StrickenBiged

I'll be all over Hi Fi Rush and Pentiment on day 1. I'll do my part to signal to Xbox that their good, single player games, can do well on PS.

"without damaging the full-price sales of its first-party games"
This is not true. PlayStation's projections are that it lost $85m in retail revenue by putting Horizon: Forbidden West on PS+ Extra last year.

The weird thing about what he said was that the logic of releasing the 4 games that they confirmed applies just as much, if not more so, to larger games that take more resources to develop. I don’t know how many people I speak for, but I’m very unlikely to ever buy an Xbox now that I have a hefty library of games on PSN. But I would buy Xbox games on PS. I doubt I’m alone, and the MS Eye of Sauron will one day turn towards me and gamers like me and wonder why we are not giving them money. It’s just a matter of time.

Thank god for that. Especially with weapons and gear appearing in the item shop. I don't care if there are such minor "pay to win" elements in a PvE game because if other people want to spend money to get items that can help me out when we squad together, that's great for me. (I can also 'accidentally' blow them up and loot the items from their corpse...)

The servers certainly seemed more stable last night. Matchmaking actually worked and I got a few missions in with some random people.

I've only just started Doing My Part for Democracy, but had a blast last night playing solo (due to the matchmaking issues). Hopefully will find some friends online tonight that aren't already all squadded up.

Oooh, yes, I’ll be there for Pentiment too if it comes across.

Whatever happens, I've just enjoyed the ride this last week. The memes have been wonderful, and all the business discussion/speculation has been really interesting.

Congrats to Arrowhead and PlayStation. I noted that even Amazon UK was sold out of physical copies and would be for two weeks. I had to pop into town and visit GAME of all places for the first time in a long time.

I’m looking forward to a few things like Hi Fi Rush and the chance to play Gears again.
I have to say though, if I was someone who was impressed by the recent developer direct and just bought an Xbox off the back of it, I’d be so pissed right now. I get the feeling out there.

@Angelus3K They'd make money, what more needs to be said? Hopefully they'll be free PS5 apps for those of us that bought them on PS4. I'd happily run through them again for some more trophies and the nostalgia.

When a piece of media is consumed by so many people, some tiny minority of them are going to be complete sh*tcakes, it's just a matter of statistics. The game sold over 10m copies, so even if we are being conservative and say that it was only some of the people who actually bought the game and that only 0.001% of those people are this sort of stalker psychopath (actual psychopathy has an estimated prevalence nearer ~0.1%), that's still 10,000 people.
I'm glad the authorities were able to provide some reassurance to the actress that those making the threats weren't nearby, but it must have been truly awful at what is supposed to be a happy time.

Win-win-win. Xbox basically becomes a publisher with a huge roster of top-tier developers in its portfolio. Sony gets a 30% rip on the games sold on its platform. PlayStation owners (and Switch where possible) get more games.
My only concern is if XBox ceased to make consoles altogether then Sony would have no real competition in the space of higher-powered home consoles, which might make it lazy and complacent of its customers.

That dummy has "Collector's Edition" written all over it.

I think it should be typed with capitals, "PHYSINT", as Kojima has done. In the world of espionage and intelligence, there is already HUMINT, SIGINT, OSINT, etc, to categorise intelligence according to the source, and they are always capitalised. So PHYSINT would make sense as an espionage-esque title, but "Physint" would not.

I doubt there will be a paid upgrade path on this one as the PS4 version was part of the PS+ collection and so a lot of people will have redeemed it as part of their subscription.

Interesting. I suspect that "INT" is a suffix. In intelligence work, HUMINT is intelligence gathered from human sources, SIGINT is intelligence gathered from signals, etc. I'm not aware that the intelligence services refer to PHYSINT at all, so maybe it's some sort of sci-fi thing, like referring to "intelligence gathered from physics" or something like that.

Looks like a decent month. Just what I want to see from PS+ Essential - games that I wouldn't buy but may get round to try.

Let's hope that the industry which couldn't sustain fewer games being made by more people in fewer studios can instead sustain more games being made by more studios, each with fewer people. Sincerely.

The Hogsmeade shop was a great mission, glad to see that other platforms will be able to get into it.
As for any more DLC, I'll probably jump in. I enjoyed the game a lot, but it lost some of its magic (snarf!) once I'd finished the story and side quests and was just mopping up repetitive activities for the platinum. Short jumps back in for some story DLC would be great, hopefully they don't litter the map with more unnecessary busy-work.

I prefer physical, even if the game is more expensive, but go digital when I have to, e.g. because there is no physical release. (Sometimes I go digital when I'd be stupid not to, like the cheap upgrade to TLoU2 vrs buying a new PS5 disc.) The lack of a physical release will stop me buying a game that I'm on the fence about. I tapped the "I only buy digital" option for now, but more because it was the least inaccurate option.
Digital has too many downsides for me, especially in the way Sony implements it, where your right of return ends once you begin the download, and you have no oversight on the item's listing as to the licensing terms Sony has agreed with the publisher. Will the game be available for download forevermore, or is there an expiry date on that? Maybe I'm old fashioned, but the games I love are more than ephemeral to me, and I like that ownership, the ability to lend them to friends who want to try something else out.

Do we know what these jobs are? At the start of the article they are "workers in the gaming division". By the end, they are a portion of the 6k "developers" being laid off since the start of the year. How do we know that all these 1,900 are "developers", and not HR, legal, corporate, miscellaneous admin staff, and so on?

He's not wrong, but I'd counter that interesting means different things to different people, and could even change over the course of a game. In S-M, I don't think I fast-travelled at all except to pop the trophy for taking the subway, swinging was just too much fun. RDR2 started off like that for me, but by the time I felt the story was starting to drag I did use it just to get to the next mission marker sooner.
Good to have fast travel as an option, and let players make up their minds. At least trying to make moving around your game's spaces interesting should be a minimum requirement.

People dunking on AI all the time is getting drole now. He clearly said "AI is something that can help improve **certain processes in game production**". That sounds to me like very boring things that happen behind the scenes. For example, with MS CoPilot, you could have a design meeting on Teams, have the transcription of that meeting generated automatically by AI, and then drop that transcription into Word to have the meeting summarised really quickly, then the summary can be translated efficiently and sent out to the relevant people to read in their respective mother tongues, etc. All stuff that can be done now, turning a few days worth of drudgery for the producer's assistant into a couple hours of clicking and proofreading.

What it does not sound like is "this entire world will be AI generated" or anything like that.

Didn't Bethesda Game Studios used to build their map's topography with AI, before devs would jump in to place dungeons, cities, etc, around the place? Was that so controversial?

"the multiverse"... there's another square on my 'overused superhero tropes' bingo card filled in.

If they did use AI to design their "Pals" then it's very short sighted. AI generated assets don't attract copyright (at least in the US, I don't think it's been tested in the UK courts yet). So presumably their designs could just be copied and used commercially with abandon.

Well deserved, and goes to show what a licence can do when handled well. Hopefully the age of the lazy tie-in licensed game is drawing to a close once and for all.

Good news. I'd hate to see TLoU go the way of The Walking Dead.

@Americansamurai1 You can trademark pretty much anything that is associated with your branding. This is why Disney recently started using the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey in the opening credits of their films; they were trying to get around the fact that the copyright on that version of the mouse was going to expire a few years down the line (as it recently did). I've heard of companies obtaining trademarks on particular colour hexcodes, scents, images, phrases, you name it. As it is an IP without an expiry date, a trademark can be very valuable.

Well, according to a few lawsuits now, you can't copyright an image created by AI, so feel free to steal those "final album covers people will see in the game". The upside of using AI is it is quick and comparatively cheap. The downside is that you own nothing. So I don't think people should be too worried about AI taking on the more interesting work from artists, like animations, character design, etc, as those are the kinds of things that the corpo's are going to want to ensure is a protectable IP.

I'm not surprised they're trying to get more money from TLoU2. It sold less than half the units as TLoU1 (across both PS3 and PS4, not counting the PS5 remaster), and if they can re-release it at a modest additional investment to try and get a few more million units sold, then why not. The upgrade path seems very fair to those who already have it for the new features, and new fans of TLoU coming off the back of the HBO show and the release of Part 1 Remastered will be getting a lot of video game for the full price.

Yep, worth the £10 to get the new mode for me. While I have issues with some parts of the narrative, particularly at the beginning of the story, once that was out of the way I did enjoy the plot. Maybe not Day 1, but Day "whenever I eventually get bored of BG3", for sure. So probably 2025 at this rate.

What's the score on this Remake and expansions? I got P5 but wish I had held off until P5 Royal had released. Is P3 Remake going to launch with all expansions (if it had any?) built in, or is an expansion expected down the line a-la P4 Golden and P5 Royal?
Or should I just wait a year and find out?

Good idea launching it on PS+. Good luck to the game and I hope those who are interested have fun.

I really hope that MS lets Blizzard off the leash again.

Is the promise of stuff-to-come supposed to encourage me to buy day-1?
Personally, I'd like to know why I should buy it at release, rather than 6 months down the line (and likely much cheaper on sale), but then what do I know about marketing?

Fantastic. I've got no accessibility issues myself but having things like reminders to return to particular locations sounds great, as I often forget where I found a roadblock in metroidvania games. It may save me having to use a guide.

I watched all the previews and I just think it looks boring. More mindless bang bang and utter chaos on screen in fights, with characters that I personally find very unappealing. (Or, rather, I should say that I find the way these characters are portrayed in the cutscenes released so far is very unappealing.) Shoot the glowing purple weak point... how inspired.
I'm sure the game will be alright and find its audience that appreciate it for what it is, rather than dislike it for what it isn't, but it definitely isn't one for me.

Considering the different constituents of these polls, I think the nominees look very fair.
Hopefully BG3 gets the nod for whichever category reflects the systems design that's going on under the hood to implement all the DnD rules. I'm reminded of the anecdote from an interview with Sven where he said that at one point in development no-one had thought to test whether gaseous form allowed a character to pass through a hole that was only big enough for tiny creatures (e.g. a druid wild-shaped into a cat, or a cat summon, or a small creature that has been shrunk by a spell). It should be possible, but no one had specifically coded "gaseous form can pass through all holes". So they loaded up a relevant area, cast gaseous form on a character, and sure enough, they were able to pass through. It's all these little and creative interactions between the rules that make BG3 so special, in my view. The community continues to find new ones all the time, even months on from release.

Depressing. But expected.

The only thing I play on my phone is Sudoku and Wordle. Gotta maintain my streaks. And they don't ask me for money.

Nah, I don't think they need to go hard on the PS5 Pro at all. The PS4 Pro didn't do that well, by all accounts, and was only adopted by the super-fans. I'll get one for sure, because I like playing at faster frame rates and if I can do so without having to make compromises to resolution or ray tracing, more's the better. Most users play on quality mode and don't care about frame rates (don't ask me why, I can't explain it). The base-PS5 is still a fantastic machine for them. Sony knows its most hardcore audience will pick up a Pro model without any advertising as they'll find out about it through sites like this one.

He's absolutely correct. I've stopped buying every game I'm interested in at release and filling up my backlog with games that, while probably good and I'd enjoy a lot, were probably not going to be as much fun as the real standouts. I spend a lot less overall now, play better games, etc, and that's money that is no longer going into the industry. For instance I haven't needed or wanted to buy or play anything else since BG3 came out last year as I am still getting my fill with that (300 hours in so far...). If BG3 hadn't come out I'd probably have picked up S-M2, Alan Wake 2, Talos Principle 2, Lies of P, and Sea of Stars. I'll get to them, one at a time, when I'm done with BG3, and probably at a decent discount off of Amazon when I am ready to play them.

But how will this game be advertised? If it shows what it is, it's indistinguishable from the fake ads, so presumably you've got to go with a big-flashy ad that makes it look like a AAA blockbuster?

Fantastic - it might come out by the time I finally finish BG3.

@ATaco There's a documentary series on Netflix UK based on stalkers which has interviews with them (from prison) and their victims, if you want to try and understand that mindset more. I think I spotted it in the "recently added" tab last night. I can't speak to how good it is yet, but the Mrs and I added it to our list to watch later.

Please, no spin offs. The story of TLoU benefits greatly from being so tight and focussed. If we must have a TLoU expanded universe, give us entirely new characters and, hell, even new settings. So much zombie stuff is based in the USA, which is cool and all, but I'd love to see how other cultures would deal with such a catastrophe (e.g. countries with a history of collectivism/communism could get really dystopian, cultures where tribe and family matters a whole lot more might fragment in different ways, etc).

The mouse outsmarts the cat again!

@Gremio108 but the puddles in S-M2 don't apply "Wet" so it's swings and roundabouts.

Clearly an attempt at passing off, which will be for the developers to fight it out. Until the original makes a claim against the other and seeks to have it removed from PSN, it's not really Sony's concern.
But that being said, I had never heard of this game and am presently enjoying a web-browser version. Oddly compelling for such a simple concept.

@Czar_Khastik Oh god... I always assumed that was either coffee, tea, or hot chocolate in their heads...