Haruki_NLI

@MFTWrecks As I said. Publicly investing. For all we know most of their money can be funnelled directly into Neil Druckmann's wallet

But all the announcements have been investing in other media which is...interesting. EVO makes sense, make it look like PS is the only place to play fighting games. The anime apps....I dunno sure? The movies on PS+....yeah I dunno either.

This makes sense though.

I remember the articles about Microsoft going for it, and the comments saying "Yeah, Discord doesnt impact us, we dont use Discord"

The benefits to Discord greatly outweigh native voice solutions. Not only does Discord enable cross-platform voice chat by not being tied to a platform, it also allows you to organise games far, far easier than any platform centric system ever has.

Sure you can send a random invite to a friend if they are online, but to arrange a time you need to contact them outside of your platform anyway.

Seperate apps and integration to them, believe it or not, is the way forward for social gaming.

Y'all best get used to the complications. The world has advanced beyond Xbox Live of early HALO days. It's easier to play with others than ever before....as long as the integration is there.

Also I must say, Sony is certainly investing in....things other than games studios publicly. EVO, Discord, anime streaming apps, streaming movies into PS+....

@JJ2 This comment section aged well.

@get2sammyb From what has been said by GamesIndustry.biz, the gap between #1 and #2 on this chart was "comfortable".

So take that for what you will.

Now we won't see more footage of the new Getsu Fumaden...

Ah yes, the small sandbox levels first introduced in Into The Nexus.

And not that there was two of them in RAC2, one in RAC3, one in Tools of Destruction...., in fact, the one level they show off here, Sargasso, WAS the open sandbox level for Tools of Destruction.

Sure none of them were quite as expansive but it was still all seemlessly loaded, items to get and lots of enemies.

Oh and big things to kill for said items too.

I do wonder if there is some trickery going on here.

Like maybe that second area is "loaded" prior, at least in part, and the crystal simply exists to swap it in to play.

Could be some clever use if preloading into RAM here rather than "none of this was loaded but in a second it all is".

I just wonder how much of it is actual SSD speed and not long established optimisations with spare space developers had.

@nessisonett Monster Hunter Rise was announced for PC officially a month before the game came out, with a 2022 release date.

Oh, and Monster Hunter Stories 2 isnt exclusive either.

I'm not paying £70 for a new IP in a genre I have an on and off relationship with depending on the title.

But that's just me.

@GKO900 Wondering how the graphics on PS4 can be better when its already 1080p 60fps on Switch.

More effects maybe? It's the RE Engine so I'm sure it can do it.

Oh yeah.

Game Help.

That's a....thing?

@thefourfoldroot So there is a solution to selling the games for £3.

Add PS1 and PS2 games to the Playstation Plus Collection. You know, those 20 PS4 games you get for free.

Maybe use it as an excuse to bump the price, chaching, Sony makes even more recurring revenue that they are already raking in.

@4kgk2 I think for a lot of people, all those PS1 games, and many more PS2 games than on PS4, are now physical only again, with prices on some of them already being astronomical or downright never got released in some regions outside of the digital store.

And in recent years we've seen the downside of CD technology in that after so long the discs themselves begin to rot.

Well, guess that website who was "doing it for clicks" was right, down to the dates.

RIP PS1 resell market. Your prices just went from £10 to God knows what.

Turn down the motion blur. Jesus christ.

That's all I'd need.

Best part of Minecraft Dungeons charting is it was 90% sales on Switch.

Yikes.

@get2sammyb A monopoly in the UK is defined as not a majority. In fact it's not as simple as simply having a majority of a market to oneself.

A company with say, 30% market share, but the rest is split between say, 4 other companies, is regarded as a monopoly because of a proportional consolidation into one firm.

Further a monopoly can be called when a company is able to out up barriers to entry into a market, and I believe this is what the USJD is looking at.

A barrier to entry is best summarised as a way to gatekeep new companies from entering a market, such as making costs high for everyone but yourself, or limiting distribution of components or services.

Sony here would own 3 very substantial streaming platforms and that would in fact act as a barrier to entry, and thus a monopoly. Sure, Netflix is the market leader, but Sony has more platforms for you to sell on.

@Jmck87 May very well be a move to incorporate both Teams and Game Pass.

And yeah, the costs have to be recouped, but Microsoft is one of the biggest companies on the planet. They bought Zenimax for more than Bethesda (That was just the tagline) but 7.5B is a drop in the bucket for them. Directly recouping the cost of that acquisition won't take them long.

That being said, the Zenimax deal was initially expected to be finished by June, the end of the Microsoft fiscal year. So maybe with this getting done sooner, they've got a bit of spare cash to throw around, or maybe they're looking and will fit into their costs for next year.

@Jmck87 Microsoft as an overall company made well over that amount in one quarter.

Got to remember, Xbox didnt buy Zenimax, Microsoft did.

Here's the funny thing.

People bemoan the lack of voice chat for games natively, yet realistically, the better option, and one most people use even with voice chat available, is Discord.

So Microsoft going for that, to have an effective voice chat and team based communication effort under it's belt, would be smart. It fits their business.

Just like Sony buying EVO, an outside thing that simply exists to bolster its image in gaming as THE place for what that thing does well.

The only question is, at what point does this consolidation in the industry stop?

And at what point does someone come knocking for say, Intelligent Systems, or Camelot, or Bluepoint or Grezzo?

There comes a point where all this does is consolidate the industry into a few companies, and that just takes stuff away from the others, causing them to react in kind.

I agree.

But to quote the author from another article about what does just amount to a slightly more complex process than desired:

" it's not ideal and could be better, but it's hardly quantum physics."

I remember when I said on this very site that it would come to PS4 eventually, even if it was a few years later, and a certain writer said otherwise.

I simply said, well why wouldnt it? It runs in a scalable engine, and the PC port showed that fact off well.

And yet here we are

I think the real problem with this process is why don't your existing PS+ cloud saves transfer automatically.

Then I remember, much like with Overwatch and Rocket League things, why that isn't possible.

On Xbox, next gen enhancements are a patch. On PS5, it's an entirely separate game. Its own download, which calls to its own unique save data.

Finished Doom Eternals surprisingly easier second DLC, got some PVZ BFN on Switch with friends tonight, and it's everything the game should have been from the start with regards to progression (all the changes are specific to this version weirdly).

And then...I dunno. Finally fixed my PS3 may try something on that.

The irony being the game is made in Unity.

So given the game that had gameplay footage is delayed, I can't see PNG Ragnarok making it.

If it does, I'll be stunned.

@Kalvort Nintendo didn't. The third party games they published did.

Daemon x Machina, Octopath Traveler, and allegedly Monster Hunter Rise.

And Nintendo of America.

So...ya know...

And probably next gen versions too.

Ah yes, the Portalizer.

Which is just a Dimensionator.

£70 for the base game, £90 for Digital Deluxe.

Probably. Could be £80.

Still, hope this can regain the charm the series largely lost in the PS3 days, when it shifted to more cinematic formats of storytelling complete with...dialogue menus...and stilted face to face animations...that went further downhill with the PS4 title.

I hope it's better than that at least.

Phil Harrison.

Hire this man, and it's an omen.

After the PS4 title being delayed countless times with the devs simply saying "it looks great" until FINALLy setting on a date for April 2016...eh it'll be late this year, early next year, but it sure as hell ain't launch window anymore.

Are there Xbox symbols on the bottom of the box?

Looks like the actual box itself is just a generic AIM brand packaging.

Especially since AIM makes controllers for PS too.

I imagine what this is, is AIM using their usual packaging and putting a Medium sleeve over it.

No point making exclusive inner packaging for your brand if you've already got some anyway.

@deathaxe The whole Spider-Man thing is weird, given Nintendo was allowed to use Spider-Man all willy-nilly, and the Fox stuff, in Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3.

Yet Square Enix has to have Spider-Man be exclusive to PS4 in Avengers?

There seems to be a lot of clauses and wiggle room with this.

No one else I know has a PS5 so no screen share.

Didn't use Game Help, forgot It existed actually, instead Googling stuff because low and behold that's what I'm used to doing automatically, and the cards....eh. I can see how they are handy but they are a bit of disorganized mess so I find it quicker to use in game fast travel like in Astro.

Financial cost or employee cost, because we know what CDPR are like regarding that...

@get2sammyb Seems to be a new thing Twitter is doing, they also did the custom hashtag emotes starting a while back, and also had auto DM reminders for things if you liked a tweet.

I first saw this a few months back when both Dragon Quest and Dragon Ball did it. Seemed a bit weird and the whole feed was going nuts over it for two weeks or so

It's not a Twitter first. Dragon Quest, Dragonball, Mario and Pokemon have all done it this year too.

Spoilers would be easier to avoid if all the regions could play all versions of the game on the same.

Everything but the damn machine itself comes out on the 12th here

@TheFrenchiestFry It can't have been too bad given Octopath was already well into development at that stage with a demo in late 2017 IIRC.

Further, I doubt Good Feel were able to get a playable demo of Yoshi at the stage it was at for the showcase in June 2017.

I imagine it was a case of Square knowing about UE4 support but the timelines didn't match up. Whereas most UE4 games starting development in 2016 were fine, anything earlier was an issue.

Hard to say, especially since SquareEnix and smooth development are pretty much antithetical 😂

@TheFrenchiestFry So regarding the claim of Switch not having UE4 support...

That came in May 2017. Heck, in April 2017 UE4 had build options for Switch already, just prior to full release, which was a surprise while doing uni coursework and compiling some code.

Yoshi arrived powered by UE4 almost a year later, as did Fortnite and many UE4 games sprang up pretty fast.

So as to what SquareEnix was doing...we don't know exactly, especially given Octopath Traveler, a UE4 game from Square, was announced and shown off before the Switch even came out.

From what it sounds like, the game they made was heavily tailored PS4, and moving that over to Switch proved difficult, so they rebuilt lots of aspects for the game.

I mean, that's like admitting "last few goes were a bit bad"

Do from what it sounds like the haptic feedback is basically the same as Switch then, which is fine. Probably more utilised though.

The real question is this...those adaptive triggers: what's the odds someone can break those? It seems from teardowns the mechanical side of it is interlocking gears and a motor applying tension, which with enough force pressing down on it can snap.

@LiamCroft I found it remarkably odd myself. The crash could just be an off chance thing. Where it happened is why its notable.

@LiamCroft Yep.

The platforms in the final stages had some...hard to describe but it's like the Slayer briefly falls through them before stopping and being fine.

A large swarm of Imps, a bigger demon like a Baron of Hell and a grenade causes frame drops (which...probably isn't surprise!).

A fodder demon clipped half way through the floor, performing a glory kill on stairs on the rig stage pops the Slayer into the stairs and then out.

As for the crash, the cutscenes to go into the second phase started, voice line goes off, demons spawn and then...it froze. Error occurred. Go back to the PS4 menu, reload the game as it booted me out, go to load my Ancient God's save and it says hey, this is corrupted. Load the save to be back at the start of the final stage.

I have no idea why, but all the other things were weird oddities, the platform one led to some reactions that led to death admittedly, but that crash at the end just put me off for the rest of the day.

Only problem I have had is clipping through things, massive performance drops on PS4 Pro, surprisingly, the difficulty being....well a bit too high....

and then the game crashing during the final boss corrupting my save file resetting my progress on that level.

@Kang81 I think the crux of the issue is this new system wants to be Discord, doesn't understand why Discord works for what it is, and in doing so fails to be Discord.

But to implement this they removed what made console based interaction worth using: because it's NOT Discord.

And this is why like on Switch, and Xbox, and for mobile games...we all just use Discord.

Drop in, drop out, send an invite for anyone new to join what already exists, done.

Yeah it requires a second screen and a phone or PC, but it works, and it's why most people playing games online these days use third party apps instead.
The old console way was simply inefficient for most content creators or multiplayer groups.

Sadly though, this doesn't look like it fixes that, and in trying to, makes it harder for regular players to just squad up willynilly with their friends list.

Discord is probably rubbing their hands with glee right now at all the Nitro subs coming up.

I just hope you can turn off or delete cards because that is a lot of clutter and information overload.

But this is just an inevitable extension of the trophy problem for me, where people only seem to get value based on whether the OS tells them they did a thing, people will now play a game based on what the OS tells them.

Instead of the game communicating it

Ooh Matron, care for a spot of tiffin?