Ricky63

One of these days Sony execs are going to realise just how much unmonetised post-launch content Polyphony put out for their games and seek to change that.

Let us all hope that's not before GT8 comes out.

@TrickyDicky99 That's not how first party works and it never has been.

Smash Bros is absolutely a first party Nintendo game despite not being made by a Nintendo-owned studio.

Microsoft Flight Simulator is absolutely a first party Microsoft game despite not being made by a Microsoft-owned studio.

Rise of the Ronin and Helldivers (and Returnal, and Spider-Man 1) are exactly the same thing - IP owned by Sony, development contracted out, is a first party game,

@BlueLobster It won't be day 1, we'd know by now if GT was getting updated this week (car silhouettes would have been posted, maintenance would have been announced).

Expect it on the 21st or the 28th to keep to Polyphony's usual update cadence.

On the fighting game question: Genuinely, they just take the party select screen for the final boss of Cold Steel IV and make that a fighting game, it already basically looks like a fighting game character select screen.

I'd give it an 8, personally.

Very fun game, but I can't say it's a particularly memorable one either, the epitome of very-good-not-great IMO.

Plus I personally don't like type of level design of "this is the rain level, and now this is the snow level, and now this is the sand level" with zero interconnectivity that it went for.

@LordFunkalot It does, yes. The in-race selection is, to be charitable to it, quirky.

You know how in GT7 there's that page that lists all the cars you have and gives you their real life history when you click on them?

I hope Astro has the PlayStation version of that for these cameos.

Quite a few of the first-party games Microsoft showed were announced in 2020, and still don't have release dates other than "2025". The main reason Sony don't have anything to show to match Fable/Perfect Dark/Avowed is because they already released their games that first got announced at the same time (Forbidden West, Gran Turismo, God of War).

That's not to say Sony shouldn't have more to show, but I'd rather have the games already have come out rather than waiting five years for them.

The comparison to 2016 doesn't really make sense to me - in hindsight Shenmue 3 and The Last Guardian weren't anything to get excited about, and FF7 took four more years to come out. That seems like not the model to want to copy.

"KT Racing wants you to fall in love with just a couple of the cars on the release's roster rather than amassing the entire collection."

This worries me a little bit, "built not bought" was also a big part of the marketing for Forza Motorsport 2023 and it categorically did not work at all in that game. Let's hope TDU goes about that better than Turn 10 did.

I don't get why people only care about games that have a specific logo at the start.

Unless you're doing console list warring online somewhere, does it really matter who's making the great games as long as they exist and are playable?

I have to admit, as someone who really likes Trails, I'm not sure I have it in me to start again with this and invest in a new arc - it's a combination of all the characters I was invested in having got their endings, not having all the free time that these games need, and the denseness of text and lack of VA in the Crossbell games made them a bit of a struggle to get through and kind of gave me Trails burnout.

I'm sure I'll get it at some point though.

@Korgon It's not even that they didn't get credit, it's just that a static multiplayer mode that doesn't refresh and update itself constantly, no matter how well-made, doesn't seem to be able to hold a playerbase nowadays.

There's tons of these anime tie-in adventure games that never leave Japan, I have to wonder why they decided to localise these in particular?

Are there good games coming out? Yes, seemingly in droves. And that should be the only thing that matters, games don't suddenly not count because they don't have a specific logo on the corner of the box.

@Maubari I could see Forza Motorsport happening, it bombed badly at retail at launch but it's a good candidate for a soft re-launch to recoup some money now Turn 10 have quietly patched it into a best-in-class sim. A PS5 launch would be a good platform for that.

Forza Horizon isn't happening though, you're right.

@Stickleman 40,000 people have put in a qualifying time for daily race B this week so far (can't check C since they wiped the leaderboards today). 186,000 people did last week's time trial.

Game's definitely got an very active online population.

I look forward to reading all the arguments in various forums about whether this is an appropriate place to start the series vs Sky FC or Cold Steel I.

(the correct answer is "play the games you're interested in first, don't force yourself through ones you aren't")

@DrVenture69 They're changing those to update on Fridays now. Assumption is so they can use new update content in them immediately instead of having to wait a week to showcase it.

This is cool.

Between this and Trails though, I do kind of want to see what Falcom could do with a clean slate game that doesn't have double-digit previous games in the series they have to honour.

Infinite Wealth fell off a cliff - feels like a enthusiast game where everyone who wants it will have bought it day 1.

@Theaussiegamer92 Someone tallied this a little while ago. Number of events by game:

GT4: 511
GT3: 337
GTS: 301
GT7: 236
GT2: 228
GT6: 201
GT5: 141
GT1: 59

This update seems to have stirred up a ton of backlash online from people who don't like these cars and generally just want more racing cars in the game. Polyphony may have mis-stepped and lost some playerbase here.

Obviously these games are very good at pitching themselves to the target market, but the bigger thing to remember is these MP social experiences are as much replacing "hanging out at the park" as they are replacing traditional game mindshare - it's how many kids socialise with their friends out of school hours nowadays.

No matter how good a given single-player game is, it won't be able to replicate that social aspect, hence why they're less interesting to children who want to interact with their friends.

Seeing The Crew outsell Forza is a surprise.

Given both GT and Forza's seeming underperformance with their newest entries, I do wonder if both first parties might pivot their racing studios away from the "simcade" racing genre that seems to be dying out, and focus more on arcade-style racers.

Sony, right now, have five premium AAA developers in ND, SSM, GG, Sucker Punch and Insomniac. Housemarque might also get up there but I think we need one more game from them first. But I think, ND recent issues aside, they aren't the issue, the massive games have been coming out pretty consistently.

It's the smaller studios not filling in the gaps around the tentpoles. You have Asobi, Bend, Bluepoint, London, MM, Polyphony, none of which are big AAA devs who are going to win any awards but all of which should be able to put out smaller titles to complement the big releases, and that's what's not really happening this gen and making the schedule look thin.

I know it's 99% the Gamepass effect, but seeing the new Forza not even crack the top 10 in the UK (a market that disproportionately loves sim racing) is still astonishing to me.

@Grumblevolcano I'm not convinced they'll port GT, at least not for a while, since it's still getting content updates so they'd have to keep the port in active dev. I think every PC port so far has been a finished product?

Notable that there's no GT7 there, I wonder why they wouldn't offer specifically that when pretty much every other PS5 game under PS Studios is available.