Still waiting for Arachnophobia mode in Spiderman 2. Won't buy until they patch it in and let me just play the whole game as Peter and Miles without the scary spider suit.
@Ralizah Yeah, I think that's a little bit of why I seem to like it so much. Much as I love Persona and SMT, I've always had a soft spot for DDS/SH. Monster collecting can become a chore after soooo many games. Which reminds me I still only got 25% into SH2....I actually picked it up again the other day and forgot how fun it was, but I only picked it up to refresh myself because I need to delete it and probably armored core, and probably something else to fit the SSD hog that is Metaphor on my Ally.
@Porco To be fair, a ver long awaited fifth entry of a beloved franchise that hadn't seen a new entry since the PS2(!!)(unless you count the Vita remake of P4 - console port was after P5) was naturally going to have a much bigger fanfare than a brand new IP from the same devs after a glut of P5 and P3 goodness no matter what series it is. Combine that with some people definitely liking Persona specifically because of its super unique setting of high school slice of life that may not be as attracted to a "traditional" high fantasy RPG, I think the reception is where I'd expect it to be. It's going to draw a more "nerdcore" SMT/DDS/Standard JRPG audience that may not like Persona, and it's going to draw some Persona fans looking for a new thing from the same devs, but there's going to be a gap there. TBH, despite the Persona trappings added, like Ralizah and I were talking about the actual game is very much more oriented toward the SMT and DDS fanbase than the Persona fanbase. Which has always been much smaller (I.E. you'll see more overlap in terms of gameplay and theme appeal from the SMTV and SH2 fans than from the P5 fans that don't already like SMT and SH/DDS.
It's weird with all the nuianced sub-series that come from SMT, how different the games, and its fans, are from one another despite on the surface all seeming extremely similar with variations of press turn/once more/etc.
After all, Persona until P5 was branded as SMT, but there's surprisingly little overlap among fans. There's "Atlus" fans and "Persona" fans, and while most Atlus fans are also Persona fans, Persona definitely has it's own fandom much larger than the core Atlus fandom that likes all their games.
Working FOR it for persona fans: A lot of similar systems, some time management, a lot of familiar structure.
Working AGAINST it for Persona fans: It's a "traditional" high fantasy, much more serious tone, theme and art style instead of wacky/fun/funny Persona, Much less life sim even though it does have time management aspects,
I think the school setting is what sells its appeal. Not many games are light hearted comedy type games despite its serious tones, Persona rarely takes itself seriously, and I think the rarity of that in gaming is a big part of its appeal. Metaphor isn't nearly as grimdark as always-postapocalyptic hellscape SMT, and as noir, eve of apocalypse as DDS/SH, but it's still a "traditional" "serious" game I think more in line with SMT/DDS fandoms, which, sadly, have always been way smaller than Persona at least since PS2 (Don't tell Nocturne fans )
You can't replace Troika. They were a pool of some of the best of the best crpg designers from Black Isle, the founders were the 3 key people (minus Brian Fargo) behind Fallout. Troika went down the 3 minds behind at are all at MS. Cain and Boyarsky at Obsidian on Avowed and Outer Worlds 2, Anderson at ineXile on presumably Wasteland. Without their magic, I don't see how Vampire could be Vampire. And MS doesn't want to license IPs for good reason.
@Can-You-Believe-Sith I choose to believe it's The Cheese Room, and autocorrect just butchers it.
@HonestHick also sale prices.... Yep sign on the economy... Retailers starting to get it that prices NEED to get lower. Even if push square "luxury" "bUt InFlAtIoN" people don't.
@HonestHick Yeah I was afraid of that. I'm thinking 2k and that's just asinine. 1600 was too much but it's just not worth it past that. Not even for VR. I got the 4090 but if the prices are right 5080 will be 4090s price. It's really getting priced for a bizarre extreme market like the Titans we're but now for the new economy. Problem with the new economy is there's enough really rich Saudi princes and Russian oil tycoons the the global economy to justify pricing things like that.
I think "high end" is over unless you're looking for status symbols. especially with AMD leaving that market entirely because there's no profit in it. It's the realm of supercars now. It actually costs that much to make it but nobody should ever actually buy it.
Vr "needs"it still but if not pushing high end vr NOBODY needs that card. at all.
I'd be annoyed that I just bought 3 games on the Ubisoft store this week. But then I remembered I've bought twice as much on the Meta quest store so I guess it's a wash.
@Rhaoulos But isn't Abstergo, technically the one responsible for all the map markers?
@NeonPizza I agree, things went bad in the 90s. I'm not sure what the catalyst was. Probably the internet rising. Something about everything started to become obnoxiously sterile and homogenized around the late 90's and that's where we've been ever since. I think in a lot of ways that's around the time the "2 parent working family" started up, and everyone became obsessed with careers and nothing but careers, and "home" stopped existing, side anything stopped existing, and everything started to become shades of off-white. And we've roller coastered ever since, where the grind is life, life is the grind, and there's no culture to speak of outside the grind.
Yeah! I got the rig, and had it all set up in general, but haven't got it all set up for VR. Spent all night a few days ago setting up all the different VR engines and the Playnite interface (had it on my handheld but not the rig, and Playnite is a drug. You spend more time playing with Playnite than the games For people that say "I want themes, and folders, and custom backdrops" Playnite gives you more than you can dream of
I spent forever getting UEVR, and REFramework, and SteamVR, and VirtualDesktop and everything installed and partially configured, and downloaded like 2TB of games that are either VR games or that I want to run in UEVR, but never got as far as actually connecting the headset to the PC router (still on my main router for stand alone) and running things. And got side-tracked getting my audio recording interface running so I can play Rocksmith with real instruments wired. Freaking 4090 to play Rocksmith.....the fans don't even turn on on the card....
I wasn't going to go 4090. SWORE I'd never do it. But when I started looking at UEVR injection and all.....that's the route I wanted to go, and I'm considering an 8k Pimax set in the future so really a 5090 might not even cut it. And even 4090 chokes on things like Wukong and (LOL) Dragon's Dogma 2 VR (30fps alternate eye ftw!) But I haven't tested it yet.
There's a lot of setup to do, only because i"m trying to do a bunch of different things with different setups. Oh, and I subbed to Luke Ross, so I get all the Sony and Cyberpunk VR mods too! Got that set up, got the games installed, but haven't run it all together yet. Will I get a sim racing setup....TBD....?
@Porco What makes you think the Persona community isn't interested? Seems to borrow enough from Persona that I'd also be surprised if they weren't.
Though I also get a lot of persona fans love it because of it's very unique feel and theme and social sim mishmash, and might not be interested in a traditional high fantasy theme just because it has similar mechanics if it's the environment and sim aspect that draws them in. This game is definitely a lot more DDS/SMT/Devil Survivor-fan oriented in feel and tone, but with a lot of Persona gameplay systems.
@Ralizah SEGA has been publisher of the year since 1985.
@Flaming_Kaiser Back then that game was pushing some limits graphically and I was between upgrades with a weaker-end rig.....and I was on dialup! MMOs and dialup were an interesting feat
@Flaming_Kaiser I was thinking about that just yesterday in relation to another conversation with someone on PXB. I think a lot of people expect "Microsoft Gaming" will replace "Xbox" but I realized that isn't going to happen, brand name wise. The "Xbox" brand, and specifically the "X" logo, has, despite the poor console sales, become synonymous with "official" controllers and PC peripherals both from MS and from third parties with the "Guide" button ("X" logo button) being a staple within Windows, and on branded PC accessories, along with the 4-color buttons and D-pad design. "Xbox" may be a weak brand name, but it's a more recognizable gaming brand than just sticking a Windows flag MS logo on gaming stuff. Even if "Xbox" as a console doesn't have mindshare, it still has recognition on Windows and on peripherals, so I think they'll keep the brand name regardless. Plus it's recognizable for the Game Pass service.
I think they're kind of headed where you say though. I think they're moving more towards being a publisher and service provider, as well as peripheral manufacturer. I don't think they're going for "console ecosystem" anymore, and I don't think the original plan was ever to do so, but it morphed into that with the 360. It was originally meant to be PC-adjacent (bringing PC gaming into the living room), and I think it's kind of returning to that (the Asus Ally handheld PC was developed in conjunction with "Xbox" and features official button design and software support. I think we'll see more of that.) I do think they'll still make "consoles" but I think they're making them as a packaged component of their overall platform/publishing/services interface with PC, and not trying to do the Nintendo/Sony thing (and frankly they never should have.) I.E. Not trying to do the whole retail disc console ecosystem thing, but still making "Xbox boxes" you can play in their ecosystem with which will use at least a few PC stores and coexist with laptops and handheld PCs etc. (Phil had mentioned Epic, Twitch.io, and some other retro gaming store in the past.) Probably not Steam, but who knows.
The problem they have with Game Pass is a lot of its subscribers are on console, so they can't afford to drop consoles totally, even if it's a loss leader to retain GP subs.
I'm guessing that like with sports and racing games this is due to licensing expiring for all the licensed music in LBP/sackboy. I assumed it was perpetual and mostly Sony/BMG/Columbia records licensing but maybe still finite. .
@HonestHick I'm waiting for slavery to go mainstream again. It will. You know it will. We'll rebrand it so it's not called slavery but that's what it'll be. We're 3/4 there already. We're already at a point there's no reason to save money. Every penny you don't spend today will be worth half a penny tomorrow, if you have a bank account balance you're doing it wrong. I don't know when it crashes but I don't see how it doesn't crash. I also don't see a way to fix it. Prices need to crash hard but that'll only happen in recession or at this point depression which may be worse. Wages are never going to magically jump up to match. And even if they do it'll be more that weve seen. The people making 150k will make 300k, the people making 40k will make 48k and be comparatively worse than where we are.. I don't see a way out short of depression, then war, as always. Yet they won't let that happen and will keep printing money to keep it going continuously making it worse. Maybe the plebeians need to be wholesale purged? A new Holocaust where the well born can take their world back from the unwashed inferiors once and for all? I don't see any good ending, just an array of bad ones.
History days wars are the only solution. Big ones. Yet even China hesitates on that front now. Someone will jump eventually.
And then yeah, Sony . All the "but inflation " "but everything is more expensive"...
2015 $2500/mo. -1k housing -800 food and utility -400 PS4 pro - 60 game, and a few pennies left for savings.
2024 $3000/mo -1.4k housing -1300 food and utility - 700 PS5 pro - 70 game.........................
.....
Can consumers do a wall Street math thing and make that leave an extra thousand? Or a Fed thing and just xerox some $100s?
@Ralizah At least with Ubisoft's launcher, their own games are often cheaper from their own store than from any reseller after launch window, so I don't even mind using their launcher if they're going to slash the price of if I just go all in on it. When even Ubisoft has a better cluepon than Sony, something's very wrong.
"Console is bigger than ever"
No, console is stagnant, about where it was in the 80's still. It lost all the casuals to phones, and what it lost in that market it picked up only by opening to new markets replacing what they lost in original markets. If Xbox is merging with PC, Sony is....copying PC until they hit a brick wall eventually? I don't see their platforms not getting replaced by general purpose computing. Nintendo has more life if they have wacky hardware, but I even see them eventually merging into iOS. Furukawa admitted years ago that they basically think of contingencies for a future without hardware. Not that they plan to do that soon, but there aware enough of the tenuous position dedicated hardware could slip into.
@Bez87 I think most of the console centric games launch at the same price as console, but then quickly start getting sales much faster than on console. Most of the PC centric games are coming in at $50 or $60. (but then quickly go on sale, or are on sale for preorders, like Metaphor is $70, but on sale for $61 at 2 official sellers for preorder...and that's Atlus, infamous for high pricing and double dipping.)
But, yeah, as you said, nobody actually PAYS that full console price on PC. A handful, but not many, it's crazy pricing and you know it'll drop fast. I think the long tail sales will be ok once the sales roll in. Not for this game though. Nobody cares about it even on console.
The PS4 PC releases do well even on Deck and the handheld PCs, so it's definitely not just the high end. The newer games maybe, though. I had a similar arc to you, high end PC, then decided to drop it for console. But soon realize that between PS and XB and all the mid gens and subs and everything else, I was spending more than just keeping an up to date PC!
@HonestHick Take a glass half full, pour it out into the other glass until it overflows. Still half full! Just have to adjust to the new level of damp surfaces meaning half and you're all set!
I'll never get "used" to thew new economy. In my world, most people are middle, there's some wealthy that live somewhat better than average but still in the same world, a tiny number of "rich and famous" and a small amount of poor. This new echo of the late Roman empire of patricians and plebeians, where all economic activity exists for the top third, and the top third alone, I'll never adapt to, never accept. Thousands of years of wars to end that system, all for nothing, we went right back to it.
This was my most hyped game from the old Sony e3 days. But I ended up disappointed. Tried to get through it twice and never did. Just bought it again in PC today with the flash sale. For $12 why not try again?
As a ps and pc player I can say this isn't a reflection of Sony on pc, it's a reflection that nobody cares about this game. If I didn't read push, I wouldnt have known it existed at all. Its launch in steam was even more muted. PC gamers aren't fomo hounds, learn to wait for sales, actually read reviews before buying and don't auto buy every game from a particular publisher, while this was up against bigger releases and bigger sales. PC games also have longer tail sales, like Nintendo, than the "box office weekend" sales model Sony seems to embrace on their consoles.
@HarmanSmith Yeah, I wasn't expecting this to be such a huge hit with me. I knew I'd like it, it's Atlus, but I got so hooked on the demo I kind of want to play it before SMTV and P3R now.... IDK why, but it just has that right mix of magic like SMTIV and P5 did that keeps me playing. It doesn't have the character charm of a Persona game, but somehow there's a kinetic flow to progressing through that makes it, from the demo, really addicting.
Oh boy, I still have to get through P3R, P5 Strikers, Soul Hackers 2, SMTV, all of which are barely started, but this is the one and only game I'm almost tempted to pay (near) full price for. The demo hooked me way more than I thought it would, and the glowing reviews make it so much more enticing. With the install size of this my Ally is loaded with nothing but an array of Atlus games at this point, lol.
@Flaming_Kaiser Yeah, I'm really not entirely sure what their plan is. I'm not sure they know what their plan is either. I bailed from the console ecosystem in my shift to PC precisely because I have no idea what their long term strategy is and neither do they.
And yet, I can't help but admit they do have a good console ecosystem. They just can't get their marketing act together. Or their strategy. Or just being consistent. I know they'll give the handheld a go, and maybe another console, which may or may not be a boxed PC.
To be fair though, the talk about $70 billion is somewhat sideways. "Xbox" didn't spend $70 billion to buy Activision. Microsoft Corp. spent $70 billion to buy King so they can finally get their foothold in mobile they've been dreaming of to go toe to toe with Apple and Google (and is half of what the cloud push was all about.) Getting Activision was just free swag that came with the purchase. And in the process they basically traded what was Xbox and merged it through Activision and that's how we have the directionless mess we have now. It was sort of Activision buying Xbox, so that MSFT could get King.
If I had to guess I think MS's plan for "Xbox" (Microsoft Gaming?) is generally being a multiplat publisher that also has its own distribution channel (not unlike Ubi and EA but a bigger platform) and to continue having a "console" hardware, which is to say, a prepackaged easy to use box for an ok price to play Windows games on. Whether that's a "true console" or a flavor of Surface that's tuned for gaming with an Xbox overlay, hard to say, but honestly that's not a bad thing if they do it. A big publisher, who's also the PC platform who also has a boxed hardware device to interact with their services and games. That's what Xbox (original) was meant to be. It was literally just a PC inside (Pentium III, custom Nvidia GPU, good old Rambus...) It was launched to secure PC games, Windows gaming, and DirectX developer dominance as consoles were starting to erode the market they had that was a big seller of Windows licenses. It was never meant to become a bespoke console, so the 360 was kind of a weird move for them, despite being their lone success. Even Sony was planning to publish on it when it first launched until Kutaragi threw a console warrior fit and stopped it. Other than him, even the other Sony brass wanted to be multiplat up until PS3. Sony was a PC publisher before they launched PS after all, so it seemed natural to them (and has kind of returned to that post-Kutaragi, lol)
@HonestHick Yeah the AI hype is extreme but where it is right now. I use it occasionally. But it's mostly just another search engine more than anything that can handle more nuance in searches. Half the time the answers are bad or wrong or clearly pulled from reddit. Seems more useful for graphics than anything else.
There's been a few studies, one showing that basically it brings the most incompetent to be equal to the competent but slows down anyone that already knows what they're doing. thus it's main benefit is the ability to replace anyone skilled with kids, interns, and generally entry level forever and get the same results. Endless pay cuts for all. Minimum wage forever!
The other one I've seen is I thinkn from open ai about how much it's used for what. #1 by far was homework. #2 was basically sex chat. Actual business use was pretty down the line. So basically every investor is throwing endless money at a thing that makes no money, costs fortunes to run and is mostly used by school children so they don't need to think and as a sexbot....... Can we PLEASE just nuke Wall Street? Just a small crater, I'm not asking for a lot.
@HonestHick Heck half the problen with investors is New Tulip Mania. Nobody wants to invest in anything when they can invest in AI companies and 10 mil becomes 100 mil becomes 3bil genuine 2 tril in 5 weeks. (All for companies that lose more money than Xbox and make nothing. )
@HonestHick I'm still not convinced they're doing day and date or 100% pc releases. As a pc customer, I'd like them do, but I'm not sure they intend to. They seem happy using them as bait for selling consoles. But it's still third party that really sells consoles.
I'm not sure I see them going switch any more than Xbox. Big market but too different a dev process and too dangerous a competitor. I think I lot of the classic ps crowd would be happy with only a Nintendo these days.
@HonestHick It's easy to make a weak processor seem fast when you have total control of what's run on it and when you force everyone to stop running what they want and run what you tell them too instead.... if apple ruled pc gaming, Pc games would have generations and $115 remasters.
I think the main problem is the whole idea of exclusives doesn't work anymore. Yeah it'll force some people to buy the console that wouldn't have but if it doesn't get them to buy lots of other games it doesn't have a point, mainly because only 10% install base even buys the exclusives. It just not why people buy consoles anymore. I think if 50% install base bought them like Nintendo things would be different, but that ship sailed.
@HonestHick lol Sony + Apple partnership sounds like the perfectly ideal soul mate match made in hell š
But yeah I could see that. So long as it's a plus and not a negative to PC and they don't start Apple exclusive nonsense that's interesting. and frankly more indication that even Sony knows consoles are on a limited future.
@HonestHick Well, I think Indiana Jones is their big holiday game, and it has much broader appeal as a family title than e day so they had their lineup right. But, then.... They decided to put it on PS and make it better on the pro so.... They dgaf. To be fair though Xbox point is they always have had a pro and it's much better and more expensive than PS5 pro, so I don't think they're worried about that. If you into the Xbox ecosystem and want ultra pro performance, they've got Windows keys for $100 for you, byod. And really that's not a bad viewpoint. But I'm still not sure they should be sharing the pot with the company the refuses to share its pot.
Then again, originally Sony didn't view Xbox as a competitor and intended to publish on Xbox. It was Kutaragi that threw a fit and stopped that. So even 20 years ago, Sonys own thinking wasn't so different from Microsofts now. And to be fair, kutaragi nearly destroyed PlayStation after that.
@Art_Vandelay Right, for PS5 games that struggle to hit targets. But this statement is about PS4 games. What PS4 games failed to hit targets on a PS5. And if PS5 is poor though that it can't even run PS4 games to spec, why does it exist?
@HonestHick Deep down inside, everybody is Patcher.
@AgentGuapo "$700 is nothing compared to how much a high end PC graphics card costs. All things in perspective."'
If comparing JUST the GPU (not a whole build), that's only somewhat true. Those super expensive cards are almost certain to be much better than even PS6. The $500 cards are a little better than what's in PS5 Pro. Just for GPU of course not the rest of a build.
@OldGamer999 Yeah, and with modern "optimization" even the very best PC money currently can't buy isn't doing 4k60 for a number of modern games. Weirdly even Metaphor, which is not a graphics feast by even the farthest stretch. Modern games are not built to run on hardware that currently exists at any price point. You can't even buy your way to the performance desired. I think the "4k60" dream is dead for a good while, even on PC, if the graphics details, RT, particles are pushed as they keep doing. Turn that stuff off and you get 4k60. Keep it on, not so much.
Another reason I like VR. Everything needs to be kept minimum to max res and fps because in VR it's just a default fact that that matters more than anything else so they stop pushing all the fx and focus on raw basics.
I actually would love to see Ubisoft go private, but only if the Guillemot brothers and NOT Tencent have majority control.
People don't like Guillemot, but the man is a developer from back in the day, and Ubisoft's games were very good until they went public. Trying to please investors and fend off hostile takeovers is when they got bad and overextended. Being public is what broke them, and being private might make them focus on quality games again. But if Tencent has control.....nope.
That's a lot of tracks, that'll be on the pricier side of the packs for sure. Not sure I need that much Britney in my life. Might just pick up Toxic and a few other tracks.
@Balosi @zupertramp Tempo-Katana....OMG I tried that on Expert and I look like a cat going after a laser. I don't think that's humanly possible and that's not even Expert+!
The one big complaint I have with beat saber though is I think the difficulty ratings are extremely inconsistent. Hard to Expert on Tempo-Katana is like 1/3 the blocks. Some "Expert" songs I can get A's on fairly easily. Meanwhile some Hard songs seem impossible. I do think there's a definite problem with the difficulty ratings. It shouldn't be possible to have Expert tracks be easier than other Hard tracks.
@Medic_alert Yeah, I forget the interviews and all that talked about that, but that's why we stopped seeing FPS Boost titles. They ran out of the ones they could get working easily, they had some that worked but had some game breaking bug somewhere in the game that they couldn't get past so they had to cancel them (a few released and then they pulled them due to finding a bug it caused.) And then a lot of publishers started to decline allowing their game to be modded, presumably because they realized instead of MS giving free 60fps patches, they could charge $70 for a "remaster" instead.
Obviously on PC there's always community mods that try to get games to 60fps, but even there it's kind of rare, because a lot of games that are locked at 30fps have actual game logic, sound, etc tied to the 30fps loop and too much of the game breaks if you try to speed it up. Or then you have modern cases like FFXVI that has an official 60 mode, but even on PC, even on 4090's something inside is so tied to 30fps that it still just doesn't work well. The game dives into the 40fps's even on 4090 without dynamic res and framegen. People can get to to stable 60 static res without frame gen if they turn off the RT features. On a freaking 4090.... A lot of times a 30fps game is simply internally 30fps and nothing really can change it without redoing a lot of work. I'm sure that's the issue with everyone screaming for Bloodborne. It probably has internal systems and all timed against the rendering, and forcing it starts breaking the game. I'm betting a Bluepoint remake of that will be a PS6 launch title.
But yeah, I can't figure out what they're talking about here, because what they describe is what PS5 already does. Unless they mean games the PS5 still can't hit stable targets. Or maybe what they mean is dynamic RES (not fps) will stay at max res. Something like that makes sense. But the hardware can't magically make a locked game unlocked. Neither on console nor PC does throwing a 5090 at it make it run faster if it's internally limited. All you can do is max its max.
Their messaging is becoming Xbox-like. Maybe they share their staff lol. I mean, yeah, you know my opinion that a 45% GPU boost and an AI upscaler is kind of sad for the money. BUT at least you'd think they'd market that aspect of it which is what it really does. Instead for some reason they won't talk much about that and keep talking about how it's a great PS4 in ways that don't make sense. It's like they've given up on anyone caring about PS5 games and just want to sell improved PS4s since everyone loves that console lol. And then they're trying to market it based on "reduces PSVR2 motion sickness". Kind of a weird angle. They sold so few PSVR2's, and they're not marketing an improved VR experience, just...reduces motion sickness, where anyone with VR motion sickness probably didn't keep their PSVR2 anyway.
It's always been that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, and I suspect here this is a case where, Jim commissioned the product, Cerny designed the product Jim commissioned, and Japan is scratching their heads figuring out wtf it's for.
@thefourfoldroot1 Yeah, I agree. I fundamentally disagree with the whole notion of "pro models" and "mid-gen upgrades." PS4 Pro was fine, it was mostly just "PS4 for 4k displays." PCs with an upgrade treadmill available is fine, and in part is fine because you can scale your graphics accordingly to your hardware anyway, but on console the entire point of the console is that the games are supposed to be scaled to run right on it to begin with, and this, as you say, just gives devs an excuse to not do that. Although TBH, if the state of how games have been for the first half already is anything to go by, I suspect half the games were going to run like garbage on P5 whether pro existed or not.
It's a weird gen. The hardware was just too underpowered because it launched too early, and while PC experienced this paradigm shift to using AI scaling and framegen, and games are designed with that in mind, the consoles for some reason didn't bother taking that seriously in their 2019 designs, and it feels like all current games are just made with PC/next gen in mind, and as long as it putters along on current consoles for a few years, good enough....they can sell the remaster in 3 years at $80. In comes PS5 Pro to add the key missing feature, for a premium, devs will love that PS5 joined their current development strategy.....and it'll apply to like 10-15% of the console base. It's a mess, really.
@Flaming_Kaiser Yeah, but that was Square under Masuda. And remember Xbox "doesn't have a big marketing budget like Sony" lol. But to be fair to it all, I think MS does allocate generally low budget to Xbox itself, and the ABK merger wasn't Xbox, it was MS corporate (It was Amy Hood, CFO, and Witch Queen of Ice, that approached ABK, not anyone at Xbox), really because they wanted King, and they were more or less using it to disband the Xbox that was.
@thefourfoldroot1 "Which is a bit sad as far as Iām concerned, as devs focus will start shifting from coding just for the base model."
If the Pro is similar levels of adoption as PS4 Pro was, they won't. Getting a "pro mode" means just adding a mode with higher target resolution or fps targeted. A lot of devs will just set the slider and build to meet the requirement if it doesn't seem like a big portion of their market. SOME devs will release terribly performing games and say "well it works well on Pro" though. And looking at MH Wilds' PC specs being absurd, I'm betting that's a big one that will do that. 4060 to do 1080p@60 with DLSS+Frame Gen? Yikes. REEngine sucks.
@HonestHick LOL, yep, and who can forget Jimbo's "why would anybody want to play this" (old Ridge Racer), and here they are with their newest console and can't stop talking about PS4.
@Medic_alert Fair enough. But, yeah, a game that's already uncapped should already be able to do this on PS5, and a game that is capped, can't just magically do this on fast hardware, not even on PC, the game needs to be modded, which is more or less what MS was doing before publishers started refusing. If it had fuzzy upscaling before it will probably scale sharper if it's using PSSR.
@Yousef- Square is a bad example because they had some weird strategy of excluding games and shaking down platforms under the old CEO. Meanwhile octopath1 was on Xbox and not ps for ages, and ps got the weird incomplete dq11 while switch got the real version and then Xbox and ps got that one together.
I think under the new CEO they'll have platform party from now on. I think they were trying to shake ms down for game pass money and Ms wasn't always buying.
@LavenderShroud It's still an uphill battle. The platform will always be a place people don't play a particular genre until they cultivate a market for it. They've been working on getting Japanese devs to support them but it's been slow going. If the games don't exist on the platform, a market for those games will never exist. Catch 22. Sony and Nintendo didn't have to work to get it because it's where they started, but Nintendo has often struggled to get Western devs supporting them until switch so it's the same kind of issue.
Has to start somewhere. Only once all the games are there can they try to court fans of those games.
One big thing that's helping finally get all these jrpgs on Xbox it that before, Japan didn't touch PC at all. It was console only. Suddenly PC is big in Japan and every game is on it. That's where PC ports to Xbox make it reasonable for devs to participate where they wouldn't have before.
It's a catch 22 for Xbox. They'll never get jrpg fans if they don't get jrpgs. But them getting jrpg marketing means it doesn't reach as many people.
Fwiw Microsoft sent an email blast highlighting the game to customers, which means Xbox PC app, console, and gp subscribers got the direct marketing on it which is a lot of what Nintendo does too. It's not flashy marketing like Sony but it's effective.
Still, Xbox marketing just flat sucks in general which is a huge part of their problem.
PS4 Pro Plus Premium. The best PlayStation 4 (TM) console yet!
I find out interesting that the main thing they keep promoting about the pro is what a great PS4 it is. Plus rebirth.
"We believe in generations. Specifically the 6th and 8th generations."
Yeah any psvr2 games that were held back by performance issues will get a bump, and vr devs are usually responsive with updates.
@Enuo By "fresh pine" you mean "heated plastic outgas" right?
@Medic_alert No, he specifically said games that have "variable fps" (uncapped). So it does what PS5 already does only even more power if any games still weren't hitting 60 (or 90 In VR) . Xbox game boost was about patching games that were capped to double their fps. This isn't that. And publishers stopped approving those so they could sell it as a $70 remaster instead.
@zupertramp Yeah, I just realized I've done some Expert ones via the campaign and didn't know it. I think I have 3 or 4 levels left at the top of the campaign ladder. So I did a lot of it. Oh, I know the one you're talking about with moving just the wrists. It was tense but I had no problem with that one, I think I had only half the max motion on try one. The ones I HATED and avoided, were the ones where you had to move your arms a lot. I guess I tend to use minimal motions by default and all that flailing around was not fun at all.
I kind of hate the ones you're supposed to miss a certain amount of blocks and badly slice a certain amount. It becomes too much about watching the health bar, and not enough about playing beat saber.
For the regular ones, I hate the ones I do perfect the whole way through, and then the finale at the last 30 seconds throws a million blocks in a new pattern at you and you end up missing a bunch and losing at the very end....that's the most frustrating of all!
@StrickenBiged Fair enough then, to a point. The risk of heavy intervention should apply to public companies only. However, Epic is a different kind of case, and is kind of a backdoor around even the existing rules. It's more of a public-private setup. One person owns a little over half, but the rest is owned by other public corporations. And interestingly, all foreign interest.I think a line would have to be drawn around what constitutes public, and when very nearly half is owned by public corporations, it's hard to say it's not a public company.
Not that in Sweeney's case it would matter if he were the sole owner, the guy's always been a giant stick.
@UnlimitedSevens Funny you'd compare it to the Pope, as I think that used to be part of it. Judges were revered as above the law and in traditional American, indeed informed by religious values (allegedly), and able to put the final word on the corruptible elected officials without fear of retribution. Maybe it's the robes? Or just idealism. People seemed to believe they were above corruption because to be fair the role was attempted to be designed as above corruption at inception, without somehow noticing that if they're appointed by politicians....there's a reason?
Yeah, the biggest problem in the system is that it was designed around the free market that existed in the 18th century. BUSINESS meant Samuel the butcher, Edward the blacksmith, and the bankers (always the bankers.) Business meant one or a few people trading goods and services for coin. And the laws were based on that. With everything decentralized and infinitely redundant. It was not based on central conglomerates of which there's 2 for the entire planet and they have more money than the government itself. None of the rules are equipped to handle that. Though, the be fair, Jefferson warned about the central bankers even in freaking EIGHTEENTH CENTURY! And here we are.
Though it also goes back to the loss of ethics in modern society, even businesses, for the most part, used to be guided by people that had a sense of ethics and sense of right. As society, and the people lost the sense of ethics, and really "will Satan torture my immortal soul for all eternity if I do this" vs "will I net more cash if I do this and will I be subject to prison time?" took hold, this was inevitable. Rule of law was designed around fear of divine punishment (right down to swearing on bibles in court, which used to make people afraid to lie, and now does not), and without fear of divine punishment it nets a society of children looking to see what they can get away with. If you're not cheating, you're losing.
IDK that just banning the corporate donations solves anything. Just like everything else you describe, the corporations would just route the money different, and of course soft funds that can't be banned. You had the infamous 2008 election where Eric Schmidt was INSIDE a campaign headquarters partying while sharing Google data with their campaign. Even without a dollar spent, Google's head was directly a part of a campaign and leveraging the entire datamined information bank of their corporation to benefit a single party's candidate. And that wouldn't ban that. Unfortunately I think "rule of law" isn't enough to fix it alone. Restoring societal ethics is necessary. But how is that accomplished. It took 10,000 years to build religion to successfully do that. And it still fell apart in a decade or two. Even a social revolution is usually just backed and sparked by the 2nd tier nobles that want to become first tier.
Comments 6,970
Re: Metaphor: ReFantazio Guide: Character Progression, Side Content, and Collectibles
Nice guide. One thing it needs is a stat distribution guide. Other than the smt standard "dump everything in MA/ST" glass cannon classic š
Re: Dragon Age Series Ditches Those Disgusting Spiders in The Veilguard
Still waiting for Arachnophobia mode in Spiderman 2. Won't buy until they patch it in and let me just play the whole game as Peter and Miles without the scary spider suit.
Re: Metaphor: ReFantazio (PS5) - Brilliant, Memorable RPG Is One of Atlus' Finest Works
@Ralizah Yeah, I think that's a little bit of why I seem to like it so much. Much as I love Persona and SMT, I've always had a soft spot for DDS/SH. Monster collecting can become a chore after soooo many games. Which reminds me I still only got 25% into SH2....I actually picked it up again the other day and forgot how fun it was, but I only picked it up to refresh myself because I need to delete it and probably armored core, and probably something else to fit the SSD hog that is Metaphor on my Ally.
@Porco To be fair, a ver long awaited fifth entry of a beloved franchise that hadn't seen a new entry since the PS2(!!)(unless you count the Vita remake of P4 - console port was after P5) was naturally going to have a much bigger fanfare than a brand new IP from the same devs after a glut of P5 and P3 goodness no matter what series it is. Combine that with some people definitely liking Persona specifically because of its super unique setting of high school slice of life that may not be as attracted to a "traditional" high fantasy RPG, I think the reception is where I'd expect it to be. It's going to draw a more "nerdcore" SMT/DDS/Standard JRPG audience that may not like Persona, and it's going to draw some Persona fans looking for a new thing from the same devs, but there's going to be a gap there. TBH, despite the Persona trappings added, like Ralizah and I were talking about the actual game is very much more oriented toward the SMT and DDS fanbase than the Persona fanbase. Which has always been much smaller (I.E. you'll see more overlap in terms of gameplay and theme appeal from the SMTV and SH2 fans than from the P5 fans that don't already like SMT and SH/DDS.
It's weird with all the nuianced sub-series that come from SMT, how different the games, and its fans, are from one another despite on the surface all seeming extremely similar with variations of press turn/once more/etc.
After all, Persona until P5 was branded as SMT, but there's surprisingly little overlap among fans. There's "Atlus" fans and "Persona" fans, and while most Atlus fans are also Persona fans, Persona definitely has it's own fandom much larger than the core Atlus fandom that likes all their games.
Working FOR it for persona fans: A lot of similar systems, some time management, a lot of familiar structure.
Working AGAINST it for Persona fans: It's a "traditional" high fantasy, much more serious tone, theme and art style instead of wacky/fun/funny Persona, Much less life sim even though it does have time management aspects,
I think the school setting is what sells its appeal. Not many games are light hearted comedy type games despite its serious tones, Persona rarely takes itself seriously, and I think the rarity of that in gaming is a big part of its appeal. Metaphor isn't nearly as grimdark as always-postapocalyptic hellscape SMT, and as noir, eve of apocalypse as DDS/SH, but it's still a "traditional" "serious" game I think more in line with SMT/DDS fandoms, which, sadly, have always been way smaller than Persona at least since PS2 (Don't tell Nocturne fans )
Re: Random: Hideo Kojima's Chronic Back Pain Symptom of Carrying Video Game Industry, Fans Say
@Northern_munkey @QiaraIris @Bigmanfan You are not alone.
I'm glad to finally see a thread about him where the majority of comments also don't get the cult following.
Re: Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 Seemingly Afflicted By World of Darkness Curse
You can't replace Troika. They were a pool of some of the best of the best crpg designers from Black Isle, the founders were the 3 key people (minus Brian Fargo) behind Fallout. Troika went down the 3 minds behind at are all at MS. Cain and Boyarsky at Obsidian on Avowed and Outer Worlds 2, Anderson at ineXile on presumably Wasteland. Without their magic, I don't see how Vampire could be Vampire. And MS doesn't want to license IPs for good reason.
@Can-You-Believe-Sith I choose to believe it's The Cheese Room, and autocorrect just butchers it.
Re: PS5 Pro Will Reportedly Boost PS4 Games, and Reduce PSVR2 Motion Sickness
@HonestHick also sale prices.... Yep sign on the economy... Retailers starting to get it that prices NEED to get lower. Even if push square "luxury" "bUt InFlAtIoN" people don't.
Re: PS5 Pro Will Reportedly Boost PS4 Games, and Reduce PSVR2 Motion Sickness
@HonestHick Yeah I was afraid of that. I'm thinking 2k and that's just asinine. 1600 was too much but it's just not worth it past that. Not even for VR. I got the 4090 but if the prices are right 5080 will be 4090s price. It's really getting priced for a bizarre extreme market like the Titans we're but now for the new economy. Problem with the new economy is there's enough really rich Saudi princes and Russian oil tycoons the the global economy to justify pricing things like that.
I think "high end" is over unless you're looking for status symbols. especially with AMD leaving that market entirely because there's no profit in it. It's the realm of supercars now. It actually costs that much to make it but nobody should ever actually buy it.
Vr "needs"it still but if not pushing high end vr NOBODY needs that card. at all.
Re: Lawsuit Alleges Ubisoft Illegally Shared Users' Data with Meta
I'd be annoyed that I just bought 3 games on the Ubisoft store this week. But then I remembered I've bought twice as much on the Meta quest store so I guess it's a wash.
@Rhaoulos But isn't Abstergo, technically the one responsible for all the map markers?
Re: PS5 Pro Will Reportedly Boost PS4 Games, and Reduce PSVR2 Motion Sickness
@HonestHick 4k120.... But only if you turn SSR and AO off, and enable dynamic res and frame gen. Game will work ok on 6090 Super though I'm sure
Yeah that$15k will buy you a rig and a box of oatmeal today, but in 4 years you'll only get a CPU and a 3oz smaller box of oatmeal.
Re: PS5 Fans Believe Halo Could Make Its PlayStation Debut
@SleeplessKnight Lol, close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades š
Re: Scalpers Want $10k to Try to Buy You a 30th Anniversary PS5 Pro
@NeonPizza I agree, things went bad in the 90s. I'm not sure what the catalyst was. Probably the internet rising. Something about everything started to become obnoxiously sterile and homogenized around the late 90's and that's where we've been ever since. I think in a lot of ways that's around the time the "2 parent working family" started up, and everyone became obsessed with careers and nothing but careers, and "home" stopped existing, side anything stopped existing, and everything started to become shades of off-white. And we've roller coastered ever since, where the grind is life, life is the grind, and there's no culture to speak of outside the grind.
Yeah! I got the rig, and had it all set up in general, but haven't got it all set up for VR. Spent all night a few days ago setting up all the different VR engines and the Playnite interface (had it on my handheld but not the rig, and Playnite is a drug. You spend more time playing with Playnite than the games For people that say "I want themes, and folders, and custom backdrops" Playnite gives you more than you can dream of
I spent forever getting UEVR, and REFramework, and SteamVR, and VirtualDesktop and everything installed and partially configured, and downloaded like 2TB of games that are either VR games or that I want to run in UEVR, but never got as far as actually connecting the headset to the PC router (still on my main router for stand alone) and running things. And got side-tracked getting my audio recording interface running so I can play Rocksmith with real instruments wired. Freaking 4090 to play Rocksmith.....the fans don't even turn on on the card....
I wasn't going to go 4090. SWORE I'd never do it. But when I started looking at UEVR injection and all.....that's the route I wanted to go, and I'm considering an 8k Pimax set in the future so really a 5090 might not even cut it. And even 4090 chokes on things like Wukong and (LOL) Dragon's Dogma 2 VR (30fps alternate eye ftw!) But I haven't tested it yet.
There's a lot of setup to do, only because i"m trying to do a bunch of different things with different setups. Oh, and I subbed to Luke Ross, so I get all the Sony and Cyberpunk VR mods too! Got that set up, got the games installed, but haven't run it all together yet. Will I get a sim racing setup....TBD....?
Re: PS5 Fans Believe Halo Could Make Its PlayStation Debut
@SleeplessKnight But the poll has an Xbox option!
Re: Metaphor: ReFantazio (PS5) - Brilliant, Memorable RPG Is One of Atlus' Finest Works
@Porco What makes you think the Persona community isn't interested? Seems to borrow enough from Persona that I'd also be surprised if they weren't.
Though I also get a lot of persona fans love it because of it's very unique feel and theme and social sim mishmash, and might not be interested in a traditional high fantasy theme just because it has similar mechanics if it's the environment and sim aspect that draws them in. This game is definitely a lot more DDS/SMT/Devil Survivor-fan oriented in feel and tone, but with a lot of Persona gameplay systems.
@Ralizah SEGA has been publisher of the year since 1985.
Re: Sony's Live Service Push 'No Joke', A Lot of People Working on Horizon Online
@Flaming_Kaiser Back then that game was pushing some limits graphically and I was between upgrades with a weaker-end rig.....and I was on dialup! MMOs and dialup were an interesting feat
Re: Atlus Fans Don't Think Xbox's Marketing Is Doing Metaphor: ReFantazio Justice
@Flaming_Kaiser I was thinking about that just yesterday in relation to another conversation with someone on PXB. I think a lot of people expect "Microsoft Gaming" will replace "Xbox" but I realized that isn't going to happen, brand name wise. The "Xbox" brand, and specifically the "X" logo, has, despite the poor console sales, become synonymous with "official" controllers and PC peripherals both from MS and from third parties with the "Guide" button ("X" logo button) being a staple within Windows, and on branded PC accessories, along with the 4-color buttons and D-pad design. "Xbox" may be a weak brand name, but it's a more recognizable gaming brand than just sticking a Windows flag MS logo on gaming stuff. Even if "Xbox" as a console doesn't have mindshare, it still has recognition on Windows and on peripherals, so I think they'll keep the brand name regardless. Plus it's recognizable for the Game Pass service.
I think they're kind of headed where you say though. I think they're moving more towards being a publisher and service provider, as well as peripheral manufacturer. I don't think they're going for "console ecosystem" anymore, and I don't think the original plan was ever to do so, but it morphed into that with the 360. It was originally meant to be PC-adjacent (bringing PC gaming into the living room), and I think it's kind of returning to that (the Asus Ally handheld PC was developed in conjunction with "Xbox" and features official button design and software support. I think we'll see more of that.) I do think they'll still make "consoles" but I think they're making them as a packaged component of their overall platform/publishing/services interface with PC, and not trying to do the Nintendo/Sony thing (and frankly they never should have.) I.E. Not trying to do the whole retail disc console ecosystem thing, but still making "Xbox boxes" you can play in their ecosystem with which will use at least a few PC stores and coexist with laptops and handheld PCs etc. (Phil had mentioned Epic, Twitch.io, and some other retro gaming store in the past.) Probably not Steam, but who knows.
The problem they have with Game Pass is a lot of its subscribers are on console, so they can't afford to drop consoles totally, even if it's a loss leader to retain GP subs.
Re: LittleBigPlanet 3 Will Be Taken Off PS Store on 31st October
I'm guessing that like with sports and racing games this is due to licensing expiring for all the licensed music in LBP/sackboy. I assumed it was perpetual and mostly Sony/BMG/Columbia records licensing but maybe still finite. .
Re: PS5 Pro Will Reportedly Boost PS4 Games, and Reduce PSVR2 Motion Sickness
@HonestHick I'm waiting for slavery to go mainstream again. It will. You know it will. We'll rebrand it so it's not called slavery but that's what it'll be. We're 3/4 there already. We're already at a point there's no reason to save money. Every penny you don't spend today will be worth half a penny tomorrow, if you have a bank account balance you're doing it wrong. I don't know when it crashes but I don't see how it doesn't crash. I also don't see a way to fix it. Prices need to crash hard but that'll only happen in recession or at this point depression which may be worse. Wages are never going to magically jump up to match. And even if they do it'll be more that weve seen. The people making 150k will make 300k, the people making 40k will make 48k and be comparatively worse than where we are.. I don't see a way out short of depression, then war, as always. Yet they won't let that happen and will keep printing money to keep it going continuously making it worse. Maybe the plebeians need to be wholesale purged? A new Holocaust where the well born can take their world back from the unwashed inferiors once and for all? I don't see any good ending, just an array of bad ones.
History days wars are the only solution. Big ones. Yet even China hesitates on that front now. Someone will jump eventually.
And then yeah, Sony . All the "but inflation " "but everything is more expensive"...
2015 $2500/mo. -1k housing -800 food and utility -400 PS4 pro - 60 game, and a few pennies left for savings.
2024 $3000/mo -1.4k housing -1300 food and utility - 700 PS5 pro - 70 game.........................
.....
Can consumers do a wall Street math thing and make that leave an extra thousand? Or a Fed thing and just xerox some $100s?
Re: Until Dawn Is One of Sony's Worst Performing PC Ports to Date
@Ralizah At least with Ubisoft's launcher, their own games are often cheaper from their own store than from any reseller after launch window, so I don't even mind using their launcher if they're going to slash the price of if I just go all in on it. When even Ubisoft has a better cluepon than Sony, something's very wrong.
"Console is bigger than ever"
No, console is stagnant, about where it was in the 80's still. It lost all the casuals to phones, and what it lost in that market it picked up only by opening to new markets replacing what they lost in original markets. If Xbox is merging with PC, Sony is....copying PC until they hit a brick wall eventually? I don't see their platforms not getting replaced by general purpose computing. Nintendo has more life if they have wacky hardware, but I even see them eventually merging into iOS. Furukawa admitted years ago that they basically think of contingencies for a future without hardware. Not that they plan to do that soon, but there aware enough of the tenuous position dedicated hardware could slip into.
@Bez87 I think most of the console centric games launch at the same price as console, but then quickly start getting sales much faster than on console. Most of the PC centric games are coming in at $50 or $60. (but then quickly go on sale, or are on sale for preorders, like Metaphor is $70, but on sale for $61 at 2 official sellers for preorder...and that's Atlus, infamous for high pricing and double dipping.)
But, yeah, as you said, nobody actually PAYS that full console price on PC. A handful, but not many, it's crazy pricing and you know it'll drop fast. I think the long tail sales will be ok once the sales roll in. Not for this game though. Nobody cares about it even on console.
The PS4 PC releases do well even on Deck and the handheld PCs, so it's definitely not just the high end. The newer games maybe, though. I had a similar arc to you, high end PC, then decided to drop it for console. But soon realize that between PS and XB and all the mid gens and subs and everything else, I was spending more than just keeping an up to date PC!
Re: PS5 Pro Will Reportedly Boost PS4 Games, and Reduce PSVR2 Motion Sickness
@HonestHick Take a glass half full, pour it out into the other glass until it overflows. Still half full! Just have to adjust to the new level of damp surfaces meaning half and you're all set!
I'll never get "used" to thew new economy. In my world, most people are middle, there's some wealthy that live somewhat better than average but still in the same world, a tiny number of "rich and famous" and a small amount of poor. This new echo of the late Roman empire of patricians and plebeians, where all economic activity exists for the top third, and the top third alone, I'll never adapt to, never accept. Thousands of years of wars to end that system, all for nothing, we went right back to it.
Re: Detroit: Become Human PS4, PC Sales Evolve Past 10 Million Paid Units
This was my most hyped game from the old Sony e3 days. But I ended up disappointed. Tried to get through it twice and never did. Just bought it again in PC today with the flash sale. For $12 why not try again?
Re: Until Dawn Is One of Sony's Worst Performing PC Ports to Date
@Bez87 TBF Sony just ran a big steam sale a few weeks ago. I picked up list legacy and got.
Re: Until Dawn Is One of Sony's Worst Performing PC Ports to Date
As a ps and pc player I can say this isn't a reflection of Sony on pc, it's a reflection that nobody cares about this game. If I didn't read push, I wouldnt have known it existed at all. Its launch in steam was even more muted. PC gamers aren't fomo hounds, learn to wait for sales, actually read reviews before buying and don't auto buy every game from a particular publisher, while this was up against bigger releases and bigger sales. PC games also have longer tail sales, like Nintendo, than the "box office weekend" sales model Sony seems to embrace on their consoles.
Re: Metaphor: ReFantazio (PS5) - Brilliant, Memorable RPG Is One of Atlus' Finest Works
@Doomcrow Truth!
@HarmanSmith Yeah, I wasn't expecting this to be such a huge hit with me. I knew I'd like it, it's Atlus, but I got so hooked on the demo I kind of want to play it before SMTV and P3R now.... IDK why, but it just has that right mix of magic like SMTIV and P5 did that keeps me playing. It doesn't have the character charm of a Persona game, but somehow there's a kinetic flow to progressing through that makes it, from the demo, really addicting.
Re: Metaphor: ReFantazio (PS5) - Brilliant, Memorable RPG Is One of Atlus' Finest Works
Oh boy, I still have to get through P3R, P5 Strikers, Soul Hackers 2, SMTV, all of which are barely started, but this is the one and only game I'm almost tempted to pay (near) full price for. The demo hooked me way more than I thought it would, and the glowing reviews make it so much more enticing. With the install size of this my Ally is loaded with nothing but an array of Atlus games at this point, lol.
Re: PS5 Fans Believe Halo Could Make Its PlayStation Debut
No PC option on the poll? I'm offended and outraged.
Re: PS5 Pro Will Reportedly Boost PS4 Games, and Reduce PSVR2 Motion Sickness
@HonestHick 1+1 = 423billion. -1=800billion. Numbers seem off? Phone the fed to print some more money and inject it. =1 trillion!
Re: Atlus Fans Don't Think Xbox's Marketing Is Doing Metaphor: ReFantazio Justice
@Flaming_Kaiser Yeah, I'm really not entirely sure what their plan is. I'm not sure they know what their plan is either. I bailed from the console ecosystem in my shift to PC precisely because I have no idea what their long term strategy is and neither do they.
And yet, I can't help but admit they do have a good console ecosystem. They just can't get their marketing act together. Or their strategy. Or just being consistent. I know they'll give the handheld a go, and maybe another console, which may or may not be a boxed PC.
To be fair though, the talk about $70 billion is somewhat sideways. "Xbox" didn't spend $70 billion to buy Activision. Microsoft Corp. spent $70 billion to buy King so they can finally get their foothold in mobile they've been dreaming of to go toe to toe with Apple and Google (and is half of what the cloud push was all about.) Getting Activision was just free swag that came with the purchase. And in the process they basically traded what was Xbox and merged it through Activision and that's how we have the directionless mess we have now. It was sort of Activision buying Xbox, so that MSFT could get King.
If I had to guess I think MS's plan for "Xbox" (Microsoft Gaming?) is generally being a multiplat publisher that also has its own distribution channel (not unlike Ubi and EA but a bigger platform) and to continue having a "console" hardware, which is to say, a prepackaged easy to use box for an ok price to play Windows games on. Whether that's a "true console" or a flavor of Surface that's tuned for gaming with an Xbox overlay, hard to say, but honestly that's not a bad thing if they do it. A big publisher, who's also the PC platform who also has a boxed hardware device to interact with their services and games. That's what Xbox (original) was meant to be. It was literally just a PC inside (Pentium III, custom Nvidia GPU, good old Rambus...) It was launched to secure PC games, Windows gaming, and DirectX developer dominance as consoles were starting to erode the market they had that was a big seller of Windows licenses. It was never meant to become a bespoke console, so the 360 was kind of a weird move for them, despite being their lone success. Even Sony was planning to publish on it when it first launched until Kutaragi threw a console warrior fit and stopped it. Other than him, even the other Sony brass wanted to be multiplat up until PS3. Sony was a PC publisher before they launched PS after all, so it seemed natural to them (and has kind of returned to that post-Kutaragi, lol)
Re: PS5 Pro Will Reportedly Boost PS4 Games, and Reduce PSVR2 Motion Sickness
@HonestHick Yeah the AI hype is extreme but where it is right now. I use it occasionally. But it's mostly just another search engine more than anything that can handle more nuance in searches. Half the time the answers are bad or wrong or clearly pulled from reddit. Seems more useful for graphics than anything else.
There's been a few studies, one showing that basically it brings the most incompetent to be equal to the competent but slows down anyone that already knows what they're doing. thus it's main benefit is the ability to replace anyone skilled with kids, interns, and generally entry level forever and get the same results. Endless pay cuts for all. Minimum wage forever!
The other one I've seen is I thinkn from open ai about how much it's used for what. #1 by far was homework. #2 was basically sex chat. Actual business use was pretty down the line. So basically every investor is throwing endless money at a thing that makes no money, costs fortunes to run and is mostly used by school children so they don't need to think and as a sexbot....... Can we PLEASE just nuke Wall Street? Just a small crater, I'm not asking for a lot.
Re: PS5 Pro Will Reportedly Boost PS4 Games, and Reduce PSVR2 Motion Sickness
@HonestHick Heck half the problen with investors is New Tulip Mania. Nobody wants to invest in anything when they can invest in AI companies and 10 mil becomes 100 mil becomes 3bil genuine 2 tril in 5 weeks. (All for companies that lose more money than Xbox and make nothing. )
Re: PS5 Pro Will Reportedly Boost PS4 Games, and Reduce PSVR2 Motion Sickness
@HonestHick I'm still not convinced they're doing day and date or 100% pc releases. As a pc customer, I'd like them do, but I'm not sure they intend to. They seem happy using them as bait for selling consoles. But it's still third party that really sells consoles.
I'm not sure I see them going switch any more than Xbox. Big market but too different a dev process and too dangerous a competitor. I think I lot of the classic ps crowd would be happy with only a Nintendo these days.
Re: PS5 Pro Will Reportedly Boost PS4 Games, and Reduce PSVR2 Motion Sickness
@HonestHick It's easy to make a weak processor seem fast when you have total control of what's run on it and when you force everyone to stop running what they want and run what you tell them too instead.... if apple ruled pc gaming, Pc games would have generations and $115 remasters.
I think the main problem is the whole idea of exclusives doesn't work anymore. Yeah it'll force some people to buy the console that wouldn't have but if it doesn't get them to buy lots of other games it doesn't have a point, mainly because only 10% install base even buys the exclusives. It just not why people buy consoles anymore. I think if 50% install base bought them like Nintendo things would be different, but that ship sailed.
Re: Random: Internet Trolls Tried to Downgrade Our Silent Hill 2 PS5 Review Score
Come on out, Mikami-san, we know it's you.
Re: PS5 Pro Will Reportedly Boost PS4 Games, and Reduce PSVR2 Motion Sickness
@HonestHick lol Sony + Apple partnership sounds like the perfectly ideal soul mate match made in hell š
But yeah I could see that. So long as it's a plus and not a negative to PC and they don't start Apple exclusive nonsense that's interesting. and frankly more indication that even Sony knows consoles are on a limited future.
Edit At least Apple people get Bungie back? š¤£
Re: PS5 Pro Will Reportedly Boost PS4 Games, and Reduce PSVR2 Motion Sickness
@HonestHick Well, I think Indiana Jones is their big holiday game, and it has much broader appeal as a family title than e day so they had their lineup right. But, then.... They decided to put it on PS and make it better on the pro so.... They dgaf. To be fair though Xbox point is they always have had a pro and it's much better and more expensive than PS5 pro, so I don't think they're worried about that. If you into the Xbox ecosystem and want ultra pro performance, they've got Windows keys for $100 for you, byod. And really that's not a bad viewpoint. But I'm still not sure they should be sharing the pot with the company the refuses to share its pot.
Then again, originally Sony didn't view Xbox as a competitor and intended to publish on Xbox. It was Kutaragi that threw a fit and stopped that. So even 20 years ago, Sonys own thinking wasn't so different from Microsofts now. And to be fair, kutaragi nearly destroyed PlayStation after that.
Re: PS5 Pro Will Reportedly Boost PS4 Games, and Reduce PSVR2 Motion Sickness
@Art_Vandelay Right, for PS5 games that struggle to hit targets. But this statement is about PS4 games. What PS4 games failed to hit targets on a PS5. And if PS5 is poor though that it can't even run PS4 games to spec, why does it exist?
@HonestHick Deep down inside, everybody is Patcher.
Re: PS5 Pro Boost Is Pretty Clear Cut in The Last of Us 2 Remastered Comparison Video
@AgentGuapo "$700 is nothing compared to how much a high end PC graphics card costs. All things in perspective."'
If comparing JUST the GPU (not a whole build), that's only somewhat true. Those super expensive cards are almost certain to be much better than even PS6. The $500 cards are a little better than what's in PS5 Pro. Just for GPU of course not the rest of a build.
@OldGamer999 Yeah, and with modern "optimization" even the very best PC money currently can't buy isn't doing 4k60 for a number of modern games. Weirdly even Metaphor, which is not a graphics feast by even the farthest stretch. Modern games are not built to run on hardware that currently exists at any price point. You can't even buy your way to the performance desired. I think the "4k60" dream is dead for a good while, even on PC, if the graphics details, RT, particles are pushed as they keep doing. Turn that stuff off and you get 4k60. Keep it on, not so much.
Another reason I like VR. Everything needs to be kept minimum to max res and fps because in VR it's just a default fact that that matters more than anything else so they stop pushing all the fx and focus on raw basics.
Re: Tencent, Guillemot Family Reportedly Considering Ubisoft Buyout
I actually would love to see Ubisoft go private, but only if the Guillemot brothers and NOT Tencent have majority control.
People don't like Guillemot, but the man is a developer from back in the day, and Ubisoft's games were very good until they went public. Trying to please investors and fend off hostile takeovers is when they got bad and overextended. Being public is what broke them, and being private might make them focus on quality games again. But if Tencent has control.....nope.
Re: Beat Saber Will Give You More with Britney Spears DLC Song Pack
That's a lot of tracks, that'll be on the pricier side of the packs for sure. Not sure I need that much Britney in my life. Might just pick up Toxic and a few other tracks.
@Balosi @zupertramp Tempo-Katana....OMG I tried that on Expert and I look like a cat going after a laser. I don't think that's humanly possible and that's not even Expert+!
The one big complaint I have with beat saber though is I think the difficulty ratings are extremely inconsistent. Hard to Expert on Tempo-Katana is like 1/3 the blocks. Some "Expert" songs I can get A's on fairly easily. Meanwhile some Hard songs seem impossible. I do think there's a definite problem with the difficulty ratings. It shouldn't be possible to have Expert tracks be easier than other Hard tracks.
Re: PS5 Pro Will Reportedly Boost PS4 Games, and Reduce PSVR2 Motion Sickness
@Medic_alert Yeah, I forget the interviews and all that talked about that, but that's why we stopped seeing FPS Boost titles. They ran out of the ones they could get working easily, they had some that worked but had some game breaking bug somewhere in the game that they couldn't get past so they had to cancel them (a few released and then they pulled them due to finding a bug it caused.) And then a lot of publishers started to decline allowing their game to be modded, presumably because they realized instead of MS giving free 60fps patches, they could charge $70 for a "remaster" instead.
Obviously on PC there's always community mods that try to get games to 60fps, but even there it's kind of rare, because a lot of games that are locked at 30fps have actual game logic, sound, etc tied to the 30fps loop and too much of the game breaks if you try to speed it up. Or then you have modern cases like FFXVI that has an official 60 mode, but even on PC, even on 4090's something inside is so tied to 30fps that it still just doesn't work well. The game dives into the 40fps's even on 4090 without dynamic res and framegen. People can get to to stable 60 static res without frame gen if they turn off the RT features. On a freaking 4090.... A lot of times a 30fps game is simply internally 30fps and nothing really can change it without redoing a lot of work. I'm sure that's the issue with everyone screaming for Bloodborne. It probably has internal systems and all timed against the rendering, and forcing it starts breaking the game. I'm betting a Bluepoint remake of that will be a PS6 launch title.
But yeah, I can't figure out what they're talking about here, because what they describe is what PS5 already does. Unless they mean games the PS5 still can't hit stable targets. Or maybe what they mean is dynamic RES (not fps) will stay at max res. Something like that makes sense. But the hardware can't magically make a locked game unlocked. Neither on console nor PC does throwing a 5090 at it make it run faster if it's internally limited. All you can do is max its max.
Their messaging is becoming Xbox-like. Maybe they share their staff lol. I mean, yeah, you know my opinion that a 45% GPU boost and an AI upscaler is kind of sad for the money. BUT at least you'd think they'd market that aspect of it which is what it really does. Instead for some reason they won't talk much about that and keep talking about how it's a great PS4 in ways that don't make sense. It's like they've given up on anyone caring about PS5 games and just want to sell improved PS4s since everyone loves that console lol. And then they're trying to market it based on "reduces PSVR2 motion sickness". Kind of a weird angle. They sold so few PSVR2's, and they're not marketing an improved VR experience, just...reduces motion sickness, where anyone with VR motion sickness probably didn't keep their PSVR2 anyway.
It's always been that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, and I suspect here this is a case where, Jim commissioned the product, Cerny designed the product Jim commissioned, and Japan is scratching their heads figuring out wtf it's for.
Re: PS5 Pro Will Reportedly Boost PS4 Games, and Reduce PSVR2 Motion Sickness
@thefourfoldroot1 Yeah, I agree. I fundamentally disagree with the whole notion of "pro models" and "mid-gen upgrades." PS4 Pro was fine, it was mostly just "PS4 for 4k displays." PCs with an upgrade treadmill available is fine, and in part is fine because you can scale your graphics accordingly to your hardware anyway, but on console the entire point of the console is that the games are supposed to be scaled to run right on it to begin with, and this, as you say, just gives devs an excuse to not do that. Although TBH, if the state of how games have been for the first half already is anything to go by, I suspect half the games were going to run like garbage on P5 whether pro existed or not.
It's a weird gen. The hardware was just too underpowered because it launched too early, and while PC experienced this paradigm shift to using AI scaling and framegen, and games are designed with that in mind, the consoles for some reason didn't bother taking that seriously in their 2019 designs, and it feels like all current games are just made with PC/next gen in mind, and as long as it putters along on current consoles for a few years, good enough....they can sell the remaster in 3 years at $80. In comes PS5 Pro to add the key missing feature, for a premium, devs will love that PS5 joined their current development strategy.....and it'll apply to like 10-15% of the console base. It's a mess, really.
Re: Atlus Fans Don't Think Xbox's Marketing Is Doing Metaphor: ReFantazio Justice
@Flaming_Kaiser Yeah, but that was Square under Masuda. And remember Xbox "doesn't have a big marketing budget like Sony" lol. But to be fair to it all, I think MS does allocate generally low budget to Xbox itself, and the ABK merger wasn't Xbox, it was MS corporate (It was Amy Hood, CFO, and Witch Queen of Ice, that approached ABK, not anyone at Xbox), really because they wanted King, and they were more or less using it to disband the Xbox that was.
Re: PS5 Pro Will Reportedly Boost PS4 Games, and Reduce PSVR2 Motion Sickness
@thefourfoldroot1 "Which is a bit sad as far as Iām concerned, as devs focus will start shifting from coding just for the base model."
If the Pro is similar levels of adoption as PS4 Pro was, they won't. Getting a "pro mode" means just adding a mode with higher target resolution or fps targeted. A lot of devs will just set the slider and build to meet the requirement if it doesn't seem like a big portion of their market. SOME devs will release terribly performing games and say "well it works well on Pro" though. And looking at MH Wilds' PC specs being absurd, I'm betting that's a big one that will do that. 4060 to do 1080p@60 with DLSS+Frame Gen? Yikes. REEngine sucks.
@HonestHick LOL, yep, and who can forget Jimbo's "why would anybody want to play this" (old Ridge Racer), and here they are with their newest console and can't stop talking about PS4.
@Medic_alert Fair enough. But, yeah, a game that's already uncapped should already be able to do this on PS5, and a game that is capped, can't just magically do this on fast hardware, not even on PC, the game needs to be modded, which is more or less what MS was doing before publishers started refusing. If it had fuzzy upscaling before it will probably scale sharper if it's using PSSR.
Re: Atlus Fans Don't Think Xbox's Marketing Is Doing Metaphor: ReFantazio Justice
@Yousef- Square is a bad example because they had some weird strategy of excluding games and shaking down platforms under the old CEO. Meanwhile octopath1 was on Xbox and not ps for ages, and ps got the weird incomplete dq11 while switch got the real version and then Xbox and ps got that one together.
I think under the new CEO they'll have platform party from now on. I think they were trying to shake ms down for game pass money and Ms wasn't always buying.
@LavenderShroud It's still an uphill battle. The platform will always be a place people don't play a particular genre until they cultivate a market for it. They've been working on getting Japanese devs to support them but it's been slow going. If the games don't exist on the platform, a market for those games will never exist. Catch 22. Sony and Nintendo didn't have to work to get it because it's where they started, but Nintendo has often struggled to get Western devs supporting them until switch so it's the same kind of issue.
Has to start somewhere. Only once all the games are there can they try to court fans of those games.
One big thing that's helping finally get all these jrpgs on Xbox it that before, Japan didn't touch PC at all. It was console only. Suddenly PC is big in Japan and every game is on it. That's where PC ports to Xbox make it reasonable for devs to participate where they wouldn't have before.
Re: Atlus Fans Don't Think Xbox's Marketing Is Doing Metaphor: ReFantazio Justice
It's a catch 22 for Xbox. They'll never get jrpg fans if they don't get jrpgs. But them getting jrpg marketing means it doesn't reach as many people.
Fwiw Microsoft sent an email blast highlighting the game to customers, which means Xbox PC app, console, and gp subscribers got the direct marketing on it which is a lot of what Nintendo does too. It's not flashy marketing like Sony but it's effective.
Still, Xbox marketing just flat sucks in general which is a huge part of their problem.
Re: PS5 Pro Will Reportedly Boost PS4 Games, and Reduce PSVR2 Motion Sickness
PS4 Pro Plus Premium. The best PlayStation 4 (TM) console yet!
I find out interesting that the main thing they keep promoting about the pro is what a great PS4 it is. Plus rebirth.
"We believe in generations. Specifically the 6th and 8th generations."
Yeah any psvr2 games that were held back by performance issues will get a bump, and vr devs are usually responsive with updates.
@Enuo By "fresh pine" you mean "heated plastic outgas" right?
@Medic_alert No, he specifically said games that have "variable fps" (uncapped). So it does what PS5 already does only even more power if any games still weren't hitting 60 (or 90 In VR) . Xbox game boost was about patching games that were capped to double their fps. This isn't that. And publishers stopped approving those so they could sell it as a $70 remaster instead.
Re: Nixxes Dev Refers to Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered as 'First Big PlayStation Content Project'
@GamingFan4Lyf "I'll still support Sony's games; I just want nothing to do with the rest of it."
Yep exactly that. I like Sony the studio. But they've killed any interest I had in PS as a platform.
Re: Beat Saber Will Give You More with Britney Spears DLC Song Pack
@zupertramp Yeah, I just realized I've done some Expert ones via the campaign and didn't know it. I think I have 3 or 4 levels left at the top of the campaign ladder. So I did a lot of it. Oh, I know the one you're talking about with moving just the wrists. It was tense but I had no problem with that one, I think I had only half the max motion on try one. The ones I HATED and avoided, were the ones where you had to move your arms a lot. I guess I tend to use minimal motions by default and all that flailing around was not fun at all.
I kind of hate the ones you're supposed to miss a certain amount of blocks and badly slice a certain amount. It becomes too much about watching the health bar, and not enough about playing beat saber.
For the regular ones, I hate the ones I do perfect the whole way through, and then the finale at the last 30 seconds throws a million blocks in a new pattern at you and you end up missing a bunch and losing at the very end....that's the most frustrating of all!
Re: Epic Games Boss Says Firm Now 'Financially Sound', Following the Firing of Over 800 Staff
@StrickenBiged Fair enough then, to a point. The risk of heavy intervention should apply to public companies only. However, Epic is a different kind of case, and is kind of a backdoor around even the existing rules. It's more of a public-private setup. One person owns a little over half, but the rest is owned by other public corporations. And interestingly, all foreign interest.I think a line would have to be drawn around what constitutes public, and when very nearly half is owned by public corporations, it's hard to say it's not a public company.
Not that in Sweeney's case it would matter if he were the sole owner, the guy's always been a giant stick.
Re: Epic Games Boss Says Firm Now 'Financially Sound', Following the Firing of Over 800 Staff
@UnlimitedSevens Funny you'd compare it to the Pope, as I think that used to be part of it. Judges were revered as above the law and in traditional American, indeed informed by religious values (allegedly), and able to put the final word on the corruptible elected officials without fear of retribution. Maybe it's the robes? Or just idealism. People seemed to believe they were above corruption because to be fair the role was attempted to be designed as above corruption at inception, without somehow noticing that if they're appointed by politicians....there's a reason?
Yeah, the biggest problem in the system is that it was designed around the free market that existed in the 18th century. BUSINESS meant Samuel the butcher, Edward the blacksmith, and the bankers (always the bankers.) Business meant one or a few people trading goods and services for coin. And the laws were based on that. With everything decentralized and infinitely redundant. It was not based on central conglomerates of which there's 2 for the entire planet and they have more money than the government itself. None of the rules are equipped to handle that. Though, the be fair, Jefferson warned about the central bankers even in freaking EIGHTEENTH CENTURY! And here we are.
Though it also goes back to the loss of ethics in modern society, even businesses, for the most part, used to be guided by people that had a sense of ethics and sense of right. As society, and the people lost the sense of ethics, and really "will Satan torture my immortal soul for all eternity if I do this" vs "will I net more cash if I do this and will I be subject to prison time?" took hold, this was inevitable. Rule of law was designed around fear of divine punishment (right down to swearing on bibles in court, which used to make people afraid to lie, and now does not), and without fear of divine punishment it nets a society of children looking to see what they can get away with. If you're not cheating, you're losing.
IDK that just banning the corporate donations solves anything. Just like everything else you describe, the corporations would just route the money different, and of course soft funds that can't be banned. You had the infamous 2008 election where Eric Schmidt was INSIDE a campaign headquarters partying while sharing Google data with their campaign. Even without a dollar spent, Google's head was directly a part of a campaign and leveraging the entire datamined information bank of their corporation to benefit a single party's candidate. And that wouldn't ban that. Unfortunately I think "rule of law" isn't enough to fix it alone. Restoring societal ethics is necessary. But how is that accomplished. It took 10,000 years to build religion to successfully do that. And it still fell apart in a decade or two. Even a social revolution is usually just backed and sparked by the 2nd tier nobles that want to become first tier.
Re: Crickets as Suicide Squad Endures Another Muted Launch
@LuXifer Any Day Now. Is that a new GaSS that crashed and burned? Hadn't heard about that one.