StrickenBiged

@AdamNovice I dunno about ugly, but there seems to be a lack of artistic style to them. The devs have gone for realism, and I think they’ve landed in the uncanny valley. Compare to OW, which love or hate the game, at least all the characters look cool and are immediately readable in-game. Maybe it’d take more time with Concord but when I tried the beta it was quite hard to tell many of the humanoid characters apart at a distance.

I grew up in countries around the Arabian Gulf. It'll be great to see what they can put out.

It's going to be everything, in time. The logic of releasing any one game multi-platform applies equally to all of their 'exclusives'. You've got to imagine that if they released Halo: MCC on PS5 they'd sell 10m copies in the first week easily. Same for the original Gears trilogy. That's money they won't want to leave on the table forever.

I'd wager that they just don't want to blow their load and announce that all at once because of the effect it would have on brand image. Plus their games would be competing with themselves on PlayStation if they ported them all at once.

I don't think I can put off Inscryption any longer at that price.

I had a massive 2TB HDD with a 250GB SSD layer for recently accessed data in my PS4, and that felt necessary.

With the PS5 though I've been more than happy with the standard storage. I delete games once I'm done with them and the option to delete and download games via the PS App on my phone means that I can set things in motion during the day if I fancy playing something in particular that evening. The generally far smaller file sizes on PS5 mean that I've never felt that the eight-hundred and whatever it is GB they give you as standard has never felt too small to me.

I'm the type of player that likes to finish a game and move on though. If you flit between games and want everything available all the time I can see how it might not work for you.

Objectively, I went with good, as there’s a decent variety of things shown off. But very little for me personally. I might take a closer look at Civ 7, I haven’t played a Civ game since Civ 4.

Don't sleep on Pentiment, it's cracking. It's very story-heavy and gameplay-lite, but boy what a good story it was.

Sounds fun. Finally doing a 100% run by saving all the survivors was the work of a week or so during a hot summer when I was a teenager, and remains one of my prouder Xbox Achievements. I'll be glad to grab the replacement trophy in due course.

The game is rated 18 by PEGI and M by the ESRB. Let adults make their own decisions, I say. This is a work of fiction/fantasy/whatever.

I suppose the change is minor - presumably you can still take the naughty pictures you just wont be rewarded with PP, right? - so it doesn't make that much of a difference. On that basis, I voted "don't really care".

All I read about is how the community is toxic, yet every time I play the game I am matched up with people that just get on with the mission, don't give a monkeys what you're diving in with or what's meta, communicate (even if just using pings), and work together to extract with the samples.

I think the opinions of a few vocal people are being blown out of all proportion, personally.

And don't necessarily look at the number of concurrent players for an idea of how popular the game is. Daily active users may have become weekly or monthly active users. How many people are playing at any one time is potentially misleading. And I bet Arrowhead and Sony are delighted with the number of players the game has retained. If you'd asked them on the eve of launch how many units they hoped to sell and how big they expected the player base to end up, I'd wager that it's a hell of a lot smaller than where the game has landed.

Moving further and further from what I want out of DA (which is essentially that they go back to DA:O). Oh well, there's plenty to play.

@TedLassoNikes Yep, bought it from Sony directly instead. My guess is Currys sold out.

@GLightning98 Yeah, I've been on to their customer service. You having the same "Please select a delivery time that suits you" but it's not actually displaying any delivery options issue that isn't letting you progress through the checkout?

The customer service person says he has raised it and just to wait. Might get bored and pay the extra £10 to nab one elsewhere at this rate.

Great news. I'm in.

"how locked in the community the community remains"

Whoopsie daisy yourself editor!

These live service games are like playing at a high stakes table. You put down a big bet, and most likely it's gone.

I think the problem is that when all these projects were greenlit, executives didn't appreciate how hard it would be to peel people away from the live service games they were already playing and enjoying. In the interim, those games have also re-invested in themselves, broadening their appeal, and players have become invested (closets full of Fortnite skins, and whatever else they buy, etc).

That and some of the ideas we've seen for live services have been god awful. Should've done better market research.

Halfling needs to be more popular, especially if you're playing a stealthy build. Advantage on stealth checks is OP when I'm getting into position to snipe mobs and bosses.

I'll be waiting for the PS5 Pro before I pick this up, not because I want the extra power, but because I've promised my PS5 to my best mate and fellow Warhammer nerd when I upgrade, and we're gonna play the bejeezuz out of this together.

Anecdotally, I hear that the new College Football game is selling PS5s in the USA. If that series was your thing, you've been happily playing a PS3/360 generation game this whole time, with no reason to upgrade even to last gen. I dunno if Sony's Q1 covers July, but we might see a bump for the launch of College Football 25.

Trying to stay on topic; that animated short is not entertaining me in the slightest. I know it's been said to death, but compare this to the characterisation in any one of Overwatch's animated shorts from 2016. It's like the team is trying to emulate something without really understanding why it was popular.

Less than 35% of players (on PS4) completed the final chapter of Remake, according to the trophy data, so unless those that didn't finish it want to skip the rest of the story and go straight to Rebirth I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't selling as well.

There's probably more people like me about who are waiting for them to complete the remake in its entirety before they jump in too.

@riceNpea I'm decidedly not suggesting multi-verse. I'm suggesting time-manipulation. In a decent writer's hands that could work for adapting a game like this where the fun comes from seeing the different ripple effects of your choices. I'm sure someone smarter than me could find a way to do it intelligently, like how Cabin in the Woods cleverly messed with the audience's expectations. There'd be no need for McGuffins or Deus Ex Machina either, because the protagonist could learn through trial and error and application of intelligence!

Do we know if the movie is telling a particular through-line from the game, or is that just an assumption that everyone is making? It strikes me that they could borrow the conceit of the Butterfly Effect movies and give one of the characters the ability to do-over their decisions, leading to progressively worse and worse outcomes.

Never played a SH game (unless you count P.T.) so I'm curious, but I'll be waiting for reviews.

My nephew will love Star Wars when he visits. Not bothered by FNaF, but I'll add it to my library. Ender Lillies might actually get played by me, once I've made headway with the backlog... so probably 2026 or so.

No complaints from me. Elden Ring outstayed its welcome after Leyndell, IMO. And too many bosses were re-used and too many dungeons had rewards that were useless to my build. I enjoyed my first playthrough but bounced off a second once I realised that I was making a beeline for the items I wanted for my build and, actually, without the sense of discovery it wasn't that interesting.
I'd much rather see them go back towards something like Sekiro.

Nice. I was searching for this on PSN just last week after hearing good things, and was disappointed not to find a listing. Hopefully a release date is announced soon.

Really interested to see how they handle S2 of the show.
I enjoyed TLoU: Part II a lot, but was a bit disappointed with some parts of the story, which I felt relied too heavily on plot contrivances and some characters acting out of character to get to where it needed to go. I get it, Game Dev is hard and for all we know there's a level left on the cutting room floor that would have explained some of those decisions by the characters involved. I'm hoping some of these inconsistencies in the writing are addressed in the show.

It would have been handy to have had these (and similar for all other characters) before I wasted time on the Beta a couple of weekends ago. 1. I might not have bothered at all. 2. I might have had a clue what everyone's kit was supposed to do before jumping into matches.

I quite like the art in that picture, personally. At least, it's got tonnes more character than Concord.

Curious what you'd get from mashing up those genres... sounds to me like a platformer with fighting-game style one-v-one combat, with Moba-style multiplayer missions, and some downtime between missions to do life-sim stuff with your roster of characters. No idea what to make of 'frog-type' though.

Anyway, it sounds somewhat original, which is encouraging.

Hindsight is always 20:20. At the time, I think the acquisition of Bungie made sense. They looked to all the world like they had the live-service game figured out with a very popular franchise that had multiple tiers of recurrent spending, and the technical chops when it came to developing FPS games, which Sony's other studios were not working on at the time.
What I think did for Bungie was the boneheaded decision to lock older expansions away and make them unplayable. This killed most interest from people who hadn't made a start on the franchise yet - would you jump into a TV show at the latest season, or want to start it from the beginning? - and meant that their audience shrank from expansion to expansion as the people dropping off outnumbered the people joining in.

Wait a second... The numbers imply that Bungie had around 1,300 staff... that seems insanely bloated - are there any other developers that big?

Deciding to send Destiny 2 content to the Vault or Archive or whatever they called it killed any interest I could have had in the game, and I am sure I am not alone in saying that. I wouldn't jump into a long-running TV show at season 4, I'd want to watch it from the start, and similarly there was no way I'd be jumping into Destiny 2 only to play the latest expansions without the prior context. They should have found a way to keep older seasons available and, who knows, I might have booted up Destiny 2 at some point (thanks PS+ essential for making the base app available anyway).
I hope the Destiny talent is distributed around SIE's other studios sensibly though. Sending some to Firewalk might not be a bad idea, I have a feeling based on playing the beta that Concord is going to need some serious help, and a big 2.0 revamp and associated marketing push, to make any appreciable impact. Good on Sony for trying to save what jobs it can, at least.

The industry is harsh these days. Great games can come out and be entirely overlooked in the churn. That something as influential as Braid didn't manage to make waves might suggest a poor marketing strategy.
I picked up a copy because I loved the original Braid and while Blow has some weird views, I can respect him as a game dev and wanted to hear what he had to say in the commentary on the game. I'm yet to get really stuck into the Anniversary Edition, but looking forward to doing so once I've finished a few other things.

'Warner Bros notes in the press release there are “no plans for microtransactions at this time”'

"at this time" doing a lot of work there WB...

Unironically looks like it was built in Dreams.

@breakneck Agreed on all points.

What is "cold-weapon combat"?

Hopefully this presages a return to the PlayStation head-honchos being a bit more accessible than they have been in recent years.

“musical queues”
I think you mean “musical cues”.

"Concord is a brand-new franchise with a fresh set of characters"

I tried the Concord beta and I dispute the claim that it has characters. ;D

Then I won't give up on you, Capcom. Don't ever change. xxx

AC is historical fiction. I'm not going to say on behalf of the Japanese whether this is offensive or not. And it appears that there is a kernel of truth to the character of Yasuke on which they could base this character.

For myself, my test for whether something is offensive is to reverse the situation and ask myself how I'd feel about it then.

What do people think the reaction to this game would be if AC's first mainline game set in historical Africa had a Japanese protagonist?

@PloverNutter Oh, I'm fully aware that Bioware wanted to make Anthem - for better or for worse - I was referring more to EA likely being behind the decision to pull the plug rather than stick with it. I can't imagine the devs who put so much time in and presumably believed in what they had managed to make were keen to abandon it so quickly.

No Man's Sky and Fallout 76 both had massive launches though which gave those studios the capital to re-invest on improving the games. I'm not sure that the other titles enjoyed such launches (perhaps Anthem excepted, but EA doesn't earn the sh**tiest company award regularly for nothing).

I gave the beta a few hours of my time this weekend. I don’t like it. My problems:
1. Apparently no incentive not to quit a session and no option to join an ongoing session. People would just quit as soon as the opposing team pulled ahead, guaranteeing a loss. Hopefully that’s easily fixed by launch, but annoying for now.
2. No sandbox to try the characters out. I was picking characters on a pure guess as to what their kit would do, and then be a total liability to my team as I experimented.
3. I didn’t think the abilities gave enough feedback on what they were actually doing. Sometimes I’d get a direct hit with something and it was unclear whether the ability had done damage directly, or was applying a debuff causing my teammates to do more damage to the enemy, or… what? In comparable games I’ve played, it’s been much more obvious what your abilities were doing.
I wish Sony and firewalk well with this one, but not for me.

I’m old enough to remember the days when a Halo release was such a big event that it garnered international news coverage. MS had the budgets then. That’s massive exposure to new audiences.

Nice, I'm maxed out on Medals so I'll be able to unlock most of it from the moment it drops. Just need to farm myself a few more SC and I won't have to give Sony any £ either.

I don't like what OW has become but it has to be said that their character design is top notch. Juno has more character in her little finger than any of the roster in Concord.

@StonyKL I got the platinum by doing the water-limit trials on smaller challenges like vehicles (where the time trial is so short it's ridiculous) and the time trials on the location based levels (where, if you're efficient and go object by object, the time requirement is not bad at all).