LordAinsley

@CutchuSlow you wouldnt know Concord was a failure until September 2024. You could think "that looks boring, I dont want to play that" but you wouldnt know it was a failure.

Games take years to make. Concords development started in 2018 and this game started around 2020.

There will be more of these to be added to the pile, just depends how many titles were greenlit. A lot of games were greenlit in 2020 during COVID when a lot of capital flooded the space as game dev and animation were two fields that were quite capable for entertainment spend for remote staff and back then, live service was making a lot of money. It still is technically!

Hindsight and that makes it seem obvious now, but back then they'd been funded and were just building something.

@RobN I've started picking up some UHD BRs for this very reason.

@Sweetz Agreed. I actually feel similarily to a lot of threads where people go "Why haven't Sony rebooted X, Y and Z? I loved those games and they would absolutely be successful now"

99% of the time? You're wrong, and they wouldn't. It's fun to think you know more than a massive corporation with financial interest who run constant testing, marketing and research campaigns on games, solely based on nostalgia for something you played when you were 10 years old but its pretty unlikely.

@breakneck Silence was one of the films I was referring to, its an incredible movie.

Personally I really loved First Reformed a few years back. Seventh Seal is one of my favourite movies and I think the knights relationship with God is the key to the film.

Even stuff like Conclave recently and the Two Popes I think are fantastic.

It's a complex topic and its absolutely worth exploring in a video game, as is any topic to be fair. I think some people have a weird skewed view that something that explores religion is going to be Billy Grahamas Bible Blasters or some sort of interactive Edutainment game about the Last Supper. It's totally not the case

Postal 2 VR is actually wild

@Steel76 I'm not religious and some of my favourite movies explore religion and faith.

its a fascinating topic and doesn't require you to go to chuch every sunday or even believe in a God to be interesting

Hulst really will throw money at absolutely anything as long as its Horizon related huh?

Good letters.

I think there is a near zero chance that Twisted Metal Live Service would have succeeded. It's never worked past the PS1. Its not an untapped market. Noone wants games like this anymore.

@DennisReynolds @Enuo @heavyartillery56
On sequels, you're all kind of right.

A sequel is a guaranteed sales push over an original IP due to the first game, positive word of mouth from the first game etc however a third game can actually be difficult.

Marketing research has proven that its very difficult to get people in to the series for the first time when you're on the third title. Mass Effect famously struggled with this and ran a rather ridiculous PR campaign focused around the concept that "Mass Effect 3 is perfect time to enter the series", which if you've played the game you know is a really ridiculous statement. It eventually underperformed.

Same deal with Dead Space 3, they basically found they had probably reached the peak of their intended audience for sales with 2 so had to pivot to including more action and multiplayer in DS3 in an attempt to expand the already stretched player base for a title. The result was a all over the place third game that original fans didnt like and new fans didnt play.

I do think we'll get 3 eventually, although I do think its concerning that Neil seems sort of burnt out by the series and is talking down potential sequels at the moment. He has been laser focused on this very depressing universe for a long time now, I can see how that can get to you.

this response needs to be banked and Harada, Ed Boon and any other game creators can set up bots to just automatically spam this response out to anyone whining.

he's bang on as usual

@dskatter I dont even like it in KC.

There's a reason they don't make games like Shenmue anymore and 3 flopped. Its boring to do things realistically in games like you would in real life.

@Dalamar interesting. I think I beat her 2nd time and then Nameless Puppet kicked my head in for about an hour

Interesting. I guess the game must be pretty playable at this state seeng as it was only pushed for polish, presumably the delay was too late to stop some physical copies getting out.

Good to hear it seems decent, plus theres another whole month of polish incoming

Personally yes, but I believe anecdotally people have lost the stomach for paying for them.

They've got to be on a service like Plus or they're just not getting played. I frequently see people complaining that 20 hour tripleA titles like Spiderman don't offer enough hours of gameplay, so what chance does a less polished, smaller scaler 10 hour game have against that mentality?

"No, no, dont worry Marvel fans! We'll continue investing in the game so you can continue feeding us microtransaction money! We're simply optimising the money filter from paying employees to paying shareholders!"

Of course thats the plan, and I think thats fine.

I just hope that Rockstar do some internal work creating a team specific to dealing with maintaining and updating it.

They really need to start making sure they've got a team that works on other projects whilst maintaining GTA online. It makes enough money, I want to see some other games coming out from them.

This is a cool series. I might start trying to players pick every month (if it isnt something im also playing!)

I'm surprised there's not more reaction to Mindseye. The Benz was the key part of so many Rockstar games and it's fascinating to see this game, which is apparently built in Everywhere.

Of course, also very hyped to see Housemarques new game announced and can't wait to jump back into lies of P in a few months, the greats non-from soulslike ever made

@thedevilsjester @ATaco I assume the intention is when that list comes up of potential trade routes, you can pick one and your merchant walks over there? It straight up doesnt work.

I thought maybe I was misunderstanding it, but it greys out trade options with Civs you're at war with and has a note that "you cant establish new routes with nations youre at war with" so I think it is the intention it just doesnt work.

Like you say, yeah I've just been backng out of the menu, then manually walking my merchant to other cities, then it lets you establish a route

@Jswift56 Mark Zuckerberg is a well publicised Civ-head, there are countless interviews where he brings up epic 10 hour sessions after coding.

I would have thought he probably lobbied for this personally, I cant see Firaxis thinking VR is big enough to bother with it otheriwise

@ATaco Yeah I played maybe 200 hours of 6 and then last week just as a curiosity jumped on and played another 10 by accident.

I'd quite like to play something with some interesting changes and yeah, like you said, I can just play 6 some more if I hate it. It's not exactly aged badly, I was playing it last week

just let someone else use the nemesis system please.

it doesnt even really make sense in a wonder woman game, I assume they'd let her use the lasso to hypnotise people or something.

anyway, please make something with it

@LifeGirl Abby is actually jacked because TLOU2 is a video game so she doesnt actually have to focus on fitness and nutrition because she's not real, happy to help.

I'm so excited. Looking forward to checking out these new changes and new ways to play

@lazarus11 I cant put my finger on it but it just repelled me pretty quick.

I thought the story and character seemed interesting, but as soon as I was walking about and doing the sword fighting tutorial I just knew "I dont want to play this for 40 hours"

Thats cool. Just need to wait to see if the game is actually good now.

I honestly found the last game a total chore that needed a lot of polish, hopefully the studio scaling means this is a much better game

@LifeGirl not much doesn't upset you huh?

Gamers hate live services until they dont. Then they want them

Great idea. I love Metros game section and it's reader letters section so this is definitely going to be appreciated.

@Oz_Who_Dat_Dare Yeah its just kind of mid honestly.

I dunno why people are super surprised, DA:2 is mid as well. Inquistion is probably only a little better than this i remember it really benefited from a empty launch window.

Last Mass Effect game was bad. I feel bad, but I dunno, I'm not sure why people were so surprised the game wasnt incredible.

As for the audience, its MCU folks right? I think thats fine, and I think those folks did enjoy it. But I think a lot of corporations think that the marvel style media is still mainstream. A lot of people are burnt out on it. Its not 2012 anymore.

Sounds cool. Honestly, mirage is the best game they've made in ages and this one was firming up to be good.

Nothing but good for it to get delayed for more polish.

@Lavishturtle To you, someone who has no knowledge what so ever on the topic, yeah maybe.

Wow, its almost like Jeff Grubb makes stuff up to try and get people to listen to his unpopular podcast because it's not very good and he's not an engaging person to listen to!

And this keeps happening over and over!

But that cant be true, because every time I mention hes a liar, I am refuted by people who explain to me "Nuh-uh".

@LifeGirl which failed live service game had unneccessary politcs inserted into it?

@DonJorginho Mirage is the best game they've made in years

@dark_knightmare2 No idea what youre talking about seeing as I also said that I think Killzone is rubbish.

@Sanquine I agree.

I think its OK that they made a sequel, but the game itself is proof that they haven't really got much else to say about the world, it was very grasping to build some sort of story worth seeing through and ultimately failed.

After that, I didnt need a remaster. The lego game is fine but I dont like lego games that much so didnt bother.

The VR game annoys me because they put it forward as the "Playstation Studios" franchise to respresent in VR and its just not very good. Now we probably wont see an Astro Bot or Last of Us VR game.

It was also a chance to play as another character, and they failed to make that character interesting either.

Personally, this isn't a "Horizon is a problem" issue, it's a "Guerilla make boring games" issue.

Technically they're very proficient, but I don't really like Killzone or Horizon. I think they have real issues writing interesting characters and stories.

And I think they do get special treatment within Sony, especially now Herman Hulst works directly for Playstation. The combo of this means you get loads of games from this studio, but they have nothing to interesting to say.

I do think a good director and writing team on a Horizon movie could flesh out Aloy a bit more and combine the games storybeats with some actual interestng writing and a good actor portraying her.

But I am definitely bored of Horizon games and think Guerilla should move on after they close the trilogy out.

such a bizarre title to this article, I know you're framing it in a PS way but they're the biggest score composers outside of Hans Zimmer

Is there a way to get updates and see the roadmap for the official Syrup emulator this team are working on?

I think it's awesome and would love to get updates

I think he's semi joking or at least saying it's silly to talk about, but at this point it is just completely not worth engaging with anyone who asks you about DEI.

It's just someone arguing in bad faith, looking for something to get mad at. It's best ignored.

It's so good that the product has succeeded and so they're adding features.

It's just a shame that shortsighted design meant they tried to save money on storage and bluetooth headphone compatability, something you cant patch in.

Id say quality over quantity but Metaphor has a good long story.

Like a Dragon is like a soap opera. It's hardly worthy of a nod for best story.

Attention seeker disputes other attention seekers attention seeking statement in order to seek more attention. More at 11.

I think the controls could do modernizing. If it's from the ground up remade, the load times should hopefully be fixed, they were so long in the original release

@TruestoryYep yeah I'm not sure why some people say that 2 is great and 3s is bad. They're both pretty cringy.

Even the first game, I remember at the time complaints from reviewers about how aggressively annoying claptrap is. Although I think the first game kind of has a consistent tone and it doesn't go too over the top

It's disengenious to say they won't rely on toilet humour as it implies they just hit the fart noise button one too many times in BL3.

The dialogue in BL3, imo, is borderline unlistenable. A cringe hotpot of stale, 5 year old meme references, Marvel-lite "he's behind me isn't he?, well that just happened" tosh and characters who just scream at you like a child on a sugar rush.

I legitimately turned the dialogue off in the game and just played through without it, which I think is the only game I've ever felt compelled to do that for? Plenty of games have bad writing but never to the point of just wanting to not hear any more of it.

If this guy worked on the first game, it's definitely a risk this game is just as bad. He mentions he hired a bunch of funny contractors to help, and that's potentially a good sign. But are they funny writers? Or what he considers to he funny writers? Because he obviously thought BL3 was a fantastic hilarious product.

@rusty82 oh man you're giving me flashbacks to my last playthrough

@wildcat_kickz on your point, I played the game and just thought it was kind of bland and unfun to play. The action set piece at the start was well done but once you're in the open world I found it not great to explore.

All the so called "social commentary" stuff was probably the most interesting stuff in there, at least it deviated from generic fantasy "we must stop this evil elf" stuff that ive seen done a hundred times