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@breakneck They state it in the first paragraph thats it was a PC code, if people are to lazy to get to 5 lines down then thats on them and not Aaron's reveiew.

I would also say Starfield, I have no interest in it myself but It would make sense to as they can now launch it as an ultimate edition with the DLC's and that improved the game so that they avoid the negative feedback the original launch had.

DS2 is a strange one, its not the best mechanically and in the base game you can kill most enemies just by circling them to avoid and throwing attacks in as needed. However I would say its the best visually when it comes to exploration as the areas are wildly different and feel really unique. And the DLC reallly ramps up the difficulty with fights like Fume Knight.

I would say DS1 is the best overall, followed by DS2 then DS3 is probably my least favourite as some of the fights started to feel a bit cheesy and cheap

Personally I love FF13, The paradigm battle system was a great version of turn based with more depth and I didn't even mind the characters. FF13-2 was a bit meh as the time travel stuff just never clicked with me, and I have not played LR as my PS3 died. I would say 13 is no more linear than most other final fantasy games as they only offer the illusion of freedom rather than actual freedom. I went through FF9 again recently and the map is very linear for a large majority of the game. People just remember them being far more openworld than they actually are.

For me the worst game in the series is easily FF12 as the game plays itself due to the gambit system and the world just lacked that spark which made it feel like a FF game.

When do we get the Vagrant Story remake / remaster because thats the classic I really want

@NEStalgia Games on floppies were something else, I remember getting Gabriel Knight and I think that was 16 discs to install

Fantastic trailer, its going on a list but will definately pick it up at some point.

@The_Wailing_Doom the only reason people parrot the first party line so hard now is because MS went hard with buying publishers and Devs who already had games in the pipeline, so it nicely fits their the narrative. Its right up there along with the other commonly touted line that sony has no exclusives if they come to PC eventually, whilst conveniently ignoring the fact that virtually every Xbox game is on PC day 1.

At this poinr it honestly makes no difference wether a game is made by a first party studio or a 3rd party exlusive for a specific console. The only thing that makes a game exclusive is if its available on the other major consoles or not, and PS stil have plenty of those.

Hopefully it gets back to its roots and is like the first game as it was the most enjoyable overall. The second game lost me a bit with the loot system as it only really added busywork to the game, they also went hard on the rule of three which got obnoxious later on. The third game was just meh overall, the weapon choices should have made for great rapid gameplay but the move to slower combat just didn't work for me at all.

Never heard of Ender Lilies, but its something I may check out in future and Lego games are always a bit of fun if I ever clear my backlog.

This list is missing Walkabout Mini Golf, Its the perfect game that is made better simply by being in VR and has so much replayability. Its without doubt the most played game i have for the VR2.

@WhiteRabbit I am waiting for my Sony cheque to appear in the post because I bought a PS1, PS2, 2 x PS3's, PS4, PS5 and PSVR2 all of which are cheaper now so I reckon they gotta give me at least £1000 back

@PuppetMaster 3D Dot Game Hero was a stone cold classic, its a shame its never been updated for the 4/5

@Sequel Well worth a play and it has the added benefit of being pretty easy if you are a souls vet so should be a fast clear.

Not bored of them yet and I have played most, or have them wishlisted for future plays. I understand they are not everyones cup of tea due to the perceived difficulty but I find that applies to every genre and if anything Souls games are easier that most to me. I tend to find faster paced action games like DMC, GoW harder and the hardest games are any shooters with a pad.

@ParboldCoder I had 3 memory cards fail at Ultimecias Castle and each time it just pushed me to go even harder at the game each time. Must have taken me about 300+ hours to finish FF8 because of that.

@naruball I get that its everyone has different priorities but it does always gets me. People will happily pay over £1000 for the last Apple Pro max which does the exact same thing as the old one. and in some cases they will do it yearly just to make calls on the latest version. But £500 for a console every 7 years is a ridiculous price.

@Odium Defiance finished the story in the best way possible as it solved that arc but let the series open for future games that sadly never got traction.

@Shinnok789 A remake would be amazing if they start right from the beginning again as you have to play Blood Omen first to understand why the world is broken and the impossible choice that Kain was given which starts everything that follows. The only change I would make is remove the choice from the ending of Blood Omen so if follows the canon choice he actually made.

That said if they did remake then they better reuse the audio files for Tony Jay and not recast.

If its just a remaster they should really do all of them at once or in order for the story

Soul Reaver was excellent but Blood Omen was the best

@WhiteRabbit or FF16 selling 3 million in the opening week and somehow thats a cataclysmic failure

I reckon it will be this year, but if not then I think it will just be held back and turn into the PS6 instead if MS are looking at a shorter generation given how the series consoles are losing steam.

As for people feeling its not needed I would put it in the same category as mobile phones, their is no requirement at all for yearly upgrades to the newest model. But if the market is there and people want to have the newst version then I don't see an issue, its just more choice for the consumer.

Looks interesting but the visuals are not really clicking for me, probably one I will wait on.

The sony method seems better imo, release new games at full price and bring them to the system 6-12m later to boost interest in the sub method for those who are not as bother about waiting. It supports the initial sales, and then supports their interests at a later date.

As for Gamepass I do read this as an admission of sorts that the model is not working as hoped. The main selling feature of GP when you listen to people is always Day 1 games, which I understand you got on the lower tier and only had some issue if you wanted online play. With MS stating very clearly that GP is not growing at a level they were happy with and moving everything to the highest tier, while making standard look worse for upselling purposes. Its essentially an admission that GP is not sustainable with these numbers unless everyone is paying the largest amount. And even then I would wager its still not fully sustainable which is why we have seen the inclusion of "early access" plans in the sub model, which is truly scummy imo (regardless of the platform or company).

Remnant 2, Crisis Core, Pathfinder, Summoner, Jeanne d'Arc and another PSVR2 game, these are some very nice additions which I will have no time to play.. Great month I just need to stop replaying old games.

@naruball Its up there with 2000h+ played, Thumbs down because I dislike this feature of this current patch.

@WhiteRabbit Internet points will never cease to be a thing as "number goes up" trumps everything for a lot of people. I have played WoW for years and its the same with Achievment Points in that, for some people the collection is the goal. I won't personally criticise a game for not including them, as I don't care about trophies at all, but everyone is different and for some people they are the meta game within the game.

@naruball The big problem is that Steam reviews are still binary and don't use a rated system. Its either you like it, or you dislike it which makes their review waves look worse than they likely would be otherwise.

Its a shame we can't play the old games, but at the same time I understand why Sony don't throw funds at it because the reality is most people only play the new things. I recently set up the PS3 emulator on my PC tho and thats pretty damn good.

RESISTANCE FTW

I put kinda but in fairness its nothing to do with Soulslike games, and is more to do with genres for me. I have done Demon Souls, Dark Souls 1-3, Bloodborne, Elden Ring, Nioh 1 & 2, Lords of the Fallen, Anime Souls etc and don't consider then to be that hard overall. Personally I find DMC style combat far harder than anything in the souls series. Other than that strategy or anything where I have to aim using a pad are my weak points.

So I reckon everyone is put of by difficult games, but it has no meaning as difficult is different for everyone.

They did manage to get me a PS5 on release day so I will give Game some credit. But that was their online store as I don't think I have visited town in about 4 years, its just easier and often cheaper to buy things online than visit brick and mortar stores. Part of the problem is that towns are just making it harder for people to visit actual shops.

@kailun PC's and consoles work differently, just because the component parts used now are similar the machines are still different due to custom OS's and other custom parts. Its fairly common for PC games to run at differing performance levels soley down to if you are using an Nvidia or AMD gpu. So its not as smooth as you claim it to be.

@get2sammyb Thats one of my biggest issues with the term "Money Hatting". Too many people imagine it as a company just paying to deny a product to the opposition. Where as the money is normally to aid development and marketting, which results in a better end product which they rightly so want to see a return on that spend.

@Godot25 Stellar Blade was different, they needed a Publisher and when SIE took them up on it the project shifted to an exclusive. Thats not really much different to how when Microsoft bought out companies they shifted games to being exclusive. Its just a company going for the best return of their investment.

As for Devs being straight Game Science has said its down to optimisation. MS are just not confirming the optimisation to protect their brand, at the same time not commenting on the exclusive rumours because its deflection for fans and media that they are not liable for.

@Flaming_Kaiser Orphan is next level torture, from the piercing screeches to how hyper aggressive that boss is.

@daldrum Right there with you, mine gave me a whole new level of appreciation for simple games that VR really brings to life. Walkabout Minigolf and The Room are stand out examples of simple games that are much better due to VR.

@kailun Elden Ring does have assist modes they are just not as obvious as being in the main menu. The amount of build options alone in ER, or any FS game, will affect the difficulty. Magic builds are always known as easier builds as you can stay at a safe range. Then you have the signs / player summons which are another level of assist due to either being told where to go, or being assisted by another player on difficult bosses. Then you also have the regular summons which are a massive assist, especially the one which clones your character completely making any sort of bleed / frost debuff build comically overpowered.

So i would say it definatly has an assist mode, it just not in the menu or attached to a specific piece of armor that plays the game for you.

Ive not got the DLC yet but my mate said the difficulty is mainly in the NG levels, he was at NG5 and mentioned its brutal on the higher settings but seems fine on normal.

I imagine a fair chuck of the complaints are from people on NG+ just getting 1 hit killed as they don't know the fights yet.

It was a really good game and I would say it could have even been great but just loses a point for not allowing you to play in FF mode from the start as that mode is much better.

Its a great bit of kit, but obviously it was never going to sell 1:1 with the consoles. Really enjoy using mine and whilst it doesn't get loads of use its a nice thing to have when the mood takes me.

The lack of first party is not really an issue for me either as the 3rd party market is strong.

@purple_mouse_gaming In some ways Bloodborne is the most approachable of all the Fromsoft games. While people praise Elden Ring for having a huge variety of playstyles which allows players to tailer the difficulty. BB tackles the problem slightly differently by having a more defined, aggresive, playstyle. You can play the entire game only focussing on Dodging and using the rally mechanic and large amount of health pots to brute force areas.

Its still a challenging game but I think that having less systems makes the game more cohesive and it translates into a more approachable game overall.

Its easily Froms best work and well worth £7.99

I went with okay overall, State of Play probably had the most that interested me. Xbox was okay but nothing there wowed me, nothing to do with console wars it just featured a lot of genres / or series that don't appeal to me.

One thing that was interesting was all the multi platform that Xbox did show makes you wonder if they offered more reasonable package deals for the trailers as the pricing revealled before hand for the main SGF show did seem ridiculous.

@Korgon Same with Yaragul to an extent, its easy to miss an entire part of the game depending on your skill level as you have to let the enemy kill you at a specific part of the game. Especially when the area gets you a ton of levels as its a prime farm area.

@Enuo I will never understand the goalpost moving that only applies to PS with exclusives. If sony put the game on PC its not exclusive, but for some reason with Xbox its different.

I normally use the game routes from fextra to just give me an idea of flow and then explore each area with a planned build already in mind. For ER i had decided to play a full int melee monster and ended up going Astel and ***** Stars.

FS fans do tend to be some of the most ridiculous for gatekeeping what they count as beating the game or playing on easy mode, such as using summons, magic, shield turtling etc. If its in the game then its designed to be used regardless of people classing it as easy or not.

I replayed FF9 recently and whilst its still the best FF of the PS1 era it was really showing its age it places. Hopefully with the remake they keep it turn based with the same art style and just expand on the dialogue a bit.

If they are going to keep doing remakes then they need to stop teasing us and remake Vagrant Story because that was such an amazing game.

Microsoft is slimy
Sony is slimy
Nintendo is slimy

They are all slimy and not one of them cares a jot for the fans. They care about the buisness and the money only. Poeple need to realise they are all just as bad as each other and stop perpetuating the console wars by thinking (insert name here) is their mate and would have them round for dinner.

The trailer was awful and actually lowered my interest in the game as the tone was nothing like what I expected. Dragon Age's world is dark with demons, political intrigue, back stabbing and questionable morality. It's should never have been a weird comedy heist movie trailer with Fortnite / Borderlands graphic styles.

Also trailers as a whole should all focus more on gameplay as cinematics tell us very little about the final product.

@Fiendish-Beaver I had seen the rumours about the next console in 2026 but have no idea how well that will go down if its highligted as a new generation. Six years life span for a generation would seem shorter than it should be, more so when neither console has hit its stride yet.

Brings us back to the real problem that games take longer to create than the machines they are played on now.

@Fiendish-Beaver The SS is in a really awkward position for XBOX imo, as like you I believe the weaker system was a mistake and has caused them a lot of headaches due to their own parity rules.

That said its also made up a very large chunk of the sales that I don't think would have converted directly to SX's if the SS was not on the market, so on that front maybe it was a good decision for the brand.

Would be great if they could drop the parity rule and release early earlier on the SX but if they did then I imagine you would get a fair amount of games just never being optimised for the SS. At this point its hard to say which option is better.

Very poor, there was maybe 4 games that stood out but the dross inbetween made me tune out and start forgetting what had already been shown.