zekepliskin

The Crew games were well liked, so hopefully this will be another strong entry into the series. Guess we'll find out soon enough!

True about racers (and a few other genres) being under-represented for current gen, though. I still boot up the PS3 for those because I'm spoilt for choice - Ridge Racer 7, Burnout Paradise, OutRun Online Arcade, the massively underrated Blur and of course Gran Turismo 6 which is still my favourite series entry (Sport and 7 just didn't work for me). That was a great canon of titles. Forza Horizon 4 and 5 on One X/Series X get closest to the vibe of those games (where it's a good arcade/sim mix)

Plus recently a lot of Burnout 3: Revenge via my BC PS3 which looks great scaled to 1080p if you boot the game then hold triangle and X to put it into 480p which sorts out a lot of the jaggies/shimmer especially with Smoothing enabled.

As usual, the few titles I am interested in, budget wise it's more smart to pick up used disc copies rather than a year's worth of payments for PS Plus gouge tiers.

Funny thing though. I've been digging more into the PS3 back catalogue and have picked up a bunch of games that have given me more hours of fun than most of the current gen stuff, which other than the odd tentpole release worth more than a few hours like Ragnarok and Returnal has been underwhelming since 2020. The pandemic really did set the whole industry back, a lot of industries actually including mine.

I think the reason a lot of these leaks (the ones that turn out to be true, anyway) use what people are calling a "potato camera" is obvious though I haven't seen it stated here yet.

They had to smuggle in something tiny that wouldn't be detected. People seem to be assuming the person taking the photos can just breeze in with a smartphone. Don't you think wherever that thing is being developed, one of the first things they'd ask you to place in a storage locker is that?

Tiny cameras that can be hidden anywhere, although massively improved, always sacrifice image quality. And the kind you'd need to take pictures in a secure development facility would be ultra tiny.

Makes sense to me.

@Darth_Stofi They should hire him. Instead they'll probably do the idiot thing of suing him into oblivion. Big companies do seriously dumb stuff that hinders them in the long run all the time - look at Netflix recently.

@PegasusActual93 Game by game as it uses memory address register hacks I believe. I forget which DF video says that, probably DF Weekly, but it's there.

"jailbreaking your console is generally a bad idea"

That's such a loaded, inaccurate statement. For older consoles like the PS3 it unlocks a huge amount of potential with minimal risk. I have a backwards compatible phat PS3 with the PS2 GS chip inside and it means I can do stuff like run ISOs rather than put strain on the now 17 year old Blu-ray drive, and also change the fan speed curve so it ramps up more smoothly and also more quickly to help stop the console dying from heat. I'd argue not modifying your console, which is insanely easy, is a bad idea.

PS4 console mods look awesome too, but they're still locked behind the "old firmware" barrier to entry which is a shame as the PS4 homebrew scene is maturing and it looks like a fun time to jump onboard that train.

Observations From Out Of Touch CEOs Like Strauss Zelnick "Aren't All That Meaningful" Says PushSquare.

Thats a compliment. 👍🏻

It's cute how after years of Microsoft having a "Pro" type controller and a Points for busy work type system, Sony belatedly shuffled out of the barn with their versions of both, except with the addition of much poorer battery life and lack of flagship console integration into UI/OS initially and still pending, respectively.

@Cashews "you can re sell it and you can still play your game when they shut down the shop updates, etc."

Yeah although that's becoming a little less possible now due to update patches etc still requiring servers. Case in point, a load of PS3 games I have still ask for an update, whether they're downloaded or disc copies. The complexity comes when all that gets switched off... the PS3 is getting close to that 20 year old milestone so who knows...

@deathaxe I think people have been saying this is the last generation with physical releases since tail end of PS3 era. I believe it's more because although physical releases are going away from a certain point of view including yours, there's plenty of places with poor broadband access or speeds or both where disc releases are key, and will be more readily available.

@Th3solution Well that's good, I see a "wait for the sales and the patches" mentality may finally be starting to happen. Because really, slow sales soon after launch might finally teach publishers to let developers finish them before releasing.

If you'd told me in the mid-2000s that Spider-Man, God of War, GTA5 and LEGO games were still a thing, I'd have gone "No way, there would be newer greater games by then". Sadly this is not the case. Although they're great games it's a sign that stagnation is a thing above all else. Here, and in movies.

Until this article, I didn't even know it was a thing. There's a lot of esports events out there, can't know them all.

Actually that should be a poll option.

Wait for Bluepoint.

When whatever licensing issues are resolved I'm sure they'll have the source code and assets. They made Demon's Souls run beautifully, so perhaps when they're done with Bloodborne it'll be pulling 1440p60 upscaled to 4K similar to how Returnal does it, plus all the frame pacing jank common to From engine games will be gone.

@Texan_Survivor The DualSense is such a double-edged sword because on the one hand it's super ergonomic, looks modern and the HD Rumble (or whatever Sony call it because Nintendo did the same exact thing first, essentially) is incredible, but yet the build quality and durability are pretty bad, the battery life is woeful even as compared to the DS4 and same old PlayStation stupid D-pad that fighting game enthusiasts hate.

@Dark_Knight Leaving aside that you're stating opinion as fact which is a classic Internet rookie mistake, odds are there's plenty of collectors out there who only game casually who have bought one. It's up to the person buying to decide what's necessary and what isn't, little things called choice and free will...

@Titntin This is true of all online environments, especially the "echo chamber" ones where people turn up to have their existing views validated by finding others who feel the same regardless of how niche it is. Well observed.

Funny thing is, no matter how many controllers have come since and no matter how much they cost, I have DualShock 3 controllers running their original batteries that will always outlast newer DualShock 4 and DualSense controllers.

It's that stupid light bar on the back which you can only dim not switch off, compared to the energy efficient little red LEDs on the DS3.

Still loving Sony's audacity in planning to release what is essentially a smartphone touchscreen with half a DualSense either side. It's cool when someone DIYs, for example, a GameCube controller onto the side of a Switch, less so when a major company calls that a product and puts a ship date on it.

Yes, I am still mad at Sony for giving up on the Vita. That was a proper console, premium design and feel. I agree with John Linneman at Digital Foundry - this is crap, basically. Vita means life, what does Project Q mean?

Hundreds of cheap deals on it on Facebook Marketplace in a year or two, right alongside PSVR 1/2 and future eWaste.

Disastrous launch aside, the PS3 Phat BC models (plus the 25xx series Slims) are personally my favourite Sony home consoles.

With the Phat it's the UI, the speed of having the whole OS on NAND flash, excellent smoothed out PS2 1080p upscaling (Burnout 3 especially looks great), how mature the homebrew is to allow you to set custom fan curves and run ISOs from internal SSD as well as GPU overclocking to push FPS up on a lot of intensive games including TLoU and Beyond: Two Souls.

Ridge Racer 7 was a killer launch time title as well, still looks crisp and clean with it's 1080p60 presentation too. Doesn't suffer from that full two-tone palette/excessive garish bloom effect problem common to some titles of this generation.

So yes I'll definitely watch this and enjoy how they turned a car crash into a winning result over time.

I recently opened up a bunch of DualShock 3 controllers to see if I could do a case swap on one of them but discovered Sony changed the design so much over the years that it wasn't that simple. Even the plastic construction for the case - it went from shiny piano black to more of a matte. The 2006-2010 controllers seem to be built the best whereas the coloured editions (I have one from 2012 in blue) are cheaply made in a way that's actually pretty shameful. Not the same level of durability at all. The analogue sticks on later ones seem to wear out and acquire dead spots/stiffness of movement so easily, rendering them useless for precise inputs as one might need for an FPS or racing game.

Anyway, my point is that all of them have something in common - it's really not difficult to change the battery, and you don't have to fully disassemble the controller and remove it from the case to do so. It's 5 Philips head screws to get the back off, then the battery is one lead and usually has little plastic clips to make it sit in the right spot (later ones used an adhesive strip and a much cheaper battery, which is why I assume my older ones still hold charge while the newer one doesn't).

I wish the Vita had had the same construction, but it doesn't. It should have. The one Vita I opened years ago that has a failed battery was so fragile that the terminals came right off the board. It's very well built in some ways, not so much others.

Perhaps it'll be like when Disney acquired Lucasfilm and Pixar, where it starts as a gradual decline before hitting a point of maximum free fall, destroying previously good IPs with shovelware sequels.

"After all, we’re all viewing this deal through the lens of being PS5 and PS4 owners, so it’s worth discussing." - Actually, no, I'm viewing this through the lens of being a console gaming enthusiast in general, owning a Switch, PS4, several PS3s, a couple of Xboxes including a One X, PSP, PS Vita etc. I own mostly Sony stuff (not just consoles but AV equipment in general including 3 of their better TVs over the years).

Personally I think this will be one of those things where everyone makes it out to be a huge deal at the time then a year later when no serious waves have been made, Microsoft haven't single-handedly killed the video games industry etc.

It stuns me that in a world on the brink of a major possibly irreversible climate change that could lead to even more drought and disease on this planet, that there are people out there who are expending all this angst (woke entitled angst I guess) over... a video game statuette.

Kinda glad Elon Musk is running Twitter into the ground; it's been a rage-fuelled playground for the bored and entitled for about a decade now, by my reckoning. There's a reason I came off it and never went back about that long ago.

Stagnant. That's how I'd describe things in pretty much the entire tech industry recently. Whether your thing is games consoles, GPUs or MacBooks it seems like there's been no real forward movement and innovation for a couple of a years now.

I think this might be the tail end of the pandemic lockdowns filtering through - as things in all those spaces are planned and executed years in advance, it stands to reason the real result of the whole world grinding to a halt is only showing now. Xbox are regularly criticised for having no games, well, now I guess Sony is welcomed to that party.

@Amnesiac Totally agree. Beautiful game, well made, good gameplay variety, should be something I'd love... nope, it's not interesting to me at all. Still has some of the same issues with lack of enemy variety etc as BotW.

Can't believe I'm the first one here to say I thought the headline meant it was launching broken and will require a Day One patch, like most big budget triple A games these days. If people would stop buying them full price and broken, if everyone took the mentality of buying a game on sale for a third of the price and in a much more optimised state, maybe it would incentivise devs and publishers to release stuff working in the first place.

@danlk1ng Well they didn't murder anyone, but they sure did make a killing.

Scarcity, whether natural or artificial, makes a product more desirable. And therefore more expensive, often tempting people with access to that product to sell at an inflated rate, because they can. That's a lot more sensible and easy to explain than saying "Sony priced the PS5 below what the market would pay". No they didn't, they just couldn't make enough of them.

Yet another cross-platform game that seems to have "skipped the optimisation pass" as DF themselves put it.

This seems more and more common these days - when developers run out of time and have to meet the deadline, they skimp on getting it running well for whatever reasons.

I see it as literally the worst thing to skimp on - if your game runs with stutters and crashes, no one is going to want to play it. They'd be better off doing something like making the later levels/endgame a little unpolished while concentrating on the overall game feel and making sure it plays well on everything it can run on.

Or, they could just do what previous generations did and release the game in an all-around finished condition, or delay the release until that's the case. There is no shame in releasing "when it's done" as "a late game is only late until it ships, a bad game is a bad game forever" as I think Seamus Blackley and several other devs have repeated over the years. Otherwise you're shooting yourself in both feet because even if gamers don't know why a game is running poorly, they will feel that as part of the experience and quickly move onto something else.

I'm glad the PS5 has outsold the Switch. Nintendo lazily shovelling Wii U ports onto it at full price (games I've owned for years) while conversely not offering a full GameCube Virtual Console library for me to buy really hacks me off. Big part of why I sold mine.

Although I don't approve of a lot of current PlayStation profiteering and gouging fans, at least the PS5 has truly next gen looking games. As much as I didn't want to believe the hype and it's crossgen, Ragnarok looks amazing, Returnal is already a highlight of this generation and Demon's Souls is one of the best remake/remasters of all time.

Having said that though, I'd still take Series X over all of them 🤭

@GamesVanDerBeek well yeah but just this one time they could do a free patch. But they won't reward loyal fans like that when they know they can make money from them again. They used to make really good games, it's just sad that for a couple of devs doing a couple of days work both the PS5 and Series X could have 4K60 versions of RDR2

@solocapers well yeah you're not wrong, just that them both leaving was the final nail and a good signpost of the actual end of an era, finally.

@carlos82 There is checkboarding. Go watch the Digital Foundry two part tech review from release time. It's most noticeable on trees and hair I think they said, and zoom in to demonstrate. Almost all PS4 Pro era games used checkerboarding in some way shape or form to approximate a 4K image.

It's just really sad how many old 360/One games have been patched to take advantage of the hardware on the Series consoles, and how many PS4 ones haven't on the PS5. And don't get me started on the fact you can't play PS3 titles natively...

@Westernwolf4 It's noticeably blurrier than the One X version due to the checkerboarding. I have both versions and have played both - the One X/Series X version is noticeably better.

Same with The Witcher 3 actually. Plays like crap on the PS4/PS5 - locked to 30fps, poorer visual fidelity in general, horrendous input lag. One X version is 4K60, responsive controls and in fact the places where it used to drop below 60FPS (Novigrad for example) on the One X it's rock solid on the Series X, I'm guessing because it's no longer CPU limited. Those AMD Jaguar processors of the previous gen were glorified laptop CPUs after all.

Here's a story about how Rock$tar operate, and how there won't be a 4K60 patch for the PS5 without paying.

GTA V still has long load screens even when playing on a Series X or PS5. But why, I asked myself as I waited, this isn't the PS3 era any more.

And then I realised. It was obvious - the loading screens were billboards to sell you more "content". That's why it didn't instantly load the game. They wanted me to buy more digital content. They needed me and everyone else to see these lame little bits of overpriced DLC for this decade old game, and go buy them with an unreasonably high amount of real world money.

Because that is their business model.

RDR2 got abandonded as soon as they realised it wasn't generating as much revenue as GTA5 and never would. Chances are they're only making a GTA6 because the income from GTA5 has either plateau'd or is slumping so they only invested in a new one to get it to rise again. Otherwise - and you know this is true - they'd happily have kept it running for another 10 years with that same 720p30 thing and by now very dated version of the Rockstar Advanced Gaming Engine underneath.

Post-Hauser brothers Rockstar as run by Take-Two is just a shell of itself now. The golden age is long gone.

Wow, even the PS Store sales are more expensive than Xbox Store ones. Besides using the PS5 to play Spider-Man Remastered, with A Plague Tale: Requiem dropping for free on Game Pass - Digital Foundry have confirmed the Series X locks to 30FPS more than the PS5 version - it's the green corner firmly taking the lead for me this month.

@KaijuKaiser They did make another PSP. It was called the PS Vita. It was amazing hardware but then Sony gave up on it and poured all their effort into the then-new PS4 instead.

Having watched the Digital Foundry analysis of this, I thought Alex basically concluded it was a moderately lazy PC port with not enough settings to tweak, plus some visual bugs that may or may not be fixed on the retail version. I wasn't impressed and by the sounds of it neither was he.

Perhaps it's just not a big enough improvement to warrant serious interest from PC players. For me it's just Sony doing the usual thing of trying to keep up with Microsoft and not pulling it off (the overpriced DualSense Edge is their version of an Elite 2 for example).

Yes they should have ported the trilogy first and its senseless that they didn't. Then port 4. Then do a quadrilogy collection at a discounted rate. That seems like simple business sense to me, but Sony run more on senselessness and hubris these days so it's not surprising.

Seeing them next to each other makes me realise how much I like Hideo and how much I dislike Jim.

Sony's communication with it's customers is so bad that we have to have news articles saying "Sony don't tell us much, now they're telling us even less". I wonder how hard they can lean on fans before they start to revolt because every little thing like this, added to the big things, makes them look like they don't give a damn about user experience.

Those saying that this is a premium product not for regular gamers are contributing to an increasing problem developing in gaming - introduction of a class system. And letting Sony off the hook for high pricing in the process.

I always looked at gaming as an inclusive hobby but these days it just seems as class tiered and profit driven as any other. Sad really.

10/15. I wouldn't consider the Human Revolution question to be a PlayStation specific one seeing as it released on PC and Xbox as well but if it wasn't there my score might have been 9, so...

Hey wait, why wasn't there a Spider-Man question?

@SerJosh97 I find it funny you throw the word research at me while not realising I did look into this which is how I know less than 5% of PS4 owners had an original PSVR unit. When 95% of people don't have one then that's not a hit, it's niche, a word I already used to describe it. Reading

@Amusei Agreed. And I still genuinely believe that if Bloodborne were on Xbox as well, it'd run 4K60 native and Sony, forced to keep up, would have From do the same for the PS5. Rather than being stuck with the same 2015 grade 1080p30 engine with janky frame pacing marring an otherwise excellent game.

After years of having Final Fantasy games locked to Sony's platforms, having SMT Persona locked to Microsoft's seems about right. I have P4G on the Vita and never completed it so wouldn't mind a go at it with the visuals bumped to 4K and less shimmering, that'd be nice.

@jrt87 I'm still holding out for holograms but even then it'll probably end up being a novelty. The 2D window that is TV has persisted for a long time because it's a format that works, tried and true.

3DTV failed for similar reasons that VR won't ever break the mainstream - it requires extra headgear people don't want to wear, motion sickness is a thing, novelty wears off quickly etc. I remember all the people justifying their 3DTV purchases by saying them and the missus would sit there watching everything in 3D, even soap operas, and I was like "yeah that'll last" lol.

@thefourfoldroot1 Yeah I'm old too, 38 here. Don't get me wrong I'm not slagging off people who like it - I enjoyed the hours I spent playing some modest games in VR - but I don't think it leaves a lasting enough impression for most people to be worth the hassle. After my friend demoed some of his favourites to me and I said "That's neat" I found I paid it no mind for weeks afterwards.

I don't want to deal with idiot children online (and sadly they're not always children even though they act like it!) either but there's still plenty of decent single player only experiences to be had that don't require a bulky headset to be strapped to your cranium.

For me it was combination of not being wowed enough plus the fact it makes second screen use essentially impossible. Bit hard to check your phone when you're wearing a VR headset, and as someone who does buy/sell goods trading a lot, not responding fast is a good way to lose a sale, whereas with the regular TV/gamepad setup you can pause and unpause easily without having to remove a headset or peek below it while trying to avoid motion sickness etc. Personal preference.

@thefourfoldroot1 PSVR2 is
"saviour of this gen" ? I think not.

The original PSVR was bought by less than 5% of PS4 owners, making it a slightly successful niche product at best, and I doubt the uptake will be that much better this time around. If anything it'll be an even smaller percentage of PS5 owners getting one for various reasons.

The fact is, for all the devotees crowing about how awesome it is, for most people (myself included having tried a bunch of VR games) it's a fun novelty and that's about it. Folks don't want the hassle of setup and a bulky headset to worry about.

In time, VR will be relegated to the same "defunct peripherals" catagory as the Wiimote, Kinect and Move. All things that the Big Three have long since moved on and consigned to history.