negative about it all rather than, y'know, actually playing it so in a way I suppose that proves there isn't really much to do with it other than play PS4 games... like you can on a PS4. I could do this alllll day in a matter of seconds, it's pretty easy.
You can knock a few handfuls off that list because either they haven't been released yet or are on PC so aren't exclusive, it's what we'd call a "padded list". Anyhow, compared to this point in the PS3 or PS4 life cycle it's significantly smaller, with or without the disqualified ones. Maybe it'd be bigger if Sony hadn't themselves tried to pivot to live service games then cancelled them after Ryan was ousted.
@lazarus11 Ah classic internet, no matter how salient your points there's always someone who'll go "no, you're wrong, and here's why!" 😂
I guess it hasn't occurred to you that it's more than possible to be able to afford something, but not want it because it doesn't offer enough value to you. The PS5 Pro falls squarely into that category for a lot of people, myself included.
When it's able to be fully jailbroken and the price drops to £200 or less, that'll be my sweet spot for owning one so probably when the PS6 is out. Hopefully the PS6 has a better library than the PS5, that is to say, more than barely any exclusives 😂 goddamn what a drought.
If I remember correctly, in the UK the PS4 Pro launched at £349 and around the same time the Slim launched for £259 so you could either have the new 4K-capable model for what the original PS4 cost about 3 years previously, or the newer Slim redesign of the same with a price cut.
Obviously all PS4s have Blu-ray drives as standard, although Sony didn't put a 4K UHD Blu-ray drive in the PS4 Pro which was a bit of a missed opportunity. The Xbox One X which released a year later had a 4K UHD Blu-ray drive but cost £100 more than the PS4 Pro. You did get an extra USB3 port on the PS4 Pro at the back, handy for hooking up internal storage without tying up the front ports and SATA-III for faster internal drive speeds as compared to either the original or Slim models, so arguably it balances out somewhat in terms of value despite that.
All of these options now seem like much better value at the time. They are arguably still are now considering you can get PS4 Pro and Xbox One X consoles for £100-£150 used and still play a lot of current games due to the overly long crossgen period and cloud streaming in the case of Xbox.
The PS5 Pro on the other hand has no optical drive of any kind as standard, costs double what the PS4 Pro did at launch in the UK, there are barely any PS5 exclusives and the few there have been are ported to PC about a year after release, doesn't have the 1080p to 4K jump "killer app" feature that sold a lot of people on the PS4 Pro, just PSSR and a slightly improved GPU which to me don't justify the price doubling at all. Oh, and doubled internal storage SSD space compared to the Slim but considering all PS5s have an M.2 NVMe SSD slot that's kinda irrelevant; cheap to buy and trivial to fit.
TL;DR
As compared to PS4 Pro, the PS5 Pro offers no massive visual improvement, an unreasonable price hike, no discount on the Slim model when it launched, no library, lack of a disc drive and scalper prices to buy one as they're out of stock often, and I personally would add badly made controllers that succumb to drift more readily than the DualSense 3 or 4 do which is additional expense. Look on the used market and see what I mean, it's very common to see consoles being offered for sale with non-original controller usually as the one that came with the PS5 in the box became defective.
Basically you can pay a lot more money for a console that relies heavily on the PS4 library, or just keep/buy a PS4 used for cheap and play PS4 games for a fraction of the price with controllers that, while they do succumb to drift, happens much more slowly than with the DualSense.
"Sony are so bad at communication that fans start wild mass speculation based on a thumbnail". Yeah, sounds about right. Some of the same who think the PS5 Pro is "good value" probably.
"Back when Sony’s streaming handheld PS Portal was announced, an enormous 33 per cent of you polled on Push Square said you had zero interest in the device. Well, as it turns out, you’re in the minority, because the Remote Play portable is proving a runaway hit for the platform holder."
This literally reads like "nanananana" style taunting, and is a weak start to the article which undermines it - I thought this was PushSquare, not PettySquare 😂.
It's perfectly possible for one third of people to not like something and a majority of the other two thirds to like it and have it.
Ah I see, classic big business pivot and retroactive change of the narrative to try and fool people so they can clear inventory that's not shifting. Taken with the price cut, that makes perfect sense. The fact the PC adapter arrived late and doesn't support the full feature set is a dead giveaway it wasn't planned at all.
For me, the correct time to buy one will be in a few years when it's been fully abandoned by Sony, and mint in box with the seller saying "used once" on the ad with a price tag of £50-100. Hopefully there will also be homebrew to make it work in games it was never made for on PS5 by then too.
@LowDefAl The delineation isn't as fine as you're making it - try "heavily/transformatively customised" for the Cell.
PowerPC was used in a lot of consoles (and a lot of computers including the Mac and Amiga) but other than some shared heritage, the way the GameCube, X360 and PS3 implement their PPC architectures is different, the dev and build tools are different.
Having PPEs etc doesn't tell the full story. If the PS3/X360 were that similar there would have been performance parity across a lot more titles. PS3 was tricky not just because of the SPEs but because the dev tools were not intuitive, especially early on.
It would be like saying because a bunch of cars use the same chassis platform they're the same car, when all the other elements around the chassis vary from manufacturer. There's too much nuance to say "they're all basically the same".
Heavily customising PC parts for discrete hardware doesn't automatically mean that hardware is immediately a PC, basically.
@LowDefAl That's pretty deceptive and misleading - Cell is so different from regular PowerPC architecture it's practically a different species and there's still a hell of a lot of custom architecture at play in seventh gen machines. Whereas last two gens they're basically just x86 PC APUs with one running Linux and the other a Windows 10 kernel.
Problem is, anyone who's used the store themselves or watched MysticRyan's YouTube video about it know that it's in a barely functioning state with a broken search function. Just because it's the last one standing, doesn't mean what's left standing is anything other than dilapidated
So to add to the multiple errors, corpospeak backwalks and unbelievably poor decisions, they've added a cry for sympathy as well. I think at this point, unless everyone in management is fired and replaced with competent people, Xbox is done.
Here's two quotes that sum them up.
"I can’t imagine a way in which you could have f**ked up more." - Thank You For Smoking
"No future, no future, no future for you." - Sex Pistols.
@MFTWrecks This is a nice ground level view which tells me all I need to know, and I appreciate the distinction between "well made" and "good". Made a lot of sense to me.
@Perturbator I don't care if it's serious or not, I'd much rather play a sequel to Tokyo Jungle than Concord, the Fortnite wannabe with a Guardians Of The Facsimile frock over it.
So... the Games as a Service model is now so efficient at tracking it's own demise that poor early access numbers mean it'll be DoA?
I think that's a bit clickbaity sensationalist premature doomslinging from Push, but also I hope it's true because GaaS uniformly and with very few exceptions sucks, so if they keep failing maybe they'll stop being made and become a closed chapter in the history of gaming.
I personally think both Xbox and PlayStation are wrong to make exclusives not exclusive at all, I know that's something PCMR gamers disagree with but I'm not them, so...
Nintendo have the right idea in terms of keeping them on their system to help sell more of them and fund future game investment, although them going nuts with their legal team I don't agree with I see why they do it.
There really aren't enough exclusives this generation for Xbox and PlayStation so the few they have making their way off-console is harming sales, it's as simple as that. I'm sure it's a decision made to short-term appease the shareholders with a bit of profit but long-term I think it's going to cause sustainability issues. Great exclusives shift systems, it's an old business model that was used for so long because it works, so if they're looking to generate more profit in the long-term, making more of those should be the priority. Ideally across a range of genres, some small and medium sized games as well as just generic open world big expensive ones like they used to.
PS Plus subscribers getting truly the best experience this month, what with a poor selection of already cheap to buy free games, Stars still down and service outages. Good job Sony. Next thing is they'll tell us they got hacked again 😁
I travel a lot and don't always have Internet connections that are any good, so when GT7 pulls a GT Sport and makes the single player work offline like both should have at launch, let me know.
Not to disparage the games themselves which are decent, but in the context of PS Plus membership it's another month where Sony limp to the barn having done the bare minimum.
Sadly it's a poor quality emulation with smeary visuals, music cues not loading bugs and a few other issues. Shame too because it's such a beloved franchise, but original hardware or any free GPL type emulator can do a better job for a more playable experience.
Rockstar really do get scummier as the years go by, more profit and greed driven.
It's funny to me that so many of the online grinds are bank heists when Rockstar themselves are dipping their fingers so deeply into players bank accounts for the "privilege" of doing so, without doing anything like fixing server problems or minimising griefers.
Online is the reason that there hasn't been a new GTA in 11 years, but to be honest GTA V ranks below several other ones anyway, personally, so I don't consider it a huge loss. The three protagonists are childish and somewhat unlikeable. The mature writing of Red Dead Redemption II is a lot better, the single player campaign is more satisfying and they'll be hard pressed to ever make a better protagonist than Arthur Morgan. The online for that died because Rockstar couldn't monetise it to the same insane extent they have with GTA V.
The sad thing is I just know, it's basically a dead cert that they will release RDR2 again for current gen consoles, finally with 60FPS, and charge as much as they think they can get away with. This is really sad because as anyone with a jailbroken PS4 or PS5 knows, it's a one line code patch to unlock the frame rate, and even a PS4 Pro without the benefit of the speed enhanced PS4 modes of the PS5 can run it at 50-60FPS pretty consistently.
Yes, of course Miyazaki is right and that's part of why the games he is involved with tend to be so good, and so challenging. If they all handed a win to you, or hand held you through every little step, it'd be awful because plenty of games already do that to be more inclusive/cater better to casuals or time poor people who might have forgotten the controls between plays as they're so busy.
The other thing I like about From games is often most if not all of the cutscenes are skippable, so upon repeated plays you're not having to hear the same lines over and over. I wish more games were like that, and I also wish they were more sparse with their lore because From at pretty decent at that too - like the gameplay, if you want to piece all the elements together and make sense of it, you have to work for it.
Basically From games tend to respect the intelligence and skill of the player, so people who love those games really love them, and people who don't gel with them tend to bounce off hard. Better than than being a game everyone thinks is average and kinda bland, I feel.
Oh and for the record, if you have a jailbroken PS4 or PS5 you can introduce an easy mode to the game with cheats, as you can patch game memory addresses not dissimilar to the Action Replay method from generations past. I tried Bloodborne this way (and with the 60FPS patch too, thanks Lance) and yep although it is amusing and almost hysterical to be able to cheese your way through early stuff like the Father Gascoigne fight (you can be a damage sponge while dishing out crazy hits with a maxed out character) it gets old because the challenge dies even though your hunter now doesn't.
Comments 645
Re: Obsidian's Already Trying to Improve The Outer Worlds 2's Poor Presentation on PS5 Pro
Considering the price premium and hype around the few features the PS5 Pro has which the "PS5 Amateur" models do not, it's genuinely amazing how many games release on it looking and/or running worse than the latter.
I'm starting to think like the regular PS5s, the console is going to be much more useful when it's properly kernel level jailbroken and features that aren't accessible by the user are opened up. Some kind of "simulate regular PS5 for games on PS5 Pro" option in etaHEN for example.
I'll bet the PS5 Pro's slight power advantage over regular PS5s would be useful when running PS4 games unlocked to 60FPS with a patch, too. Time will tell when the exploits and homebrew is released so those so inclined can test.
Point still stands though - five years into the generation and there's still very few big games being released and of those that are, far too many have been rushed through testing/QA stage with a "release now, patch later" mentality. Which means, as has become surprisingly common in the last decade, you're better off waiting a year or so and buying it on sale, paying less for a better experience after a game has been patched multiple times to fix things that should have been working before release.
Re: PlayStation Is Trying to Scrub Any Mention of Its Failed Concerts from the Internet
Very 1984, trying to scrub past mistakes from history. Unlike 1984, doesn't usually work. People do like to archive for posterity.
This smacks of "bad idea era Sony" as far as I'm concerned. Stealing the idea for video game concerts from veritable industry icon Tommy Tallarico (his mother is very proud) is usually a sign you're out of ideas, when the idea should be simple, should be what it used to be and worked fine.
Drop console prices as generation increases. Make great games, keep them exclusive. Profit and happy fans.
Why that wonderful business model has been junked by people who think they know better, I can't understand.
Re: 'We Want to Be Everywhere, on Every Platform': Microsoft CEO Once Again Commits to PS5
@Lowdefal SEGA wanted to do that too, as I recall, and while it worked for a few years and they're still here, they lost a ton of market share over time and are a shadow of their former self. I figure if it happened to them, it can happen to Xbox too, another two syllable four letter brand.
Re: 'We Want to Be Everywhere, on Every Platform': Microsoft CEO Once Again Commits to PS5
@Carnage Fair points but remember, no company is too big to fail. All it takes is enough short-term greed, consumer hostile behaviour etc and it'll bite them later on. Forcing everyone into Windows 11 is already going nicely - it's not common yet but the smarter autonomous sys admins are instead transitioning or planning to with some form of Linux distro which is low fat, less nonsense and allows basic office drone level work to be performed just as well than W11. We'll see.
Re: 'We Want to Be Everywhere, on Every Platform': Microsoft CEO Once Again Commits to PS5
@UltimateOtaku91 I wouldn't be surprised if they pivot on that as well, lean into their stupid "Everything is an Xbox" (therefore nothing is) marketing and decide not to release a console at all.
It's a shame too, because I can't fault the hardware engineers for what they did with the Series X. It's a decent piece of industrial design, runs quiet, is reliable, can be used for emulators via Dev Mode... it's the lack of quality software and poor management that hurt it the most.
Re: 'We Want to Be Everywhere, on Every Platform': Microsoft CEO Once Again Commits to PS5
@LunarRabbit There must have been a miscommunication. They said "just 4 games" and the person writing it down put "just all games" instead.
Re: 'We Want to Be Everywhere, on Every Platform': Microsoft CEO Once Again Commits to PS5
The best thing about this constant pivoting nonsense that is ruining the Xbox brand completely is, the more it continues the more likely that it'll be nowhere, on no platforms, in about a decade. They've taken so many consistent Ls recently they couldn't spell anything else.
Remember Games For Windows? Well it's not quite the same thing but it looks like another Microsoft owned branding that'll be going the way of the Dodo soon enough.
Re: PS5 Surpasses Lifetime PS3 Sales in the US
PS5 hardware sales might have surpassed PS3 sales in one territory, but let's be honest, the PS3 has a much, much richer library. Especially if you have a modified, fully backwards compatible one as then that also encompasses the PS2, PS1 and some of the PSP library as well.
Re: Disappointment As Tekken 3 Is the Latest PS1 Classic to Launch without Trophies
Well if you don't get trophy support you're better off emulating. This is part of the reason I have an offline PS5 for JB purposes, it'll run PS4 grade PS2 emulators really well and you can build your own packages for games that'll never be re-released due to licensing issues, like OutRun 2006 with all the Ferraris or anything with a ton of licensed music. Or to hack in 60FPS support for games I've already bought 3 times and refuse to pay for again just for that.
Re: New PS5 Firmware Update Available Now, Here's What It Does
Patching out more bug bounty exploits is what they mean.
Still no feature to alternate what the PS home button on the controller does. I move between PS3/PS4/PS5 all the time and the PS5 having it work backwards is one of the many failings of the default UI along with its unintuitive layout/navigation and ugly grey colour scheme.
More firmware updates this generation than first and second party games. Well done Sony. Nice PS4 Pro Pro, or for those of you whom have the PS5 Pro, the PS4 Pro Pro Pro (except in cases where the developers mess up and make the PS5 Pro version worse than the regular PS5 version which is often).
I used to be a PlayStation fan once... 😂
Re: 'As Long as You're Having Fun, We Don't Care': Ghost of Yotei Dev Comments on Open World Freedom
The vaunted Fallout: New Vegas approach - get the player into the open world as quickly as possible, litter interesting content all around, let the player figure it out.
I was genuinely hoping this generation would have a handful of games that do this rather than a glut of disappointments, but hey, nice to get one at least.
Re: PS6 May Go Uncontested as Rumours of Next-Gen Xbox Cancellation Force Microsoft to Comment
I'll be fascinated to see, in about two decades, a documentary called "When Big Business Went Nuts" that covers those consumer-hostile, moronic greed biased decision era of companies like Microsoft and specifically their Xbox division whom are a poster child for it.
It seems to be a thorough case study into how to do everything you can to completely destroy a once beloved brand. Lying, pivoting, making and breaking promises, raising prices even in spite of dwindling hardware sales, trying and failing to gaslight customers into it being them "listening to their feedback", and wearing big s**t-eating grins while doing so.
After a few years of doing this even the slowest of gamers have woken up and are jumping ship. Funnily enough no-one wants to pay a jacked up price to play decade old games and have a token insultingly small amount of Vbucks thrown their way should they happen to have kids that play Fortnite.
No-one can trust a word they say, and the bare minimum to even making people think Xbox is trustworthy as a brand again is immediate firing of Spencer, Booty and Bond as a team, issuing an apology and hiring someone with the respect level of a Shawn Layden who can actually fix the problems, and quickly.
Sadly none of that is going to happen so those three stooges will continue running what's left of the brand into the ground.
Re: Halo: Combat Evolved Remake Could Be the Final Frontier for Xbox on PS5
As mentioned, it's a softmod. No soldering.
Re: Halo: Combat Evolved Remake Could Be the Final Frontier for Xbox on PS5
This choice seems to combine a bunch of dumbassery in gaming - another lazy "remaster" which as usual will just be a very glorified cheaply made overpriced port cashing in on older gamer nostalgia, the further erosion of platform exclusivity for anything non-Nintendo (a bad idea in the long run) plus Microsoft in general making stupid decisions and absolutely decimating the Xbox brand.
What a great trifecta that is! A better idea now ABadAvatar is a very viable and reliable softmod - buy an Xbox 360, do that, and retro game happily. For Halo and any other series because seventh gen was peak Xbox, it's all been downhill since.
Re: New PS5 Firmware Update Is Available to Download Now
Such a slow generation that minor firmware updates are article worthy, apparently.
Re: PlayStation's New 'Rewards' Program Goes Down Like a Lead Balloon
Just another thing in the long line of Sony disappointments this generation, really. Monetised to the hilt but worst value generation.
Re: Silent Hill F Is Another Game That Stumbles on PS5 Pro
@OldGamer999 Of course not, I agree. Games offer less value and there's fewer of them yet they cost more, on hardware that this generation has only ever gone up in price. Seems like a lot of money to just lean on the previous gen back catalogue. Backwards compatibility, once a nice to have feature, has now become a crutch.
I'm sure that even the slowest gamers will wise up to this eventually though. People are already starting to flat out walk away from the hobby, and it's not just a case of aging out. It's a case of, it's too heavily monetised and doesn't justify the expense.
Re: Silent Hill F Is Another Game That Stumbles on PS5 Pro
@OldGamer999 We've had games that do that for decades. They're called Bethesda games. Good old Creation Engine jank.
Re: Silent Hill F Is Another Game That Stumbles on PS5 Pro
It's pretty awesome how committed Sony are to making their products unappealing. PSVR2 died with no games, PS Portal sold well initially but you can find them in droves on Marketplace with "never used" in the description probably due to the lag, and the latest PS5 is kind of an Anti-Pro to remind people their existing PS5s are probably fine and don't need to be upgraded from as there aren't many games this generation anyway.
Yes sir... awesome.
Re: 'The Number of Live Service Games Is Not Important': PS5 Boss Gives Rare Insight into Strategy
Wow that's only about a decade too late then. Let's be honest, neither Hulst or Ryan are anywhere near the level of a Tretton, Layden or Kaz. Those guys were a lot more "give the fans what they want" while also pushing for things fans didn't know they wanted. Sure, they weren't perfect but they were solid leaders more often than not.
Same deal with Nintendo, they were a much more friendly and lovable company when Iwata had the reins. At the moment they're in their own version of the Jim Ryan era except worse because they keep suing people and pulling paid for features back with firmware updates, because they're profiteering like crazy. This usually leads to short term gains and long term losses. We'll see.
Re: Rumour: Leaked PS6 Specs Reveal Affordable, Power Efficient Next-Gen Console for 2027
They're going to have a real problem re-releasing the PS5 library onto the PS6 as the PS5 doesn't really have one, so all I'm seeing right now is a PS4 Super Pro that is a slightly fancier way of playing 5-10 year old games. As a lot of PS4 games still look really good, that holds very little appeal to me. Killer apps are exclusive games.
I'm starting to see why console gamers are trickling away from consoles though. On PC if you own the same games they continue to work when you upgrade, just better fidelity or faster loading etc. Rather than constantly paying for new hardware just to play the same old games.
Re: Sony Job Listing Implies More PS5 Exclusives Will Be Ported to Xbox, Switch
Wow, Sony really are itching to release The Last Of Us on yet another platform, aren't they? PS3, PS4, PS5 (plus Pro patch) and PC really wasn't enough, gotta mop up some incidental sales on Xbox. Potentially.
The thing is, for all the litigious very consumer hostile stuff Nintendo are doing, increasing revenue by taking features away etc, they are smart enough to know that console exclusivity is the backbone of their business. They know to keep their titles locked to their hardware and rarely put anything on sale. I have to credit them with that; it's the correct model, it's a model that has worked for decades.
Xbox is basically gutted as a brand, it's dead, mismanagement killed it. Sony, if they go for a similar "everything is a PlayStation" strategy, maybe they'll see short-term gains but they don't have the foresight to see the long-term damage. Hulst already looks incompetent as hell, certainly no match for a well-motivated Kaz, Layden or Tretton. Even Reggie on an off-day could do better.
If things continue in that direction for both brands, all it'll take is patient PC gamers to wait a few years, buy the titles on sale and if that holds, the consoles become even more pointless than they have been the entire way through the ninth generation.
It genuinely feels like gaming has stood still since about 2018 and stuff like this won't move it back in the right direction. It's a continuation of the same ***** thinking that based profit projection on pandemic sales, thinking that would continue. Ignoring key factors to make line go up for shareholders. It's unbelievably stupid, worse than making the consoles steadily more expensive even though there's nothing to play on them compared to the two generations before, minimum. They might have gotten away with that this time, but I can't see it working again in the tenth generation.
Console sales are often built on the promise of a few good things at launch, and great things to come. Neither Xbox or PlayStation have delivered on that this time around, but that hasn't kept them from burrowing deeper into people's wallets. It's disrespectful to the consumer and it's got to stop.
Maybe when the profits start drying up because people stop buying up, it will. It's going to be a very interesting couple of years in gaming, that's for sure.
Re: Ghost of Yotei's State of Play Has Been Watched More Than Sony's Summer Showcase
I freaking love Sucker Punch. They wowed me with Second Son on my launch PS4 and it's been fun checking out their earlier inFAMOUS PS3 games too.
All power to them, honestly. Still making kickass single player action games and trying to move the genre forward. Nothing but praise and I can't say that about most publishers and developers.
I hope Yotei smashes it like inFAMOUS 2 did, and I'm almost certain it will.
Re: Xbox Port Forza Horizon 5 Reportedly PS5's Best-Selling New Game of 2025
I think it's a great game but equally a bad sign that a top selling PS5 game is a ported Xbox one, says bad things about both of them. Namely, PS5 doesn't have enough first party, and Xbox is being mismanaged so badly they're moving their first/second party onto other platforms.
Re: New PS5 Beta Firmware Update Out 24th July, Includes Teased Controller Feature
Lol I love the first comment that "PS5 is a great pad". First of all the pad is the DualSense, and second no it isn't. It's not durable at all. I have 20 year old GameCube controllers that work better and don't have drift. The idea is if they're built fragile you have to keep replacing them, keeps up the revenue stream in lieu of any actual, you know, games. Most of the advanced rumble gestures etc were never used, Returnal is one of the few that did actually worthy things with it and that came out in 2021.
Basically it's minutiae. If they'd put as much effort into single player games as they did PS5 firmware and controller firmware, ninth gen might have actually been worthy of the investment.
Re: Sony Reiterates Big PS5 Pro Graphics Upgrade for 2026
It's nice how "release now, finish it later" also applies to the gaming hardware not just the games themselves, after a generation where prices went up never down overall.
I feel this is a bold step forward for the industry, and in no way smacks of a low effort Sony who don't have a strong direct competitor, greedy management and almost no library built up in the last 5 years who are finding other ways to fleece fans. Not at all.
It's a bold step, mark my words.
Re: Death Stranding 2 Is Causing Some PS5s to Overheat
Right so we have a generation where barely any games were released, and those that were are often crossgen so they're not built to push one specific console to the limit. Now we have one in DS2, it might be revealing design flaws or lack of maintenance or both, combined with heat. Considering the dusty state a lot of people run their consoles in, clogged fin vents are a dead giveaway, I'm not surprised.
This would have come up a lot sooner if there were more games like DS2 released earlier in the generation. I'd bet a lot of failures are in the CFI-10xx launch ones, those also known for HDMI port issues and coil whine.
Sure, Kojima Productions might have messed up the map screen capping as people suggested, but the root of the problem, as ever, lies with Sony. The PS5 is their weakest console for a lot of reasons, mostly for the lack of library but I'm sure the pandemic quality builds of the launch ones (they're the heaviest too) are the issue. I imagine Slim models are fine.
Re: Rumour: New PS5 Pro Update Could Give Frame Rates and Resolutions a Massive Boost
That's cool, so the minuscule library of the PS5 Pro will have some tiny performance boosts for the developers who bother to optimise for it in the first place. Definitely seems worth the £699 alright.
Re: Sony's Pricey PS5 Pro Is Now Being Outpaced by PS4 Pro Launch Aligned in the US
@lazarus11 I can tell from your reply I touched a nerve or five there. Seems like I nailed it with purchase justification cope.
Yeah cos exclusive means exclusive to one platform, that's what the word is by definition. It's a word, it's not something you "grow out of" 😂 yeah I had noticed loads of stuff coming to PC that's why I said they're not exclusive cos some are on PC... good lord.
A decent spec PC can handily outdo a PS5 Pro for visuals as long as the port of the game is half decent. This is common knowledge. So if you don't want the inferior version, you better join the Master Race or whatever they're calling themselves these days. DLSS beats PSSR in a lot of cases.
I'm not angry at all kid, this is more like sport, I guess.
Anyone can own things they can't afford, it's what credit cards are often misused for. See, I can do with the word poor what you did with the PC exclusive thing if you like... oh that tired old chestnut, people don't consider it good value cos they can't afford it cos they're poor, I thought people had grown out of that years ago, there are still some championing that outdated mantra blah blah blah 😂
Re: Sony's Pricey PS5 Pro Is Now Being Outpaced by PS4 Pro Launch Aligned in the US
@lazarus11 Notice you couldn't summon an argument for the rest of it so pivoted to the one thing you could. 😂 I suspect someone bought a PS5 Pro recently and has serious purchase justification cope... don't worry, it'll clear up over time, it's not permanent. It's probably why you've turned yourself into a one-man rebuttal team against anyone saying anything vaguely negative about it all rather than, y'know, actually playing it so in a way I suppose that proves there isn't really much to do with it other than play PS4 games... like you can on a PS4. I could do this alllll day in a matter of seconds, it's pretty easy.
You can knock a few handfuls off that list because either they haven't been released yet or are on PC so aren't exclusive, it's what we'd call a "padded list". Anyhow, compared to this point in the PS3 or PS4 life cycle it's significantly smaller, with or without the disqualified ones. Maybe it'd be bigger if Sony hadn't themselves tried to pivot to live service games then cancelled them after Ryan was ousted.
Re: Sony's Pricey PS5 Pro Is Now Being Outpaced by PS4 Pro Launch Aligned in the US
@lazarus11 Ah classic internet, no matter how salient your points there's always someone who'll go "no, you're wrong, and here's why!" 😂
I guess it hasn't occurred to you that it's more than possible to be able to afford something, but not want it because it doesn't offer enough value to you. The PS5 Pro falls squarely into that category for a lot of people, myself included.
When it's able to be fully jailbroken and the price drops to £200 or less, that'll be my sweet spot for owning one so probably when the PS6 is out. Hopefully the PS6 has a better library than the PS5, that is to say, more than barely any exclusives 😂 goddamn what a drought.
Re: Sony's Pricey PS5 Pro Is Now Being Outpaced by PS4 Pro Launch Aligned in the US
If I remember correctly, in the UK the PS4 Pro launched at £349 and around the same time the Slim launched for £259 so you could either have the new 4K-capable model for what the original PS4 cost about 3 years previously, or the newer Slim redesign of the same with a price cut.
Obviously all PS4s have Blu-ray drives as standard, although Sony didn't put a 4K UHD Blu-ray drive in the PS4 Pro which was a bit of a missed opportunity. The Xbox One X which released a year later had a 4K UHD Blu-ray drive but cost £100 more than the PS4 Pro. You did get an extra USB3 port on the PS4 Pro at the back, handy for hooking up internal storage without tying up the front ports and SATA-III for faster internal drive speeds as compared to either the original or Slim models, so arguably it balances out somewhat in terms of value despite that.
All of these options now seem like much better value at the time. They are arguably still are now considering you can get PS4 Pro and Xbox One X consoles for £100-£150 used and still play a lot of current games due to the overly long crossgen period and cloud streaming in the case of Xbox.
The PS5 Pro on the other hand has no optical drive of any kind as standard, costs double what the PS4 Pro did at launch in the UK, there are barely any PS5 exclusives and the few there have been are ported to PC about a year after release, doesn't have the 1080p to 4K jump "killer app" feature that sold a lot of people on the PS4 Pro, just PSSR and a slightly improved GPU which to me don't justify the price doubling at all. Oh, and doubled internal storage SSD space compared to the Slim but considering all PS5s have an M.2 NVMe SSD slot that's kinda irrelevant; cheap to buy and trivial to fit.
TL;DR
As compared to PS4 Pro, the PS5 Pro offers no massive visual improvement, an unreasonable price hike, no discount on the Slim model when it launched, no library, lack of a disc drive and scalper prices to buy one as they're out of stock often, and I personally would add badly made controllers that succumb to drift more readily than the DualSense 3 or 4 do which is additional expense. Look on the used market and see what I mean, it's very common to see consoles being offered for sale with non-original controller usually as the one that came with the PS5 in the box became defective.
Basically you can pay a lot more money for a console that relies heavily on the PS4 library, or just keep/buy a PS4 used for cheap and play PS4 games for a fraction of the price with controllers that, while they do succumb to drift, happens much more slowly than with the DualSense.
Re: PS5 Fans Think Sony's Accidentally Leaked a Wireless PSVR2 Headset
"Sony are so bad at communication that fans start wild mass speculation based on a thumbnail". Yeah, sounds about right. Some of the same who think the PS5 Pro is "good value" probably.
Re: PS Portal Is By Far the UK's Most Popular Gaming Accessory Right Now
"Back when Sony’s streaming handheld PS Portal was announced, an enormous 33 per cent of you polled on Push Square said you had zero interest in the device. Well, as it turns out, you’re in the minority, because the Remote Play portable is proving a runaway hit for the platform holder."
This literally reads like "nanananana" style taunting, and is a weak start to the article which undermines it - I thought this was PushSquare, not PettySquare 😂.
It's perfectly possible for one third of people to not like something and a majority of the other two thirds to like it and have it.
Re: Sony Apparently Planned PSVR2 for PC from the Beginning
Ah I see, classic big business pivot and retroactive change of the narrative to try and fool people so they can clear inventory that's not shifting. Taken with the price cut, that makes perfect sense. The fact the PC adapter arrived late and doesn't support the full feature set is a dead giveaway it wasn't planned at all.
Re: Talking Point: Is It Finally the Right Time to Buy PSVR2?
For me, the correct time to buy one will be in a few years when it's been fully abandoned by Sony, and mint in box with the seller saying "used once" on the ad with a price tag of £50-100. Hopefully there will also be homebrew to make it work in games it was never made for on PS5 by then too.
Re: Random: PS3 Is Now the Only Console from Its Era with a Functional Store
@LowDefAl The delineation isn't as fine as you're making it - try "heavily/transformatively customised" for the Cell.
PowerPC was used in a lot of consoles (and a lot of computers including the Mac and Amiga) but other than some shared heritage, the way the GameCube, X360 and PS3 implement their PPC architectures is different, the dev and build tools are different.
Having PPEs etc doesn't tell the full story. If the PS3/X360 were that similar there would have been performance parity across a lot more titles. PS3 was tricky not just because of the SPEs but because the dev tools were not intuitive, especially early on.
It would be like saying because a bunch of cars use the same chassis platform they're the same car, when all the other elements around the chassis vary from manufacturer. There's too much nuance to say "they're all basically the same".
Heavily customising PC parts for discrete hardware doesn't automatically mean that hardware is immediately a PC, basically.
Re: Random: PS3 Last Seventh Generation Console Standing with Functional Storefront
@LowDefAl That's pretty deceptive and misleading - Cell is so different from regular PowerPC architecture it's practically a different species and there's still a hell of a lot of custom architecture at play in seventh gen machines. Whereas last two gens they're basically just x86 PC APUs with one running Linux and the other a Windows 10 kernel.
Re: Random: PS3 Last Seventh Generation Console Standing with Functional Storefront
Problem is, anyone who's used the store themselves or watched MysticRyan's YouTube video about it know that it's in a barely functioning state with a broken search function. Just because it's the last one standing, doesn't mean what's left standing is anything other than dilapidated
Re: 'PlayStation's Blessed with Marketing Budgets We're Not Able to Enjoy,' Xbox Bigwig Bemoans
So to add to the multiple errors, corpospeak backwalks and unbelievably poor decisions, they've added a cry for sympathy as well. I think at this point, unless everyone in management is fired and replaced with competent people, Xbox is done.
Here's two quotes that sum them up.
"I can’t imagine a way in which you could have f**ked up more." - Thank You For Smoking
"No future, no future, no future for you." - Sex Pistols.
Re: There's Already Concern Over Concord's Player Count as Open Beta Begins
@MFTWrecks This is a nice ground level view which tells me all I need to know, and I appreciate the distinction between "well made" and "good". Made a lot of sense to me.
Re: There's Already Concern Over Concord's Player Count as Open Beta Begins
@Perturbator I don't care if it's serious or not, I'd much rather play a sequel to Tokyo Jungle than Concord, the Fortnite wannabe with a Guardians Of The Facsimile frock over it.
Re: There's Already Concern Over Concord's Player Count as Open Beta Begins
So... the Games as a Service model is now so efficient at tracking it's own demise that poor early access numbers mean it'll be DoA?
I think that's a bit clickbaity sensationalist premature doomslinging from Push, but also I hope it's true because GaaS uniformly and with very few exceptions sucks, so if they keep failing maybe they'll stop being made and become a closed chapter in the history of gaming.
Re: Talking Point: Was Sony Right to Resist Adding PS5 Exclusives to PS Plus Day One?
I personally think both Xbox and PlayStation are wrong to make exclusives not exclusive at all, I know that's something PCMR gamers disagree with but I'm not them, so...
Nintendo have the right idea in terms of keeping them on their system to help sell more of them and fund future game investment, although them going nuts with their legal team I don't agree with I see why they do it.
There really aren't enough exclusives this generation for Xbox and PlayStation so the few they have making their way off-console is harming sales, it's as simple as that. I'm sure it's a decision made to short-term appease the shareholders with a bit of profit but long-term I think it's going to cause sustainability issues. Great exclusives shift systems, it's an old business model that was used for so long because it works, so if they're looking to generate more profit in the long-term, making more of those should be the priority. Ideally across a range of genres, some small and medium sized games as well as just generic open world big expensive ones like they used to.
Re: PSN Online Services Restored Across the Board
PS Plus subscribers getting truly the best experience this month, what with a poor selection of already cheap to buy free games, Stars still down and service outages. Good job Sony. Next thing is they'll tell us they got hacked again 😁
Re: Next Gran Turismo 7 PS5, PS4 Update Could Be a Big One
I travel a lot and don't always have Internet connections that are any good, so when GT7 pulls a GT Sport and makes the single player work offline like both should have at launch, let me know.
Re: PS Plus Essential Games for July 2024 Announced
Not to disparage the games themselves which are decent, but in the context of PS Plus membership it's another month where Sony limp to the barn having done the bare minimum.
Re: Sly Cooper PS2 Is PS Plus Premium's Biggest Classic Hit So Far
Sadly it's a poor quality emulation with smeary visuals, music cues not loading bugs and a few other issues. Shame too because it's such a beloved franchise, but original hardware or any free GPL type emulator can do a better job for a more playable experience.
Re: GTA 6 Fans Nervous As GTA Online Locks Crucial Quality of Life Feature Behind GTA+ Sub on PS5, PS4
Rockstar really do get scummier as the years go by, more profit and greed driven.
It's funny to me that so many of the online grinds are bank heists when Rockstar themselves are dipping their fingers so deeply into players bank accounts for the "privilege" of doing so, without doing anything like fixing server problems or minimising griefers.
Online is the reason that there hasn't been a new GTA in 11 years, but to be honest GTA V ranks below several other ones anyway, personally, so I don't consider it a huge loss. The three protagonists are childish and somewhat unlikeable. The mature writing of Red Dead Redemption II is a lot better, the single player campaign is more satisfying and they'll be hard pressed to ever make a better protagonist than Arthur Morgan. The online for that died because Rockstar couldn't monetise it to the same insane extent they have with GTA V.
The sad thing is I just know, it's basically a dead cert that they will release RDR2 again for current gen consoles, finally with 60FPS, and charge as much as they think they can get away with. This is really sad because as anyone with a jailbroken PS4 or PS5 knows, it's a one line code patch to unlock the frame rate, and even a PS4 Pro without the benefit of the speed enhanced PS4 modes of the PS5 can run it at 50-60FPS pretty consistently.
Re: FromSoftware Boss Puts Elden Ring Difficulty Discourse to Bed, Once and For All
Yes, of course Miyazaki is right and that's part of why the games he is involved with tend to be so good, and so challenging. If they all handed a win to you, or hand held you through every little step, it'd be awful because plenty of games already do that to be more inclusive/cater better to casuals or time poor people who might have forgotten the controls between plays as they're so busy.
The other thing I like about From games is often most if not all of the cutscenes are skippable, so upon repeated plays you're not having to hear the same lines over and over. I wish more games were like that, and I also wish they were more sparse with their lore because From at pretty decent at that too - like the gameplay, if you want to piece all the elements together and make sense of it, you have to work for it.
Basically From games tend to respect the intelligence and skill of the player, so people who love those games really love them, and people who don't gel with them tend to bounce off hard. Better than than being a game everyone thinks is average and kinda bland, I feel.
Oh and for the record, if you have a jailbroken PS4 or PS5 you can introduce an easy mode to the game with cheats, as you can patch game memory addresses not dissimilar to the Action Replay method from generations past. I tried Bloodborne this way (and with the 60FPS patch too, thanks Lance) and yep although it is amusing and almost hysterical to be able to cheese your way through early stuff like the Father Gascoigne fight (you can be a damage sponge while dishing out crazy hits with a maxed out character) it gets old because the challenge dies even though your hunter now doesn't.