Rich33

The way this was done, both Asobi and the IPs lending characters (or more) won.

Remove ray tracing, up performance and resolution with the (potentially very big) savings. Might then take a proper look.

.. oh, and from what i read add in the ability to save anywhere.

I just find it funny that Sony have had their reputation somewhat saved this year by little Astro!

(No slight on the game - I am loving it)

Maybe bots were there but levels were cut - i can imagine in a game like this that a lot of levels were started, but not finished for various reasons (and they forgot to remove the credit / didnt remove just in case).

The way the game groups bots, it could just be a level cut in the interest of quality, which accidently caused all square enix characters to be cut without anyone realising.

Maybe said level will be fixed up and added as dlc.

Poor framerate, low visual fidelity, all to include ray tracing in all modes.

I wanted to play Concord this weekend, but alas, i will have to settle for Astro bot.

Its worse than that hes dead jim...

A pleasant pat on back is good for morale - more businesses should do it in similar cases.

Isnt infamous a Sony IP - they can tell different stories set in the same world.

@Slideaway1983
From the very little i have been able to play so far, the amount of care, attention, and detail is amazing.

I often complain about poorly optimised games with poor framerates, or low visual quality - this is literally the complete opposite and makes most other non-Sony games look like budget titles!

@Icey664
For the work thats gone into it, it feels very much worth the asking price.
Gaming needs to get back to a you get what you pay for - if you pay a premium price you expect a premium game. If its not a premium game - you expect a cheap price. I think this game fits the former.

@Sequel
Your last comment made me smile. Whilst I love the somewhat more serious tone games like GOW / SM, sometimes you just need a happy family game.

World tour made this game for me. Glad to see it doing well.

One problem with this launch / dlc model is if you have a favourite, you wont buy until after they have been added - i did this and still know of people waiting on characters like Sagat b4 they buy. Not an easy fix, but it causes a lot of people to buy at a later reduced price.

Watched it live and it was quite cool. A big smile moment. I saved the video for posterity! (Sad, i know)

You cant see too well in the video (well i cant), but there are little messages on all the monitor screens.

Astro is clearly a celebration imo, and calling it a graveyard just sounds silly.

But there is an underlying feeling that a lot of people have been asking for things such as a new infamous game, or a 60fps remaster of bloodborne, as well as others for a long time, yet Sony appears to have ground to a complete halt with this live service push.

This may not be entirely accurate, but with Sonys current lack of announcements, it feels like it at present.

@somnambulance
PS Library makes it easy.
Its interesting indeed that Sony didnt see it as a major or tentpole release (I cant exactly remember their wording) - when it may well be the game that saves their reputation this year.

Will they be headlining the celebrations with concord or Astro... hmm decisions, decisions...lol

@UnlimitedSevens
Agree with everything you've said, and i would add that i do not believe a word of the "we need GaaS to fund single player" rubbish they come out with - any money from GaaS will just fund more.

@Quintumply
Thank you - they missed a trick here!

@themightyant
Was just looking at that 5 mins ago too with a big smile.

@Quintumply
One quick question - does it include the PS5 Pro design as an esster egg?

(I have tried not to look at other spoilers as i didnt want other parts of the game spoiled)

Sounds like a very easy GOTY then.

@somnambulance @UnlimitedSevens
Your posts made me look back and see what games i have purchased this year, and its pretty dire:

Full price:
Astro (pre ordered) - so looking forwards to this.
WWE 2k24 - I only bought this years at all because, after Bray Wyatts passing last year, they put 3 of his major characters in the game, so it was a bit of an impulse buy.
Stellar Blade - Ok, not fantastic, but good. (Technically Excellent).

Sale:
SF6 after they added Akuma who is my longstanding favourite, but i waited for character release and sale due to how he was handled (along with others) in SF5. Enjoyed World Tour.
Rise of the Ronin - Only after performance patches and demo, even then its just on my tolerance limit for performance, but im enjoying it.

And thats it 5 games (1 of which is not quite out). I also played Immortals of Aveum after they updated with the frame gen patch, which i got for nothing as i added it to my library a month or so before when it was free with PS+ (having seen they were planning the patch). I probably would have bought last year, maybe at full price, if not for the bad performance which made me skip it.

I tried the demo for DD2, liked the game, couldnt stand the performance so skipped - same story as FF16 last year.

I couldnt get exited for star wars outlaws, but did watch a few performance reviews of it.

BMW - im torn on this one, and really want to see a demo - the frame gen may work but is so extreme, and i dont intend to take a punt on a game i dont think was programmed with PS5 in mind. It does look fun though.

Bad performance at launch, combined with early sales is going to kill full price purchases.
But I certainly agree that these devs (Sony included) need to pivot away from chasing the GaaS (or similar) model quickly before they alienate long term gamers.
Sony particularly need to remember that some only buy their consoles due to their big single player exclusives and they are risking a lot in the long term - if it hadnt been for 60fps this generation, and their AAA single player games being exclusive, i may well have defected to PC.
GTA6 may be a big disappointment next year - i fear it will be a slideshow on anything but PC and maybe PS5 Pro, and i still think it may include microtransactions or subscription requirements.

Anyway, Happy Astrobot Day Tomorrow!!

@Bentleyma
I havent - the various performance reviews were enough to see that this game needs work before i would be prepared to buy it. The 60fps mode image quality did not look good (and im accounting for the fact that even 4k videos look worse than when you actually have it on screen), and the framerate drops are well, well, beyond what i can usually see and tolerate.
They should remove ray tracing like Jedi Survivor, which should enable them to lock to 60fps, with a res boost.

He may mention metacritic and say players like it but it doesnt look like that from the PS Store star rating to me - 3.96, which feels comparatively quite low, with nearly 1/5 (19%) of players giving it 1 or 2 stars.

The game doesnt perform well, and visual quality looks bad too - another game where performance and visual quality were sacrificed to the god of ray tracing?

@Paulbuck28 @riceNpea @Rob_230

The haunted shop mission "minding your own business" was a PS exclusive.

DLC - There was a Dark Arts pack (which was very fairly priced if i remember, and included in the deluxe version) which contained a few cosmetics, 2 animal mounts that could also be used in vivariums (though I think these were also more widely available and the hippogriff certainly is now), and most prominently the Dark arts battle arena. This enables you to do an arena battle fairly early on using all 3 Curses (Crucio, Imperio, Avada Kedavra), in their basic forms, way before you get chance to unlock. It does not unlock the spells early, and you can only use the spells in the arena until you unlock them normally - The way your character behaves, its like the arena acts as some sort of vision. The arena is located in the southern tip of the forbidden forest.

Other than that there were a few cosmetics that were available for following Twitch streams or the like (im not social media minded), but some(/all) of these have now been added in for everyone, and a few cosmetics if you linked a Fan club account.

The house specific missions (1 per house) were not dlc, but were locked to the house you chose, and take place as part of the main story.

@riceNpea if this works its a star before and after the word.

Having loved the original, with multiple playthroughs, I would happily buy a sequel even if it added very little in terms of new features - in fact, the less they change, the better.
If they go live service, or mess with the core gameplay / engine too much, im out.

Best case scenario would be GOWR compared to GOW 2018, or SM2 compared to the original.

@somnambulance
Im in the category of 8-12 games per year - if there are the games out there that im interested in, but as you say, and i completely agree with you that those games just dont seem to be there in the same numbers over the last few years.

I would however say that poor performance or sub 60fps has been a much bigger factor in me not buying a game at launch / full price over the last year or so.
In addition, but somewhat less important, games that look "muddy" due to too many effects (particularly ray tracing) but too low res.
There are several games i either didnt buy, or bought on sale after suitable performance patches, for these reasons alone; and apart from 1st party Sony i have stopped pre ordering games for these reasons unless i have played a demo (eg lies of P).

@Jayofmaya
No probs - Pushsquares guide helped - a couple are very "unconventional" solutions.

@riceNpea
(re the talking style) - i read this earlier and didnt notice, but you are so right (no pun intended).

@Fiendish-Beaver
Even though i think the xbox delay is more to do with dev time / sales priorities, its an interesting point you raise - the longer this carries on the worse it looks for xbox.

Maybe in a few days Sony can release a statement of "We have no exclusivity deal in place with GS for BMW. In addition, we would prefer not to comment on whether user base or Series S scaleability have in any way caused this delay".

@Kienda
Given this games performance (and what was used to get there) on PS5, we probably have nothing to gloat over....

Unless I see concrete proof, i will remain of the opinion (formed purely by the lack of Sony / GS marketing as exclusive) that the reason is:

• comparatively low sales of Xbox (compared with PS5).
• the gamepass effect causing Xbox owners not to buy full price games.
• the need to code 2 versions s/x instead of 1.
• therefore their focus on getting PS5 version launched and making money.

I think we are likely to see this FAR more in the next few years.

I think that after Concord, it doesnt matter at all how good/bad it is - it will be labelled as the 'Next Concord', from a company that is 'not listening to people or they would have cancelled it'.

The only way it doesnt fail horribly on release is if it comes around a time when Sony release a couple of amazing AAA single players, with others already announced.

Im surprised that over the years of this being an issue publishers/Sony havent worked out a way to stop early copies being played... (well, except review copies of course!)

@Jayofmaya
I may have misunderstood, but all four of the 'dlc' secret bots are out for playroom - i collected them Sunday night.
Suggest "check for update" to force it through.

@Ilyn
Dizzy really was eggcellent... (oh dear..)

@Fiendish-Beaver
You more or less covered it in your last comment (#50), but what happens when this AI and its robots, which serves and provides for us, just decides that we are no longer needed, and reclassifies the human race from "masters" to "vermin".
(Im sure there was a popular series of films about that).

AI should be used sparingly and as a tool by people (and certainly not to manipulate people).
The trouble is that over cost cutting will lead to abuses of the technology, which will negatively affect certain areas to such an extent that people in general will wish for decades to come that we could go back to a pre AI situation.
Voice acting could be one of those and I somewhat agree with @StrickenBiged when he commented about games of the future advertising "recorded with real voice over".

AI can be used in positive ways too, but I fear there are just as many ways to abuse it as there are positive ways to use it.
We need to ask what is more prevalent in the games industry - the desire to make good games, or the desire to make money.

@riceNpea
Total freedom of speech is not a good thing either - no one should have the right to a freedom to bully, or a freedom to encourage/manipulate others in order to cause harm to another person or persons.
Total freedom of speech is not the answer, neither is total censorship, but a happy medium is not the easiest thing to achieve.

In the case if AI, I think the same thing applies, and it needs to be used carefully.

Series S is a good thing, as it keeps game developers ridiculous ambitions for this gen of consoles in check - PS5 and series X (not to mention a huge number of less powerful PC's) are Nowhere near powerful enough to do what some devs want - unless what you want to see is Pixel porridge as a slideshow!

Will PS5 hold back this gen once PRO is released?

@B0udoir
I commented way back at the 1st trailer that i thought they missed a big trick -
As the playstation ships join formation, the "flagship" should have been revealed to be the PS5 PRO, and astro could have hopped on board...
Either that or the PS5 crashed in the desert could have been rebuilt into a PRO.

(Can you imagine how it would have boosted views and interest!)

Spoiler Warning: GOTY

(Well, i hope so at least)

I genuinely think Sony are hoping now to divert attention away from this with Astro launching this week.

After Jim Ryan left Sony (+ 1 more exec deeply involved in the GaaS push if i remember right), i wonder if those that took over arranged the release dates of this and Astro accordingly. Then it gives them a distraction to work out all the many things they did wrong, and work out what they are going to do.

Also bare in mind this game was being used by JR's Sony as their 'Poster Child' for GaaS - so fans upset by this direction used this game as a target too.

I really hope this sells more than well. The care and attention that appears to have gone into it deserves it. Technicals look good too.

Hopefully all those that 'voted with their wallets' by not buying the GaaS concord, will 'vote' with them again this time and buy it!

@tselliot
They have been added at some point after launch - i played it through twice in the early PS5 days and the messages about the bots werent there then.

Thanks for the pre warning and guide, ill jump back in a collect them tomorrow!

I definitely dont think consoles will die out, but i can see them losing an awful lot of users to PC over the years to come particularly if :

1) games continue to come out with poor or sub 60fps performance, or muddy images through low res, due to devs pushing the hardware too far. This will push those that can afford a PC towards PC just to get a decent experience.

2) Console exclusives remain the best way to keep players who are thinking of switching to PC on console, but even Sony are showing signs that they will eventually port all theirs to PC.

I keep hearing that people wont abandon consoles to go to PC due to price and convenience, yet I read lots of comments of people already doing so, and know quite a few considering it as this gen draws to a close.