Ilyn

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.

@ShaneReactions its only recently that motherboards started including headers for USB C, and even then its limited to the top end boards, and the headers usually connect to a single USB C on the the front of the tower. They do however always have 6-8 USB A / B sockets on the standard back panel board however so makes way more sense using them.

@GeeForce Virtual Link is the name as far as i know and it does power, video and data down one cable. So i assume the adapter is just breaking that down into 2 or 3 cables for PC

@OldGamer999 Its also possible that they are holding something back for summer games fest next week. I could maybe see them announcing something new for Spiderman 2 then. Also likely they are holding something back as a PS5 Pro game which is also something we know exists but have not heard much about officially.

But May '25 would not surprise me

@weeniebeenie I get what your saying about a limited selection of categories, but at the same time I suppose its just a refelection of what sells and what needs the push.

I bet plenty of sports games sell, but do they really need the focus when people who like FIFA will buy the latest iteration regardless.

@OldGamer999 I am the opposite in that I am glad they are no longer showing us teasers or trailers for games that have no set date. The biggest failing of the industry in recent years imo was getting shown games like Cyberpunk so early that the hype died off and turned into negativity because its became just more talk for a game that was still 3 - 4 years out.

For me 12 months for teasers and 6 months for trailers is what they should be aiming for.

Decent enough showing, as usual people expect it to be 14 AAA brand new unmentioned games that are first party out next week and then get shocked when its not.

Astrobot and the PSVR games where enough for me, POE should be good if the 1st is anything to go by and the overwatch clones may have some fun value in them.

@NEStalgia I don't know the full info but its something to with the PSVR2 using a VirtualLink port that was a tech that just never caught on. It was a tech that was original used on some of the high end 2000 series of Nvidia cards but never took off and was dropped pretty sharpish.

Some nice additions for us VR users

Don't sleep on walkabout as its really good fun

@LifeGirl Baldurs Gate 3 is to my mind a really good example of this. Anyone describing the game will likely always call it an RPG but at its heart the combat is strategy and that was one of the most played games of 2023.

@Illyrian I think a big part is also that games on that nature just don't work well on a controller. Sure they work and there will always be a few players who swear by the controller version. For the most part however the second you swap the mouse and keyboard for the controller is just adds to the game feeling longer and more complicated that it needs to be.

I think part of the problem is that strategy games have also evolved with their player base in ways that is off putting for people new to the genre. Games like Total War: Warhammer are really well done but have a steep learning curve to play well, which can be off putting.

One of the best, if not the best, strategy games of all times is Warcraft III imo. It had all classic units, 4 distinct armies, small groups led by heros and a fantastic story running through the campaign and expansion which was so strong it carried an MMO for 6 years. I think the closest strategy games have come to it in recent years has been the Shadowrun series, but I will admit bias to the series as it reminds me of the pen and paper sessions when i was younger.

@OldGamer999 Thats pretty much the same for myself, The only people I know who play COD are for the most part ex-gamers who maybe get 1hour a night, twice a week after the wife and child has gone to bed.

My nephews also have no interest in COD for them its Minecraft, Fortnite or GTA and COD is not even a blip. I do wonder how its the biggest selling game.

Champions of Norrath 1 & 2, Legacy of Kain series, Evergrace, LotR: The Third Age, Ring of Red, Summoner, Shadow Hearts would all be welcome additions.

Evergrace mainly because its that game i remember having when I was younger but being very confused by at the time.

@breakneck whilst I agree the sidequests in FF16 where not anything special, I do think they were needed and I understand why they were so heavily loaded to the end of the game.

It was a problem they created for themselves by spacing out the Eikons, the last haul of quests was essentially just so you had something to do with Odin.

@HonestHick Being from the North I would like to see that, if only to put Manchester Cathedral back on the game drama map

@CutchuSlow Nothing at all is up with PSVR2, but for some reason people like to pile on and make it out to be awful due to a lack of first party games.

They act like the only game available on it is Horizon: CotW and ignore the vast, and ever increasing, library of smaller 3rd party releases because it doesn't fit their arguement.

@HonestHick I still don't understand why the Resistance franchise is not all on Premium, or just re-released as a trilogy bundle for PS4/5.

I still own my PS3 copies as I loved the game, but my PS3 broke and for some weird reason they only have Resistance 3 on Premium. They do need to show these old IP's some love as they were really good imo.

@UltimateOtaku91 I was thinking about this recently, and I agree that a lot of people will wait for the trilogy to be complete before buying into the series.

I also think that part of the general sales issue that all games are facing is that games are getting bigger to offer false value with collection bloat. As a result I find that I am rarely ever buying games on release now at full price simply because my backlog is huge, so they either arrive on PS+ and I get them for free or i pick them up at £15 6 - 12 months later.

That must hurt sales overall because I imagine a large proportion are of the same mindset.

@UltimateOtaku91 I would wager that a lot of those sales for X/X2 remake are also people who already had X and X2 for the PS2 and just wanted the upgrade.

Its interesting data as it shows that FF has never been this mega seller than Square seem to expect it should be as it sits as a niche area of rpgs in general.

Still up there as one of my all time top franchises, but Square really do need to ground their expectations a ltittle.

Really enjoyed my time with the base game, yeah the side quests were terrible, but overall the game was enjoyable. I had already paid for the DLC bundle so will jump right on it after I finish RE4 VR which is fantastic so far. Picked up a new C3 oled since my original playthrough so I am curious to see how much better the game will look with those colours going full pop.

As above I am also here for the XIII love, really enjoyed my time with the first one even if it was linear. The sequel was a bit meh mainly as I felt the story got far to convoluted just for the sake of it. Its genuinely dissapointing that they never sorted out a port for PS4 / PS5 as its the only one you can't replay on the modern machines.