Golem25

"the video game god himself Neil Druckmann"

Druckmann wouldn't make my top 100 of most influential/consequential developers. Yet this is the God of gaming? Shigeru Miyamoto who? Hideo Kojima who? Yu Suzuki who? Shinji Mikami? Toshihiro Nagoshi? Satoshi Tajiri? Hideki Kamiya? Hidetaka Miyazaki? How about a few Western folks? Warren Spector, Will Wright, John Carmack, Ed Boon?

Her saying this, ironically or unironically, says quite a lot about her and/or the kind of relationship you need to have with someone to land starring roles in entertainment. Cringe. What a shame.

Nothing from Firewalk?

The PS Studios game I had the most fun with this year was..... Concord.

Didn't play it, not even the beta. That whole spectacle unfolding was the single-most gripping narrative Sony has ever produced, and wholly unintentionally at that. I sat down with a 30 minute video of a guy clicking through the badly-written lore dumps with typoes in them (Firewalk cannot into spelling) to laugh at it, I watched the weekly cutscenes to laugh at them, and I look out for Youtube essays just to laugh some more ('The Absolute Chaos of Concord' is a good one). I signed the 'Re-release Concord, We Were All Busy That Week' petition. The Concord episode is the only bit of Secret Level I care about. I go to Taco Bell hoping it's a former Firewalk executive putting the fries in my bag.

Have to question Sony's business strategy of spunking 400 million smackers down the drain to give everyone this daring meta experience for free, but I thank them for trying something entirely new. Looking forward to the epic sequel next year, inexplicably called Fairgame$ rather than Concord 2.

Looks cringe, zero interest. Whole vibe feels extremely dated. Feel free to call me any number of names ending in -ist, don't care. I tend to play as buff Japanese dudes in most of my games that don't have a character creator, but I'm not exactly a buff Japanese dude IRL. I'm also not whatever this trailer identifies as. Hopefully that helps people understand that, actually, not everyone who dislikes whatever this trailer is trying to go for is a bad person.

This is the type of game we need more of on Playstation. Smacks of something that would have been a Vita-exclusive in the past.

My answer is always; did a Yakuza/Like a Dragon/Judgment game release? If so, GOTY.

Totally tubular, dude.

Fake news, it has Concordillions of players on PS5!

Jokes aside, it did not crack the top 10 games played on PSNProfiles, a ranking which, while heavy on Trophy hunters, is one of the better indications we have available to us when it comes to playercounts on PSN. It petered out at 11th, and then dropped - it's 13th at the time of writing. For a first party title built on not one but two big IPs, that's pretty damn dire.

Please just give us a Playstation equivalent for the Steam Deck, the Portal being reliant on streaming from the console itself is not good enough. It's 2024, nearly 2025, I do not want to be bound to a TV screen for my gaming needs.

As long as they don't add new Trophies, I'm all for it. Played and Platted it as part of PS Plus Extra.

The game has 'PS Plus Essential' written all over it, wouldn't be surprised to see it in the monthly line-up somewhere in the next twelve months.

An absolute steal of an acquisition considering how much quality stuff they get. Daylight robbery when you contrast it with how much money went to waste buying Bungie and the halfwits at Firewalk.

You're Sony, you include Resistance FoM and Resistance 2 in your super expensive deluxe subscription tier, but you can't be bothered to get Insomniac to hook some multiplayer servers back up to make the games fully playable?

The announcements from Sony should make it entirely clear that both games are only partial inclusions. Both shipped with expansive online modes that are now dead in the water.

If you as platform holder think they are worthy inclusions to your service, then it takes some real cognitive dissonance to say 'oh, but the online modes are totally irrelevant'.

Yes, I'm mad because I have unobtainable Resistance 2 trophies lol

I'm sorry, but, maybe Horizon just isn't 'a thing'. Sony, or maybe Hermen specifically, think they can make it 'a thing'. But it just ain't.

This is not a Star Wars or Marvel-level franchise. It never will be. It's two pretty but otherwise unremarkable open world games and now a sub-standard LEGO spin-off. I'm surprised it didn't debut lower on Steam. Sony's own Star Wars, Concord, launched at 698 players.

Not that I want to rain on anyone's parade, but these horrible YouTooz and Funko Pop vinyl figures, that take any popular IP they can find and mutilate and molest the characters to fit their products, are just ghastly.

Funko is horrible with those beady-eyes, and half the time you can't even recognize what character they're supposed to be - especially with humans, as the faces are all generic and the bodies comparatively tiny. YouTooz just feels to me like a late arrival to the party who are not subtle at all in ripping off Funko's shtick with differently-styled eyes.

Please give Ghostwire: Tokyo a try. It's not a perfect game, but its sandbox is absolutely beautiful and full of atmosphere.

I loved Ghostwire on PS Plus Extra, so while I have already played and Platinumed and 100%ed it, I am pleased to now add it to my library on a slightly more permanent basis. It's an acquired taste, but if it does fit your palate, it's a blast to play through.

However, the Platinum is a humongous grind and the 100% introduces a fair bit of difficulty plus RNG collectibles in its roguelite mode. Looking forward to seeing the average and Platinum rarity drop a few notches.

BBC News ran a piece on this, with the presenter saying he 'dressed up as the video game character Hitman'.

I had to stop myself from going on a rant and scaring everyone around me.

I still have NHL 2K10, that's good enough. Even then, you can get something like NHL 20 or 21 for less than the price of a cup of coffee if you want something more modern. No reason to ever buy these games brand new and let EA get away with the painfully minor updates each year.

Unless you're a HUT or MUT or FUT fan, in which case I'm just glad you didn't get addicted to something worse.

Ubisoft; 'after 8 years and numerous delays, we have finally released a bare bones pirate ship simulator with dreadful monetization'

RGG Studio; '***** it, we ball - side-game we threw together quickly, including naval combat plus everything else found in a Yakuza/LAD game now comes out a week early'

Can these guys get any more goated holy ****

I skipped out on the PS4.

I got a PS5 months after release, and guess what? I've been able to enjoy an endless deluge of last-gen games at cut-rate prices. Pennies on the Pound stuff. Disc drive. Used copy. PSN sale. No problems whatsoever.

And then the new PS Plus tiers came, and I bought a few years of PS Now to convert into Premium cheaply. Now I genuinely don't remember the last game I bought new on day 1. Yakuza Like a Dragon, I think? Purely to support RGG studio.

All this to say, don't be a mug. Let others pay the premium and beta test the bugs for you, and ride their coat tails for cheap a few months or years later. You don't seriously think games like Star Wars Outlaws are worth playing on release, right?

I know four of these names, and for the rest I have just no clue. If you told me they came from whatever IMDB's adult-only equivalent is, I'd believe you.

They're insane if they bring it back now. Do you really want to take the 99.9% risk that this flops AGAIN? Your tentpole first party title, flopping twice, that's what you want?

It's like re-releasing Morbius an-.... oh.

Very slay. This is the kind of genre diversity we need.

@tselliot That sounds interesting, what was the quote exactly? Sounds like the French equivalent of Concord's 'Talentless freaks' moment.

You should watch the cutscenes, she goes on an anti-v4xx rant in her 'ending'. Throws around words like 'bodily autonomy', 'colonizer', 'wealth redistribution'. I can't believe hundreds of devs had a hand in this, and no one said 'you know, this actually isn't the epic slay we think it is'. Or they did, and got shut down by senior / third party agents.

I'm really sorry, but this looks really poor. Deviating way, way too far from the source material from the looks of it. Easy pass for me, despite being a hardcore, obsessive fans since 2010.

I'm all for fighting for your right to your own patents, but surely this money would be much better spent on making an actual next-gen Pokemon game, rather than the woefully buggy low-tech slop Game Freak has served with Sword/Shield and Scarlet/Violet.

There is a timeline out there where Nintendo managed to wrestle control of the franchise away from Game Freak and Creatures Inc, and had actually competent studios do the mainline games and achieve world peace.

Right guys, who will chip into my GoFundMe to buy the Killzone license? I'll call the project 'True Killzone 3' and it opens with you shooting Rico before he shoots Visari.

I know I'll likely be the only one saying this, but I absolutely loathe the tone and especially the artstyle of this game. Can't quite find the words for it, but it's incredibly off-putting from the use of colours to the 'whimsical' characters to just the general vibe. I also don't understand why the lines on every character and object seem to be broken up. The art lead putting an ill-informed signature gimmick on everything, perhaps?

Other day 1 PS Plus Extra games like Tchia and Stray had a lot going for it. Lesser known gems like Jett: The Far Shore were well worth experiencing. But this one seems to offer absolutely nothing at all. A shame for all involved.

Was it really that hard/expensive to get the old voice actor back? Really, guys? What a shame. Glad I found a physical copy of the original for PS4 in Hong Kong, just 6 quid too - what a steal.

I enjoyed 2042 via PS Plus. Perfectly fine bog-standard shooter, better than Battlefield V. Future settings are much more interesting than the present when executed well, but DICE really didn't manage to spin a good yarn in 2042.

@Yagami I'm sure that the official social media accounts for the series / RGG Studios spamming OG Yakuza 3 screenshots right now is purely to rub salt in the wounds, and definitely not a hint at what's to come in a few days.

Good thing Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio is swooping in to save September with their summit on the 20th. Kiwami 3 GOTY 2025 baybee!

I grew up when the Powerpuff show was first airing and in the targeted age range at that, and frankly, I never understood why it was so popular - let alone why the IP seems to endure to this day.

Randy Twitter meltdown in 3... 2... 1...

Reminder that Firewalk's Lead Character Designer had never previously held any kind of character design-related role, only gameplay design and QA. Doomed from the get-go.

Will this let players get the Plat entirely offline? If so, I might pick this up many years down the line at my own leisure (or once it comes to Plus Extra)

But if even the game's creative director thinks these section were a mistake, why did you ship the game with them included? Especially when they are apparently mostly in the early parts of the game, e.g. exactly the part where you don't want to frustrate people into dropping the game. Are these people for real?

EDIT; "But if Massive Entertainment can polish the experience over the coming weeks and months, we could see something of a turnaround."

This stupid game launched nearly two weeks ago, why are we talking about polish in the coming weeks and months? What happened to shipping a polished game on day 1? I know this is Ubisoft and thus the bar is very, very low, but this goes to show how clownish the industry is currently. Can people please stop buying this kinda slop so Ubi and friends can finally learn their lesson?

Bless these hunters, such a feat to pull off. Also a very small community, I'm pretty sure I boosted one of the PS3 Assassin's Creed games with Sultan.

Sony/Firewalk could have put in the smallest possible amount of effort to simply boost XP by, say, a factor of one thousand, as a gesture of goodwill. But nope. Shutdown notice three days ahead of time. Nice one.

Also to note that this was mishandled by Sony from start to finish.

This game couldn't possibly have looked good enough to acquire so late into development, let alone the studio that made it. No one, at least not at the very top, seems to be able to read a room, because a hero shooter with a pricetag like this, in a saturated market where pretty much all the established competitors are F2P (including the upcoming Marvel Legends that leverages an established IP). Even when they finished the acquisition in 2022 or 2023, it was obvious that Firewalk were six years late chasing a trend that had since deflated.

Sony rubber-stamped the character designs, the knock-off Temu-ass Guardians of the Galaxy vibe. They signed off on investing concordillions of Dollars in the poorly-conceived idea that a hero shooter should drip-feed its story through weekly cutscenes and a humongous lore dump in an optional menu. They also figured it worth investing even more money in a Secret Level episode - essentially product placement - plus those horrible animated shorts they put out on YouTube.

Sony looked at the studio, could have noted that the lead character designer had only ever held gameplay design and QA roles, could have seen that the lead narrative designer (eventual 'Head of IP') had never worked on a video game before. They still bought this team, and let them fumble around. To let a guy with zero experience design the HEROES for your HERO shooter and letting someone unfamiliar with video game development design lead the narrative on such a tricky proposition is mind-boggling. It's like letting a stoker steer the Titanic, since he's proven so good at shovelling coal previously.

They must have seen the overwhelmingly negative reception to the trailer. The low pre-order numbers. The dismal numbers for the first beta, which was quickly thrown open to everyone (this was such a red flag for me).

Instead of delaying the game and baking it properly (change to F2P to stand a chance) or quietly canning it, they still went ahead with the launch, knowing the public Steam playercount would make them a laughing stock.

The game launched exactly as everyone predicted, and instead of giving the 27 or so people who liked it a proper amount of time to say goodbye, they just nuked the entire game outright. Three days of advance warning, nothing more. Offering universal refunds was the only call they got right. But those three days were obviously not enough for the people who did want to play or the hardcore fans that hunt Trophies and now had a race against the clock on their hands. Trophy hunters might be a tiny minority, but they are your whales - they will buy way more than just COD + FIFA/Madden every year.

And now the game will be memory-holed for good - there is no way they will waste more money on it, F2P won't save it, and they can't afford to have it flop twice. Heads must roll for this, and I'm sure they will. But we can only cross our fingers that it will be the right heads, rather than scapegoats.

Concord has fallen. Concordillions must refund.

'Comedy' was never listed as one of Concord's genres, but then here we are.

Idk guys, that's only 56 times as many players as Concord's beta managed at its peak 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

The argument made is that Playstation reinvents itself, shedding/leaving IP behind in the process.

I'm willing to argue that, rather, Playstation has largely failed to reinvent its IP. God of War and Ratchet are the only currently-relevant PS icons remaining from the PS2 era. Plus maybe Toro in Japan.

Nintendo can keep something like Kirby going, but Ape Escape is dead and buried? Halo survived a change of developer and some hiccups, but Killzone's amazing universe couldn't survive the tepid Shadow Fall? Meanwhile, eight years and tens of millions of Dollars so Concord could be playable for eight days. WipEout is dead but we sure all loved Destruction All Stars. Resistance is gone but hey, the floundering Destiny universe is first-party now! A new take on MAG or SOCOM would wipe the floor with Fairgame$, if it hasn't been quietly shelved already.

Reinvention is only good if the new reality is worthwhile / better than the past. Sony cooked the entire PS5 generation by not turning on the stove. I want the best for the company and for us enthusiasts, and for all our sakes, they need to take a long hard look at themselves.

I assume you can still boot the game from a physical copy after shutdown? Sure, no matches or anything, but you could still theoretically do the time trials and read the cringe lore dumps?

Mid game, mid score. If that's difficult for him to comprehend, I can understand why the game turned out the way it did.

Can't wait for this one. Will it last at least three weeks?

I respect the hustle, Godspeed you crazy rascals.

The Plat seemed like an easy but long grind. Little did anyone know, it came with a two-week deadline.

I assume the original Borderlands was only good by accident, considering who's helming the company.

Incredible, we're watching gaming history as it happens. E.T. ain't nothing compared to this one.

Game no one asked for, in a genre everyone is sick of, with characters no one likes. It was always going to fail, but this badly? I'm at a loss for words.