Fath

@Kellanved You'll see what the point is, after the high from the shadenfreude wears off.

Getting nickel-and-dimed after you've already committed over 4x full retail price of a game doesn't cultivate goodwill.

Bioshock: Jellyfish Edition.

@adf86 Yeah, it usually doesn't make business sense to be pro-consumer, but Sony claims to be "For the Players," so they should, y'know, actually be putting their money where their mouth is.

Being such a devoted fan that you're cheering for your corporation to be anti-consumer in order to maximize profit and market share... it's weird, to say the least.

@adf86 The console war. Sony's squarely won it this generation, but the foundation of the argument against cross-platform play is that the enemy must still be shown no quarter, that no peace can be found until every last filthy MS-lover has been scoured from the Earth.

As with any war, it's prejudice and hatred that are the true enemies, keeping both sides from seeing that they're ultimately the same - all of us gamers, who just want to have fun and play with our friends. Removing roadblocks to that end, that only exist to fan the flames of partisan platform divides, can only be a good thing.

Wow, such gracious "winners" these commenters are, willing to cut off their nose just to kick a dead horse while it's down.

Cross-platform play can be nothing but healthy for gamers and the industry as a whole.

Not being longer than 30 hours sounds like a selling point to me, rather than a detraction. Do you people not have backlogs???

Though I generally don't personally care for or about Japanese voice tracks, I can respect that they make a real difference for some people's immersion in the game, and dangling them like some piece of frivolous tat is a terribly scummy and disrespectful move.

Imagine if it was the other way around, and only the first-print editions came with an English dub. It'd be - no, wait, forget you saw that; I don't want to give SE any ideas here, because I'm honestly not sure if there's any line they won't cross with this kind of exploitative BS.

@viciousarcanum @Neolit
Came into this article intending to ask if the inevitable collector's edition had been announced yet.
Left having preordered it (sigh, is it too much to ask for SE to offer free shipping for its $100+ CE's? =)

Thanks,
An Inevitable Collector

The Vita has a new game at #2 behind the Yo-kai juggernaut, that's not nothing at least.

"Literally"... I do not think that word means what you think it means.

@get2sammyb AFAIK, it's actually quite to the advantage of the legal firms pursuing class-action suits like this to let it get drawn out far past the point at which anyone remembers or cares. In addition to getting to deduct their hefty legal fees directly from the settlement, it's common for these agreements to stipulate that the prosecuting firm gets to keep whatever portion of the settlement isn't claimed, which can obviously get pretty damn lucrative.

Anyway, does said articulate illustration need to be in Penguinese? Because I only know a few conversational phrases... pretty much just "Full of fish?" and "Then let's fish," really.

Sweet, since it only says I'll need the headset and camera for those games, I won't need a PS4 console or controllers, right? That'll be a moneysaver!

It's fascinating to me that the trailer attached to this article, for all its atmosphere and flicker cuts, doesn't actually have a single jump scare. I have to imagine that's intentional- a challenge to themselves, perhaps, to stand without such a crutch.

Granted, I haven't tried or seen anything of this demo yet, but now I'm interested.

And the 2016 E3 award for Best Spin in a Soundbyte or Promotional Statement goes to Andrew House, for "We have growing confidence that we'll be supply constrained with this product." Mr. House, please come up and take a bow!

@itshoggie @itshoggie Globally, Sony's events will be at midnight, 1:00, 2:00, 3:00, 4:00, 5:00, 6:00, 7:00, 8:00, 9:00, 10:00, 11:00, 12:00, 13:00, 14:00, 15:00, 16:00, 17:00, 18:00, 19:00, 20:00, 21:00, 22:00, and 23:00, except for the ones that start at 00:30, 1:30, 2:30, 3:30, 4:30, 5:30, 6:30, 7:30, 8:30, 9:30, 10:30, 11:30, 12:30, 13:30, 14:30, 15:30, 16:30, 17:30, 18:30, 19:30, 20:30, 21:30, 22:30, and 23:30.

@rjejr You can see the player turn as soon as 12 seconds in, during the fall/glide (look for Noctis leaning as he's about to land), and then there's a big turn/flap/airdrift thingy at 31 seconds that's unmissable. Not that turning or not turning says anything about it being on rails, really, since rails turn too.

Turning aside, some of the stuff in the trailer just wouldn't make sense for a taxi, like that whole battle sequence (short as it is) and, uh, walking. A taxi that walks is kinda pointless.

Another possibility, though, is that they could have both on-rails and free-roaming in the game, similarly to how it's done in FFXIV: new players can hire point-to-point taxis for a nominal fee, then later on in the game you're able to obtain your own personal chocobo buddy to ride anywhere. I could live with that.

edit: Just watched the video you linked to for a better idea of what you're framing it as. Eh, I guess I can see where you're coming from, but it still seems like a stretch to me. I wouldn't worry about a lack of playing like a spaz in a video that's clearly trying to be artsy.

@Deadlyblack @RaymanFan2 100% of backers of all (funded) projects on Kickstarter will never see a penny of their money back. Shocking!

You're not supposed to back any Kickstarter project because it's a sure thing, but rather, because it's not.

I'll always read that title as "I Am Satsuma," and will forever hold to my belief that this game is really the story of a very sad tangerine.

Sony can market circles around Nintendo, and they've got popularity and public goodwill on their side; competitive NX and PSVR launches would've left Nintendo far more bloodied than Sony.
So, win-win I guess???

@JaxonH Ok, my apologies to you, I was painting with too broad a brush.

Speaking as someone who did buy one, though, I'm ok with this, even though they did commit to 35k. A number is just an arbitrary point, after all, signifying a vague sense of rarity, and this one was obsolete almost as soon as it left their mouth - while 35k might mean at least a day or two of sales under any orher circumstances, these sold out way too fast by any measure.

If (big as the "if" may be imho) we really want companies to hold to keeping a release at a certain level of rarity, a better system might be to hold open preorders for a preset window of time, to establish an objective, apples-to-apples measure of how difficult it is to score a copy. 35k of Final Fantasy, or 35k of Dark Souls, or 35k of Neptunia are going to have wildly different perceived rarities as they sell through, but an X-day preorder window will exclude all but the most Y percentage of hardcore fans with some shred of regularity.

And a 1-hour preorder window will be just too damn short under any circumstances.

@JaxonH @Boerewors Solution? Buy things based on their value to you, not to other people.

If it makes you feel any better, people who can only appreciate what they have if they know other peope hate them for it bug the hell out of me. So you'll always have at least one guy mad at you!

Neo, eh? Back in the day, Sony touted their Emotion Engine; now they've moved on to the Emotionless Engine.

@rjejr Kind of like the Famicom Disk System?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Computer_Disk_System
Everything old is new again!

@Majic12 Well, folders would be useful immediately; external drive support would only be useful after spending $50+.

@RPE83 Fair enough, and thanks for not taking my morning rant from last week personally! Here's hoping the remake of VII ends up surprising you once we see more of it, then.

Two things to note: one, the game's producer(?) has said that they're at least looking into printing more of these to satisfy demand, as well as taking action against abusive preorders.

Two, any listing right now is in violation of eBay's presale policy (http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/pre-sale.html), which states that all sales must "be available for shipping within 30 days from the purchase date", and even uses video games as its example.

So if it makes anyone feel better, I encourage everyone to report any listings of the ultimate edition as a policy violation for the next, what, 5 months or so, and I wish everyone who wants one the best of luck in catching a break with Square's potential restocks.

Premium avatars are literally just bragging to the world that your chosen self-image is a consumer *****. I've never, never understood why ANY avatar is worth paying for.

...Until now. For actually providing a novel spin and a cute metastatement about its own pointlessness, this is the only PSN avatar that's ever really had me tempted.

Also, cute headline image.

@Beefy01 Youtube does 4k now? Anything worth watching?

@RPE83 An interview from August says the VII remake won't be using the XV engine (www.novacrystallis.com/2015/08/gc-2015-final-fantasy-xv-interview-with-hajime-tabata/), but even if it was, the word "cheap" is such an antithesis to the XV engine that I'm surprised putting them in the same sentence doesn't cause a matter/antimatter explosion.

The entire concept of a game "engine" is centered around reuse. Cynicism indeed, to condemn a game for theoretically using an in-house engine, in development for the better part of the last decade, that's not even been fully used in a single released game yet (from what I can find, FFXIV is the only game besides XV using it, and is running a "scaled-down" version).

So that's $600 million in lifetime sales they need? Seeing as they cleared $7.5 million in let's say a single hour or so selling out the Ridiculous Edition alone, I'd say they're on track so far.

@Grawlog At least one, thanks for the heads up. Clicked through the link in this article, and was kind of gobsmacked to think that they'd sold through all 30,000 copies of a >$200 edition in under an hour. I suppose if it's split between Sony and MS, and maybe by region, that's only 5-10,000 they've sold through.

Which is still crazyballs.

What's a laive?

I'd pay Sony 10% of the value of the demos sitting around on my PS4's library just to get them out of there.

@Neolit Nice wrinkle - not quite sure what that would imply for my analogy, though!

This whole drama llama is like listening to the Democrats and Republicans each trying to claim the moral high ground of "We'd be happy to work together, but those other guys are being such babies!"

Cross-network play should never have been an issue of contention, on either side. It's as rotten a barrier as if Internet Explorer was unable to load Google.com.

This is why we can't have nice things.

@KingofSaiyans Just try to hold on to your eyes; we don't want a Gift of the Magi (Sale of the Magi?) situation here.

@harses Since it's being launched bundled with free DLC and themes, the PSN blog appears to have stuck it in their boring Bundles table (not transcibed in this article) instead of their flashy NEW GAMES! section.

Really unfortunate that they're going to lose sales for packing in freebies.

Heck yeah, go McArthur, calling out a move like this, and go USPTO, actually doing your job right for once!

Wish there was a way to punish companies for doing stuff like this. Sony trying to steal the concept of Let's Plays is like a private citizen trying to, uh... kidnap Justin Bieber. A comedically boneheaded act, to be sure, but still (should be) criminally illegal.

_{Language -Tasuki-}

Back in my day, it was the player's job to save, not the game's, and if you wanted to rotate your saves, you saved in different gosh-darned slots!
<waves old-man cane angrily>

I'm not sure how I feel about non-impactful dialogue trees in general, but used as a vehicle to let players choose what to brag about? Brilliant.

@WanderingBullet I wouldn't be so sure... his gloves do have some zany Eastern writing on them, are we suuuuuure it doesn't translate to "PS4 CONSERU EXCRUSIVE?"

I don't know any of the songs on that top list, but from their titles and, uh, "artists," I'm pretty sure I'm dodging about 10 bullets here. All Matrix-style and everything.

This article's awfully cocky, crowing over Sony's victory before they've even made their opening move.

That said, the one glaring weakness in the Rift's pricing here is the bundled controller - that's a pricing albatross that Sony can, and will, undercut mercilessly. Recall that one of the key reasons Sony secured an early lead over MS this generation was that they were able to advertise their console at $100 under the Xbone, when they were really the same price in an apples-to-apples comparison - Sony just framed its price point without its $100 camera attachment, while MS made theirs mandatory.

Wasn't there an article here when they first rolled out microtransactions for this game in which the producers promised they'd stay cosmetic-only?

Ah, yeah, here it is: https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2015/10/yep_destiny_is_getting_microtransactions
"Bungie's quick to point out that she'll never deal in anything that has an impact on the action, or your progress, however."

Posted Oct. 5th, 2015... that promise sure lasted real long!

@thatguyEZ There's nothing new about Puritans in the US, and they hail from all ends of the political spectrum. Madness knows no bounds.

Sure, it took him 25 hours to build it, but how long did it take him to solve it?

The most impressive thing to me about this CoD piece (though it pains me to put "impressive" and "CoD" in the same sentence) is that the PS4 version actually managed to outsell the PS3 version by around an order of magnitude; most cross-generation releases in these Japanese charts are much more of a tossup between the two platforms than they rightly should be.

I guess butchering the graphics and completely removing the story in a game is what it takes to get the Japanese to stop settling for the PS3.

@Grawlog Well, in my defense, your post mostly caught my eye as just the bottom element in the sixty-long discussion I didn't have time to read, so I kind of skimmed it. The only part I really intended to counter your post was the first paragraph; the rest of it isn't meant as a reaction to you, but rather as what I honestly feel.

I do still disagree with a lot of your conclusions:

• PC games have a richer and more varied history than just MMO's, and MMO's themselves have demonstrated that the business model can be sustained, at least for the "winners", without microtransactions.
• Fatalism is terrible and never helped anything - concerted change CAN happen, man's point of view on seeing it, both in time and scale, is just crap.
• "If you don't like it, just ignore it" is and always has been a flat-out insulting line of reasoning.
• I don't play video games for the thrilling experience of going to the grocery store. I don't go to the grocery store for the thrilling experience of going to the grocery store, either. I go to stock up on food, so that I can come home and make from my ingredients a sumptuous meal. The day my toast asks me to swipe my credit card to upgrade to salted butter.... FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUU

Ahem. Putting all that aside, though, your reasoning is well-written, and your tone very accomodating, by internet standards. I think my disagreement with you comes down to a matter of taste - you seem to prefer the lesser evil of microtransactions to high fixed game costs such as subscriptions and expensive expansions, while I find the pollution of gameplay with money that microtransactions bring to be far more offensive than paying more up-front.

Though I disagree with it, I respect your opinion, and that it gave me a springboard for more clearly articulating my own. No hard feelings?

@Grawlog That's a terrible attitude all-around. MMO's don't need microtransactions any more than any other genre, and there IS a fundamental difference between microtransactions and more classical ongoing charging mechanisms - required subscriptions keep gameplay and finances completely separate (the player isn't presented with gameplay choices that are dependent on finances, or financial choices that alter their gameplay), as do expansion packs, for the most part. Even the titans you've mentioned, WoW and (from what I know of it) Everquest, deliberately held to this line in the sand for quite a while.

Without reading through the whole thread, I think that's really one of the important distinctions to be made here - whether the consumer is paying to play the game, or to modify it.

That said, it's a linear relationship between the two concepts, and it always has to add up to the development costs.
Cost_to_consumer(playing the game) + cost_to_consumer(modifying the game) = cost_to_develop_game.
That equation is inviolate. Back in the good old days, the cost_to_consumer(modifying the game) was generally fixed at 0, and the cost_to_consumer(playing the game) was higher, at least in the US.

For example, Final Fantasy VII launched in 1997, at a price (as best I can determine) of $50 - that's equal to $74 in 2015 money. Go back to the cartridge generations, and prices climb even higher. Just as importantly, prices stayed high; games didn't get slashed by 75% within three months to Steam sales.

Want to kill microtransactions? Refusing to buy them is all well and good, but just as importantly, we as consumers have to be willing to foot the increased bill from, well, the macrotransactions. If you REALLY want to vote with your wallet, stump up more cash for your games.
Buy new.
Buy full-price.
Buy the exorbitant CE's with the physical swag, if you want (but that's a double-edged sword, since CE's are riddled with DLC of their own these days).
If you must hold out for a GotY edition to not get burned on DLC, at least buy that edition new and full price.