Richnj

@Marquez No, gross revenue was $400m

https://www.thathashtagshow.com/2020/12/22/alleged-twitter-leak-god-of-war-made-half-a-billion-horizon-zero-dawn-made-400-million/

Which was 8 million sales, and of which, 35% was digital, meaning less built in costs for Sony, a platform holder, to pay out. I picked $300m because it's minus the $100m it cost to make and advertise.

@Marquez "Negligible load times due to the ultra fast SSD
...and almost certainly, a smaller install size versus the PS4 version."

I thought these were inherent benfits of an SSD, not something that requires extra time and money to impliment.

"All of these improvements requires man hours that need to be paid for."

At an estimated profit of $300m, I think HZD covered these extras. You argue that extra cost is required as if these games have a thin profit pargin. I expect HFW to have massive profits too, without the extra charge.

@naruball Yore right, AAA shouldn't affect AA. I think AA is collateral damage for that AAA graphical arms race.

But it's also why, despite being a heavy critic of 343i and even Halo Infinite, I didn't criticise the graphics when it was shown off. It's why I don't pay much attention to review scores, and especially not the random number dropped at the end. It's also why I have been arguing against Metroid Dread being a full price release. I personally recognise not all games are not made equal, and we should be more informed in what we are buying.

I'm not sure how to change how reviewers operate. I only know to be mindful when I do read a review, and to continue to downplay the importance of scores when one is "problematic".

@naruball "If you read any reviews of AA (or even AAA) games, you'll see how unforgiving reviewers are over graphics"

I'd have more sympathy if it weren't publishers and gamers who created that situation.

Publishers, Sony especially, have been using graphics as a primary selling point for decades. And gamers, both hardcore and casual, have very superficial standards when it comes to how they judge games. On this very site, a gameplay teaser was shown. The game was pretty standard in terms of gameplay, but had really beautiful, high standard of detail, and of course people automatically jumped to calling it a masterpiece and Goty. So I'm not surprised that reviewers have this stupidly high standard to what devs and gamers expect.

Likewise though, publishers and gamers have the ability to not participate in the graphical Arms race.

Nintendo obviously do not do so, and have still done well and made great games regardless.

MS kinda haven't, when you consider the Series S and their streaming service. I don't think the series X was at all necessary but they did it because they could. Even in terms of MS games, not many achieve, or even try to achieve, a ridiculous standard of graphical fidelity. And Pyschonauts 2 has proven it's not needed.

Sony didn't need to make the PS5 powerful. They'd obviously catch a lot of flack because they've billed their last two generations as being the most powerful, so they have most definitely trained their fanbase to expect it, but honestly, as long as it was marketed as a positive change, and apart from the "vocal minority", people wouldn't complain and they'd still be brand loyal to playstation, and they'd still buy it, and they'd still praise it's single player experiences as being unbeatable (and given the aforementioned Pyschonauts, and dozens of Switch games, I'd expect reviewers would too).

@Col_McCafferty "Not many on here wanted people to pay twice, rather they just said it's your choice if you want to play it so bad you'll get it on PS4 anyway or wait until you have a PS5 before purchasing the game."

Kinda feels like the same thing, especially when FOMO and console shortages are a thing.

I've been a long advocate for not buying games within the first year of launch, but having a multi billion dollar company spend millions on advertising their brand new console, and their brand new game, then telling people who have been unfortunate enough to not be able to buy the console that "you can get our new game on the console you have, but if you then are lucky enough to get our new console, well, you'll also have to rebuy that brand new game we just spent millions trying to get you to buy at launch" seems a little sketchy, and dare I say, exploitative.

@nessisonett Alan Dlocked Country.

I don't know how this game works.

For everyone else who wanted fans to pay double, please make sure you send an extra $80, or whatever it was, directly to Sony, lest you be a hypocrite.

Oh god, yes. This is a great game. Loved it back on the 360. Highly recommend to new players.

Well the industry are the ones to blame. Sony especially have a major hand in this.

They have been pushing visuals and using those to sell games, requiring more work and more money to have the prettiest, jaw dropping game, to impress their audience, then having the audience expect more and more each time.

This is a problem of their own creation and the entire industry will have to reckon with it. While "AAA" publishers are releasing buggy or outright broken $100m games made by hundreds of people, you have indie devs out there delivering quality experiences for less than a 1% of that cost.

And if those too-big-to-fail games do fail, you have companies going bust and people being ejected from jobs. Coupled with the high expectation of work, long hours, and potential abuse (or just general poor atmosphere), and a general lack of individual creativity in a creative industry (because one person can not have much room to be creative when your work is tied to hundreds of others), you have an industry full of anxiety.

Oh, and shareholders who expect ever increasing profits.

And we've had major publishers go bust. Others (and smaller devs) are all being bought up. The real question will be: which is going to be the next major publisher that either crumbles under its own weight, or restructures to have smaller teams.

Note: if you want a case study, have a look at Irrational Games. After releasing Bioshock 1 and Infinite, the director, Ken Levine just couldn't take the personal strain of maintaining that level of development anymore, so restructures the studio to be smaller.

So we have people saying vote with your wallet and calling "complainers" entitled.

And look, I think these people are right. You should all vote with your wallets by buying an xbox and being entitled to free upgrades and paying a cheap subscription to access games.

Leave Sony with nothing but their loyalist of fans.

@SJBUK I didn't see anybody calling Sony the anti-christ. All I saw was people saying they didn't like it, which you are saying people should do.

It seems like you tried to exaggerate the backlash so that you could appear to be the one who's being reasonable.

@AdamNovice As bad as 343i are for not completing their game before selling it, Sony charging fans double for Horizon is worse.

The co-op and forge will be added for free later on. The PS5 update won't come for free later (unless the backlash hits them).

(Though honestly, I'm not supporting either with my money as things stand.)

Physical version complaints: I totally get wanting a physical version, I wish having playable, worth while physical editions was still a thing, but ever since the xbone and the PS4, physical versions have been worth squat. The fact that physical is still subject to full game installation, playing off of the HDD and having to update, means there's very little reason to want a physical version except to put it on your shelf.

Worst version complaint: Yeah. That's always been a thing. If this was really a concern for you, you'd have a pc and buy all games there. PS3 recieved plenty of worst versions. Only they were near unplayable.

You can be put off by this being an xbox game on a PS console, just be honest about it.

@Arnna hence the aforementioned subgenres of horror.

@Arnna yes it did. There's different subgenres of horror, and any product that contains elements of horror can be classified as a horror.

For instance. Shaun of the Dead is classed as a horror comedy. I'd argue Aliens is much scarier than Shaun of the Dead, but both contain horror tropes, so both are horrors.

and I repeat, PSA:

Alien = slow burn horror
Aliens = action horror

"But there's always something at the back of your mind when you're mulching bugs with shoulder-mounted rockets and electrifying sentry guns — this is supposed to be an Alien game."

No it's not.

Yeah, well maybe this could have been done on PS3 and PS4, but flying mechanics and lip syncing certainly couldn't /s

@Voltan The first game was/is really cheap, so if you have an xbox or just an xbox account, go grab it while you can.

Edit: it still is £0.91 for 1 more day.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/p/psychonauts/c5hhpg1txdng?activetab=pivot:overviewtab

I prefer this franchise over GTA.

Even enjoyed 4 and Gat, they just shouldn't have made 4 a main line title. They work much better as a sub series.

A reboot is definitely needed, and 4 player co-op would be nice.

Charging for DLC: OK
Charging for upgrade: Not OK.

So no one is going to talk about that critical hit at 4:10?

I did say that with such a small team, this game had the chance to be a success because it would have had low costs, but selling so many units as well is surely going to make THQ consider a sequel.

The dev team must be really happy their work paid off.

@AFCC "imo"

I think that part is the key here though.

I think the people calling Halo a masterpiece do, in their opinion, think it's a masterpiece.

And there's plenty of parts of MSG1 that aged poorly.

@AFCC Well what games are you categorising as masterpieces?

@get2sammyb Yeah, I appreciate there's a difference. To me though, cheating is cheating.

Kinda puts a spanner in the argument for the people arguing that they hate crossplay because of PC cheaters.

@AFCC The original Halo trilogy are some of the best rated and most played games of their day. Unless you are using some arbitrary metric to class games as "masterpieces" (which in all honesty, is a pretty much the only way people use that term) then I think the original trilogy class as masterpieces.

You know like how the Switch OLED was super disappointing compared to the Switch Pro everyone had built the project up to be?

This is gonna the game version of that.

"which will never happen in our game"

Then it turns out they've moved all MTXs to an outside website that gives you tokens to open lootboxes inside the game.

Genuis.

Y2K on Internet explorer finally hit.

Step 1) Abuse staff causing talent issues.
Step 2) Use interns to make COD clone.
Step 3) Profit.

Not played it yet. Solid 8/10 masterpiece.

@zekepliskin "perhaps in an attempt to try and shut down a point of view you don't agree with?"

No.

This entire conversation came from a comment claiming (whether it was joking or not, I can't remember at this point) that the lower left stick position was the correct one. I countered by pointing out that the PS design comes from a pad designed for 2D games, and that the asymmetrical design came from a controller designed with 3D in mind. I made no comment of which is best, nor did I comment on what people should prefer.

I never dismissed people's preferences. I was only commenting the "correctness" of stick positions, and you took offense to that.

@zekepliskin Right, but injecting personal preference in to these kinds of conversations is pointless overall.

I could argue I personally like playing with pads upside down and backwards, but it doesn't speak to the design philosophy of the controllers I do that to.

@zekepliskin "Whether or not they take that into consideration at the design stage is kinda irrelevant"

In a conversation about controller layouts, where companies spend thousands of dollars and hours trying different layouts, shapes, and positioning, and all of these will be tested with a standard grip, it's not.

It's nice that it works for you, but the fact the pad works for the crab claw is a happy accident.

@JapaneseSonic @zekepliskin I too, am curious about this.

Are you crab clawing it?

That's not a technique that's taken in to consideration when designing a pad.

@Kidfried By this logic, the Wii U pro controller, with its symmetrical sticks, was perfectly designed.

The issue is that even with 3D games, the face buttons are still extremely important to the game. I think this is why Nintendo ditched the top sticks and went with asymmetrical with the Switch Pro. The primary left stick design is perfect for Mario and Zelda games, where the focus is on 3D movement and face button controls.

Even in FPS games, you spend a lot of time pressing the face buttons. You can spend half your time swapping between right stick and face buttons while you swap weapon, reload, jump, crouch. The D-Pad doesn't see nearly the same amount of action. So placing the face buttons in the secondary position felt extremely weird, to everyone.

@fR_eeBritney the symmetrical layout is designed to have the D-Pad in the primary position. Unless you are playing 2D games, the asymmetrical layout is the correct position.

@Northern_munkey @Nepp67

I've been a long advocate for publishers waiting until their game is 6 months from completion before they announce their projects.

But, what's happening is the devs and publishers are agreeing on deadlines before the project is funded. This needs to happen because of the risk of development hell, but then the publisher (who are also the ones in charge of marketing and selling the game being made for them now) are eager to announce new projects because it increases their shareprices, or in the case of Deathloop and Ghostwire, were probably part of their timed excluisivity deal with Sony, where the two games needed to be advertised to promote the PS5 system.

In short, there's money reasons why publishers do dumb stuff.

@AdamNovice it's ironic that the intentional cringe was less cringe.

Well would you look at that, even Hideo agrees with me.

Money well spent?

Also, I'm throwing my hat in early that Pushsquare give it a 7/10

@Retro1994 Director's cut isn't a fancy word for ultimate edition. Using it as such diminishes the meaning.

@Thelegend159 I know, but back then Capcom couldn't have pushed an update through to the Internet to enable that feature. A re-release was the only option for that.

All that sounds like stuff that could have been added to the existing version for free.

Director's cuts use to make sense since it was a second shot at delivering the experience the director wanted but couldn't. But in a world of live service and constant updates, what's the point?

If the game isn't what you wanted at launch, fix it post launch. That has been the mentality up until now. But I guess no one would be stupid enough to pay for an update though, right?

From the original PS5 reveal, I've been saying how unintutitive the disc drive position is.

@playstation1995 But what if the game you do get is actually really fun and worth every penny?

I have literally been snapping up Bethesda and MS games on PS so that I can enjoy the ones that are there. Doom Eternal Deluxe has just dropped to £26 and I'm really tempted to pick it up and blast through the entire series on the console.

There's somethingwrong about not being able to enjoy an experience because other titles, even none existent ones, are not going to be available on the same console.

I let my psn plus run out last month. My only real concern is losing cloud saves.

Also, everybody picking the 6/10 over the 9/10. It warms my heart.

@Divergent95 I enjoyed this exchange. The sudden "well you're clearly an xbox Fanboy" had me rolling.

A Plague Tale 6/10

"developed a cult following"

Cod Blops 4 9/10

"opinions have altered"

It's ***** like this that makes me think reviewers try to score games based on expectations of the gaming community, even if its unintentionally, rather than any sort of justifiable merit.

The fact that it didn't show off that it was 3D made me think it wasn't 3D.

If I was going to create a 2D logo, I wouldn't use a 3D model.