MattBoothDev

@Mio_Nakashima may be because they know it'll be unpopular

It's more than likely going to be inferior. It'll be the same price as the digital only console and will also be digital only, with the Blu-ray drive being overpriced but ultimately cost the same as the disc version that currently exists. Maybe the Blu-ray drive will playback 8k or something just to entice.

Hopefully we all still buy the Blu-ray drive and let it be known we want our consoles to playback physical media.

Physical for me. It was £10 cheaper 🤷‍♂️

I had this on early access on PC and haven't checked on it for a good while it definitely wasn't finished when I played.

However, I picked this up straight away on PS5 and it's glorious. It was the PS Plus version of the first game that got me into this franchise in the first place.

@Mikey856 admittedly I haven't played it, but one watched gameplay and seen the odd review and... Yeah it's pretty bad.

I feel sorry for the people losing their job who were just doing was instructed, though.

@Mikey856 to be fair, though, they should apologise for Gollum.

.... probably for the best. The Gollum game is embarrassingly bad.

Easily the best Assassin's Creed. Matt Ryan was exceedingly well cast in this role.

7/10

The voice acting isn't the great and many of the voices don't fit the characters.

A lot of the models look the same.

Water looks distractingly bad.

No HDR

Lackluster performance, not enough optimisation.

Side quests are pretty boring and unchallenging.

Yeah, performance mode for me.

The framerate is actually better then I first thought (measured on my TV using VRR) but there's obvious problems when moving the camera.

The lack of HDR is fairly confusing as well.

I'd expect a patch on the next week or two, given development and testing cycles and that the last patch was on launch day. Depends how long they run their sprints/cycles.

Well, I won't be playing Starfield and I've played other Baldurs Gate games, so, easy decision!

@Sil_Am which fills me with hope 😁

@Sil_Am Sony want you on digital, evidenced by the loss leading discount they've given on that SKU.

They want you on digital because they get a straight 30% cut of everything you buy. They don't get that with physical media, because we can trade physical games.

@HonestHick well, I live in the UK, where discs are £10 cheaper and the internet sucks.

I don't see how discs are dying when the disc console is steadily outselling the digital console.

I'm so glad the digital edition of the PS5 is doing so poorly. It is encouraging, meaning a disc version PS6 is pretty certain.

@saffeqwe i have the collectors edition for PC with the statue 😁

... Admittedly it was going for £10 massively reduced at the time, but still!

And my PC couldn't even play it when I got it home.

Sony bought Psygnosis before they even had released the PlayStation and before we even had Windows 95 😂 getting ridiculous now

@cragis0001 I mean, no?

Microsoft aren't reacting to what their competition is up to because neither Sony nor Nintendo have bought an entire publisher (Zenimax) and attempting to buy another (ActivisionBlizzard).

Neither Sony nor Nintendo are in a position to spend $69bn on acquisitions. Sony's operating revenue is $8bn. Sony's market cap is $80bn. Microsoft are trying to spend almost the same amount of cash that Sony is worth.

If you mean acquisitions of studios, it's worth considering that they do fall under the scrutiny of regulators and they're passed because a single studio is small scale in terms of affect on the market and industry.

So if Microsoft are reacting to the competition in terms of the competition buying studios and development teams, then the correct reaction would be a similar purchase of a studio, not an entire publisher that owns several studios.

That and Sony didn't start buying up things like Housemarques (a single studio) or Bluepoint (another single studio) or Bungie (again...) Until Microsoft started getting the cheque book out.

There's just no justification for this that's possible. The fact is that Microsoft is a juggernaught in this industry and with the Microsoft fortune behind it, it could spend Sony and Nintendo out of business. Hell, they've even said as much, as has come to light over these court proceedings.

This deal should be blocked, or, Xbox needs to split from Microsoft to prevent anti-trust and anti-consumer issues arising.

@HonestHick is ok, I was a contractor, so I was outside looking in 😁

Yeah they do want GamePass to be the Netflix of gaming, but I personally have zero interest in streaming games. It's a subpar experience and will never top having a console or PC locally. I have a friend who works at EA in Ireland who's been telling me that for a few years. They will try to push it as no different to streaming movies.

I personally want the focus on "cloud" gaming to fail super hard.

@HonestHick indeed, success is earned not bought.

That's the problem. Microsoft don't know how to run a studio, let alone a publisher.

They once owned Bungie, Bungie bought their freedom from Microsoft and as was revealed recently, Microsoft wanted to buy them again and wouldn't accept the level of freedom Bungie demanded.

I've worked with Microsoft as a contractor during their Mixer years and what they do really, really well is capitalism and marketing. They have no patience with studios and want things now, by this quarter or next, because there's always someone breathing down someone's neck about something.

They most certainly have done some good things for gaming. They had the 7th generation nailed down with the 360 and then blew all the good will and press with the Xbox One announcement.

Now I'm not saying Xbox have no right to exist or the they should go away, I'm saying neither Sony nor Microsoft should own a large part of the publishing space.

Microsoft own Zenimax and therefore Bethesda and iD, two juggernaut studios capable of putting out great games of a high quality. They're in a good position and there's plenty of third party games available. Sony don't own that many studios and the ones they do have they've owned for a good while (some around 25 years - Naughty Dog).

@HonestHick sorry but thats wishful thinking.

The era of Microsoft having no good games is still based on Microsoft not knowing what they're doing and being a terrible partner.

I read someone's analogy the other day that made sense.

Microsoft is that guy at the gym who didn't start until his late 30s and wants to skip all the hard work and experience and go straight to steroids.

They haven't earned their place in the gaming market (through a good brand that's trusted) and haven't had the experience of running a gaming platform well or running game studios properly.

I think cade in point that Phil Spencer is the kind of guy too just buy the studio rather then see the competition negotiate an exclusivity deal.

Microsoft aren't going anywhere, but their success isn't written in stone. They absolutely want to de-throne Sony. They don't want competition. They want Xbox to become Windows, ubiquitous in the gaming sphere.

But they don't deserve it and all they're doing to generating bad, bad press and publicity.

@4kgk2 or, one, or all, of these competition and regulatory bodies needs to step the hell up and do their job and either demand Microsoft be split up from Xbox or start punitive fines.

Just... Something to stop them abusing the market with their position and huge Windows wallet.

@cassiel any game that has virtual currency and paid cosmetics in it has no business charging upfront for the game. This should've been a free to play game, if they intend on monetising with microtransactions.

So, it gets worse and they're still not finished trying to push everyone onto a subscription service where no one owns any games?

@TeapotBuddha yep, it looks like a free to play game charging £35

@OmegaStriver I'd see no issue with that.

@tallythwack but you still get the win, don't you?

I don't see the need to "punish" people who quit a match.

I'll preface this with saying I don't play these kinds of games (Beat 'em up) online, so this doesn't necessarily apply to me.

But, if someone is getting stressed out with a match or game the best thing for them to do is take a break and stop playing. The only negative for them quitting should be a loss on their profile.

@MasterVGuides ... Actually, Sony and Microsoft have similar operating revenue, but Microsoft has much more liquidity, Sony has much more debt.

Probably would've been 60FPS as well.

@Darthmoogle I hear you. 100% not a fan of this stuff either.

@cragis0001 to be honest if Sony bought SquareEnix now I'd have less of an issue then if they'd bought them before Embracer bought a load of their IP. SE are a hell of a lot smaller now. But, regardless, you're dead wrong. I wouldn't need cheering. Neither console manufacturer should own a large part of the publishing space.

At the end of the day, it's consumers/gamers that suffer

Who's buying this stuff? Stop buying it. You don't need to buy this. It's not that important.

The point is, for me, that I'm not going to be buying an Xbox any time soon and with stuff like this, it makes me less likely to want to in the future.

I don't like being blackmailed into using an Xbox to play games that have been multiplatform for a while (at least since Oblivion and Fallout 3).

Great work, Phil. You had no good games, so you just took everyone else's rather than creating your own.

Phil Spencer is the kind of guy that tries to rent the public park and stop other kids playing on the playsets.

@Relygon I'll take 40FPS@120Hz..

I'm in the first exploration area after the demo/prologue and it's just... Yeah

@JuggaloRazzam i have a 2TB Sabrent Rocket and their heatsink installed in my PS5 and a 4TB USB 3 external, so I'm all sorted.

I've just found some PS4 games don't benefit that much, but others do. For instance, Tekken 7 it's painfully slow, but much better on the SSD!

Sniper Elite 5, I'm waiting for a performance patch for FF16

I'm sold already. I have a PS3 and MGS4 but it'll be much better in 4k@60FPS

@EVIL-C Sony has bought Studios not entire Publishers. Microsoft has bought studios over the years too.

The reason no one has batted an eyelid is because they're small changes and therefore small scale.

This is huge in scale because it's an entire publisher with a vast catalogue. The Zenimax acquisition raised a LOT of if eyebrows because it was larger in scale, just not as large as this one. A lot of people were against the Zenimax acquisition for the same reasons, most of which have come to fruition over the course of the years.

Try to compare apples to apples.

Absolute rubbish. They're second place after blowing their lead when they tried to kill pre-owned games last generation.

They have $69bn to spend on acquisitions. Sony do not. They're doing just fine without the deal, especially now the Zenimax acquisition is starting to come home with exclusives like Starfield.

Microsoft are second place through their own failings and neither of them should get to own a large part of the publishing sphere. At all. No consumer benefit to that, in fact the opposite.

@Aeula GoW 2018 and Ragnarok are absolutely stellar

Yes, played a bit last night. The performance mode is kinda broken. I'm hoping for a fix over the weekend as it's difficult to deal with.

@tallythwack ah, but I have heard of Yong Yea... From YouTube on his gaming commentary.

@tallythwack he's most famous as a YouTuber, at least given that I'm finding out he's a voice actor today.

I had no idea Yong Yea was a voice actor. I first found him during the build up to, and disaster that was, the Metal Gear Solid 5 launch with his interviews with the cast, past and present.

After FF7 Remake... No thanks

@JuggaloRazzam some PS4 games don't really take advantage of an SSD, though. Whether the disk is running at 130MB/s or 3,000MB/s, they're bottlenecked elsewhere. At best you get slightly faster load times.

@Jtheripper yeah, having bought DX:MD on PC years ago and played through multiple times at 60FPS it's really, really hard to play on 30. I did it, though. Even got the "Foxiest of the Hounds" trophy, which is notoriously buggy!

More interested in this than Spiderman or Alan Wake!

@Jtheripper Deus Ex has been a solid 30FPS for me on PS5 but it desperately needs a 60FPS patch.