NeuralDeclan

Calling this the worst Ratchet and Clank is an affront. Don't forget "Before the Nexus" the trash mobile game. In terms of console/handheld releases, Full Frontal Assault (which you mention) is worse than this, but don't forget about the co-op PS3 game Ratchet: All 4 One. Sammy says Ratchet and Clank is never outright bad, but that one was pretty close...

To convince me on PSVR2 you would need more first party games rather than fewer wires. Even the PSVR1 multiple wires and awkward setup didn't bother me because there were games worth playing (Astro Bot Rescue Mission, Moss, etc)

When we have people posing rhetorical questions like "I just can't understand why gamers want to see live services fail and be glad when they do, it's not an either/or issue with single player games, both can coexist", I will refer them to this article. Publishers have clearly been chasing the GaaS dragon for ages, and putting SP stuff on the back burner even if it wasn't explicit. Glad to see a reversion to a sensible balance.

This coming to PlayStation is good news, if only that now when I say that the animations (both facial expressions in cutscenes and in-game movement) look stiff and awkward and that the gameplay looks slow and bland, that can be taken at face value, rather than dismissed as "Sony Pony is just butthurt about this awesome Xbox exclusive"

It's still spring in the Northern Hemisphere until 20th June, so if the DLC shadow drops (the most appropriate kind of drop for an Alan Wake game all about darkness I guess) tomorrow or they announced it is out in the next two weeks then they would still hit that spring release window, they've not missed it yet Sammy!

@AK4tywill the collective consultation process is nominally to ensure fairness, as you say. The employer says why they're cutting the roles, and how they will select who leaves so they can't just fire people they don't like or who are "too expensive", you have to be both truly unnecessary and score lower than the other employees at risk.

At this point employee reps or unions can discuss with the employer about whether redundancy is necessary or not before it happens (in my experience this is lip service and nothing changes). You as employees can sometimes have input into the scoring framework for who is made redundant.

From a practical point of view, this period also allows the employees to look for a new job while still employed in case they get cut.

@AK4tywill the logic is compliance with UK employment law - when making redundancies you don't fire people, you say a certain number of roles are no longer required, then there is a process of consultation where you need to announce like this and then make a final selection of who leaves at the end of that process. Having been through it myself in another industry, it is approximately as awful as you describe but it's not unique to this business nor this industry, it's how the UK works

I wonder if the roguelite mode with new playable characters is them salvaging what value they can from the development and assets from Factions and bundling it in here before they cancel it?

No problems here either, have two months left on my current annual sub for PS Plus Extra but just bought another year for £75 on the mobile app, so 25% off the £99.99 price as expected.

@Slippship you can actually connect your DualSense to your PS3 as a Bluetooth controller when you go back to play old games - I've done it because going back to the DS3 also felt awful to me. Doesn't work with DualSense on PS4, but does work on PS3 for some reason

@nessisonett I had never thought about F.U.D. = fud like that before, and thanks to you I can never un-see it, thanks for that 😅

When people ask "how could devs and publishers possibly release a game in as poor of a state as Gollum?", here is your answer. If you spend money on the license and barely anything on dev costs you can trick enough mugs into buying it to still make money, reputation be damned

@danlk1ng I suppose I was meaning "professional" here in the sense that it is their main paid occupation rather than a hobby, as opposed to ascribing professionalism (i.e. one of the professions, requiring skill/education/training) to the work in question

I was not aware that helplessness rented land or property from the Callisto Protocol? Come on guys, as professional writers and editors you should 100% know the difference between 'tenet' and 'tenant'...

@BowTiesAreCool agreed - I'd say that for what RDR2 tried to do as a hyper realistic slice of life, it still is yet to be beaten. However, I'm not convinced that the R* of five or ten years ago, with the genre-redefining pedigree, is the same now that Dan Houser is away. Equally, when they have moved the bar for games, they didn't go "hold my beer, I'm about to redefine the industry" which invites nitpicking and haters to drag it down

@tameshiyaku I'm very specifically not talking about the bugs in Cyberpunk. CDPR promised a revolution in terms of game design for years, and once the bugs were fixed we still didn't get that in the finished game. It was a good game, and one I enjoyed and played a lot of it, but in the end it was never the game changer that they hyped it to be. That's my point here, not that GTA 6 would release in a poor state technically.

Does anyone else get powerful Cyberpunk vibes here? Long hyped game in development for years with absolutely outlandish promises of "redefining the industry" which ends up being a bit of a let down on release because nothing could possibly live up to the hype the developers/publishers have built...

@nessisonett or perhaps the demo is so awful that they're having to start again completely from scratch 🤔

While I feel bad that I have been baited into clicking and commenting here, the record needs setting straight. To clarify, I and most other people are not interested in Stray because of the mechanics. Even the first reveal trailer had people excited because it was the only game where you were just a cat and that appeals before anyone knew anything else about it. The gameplay, innovative or otherwise, just gives you an excuse to be a cat and exist in the cool world. It would not be the same without a cat because I'm here for the perspective of being a foot off the ground, slipping through gaps, and pushing stuff of shelves because that itself is the fun, not the mission objectives.

I don't play Crash Bandicoot to feel like a bandicoot, and I don't play Mario to understand the lived experience of short Italian men, but I do play Stray to feel like a cat in a sci-fi dystopia for a while. That's the key difference.

For a professional game journalist to ignore the mportance of character and sense of place to enjoying a game feels like contrariness. As examples; the mini games in Edith Finch are not revolutionary for their game mechanics - slithering around as a sea monster's single tentacle or eating mice as an owl or even steering a boat while cutting fish - but they are all enjoyable because of the dressing around them, and people love that game. Hey, even the two halves of TLoU2 are mechanically very similar with objectives of "shoot the people and the infected through linear levels with a few open bits" but they feel extremely different because of the character and perspective. People were not mad about that game (rightly or wrongly) because of the gameplay changes but because doing the same thing suddenly felt so different. How it feels to play Stray as a cat is so much more important that what you do while you are that cat.

PS Team - I am available to write full rebuttal pieces if you keep putting out content like this with which I disagree so strongly 😂

The key point here for me is that this is clearly a lot of work from the developers and they feel passionately about it, but none of this stuff delivers me any value. After about 5min of playing the game I won't notice the extra bushes in the background, or an NPC pushing himself out of a chair with his hands. I'm not so cynical to call it a cash grab, but it just feels pointless. Remasters and remakes have been good at restoring access to games lost to time on old systems, or modernising archaic game mechanics. For a game I can already play on my PS5 and that plays largely the same, why would I spend any money, let alone £70? It feels on a par with the legacy of thieves collection that I got for £10, and half of that was to get the free uncharted movie ticket. Call this a £10 upgrade for owners of the original TLoU, and throw in a 1 month pass to HBO / Sky TV to watch the new TLoU TV show and maybe we'll talk Sony...

I have this issue and haven't played the new RE8 demo. The weirdest thing for me is that my Hotline Miami 2 trophies now come up as Mubi the movie streaming app which isn't even a game and doesn't have any trophies at all!

I think this whole situation highlights why people were disappointed that Horizon Forbidden West is a cross gen game. CP2077 is clearly a dense and ambitious game designed for new gen that the base PS4 cannot handle. People hoped that HFW would be similar and do things that just would not work on PS4 at all (cross the whole map on a flying pterodactyl machine in a few seconds in real time, fights with dozens of machines on screen at once) but it likely will just be a 60fps/ray traced version of a game limited in scope to still run perfectly on 2013 (at point of release 8 year old) hardware. Clearly here CDPR have not limited their ambitions to make it run on PS4 - their artistic vision is uncompromised but it just does not run on base PS4. This is why people are keen on next gen exclusives rather than cross gen games

@nessisonett does this count as review bombing if people are scoring the game poorly because it's an unplayable buggy mess? Not saying there aren't tryhards piling on with low scores who haven't played it, but I would honestly score a game that ran at 20fps and crashed all the time about a 2/10 so the user score seems not miles off, this isn't a TLOU2 situation

@get2sammyb regardless of the increase in AAA prices on PS5 from £50 to £70, I am genuinely surprised that this is a full priced title (whether that was £50 or £70) at all. I fully expected this to be a higher priced indie at £30ish, like the Pathless, and not sure how to feel seeing it on preorder at full whack

This is huge! I did my first story playthrough on fidelity mode for the graphics whistles, then my NG+ run was in the 60fps performance mode. After seeing 60fps I could not go back to the 30fps, it was like swinging through jam but I really did miss the ray tracing. This is the perfect middle ground that might even warrant a third playthrough!

Classic GT though, is anyone surprised by this? I would have been more surprised if Polyphony actually met a release window on the first go around...

I really miss the fully destructible environments. It's just not worms if I can't trap someone in a giant crater with a holy hand grenade

@Perryg92 I had the same, was playing the game, pressed a triangle button prompt on screen and it was like I pressed the off button on the console, just straight to black. PS5 lights all off then refused to boot back up for a solid 20-30s (long enough that I tried to turn it on pressing the PS button on the Dualsense and the controller had turned itself off not finding a system by the time I went to hard start the console with the power button). No issues since then however and I now have the platinum and am done with the game after ~15hrs

@nessisonett exactly the same - when stuff from my wishlist comes up on PS plus it's a huge bonus. I was going to buy Bugsnax day one anyway so when it was free on Plus I effectively just saved £17.99 so even if I play nothing on plus for 5 months now it's still even.
For other games, like this month's Worms, I tried it once, hated it, never think of it again and that's OK too.

@get2sammyb I'm having issues with the playtime counter even with PS5 games too. Got the Miles Morales PS5 platinum today and it says 13 hours total, but I played yesterday for ~5hrs and the counter was flat at 10hrs all day, then played another 3 in NG+ today and it started counting back up to 13 again. Have you heard of anyone else having issues like this?

Also PS4 games which have a playtime counter built into the game don't agree with my PS profile count either (Celeste, Ghost of Tsushima etc)

@TheRedComet oh I 100% agree. There's a reason that my avatar on here is Madeline - I love that game and I think the difficulty is perfect. The ability to die sometimes hundreds of times and reload instantly plays into the "every death is a learning opportunity" hook that makes the game so compelling. No matter how hard the game got, or how stuck I was on the B-sides I would never personally use the assist mode as to me it was cheating and then what's the point of playing?

My point was simply that Assist Mode was implemented so well and subtly in Celeste that people could play the developer's vision as intended, but if they were having real bother with the difficulty (or had accessibility needs) then Assist Mode was there as a safety net. Note that there are several warnings before you implement Assist Mode telling you that it will ruin the game and the developer's vision. It never ruined the game for me or for you or for anyone that didn't need it, but it might have helped someone. The only contentious part is that Assist Mode doesn't disable trophy unlocks so people can cheese the platinum trophy if they are so inclined.

@TheRedComet you do realise that Celeste does have an easy toggle called "Assist Mode" right? It 100% ruins the game for me personally (changes game speed, amount of stamina/dashes, or makes you invincible) but it allows people to cheese past a difficult section to progress and then maybe turn it off later, rather than getting stuck at one point and gating off the rest of the game. The fact you didn't notice it was there is the perfect example of why games can have easy modes - it didn't ruin it for you, you didn't even know it was there, but if it helped out even one person enjoy the game more then it's worth it

@Dan_ozzzy189 you should definitely have been avoiding yodel well before this anyway haha! They truly are in the garbage-tier of UK couriers, just below Hermes in terms of poor reliability, late delivery, damage to goods, and zero accountability and customer support if your parcel ever doesn't arrive / gets damaged. This is not my first experience with them, but as others have said I had no idea that this would be coming with yodel until yesterday when it was too late. My PS5 accessories preorder came on time last week from Game via royal mail absolutely no bother, and it just shows me what could have been if they used a proper delivery company...

I just had confirmation from Yodel that I will not be getting my console on launch day, but my friend's PS5 coming to the same address from Amazon will arrive today which makes it even worse. Game are trying to put all the blame on Yodel but Game have chosen to use a cheap and nasty courier to save themselves money and all the consequences are on customers. Regretting taking the day off work today, now I can just sit around all day being annoyed!

@K-Wud this is to allow people who have had issues with pre-orders etc re-buy their console. Currys send them a dedicated "£2000 off PS5" coupon to allow only them to purchase it at the normal price of £449, while the high price stops anyone else coming in to buy one when they are officially sold out bar the ones reserved for pre-orders

@PegasusActual93 it's a bit trickier given that I have a digital only PS5 😂

@thefourfoldroot which games in particular are you thinking of? My copy of RDR2 has a data disc and a play disc separately, and all my other physical games are <50gb. Anything else larger than 50gb I've gone digital for.

@hulkie I too will be getting the PS4 version on my PS5, it's just that I'll be getting the digital download version instead because I can't be dealing with two discs!

@thefourfoldroot PS4 uses regular blu ray discs with a capacity of 50gb so anything between 50-100gb needs two discs. PS5 uses double layer BDXL discs with 100gb capacity so assuming the PS5 version is still <100gb it'll be one disc

@oldschool1987 I didn't see it as shilling at all - most of them were pretty negative on it apart from Greg Miller and I got the vibe that he just genuinely loves the game despite all its flaws. There are some objectively garbage games and films and TV shows that I still love anyway, why can't he?

I thought this sounded an awful lot like "Way Up" from the Spiderverse movie soundtrack until I checked and that too was by Jaden Smith. Makes sense then...

@DeepSpace5D exactly, this wouldn't be a nice surprise for me. I deliberately ordered the digital version because its symmetrical design looks better to me than the disc console. It's nothing to do with cost and buying the cheaper one, I bought the one I wanted so if I got a disc console instead I would be pretty unimpressed!

@Kidfunkadelic83 that might explain why the triangle is upside down? Location tag needed for the triangle button to face up at the top would be the inverse of the X button to go at the bottom, so if you flipped it an upside down triangle would fit where X goes

For those not familiar with Dbrand, this insult-comedy thing is their whole marketing schtick along with pretending everything is done by robots rather than human employees to make them seem cool and interesting compared to other phone skin and case companies. Whenever I've had an actual customer service issue with them they've been very helpful, courteous, and obliging. Here, this is just their "fun" way of discontinuing a product that they weren't happy was user-friendly enough

@S1ayeR74 fair point, and I imagine Microsoft have rather a larger hardware design team too. I will have to see whether a larger PS5 console is a fair trade off for the innovative new Dualsense controller once I get my hands on it next week. From the media impressions it sounds like the answer will be yes!

My question is how Microsoft have managed to make a machine more powerful in the XSXand yet only 2/3 the volume of the PS5 but with similar cooling. Either Microsoft have a team of engineers who have simply done a better job of optimising than Sony and Sony have been way too cautious leading to a giant console or they've gone too aggressive on size and cooling and the Xbox will have cooling issues under heavy load - after the RROD issues I doubt Microsoft would risk it again so they must be sure it's ok. Time will tell, but I do wish the PS5 was as small as the XSX (assuming that size is sustainable).

@wiiware I've seen Sony is providing 3rd party Devs with a software package that lets them take existing in-game sound effects and convert them automatically into equivalent haptic outputs on the Dualsense - they're both just kinds of vibration after all. Hopefully that makes it super easy for Devs to add in high quality haptics and the feature doesn't get abandoned

I cannot stomach horror, not in video game nor film form. I can just about stretch to things with zombies like TLOU, or Days Gone because the story or gameplay trumps the fear factor. I still remember losing my mind over the "descendants" zombie people turning up expectedly in Uncharted 1......

@playstation1995 to me, the digital version with its symmetrical curves both sides looks like the way it was meant to be, then they realised you couldn't fit a disc drive and grafted one onto the side of the disc edition, looking like a hernia. However, design is subjective and I get that other people feel differently. And everyone who doesn't want a digital edition is one less person I need to compete with to buy one on launch so it works for me

@NEStalgia 100% agree - I bought the digital edition just because of how much better it looks than the disc edition. I buy most games digitally already, and I'm prepared to possibly pay more for my games in the end just to have the better looking box on display in my house