Ainu20

@get2sammyb Absolutely, despite the sorry state of the industry and the numerous questionable business practices, there has never been such a wide variety of fantastic games available, from the smallest one-person indie to the largest blockbusters.

Do people simply not look far enough?

It's still more or less keeping pace with the monstrously successful PS4 despite launching at the height of Covid and the associated global chip shortage crisis [edit: also forgot to mention the cost of living crisis we've had post-Covid]. I have literally no idea how anyone could consider that anything less than a resounding success, or why their expectations were higher than that.

Then again, I feel increasingly out of touch with expectations from both corporations and the public.

Has any game of the last 10+ years ever met Square-Enix's expectations? At some point, you have to wonder whether the problem is with their sales performances, or their expectations.

@HonestHick There have only been 2 main, full releases in 7 years, how could that IP possibly be played out and in need of a break? That's an absurd take. Also, the IP reached 32+ million overall sales by this time last year. "Numbers don't lie"? People don't buy it?

I think this is a case of confusing your personal views for facts.

(source for the number: https://blog.playstation.com/2023/05/09/20-years-of-guerrilla-the-story-of-a-playstation-studio/?sf266576029=1)

A racing game having billboards with ads on them would be tolerable, that's basically what you'd expect when driving around the real world anyway. But EA being EA they're obviously looking at avenues that are much more intrusive and annoying than that.

@Nem I didn't say terribly, but poorly, which I don't think is an exaggeration. I do own a Switch by the way, so I'm well accustomed to games that don't run great all the time.

But the idea of FF16 on a Switch 2, well, that goes well beyond just running poorly!

@mariomaster96 Considering how poorly FF16 already runs on a PS5, I don't even want to contemplate the potential state of a Switch 2 version.

@NEStalgia Exactly. Quoting Aaron Greenberg himself:

"Hi-Fi RUSH was a break out hit for us and our players in all key measurements and expectations. We couldn’t be happier with what the team at Tango Gameworks delivered with this surprise release."

These are his exact words from a tweet on 21 April 2023. So any claims that it underperformed directly contradict previous statements on the matter. That is if we're assuming they weren't lying in the first place, which wouldn't be particularly shocking.

Edit: lol, I see this tweet was already included in the article. I should pay more attention.

Whoever is in charge of this at Sony is clearly woefully incompetent at their job. How can you make such a mess of this?

They need to work towards making PSN available in all regions of the world and any games released before that happens, should do so without requiring a PSN account for online play. It's that simple really.

The only acceptable exception to this would be crossplay.

A real hunger among shareholders he means. How many can devs can we lay off if we replace them by AI, is surely what they're all thinking.

Good, I never liked the idea of this model as the dominant way to deliver video games to players. I know there's an argument to be made you never truly own your games, especially not when bought digitally, but on a sub you definitely don't own or even have any sort of control over your access to them.

Phew, dodged a bullet there.

In all seriousness though, Arkane Austin's downfall and closure are sad to see. They weren't the same studio anymore but maybe they could've regrouped and create something good after Redfall. No chance of that now.

@glennthefrog I wonder if Sony could just make it officially available there in, say, English (or any other already supported language), rather than translating everything. Not ideal but at least it's something.

Or I guess it's possible that local laws demand everything be available in the official language(s) of the country in question.

@REALAIS I'm not going to dispute that it's a problem, but I doubt the solution is as simple as Sony just making PSN open to everyone worldwide. It would be interesting to know exactly why it's not supported in certain regions, and just for reference, to know how Xbox and Nintendo account support compares.

It might be related to local regulations, which could be a fairly complex situation. On the other hand, you wouldn't expect that to be an issue in EU countries. Is it simply a case of Sony not bothering to support these countries? Difficult to judge without knowing the specifics.

@ATaco It's just very hard to compare all these things. It's not always easy to get the same sort of directed, focused protest going against more "general" issues. It's harder to get the same momentum going, unless it's a particularly egregious case, like Dragon's Dogma 2's microtransactions (which did receive its own share of review bombing).

In this case though, while part of the player base would merely be inconvenienced, another part would simply lose access to the game, which makes it a far more immediate issue. Instead of comparing and whataboutism, I think it's better to just accept that this was an untenable situation and Sony eventually did the right thing.

@ATaco Call it fearmongering if you like, it's still a risk. By doing that, you're giving the platform holder and/or publisher a legitimate reason to get your account banned. If that is the only option available to players in certain regions, that can hardly be considered a viable solution.

As much as I thought some of the reactions from the PC crowd were far too hysterical, the counter reactions of people claiming Sony are spineless for bending the knee or even "destroying themselves" because of it are somehow even worse. Can we all just behave like normal human beings for a change? Is that really so hard?

Ultimately, the right decision was reached to ensure that everyone could continue playing the game, which is the only thing that REALLY matters in all of this. The whole thing will blow over except in the minds of some people who will remain obsessed by stuff like this. The rest will just happily move on and continue playing.

@Flaming_Kaiser Not an issue for me, and I would probably rather see even the worst THPS game remade instead of a new COD, it's just my suspicion that it wouldn't have sold as well as the 1+2 remake.

@ChrisDeku Can't speak for all the games but those times seem extremely short. Metal Gear Solid in 5 hours? Sure, for an experienced player who skips most of the cutscenes, but the average first time experience has to be about double that.

Resident Evil 1 in 6 hours doesn't feel accurate either. Super Metroid in 7.5 seems more reasonable but even that is probably on the shorter side for a blind playthrough.

@REALAIS I'm not sure I follow. Which part of my post did you disagree with?

@AverageGamer Nah, I wouldn't worry about that at all. Arrowhead clearly went to Sony and asked them to drop the requirement, which Sony did almost immediately. If anything that indicates there's a significant level of mutual trust and understanding. I think they both know how much they benefit from this partnership.

@BeerIsAwesome The big difference is of course that a PSN account wasn't mandatory from the start, even if players have been told that was only temporary. Once players have experienced a certain convenience, even the tiniest change usually leads to a massive uproar.

Had it been mandatory from the start, there would've been a bit of moaning but little else, just like with other external accounts.

@Sakai I don't think too much damage is done, Sony overturned this pretty quickly all things considered. I'm not convinced goodwill is an actual thing in this case; if Sony's next live service pc release is as good as Helldivers 2, people will be all over it anyway.

A Tomb Raider game needs tightly crafted level design, not an epic open world. If it contains both, it could work, but that's a tall order.

@Northern_munkey "Is this still a thing? Entitled gamers having a right old moan about anything and everything."

This will unfortunately never stop being a thing. Gamers, like most humans on the internet, are generally awful.

I'm in two minds about this. Ultimately I think the right decision was made and I think it's best for everyone involved that Sony didn't escalate the situation any further. However, the reaction from the gaming community has been beyond embarrassing and many have behaved in a way that no grown person should ever behave.

Having said that, there aren't many ways for gamers to make themselves heard beyond review bombing. I don't completely disagree with the practice, if it's done to air legitimate grievances and without resorting to insults and threats. But this was not pretty.

As much as I personally would've loved it, I think they would've found it hard to sell a 3 + 4 remake when all the gameplay improvements from those games were already present in the 1 + 2 remake.

The biggest shame is that they didn't use the momentum of the remake to release a completely new entry that could've breathed new life into the franchise.

Judging by the reactions on this place month after month, I can only conclude most gamers are a miserable lot of moaners that are never happy.

Oh wait, we already knew that.

@nomither6 Dirty? You think MS are making their games available on PS as a courtesy or something? They're doing it because they've decided it makes sense from a business perspective, nothing else.

There's something deeply, deeply wrong with the entire industry if a studio like Roll7 gets closed down. They only released 2 of the highest rated indie games of 2022. No idea what the sales numbers were but surely it can't have been that bad that the entire studio had to shut down?

It's just another source of creativity that is now lost to the industry, when it is so utterly unnecessary. Had Take Two decided to be a little less greedy or pay a couple million less to their executives, we'd get to enjoy future output from a fantastic indie studio. It's such a frustrating and sad state of affairs.

As usual, you've got people calling everything a garbage month. The games might not be for you, but Tunic and Ghostrunner 2 are absolutely worthy additions.

@wiiware Biome 4 might look like an alternative version of 1, it still plays very differently and has arguably the best sequence in the game with the approach to the boss and then the fight itself.

Biome 5 and 6 are nothing like 2 and 3. So yeah no idea what you're on about. And you can't just watch the ending and expect everything to make sense, it's something you need to piece together along the way.

Anyway, you robbed yourself of something special.

Honestly, this should've just been announced in the initial tweet, without that "Tomorrow" tease. To do that at a time when a lot of gamers are getting increasingly impatient with the lack of Sony first party news is very tone deaf.

I wasn't necessarily expecting anything major, but this would still be a disappointment. With how much radio silence we've had from Sony first party studios, it really seems ill timed to share a tweet like that, only for it to be something that's barely video game related.

I've always found romances in these types of games to be so poorly written that they actually devalue the relationships, rather than the other way around. See also: games like Judgement etc.

Give me a canon romance with actual depth and story implications any day of the week, or at max a choice between two meaningful paths or something like that.

Yes, you could. You should. But you won't. Not in any meaningful way at least.

@OmegaStriver I haven't played it yet, but the whole thing gives me Kingdoms of Amalur vibes, in that it was a big, ambitious project with grandiose narrative aspirations but always looked incredibly generic in (gameplay) trailers.

That game ended up failing and costing the studio dearly, but was actually a very solid experience with some excellent gameplay elements and became more and more appreciated by the gaming public as time went on. It's generally looked back on with fondness nowadays.

So I wonder if this is, or will be, a similar story at some point in the future.

@TheTraditional I firmly believe what you're describing is not a thing of the past, it just doesn't exist in the AAA space right now. In the range of AA down to single-dev indies, the variety, quantity, quality and affordability is at an all-time high.

@Northern_munkey They might still have their job but they're not getting paid, nor getting any severance payment. How is that a positive?

@Savage_Joe She only had a body model, not a face model, so she wouldn't have looked like her anyway. It doesn't seem like they went with the cheaper option here, though I am absolutely clueless about Korean media personalities.

There is no way prices for AAA games are going to drop, surely no one in their right mind believes that? What we might see, and I think this might be what he's getting at, is more AA games getting made in favour of AAA games, which typically sell at a lower price point.

But even that is a very optimistic scenario. In truth, I fear we might start seeing AA games masquerading as AAA games and selling at the higher price point. And I don't say this as a slight to AA games, I enjoy many games in that category, but they need to be priced adequately.

If they polled a British audience, Lara Croft at number 1 isn't particularly surprising or shocking. Whatever you think of the games, she IS pretty iconic. The rest of this list is mostly nonsense though.

It's going to be a relentless negativity fest in here, as seems to be the norm these days, but I'm always looking forward to potential new reveals.

I believe Sony's first party studios still have a lot to give this gen, and eventually they will. People get way too hysterical about these things. Just have some patience, and play some of the many, many, many other brilliant games out there.

@Frmknst Is there a more meaningless term than overrated? It basically means "I don't like it as much as other people do".

@DennisReynolds You call it mediocre fake 4k, but the checkerboarding we saw on the PS4 Pro was often better than the blurry combo of super low res internal rendering and FSR we get on current platforms today. It was a worthy upgrade at the time.

@GamingFan4Lyf I definitely agree it's a developer problem rather than a hardware problem, the PS5 can do better and we see that in first party games. But instead of developers getting better at optimizing, image quality and performance only seem to get worse, with 2023 having some of the worst offenders.

So yeah, if developers aren't improving at getting the best out of the hardware, we can give them more processing power and hope that helps them hit resolution and performance targets. Not ideal, but that's the reality.

@DennisReynolds Just because you say the same thing twice, doesn't make it more true. It offered improved image quality in a long list of titles. That's not up for debate, it's factual data.

Whether you personally think that makes it worth it, is a completely different story, but that's not the same as saying it was a waste of time and money or that it didn't offer much.

@DennisReynolds "a PS5 Pro is a waste of time and money just like the PS4 Pro was"

You don't get to decide that, though. The PS4 Pro offered tangible performance benefits in a large amount of titles, vastly improved image quality and gave us PSVR support. It most certainly wasn't a waste of time and money for a lot of people.

@TheStormGL I don't know where those people are that are expecting brand new experiences on the Pro. I've literally not found a single person who said that.

Most are sensible enough to see it for what it is: a box designed to provide better image quality and performance in most games. Nothing more, nothing less.

Many devs may not feel like they're making the most of the PS5, but at the same time they're often running performance modes at 1080p, or trying to get away with even worse internal resolutions and letting FSR make up the difference, which it is entirely unsuited to, leading to games with very poor image quality.

So which is it? Either you've still got headroom and your games should really be running better than that, or you need additional GPU power which the Pro would provide (especially in terms of image quality).