Th3solution

I am both surprised and not surprised by these statements from Miyazaki. I haven’t played Elden Ring yet, but it does look like an attempt to make the genre more approachable and “organic” to play at one’s own pace and preferred structure. By the same token, Demon’s Souls appears to be the least forgiving in regard to how you approach the game and what order you would choose to do things.

For me, online walkthroughs, boss guides, build guides, and wikis to explain the games’ terms, mechanics, maps, structure, and various systems and nuances are absolutely essential. They really have enhanced my enjoyment of the series. My first FromSoft game was Dark Souls on PS3 and I lasted about 3-4 hours maybe before I just gave up, partially because of the difficulty, but partially because of the lack of guidance to make progress through the game. I didn’t touch their games again until I played Bloodborne several years later. That first area is brutal and the only way I made it through to the first opportunity to level up was through online help on the forums here on Push Square. Advice from players taught me to just run past enemies, engage with the boss, and wake up the doll so I could start farming for echoes and leveling up to be strong enough to beat Cleric Beast. Later on, I finally searched and found the fountain of information online that I continued to access throughout my playthrough with Bloodborne and I ended up thoroughly enjoying it and still hold it as one of my favorite games of all time.

Subsequently I have gone back to Dark Souls 1 and played to completion with online guide assistance and recognize it for the masterpiece that it is also. Same for Demon’s Souls and now I’m currently playing Dark Souls 2. Absolutely love these games and I would have totally missed out if I hadn’t sought online help. Next will be Dark Souls 3 and then finally Elden Ring.

And I feel no shame in using all online support, even cheeses. My philosophy is that the game is cheesing me (enemies you can’t see around the corner jumping out and knocking you off a cliff, enemies hitting you through a wall, and all the various other cheap deaths) so I feel justified to cheese it.

I like me a good character creator and deep companion and squad management.

I thought the promotional footage they showed looked really good, but this is concerning. Watching a game and playing a game are certainly two independent experiences.

Honestly, I don’t spend much time at the Home Screen and I find most of the content there completely useless and arbitrary. And I guess that’s what the point of this article is, that however they do it, Sony needs a better way to algorithmically show people information that interests them. Right now I just interpret all the visual noise as advertisements to ignore. Fortnite and COD garbage updates have zero interest for me. And when it does try to highlight something for me that I actually played, it’s from months or even years ago. For example, it’s repeatedly showing me random little promos for Control, which is a game I absolutely loved, yes, but I platinum’d it in early 2021. I’m not going to go back and engage in that game. The still shots of Jesse are eye catching (since I have a crush on her 😅) but to what effect? Now when you have some info on Control 2 then by all means show me.

The system allows you to have “folllowed games” and that is where some of this comes from I guess. Unfortunately the list itself is flawed and going back through and clearing out games from the list every few weeks (because it seems to automatically add games to the list, such as any that you claim on PS+) is a chore and doesn’t really seem to effect what they show on the Home Screen in the end.

Oh man, I’m so disappointed — I was happy to not have any new releases this year that I was excited about and now I totally want this! It looks brilliant. Maybe some GTA meets Starfield meets Mass Effect meets Cyberpunk meets Uncharted meets Hogwarts Legacy…? All with a Star Wars coat of paint. Seems like a huge and rich gaming world.

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

2024 is fairly lean but good grief 2025 appears to be shaping up to be insane.

The only 2024 release that speaks to me is Life is Strange, although DragonAge is a wild card. Flintlock looks like it could be interesting too.

But overall, I think there’s a saturation of Souls-inspired, Bloodborne-like settings, and samurai games. Sony has missed the mark getting out any Bloodborne remake or sequel and the Ghost of Tsushima sequel because now those genres are quite saturated.

This seems to be a common trend now — games that are digital only getting physical releases. It’s a good sign to me that perhaps the predictions of the death of discs is a bit premature.

So many of these games have a Bloodborne Lovecraftian aesthetic. Which is fine, but Sony has really dropped the ball not doing anything with the Bloodborne IP. Now there’s too many knock-offs.

The gameplay in the trailer doesn’t look Soulslike to me. More like a God of War-like.

Either way, it actually looks pretty fun. I’ll keep my eye on it.

@twitchtvpat Yeah, most of us know that Naughty Dog, Sucker Punch, BluePoint, Housemarque, Bend, Guerilla, and Santa Monica all have projects that would go toe-to-toe with any of these Xbox announcements. But they just aren’t saying anything and I think everything with the Live Service initiative delayed everything and now we’re feeling the effect. So they have chosen to concede 2024 to Xbox, and that’s ok. 2025 has potential to be great.

I said even before this Xbox showcase that as a PS gamer I was more excited about what Xbox will likely bring to PS5 over the next year than what Sony has coming. Now this has made it even more frustrating.

It will be interesting to see if all these big releases end up in more GamePass subs. Because we know Xbox gamers won’t buy anything. 😅

But, as I’ve said before, I’m not starving for content on my PS5. I have a huge backlog and third party has kept good releases coming.

Man, it looks really fantastic. Like Stellar Blade on steroids. 😅 Definitely one to try the demo on though because it looks like it could be difficult for those of us who are mediocre at parry mechanics.

We can only hope that they give us all some free games or credits for our troubles. They’ve done that before with the PSN outages, so we can hope.

I suspect it will be closer to Suicide Squad than to Helldivers 2 on the multiplayer live service spectrum. But will probably land somewhere in-between.

Either way, it’s not likely to interest me. But more power to ya if you like this kind of game and have the time to spend on it.

As I’ve noted before, not much on the Xbox side interests me. I’ve got more than I can handle with Sony’s games and the third party multiplatform stuff.

The only exception is Hellblade II which I’m champing at the bit to play. And maybe Indiana Jones, depending on how that reviews. Although I’m not a fan of first person viewpoint in my action games.

Gears of War and Fable both seem interesting. Otherwise, eh… I mean options are nice, but I’m up to my neck in options already.

Isn’t this a bit like benching your closer, then pulling them off the bench to be the ball boy for the 2nd string pitcher out of the bullpen?

@CWill97 Yeah, probably need to withhold your expectations until after they get Metaphor: ReFantazio out the door first.

As much as I loved Part II, it did drag on for about 10 hours too long. Not that I didn’t like the ending and the decisions the characters made during those closing hours (trying to avoid spoilers here), but the gameplay sections that were placed at the end were just a little too much, imo, for a narrative heavy game. Here’s hoping that the TV show doesn’t overstay its welcome also.

Is Fumito Ueda still making a game? That’s my dream announcement.

I can’t decide if I like the game’s title. “Metaphor: ReFantazio” sounds just cringe enough to be offputting, but I give them props for not calling it something generic like “Legend of the Fantasy Chronicles” or some such. But really, what is a Fantazio and why is it being Re-peated? And of what is it a metaphor?

Thank goodness, it has a fishing mini-game. Don’t know what we’d do without that.

Slightly off subject, but is it weird how the industry gives us remasters and remakes ad nauseaum, especially when an upcoming sequel is involved, and yet there’s no way to play the first Beyond Good & Evil on modern consoles? A lot of these remakes we didn’t really need and certainly didn’t ask for, [cough] Horizon Zero Dawn [cough], but the first BG&E would be perfect for a remake in preparation for the sequel. Many of us didn’t get a chance to play it on previous generations and I don’t really want to turn on my PS3 ever again if I can help it.

Edit: I spoke (typed) too soon. A quick google showed me that a remaster is in the works, so I must have missed that. According to the Wikipedia page, “The official release date is set in early 2024” 😂😂😂. Welp, that’s not happening.
Anyways… at least it exists and appears close to release. So, my bad.

I have some memories of playing one of the Streets of Rage several years ago, so I might play SoR4 for nostalgia’s sake. And it seems to be a solid couch co-op game, and it’s nice to have a stable of those on hand in case people ever show up who want to play together.

It’s a wonder that we don’t have more leaks. The fact no one knows what BluePoint, Bend, Housemarque, Naughty Dog, or Santa Monica are working on is a miracle. With all the employees who have access to this information it’s amazing no one spills the beans

Well, either way, something is better than nothing.. I think?

But honestly, I don’t want to hear about projects that are 2-3 years away, or that are so early that they have a high chance to never see the light of day.

I would say they the normal cadence should be reveal the game at around 12-18 months, give an extended trailer at around 6 months, show substantial gameplay at around 3 months, have a larger state of play with a deeper dive at 2-4 weeks, and then release the game with appropriate expectations.

Of course I realize these things don’t always follow a perfect schedule, but sheesh — publishers are all over the shop here with reveals. Sometimes they tease a game over 8 years out (Hello, Elder Scrolls 6), and sometimes they reveal the game within a couple months of release (Astro Bot), or even less.

I think there needs to be a better balance to temper expectations

@themightyant Yeah, I was wondering if there’s a possibility this will break or destabilize the PS5 version to any degree. I suspect that’s what this testing period is for.

I’ve yet to play through my first run on the game yet. I just messed around with it a little and discovered it’s something that requires my undivided attention, at least at first until I learn the systems. So I put it on hold until I wrapped up some other games first. And also, I knew this update was coming so I figured maybe wait until the mods were available. Although now I’m wondering if I need to do my first playthrough unmodded to get the full effect. I don’t really know how mods work, necessarily. But it would be nice to enable something to help me if I’m getting stuck because I’m not adept at D&D.

I wonder if this is damage control preemptively done to calm the masses when TLoU3 is announced soon. I had wondered if the new IP they’re working on would come before TLoU3, but this suggest maybe it will come out afterward.

I think the other part of this story is that the game is locked at 30 fps even on the more powerful consoles. Every time this comes up we get a backlash of people who can’t tolerate less than 60 fps. Perhaps they are seeing that it didn’t seem to affect sales of Dragon’s Dogma 2?

Really weird that the exclusive interview the studio did was with Entertainment Weekly. EW is mostly about TV and movies. They have a meager gaming column, but mostly they write about gaming and TV/movie crossovers, like TLoU and Marvel stuff. Not sure why Asobi chose to do this with EW.

Finally cleared some time to go back to the Kingdom of Drangleic. So far I’m enjoying Dark Souls II, more than I thought I would. Is it as good as Bloodborne or the first Dark Souls? Well, no. But it’s still great.

I’ve said this before, but since Sony isn’t delivering the goods, I’m maintaining hype right now through the third party stuff. Heck, even Xbox has me more excited of some future games to be coming to my PS5. If they port Hellblade 2 and Indiana Jones this year then I’ll be weirdly more excited about what Microsoft is doing on my console than what Sony is doing. That’s a problem.

@UnlimitedSevens 😄 Haha, yes, spot on. I’ve lived through those bottlenecks in other industries. Cheers 🍻 and here’s to meetings about meetings!

@UnlimitedSevens You’re speaking my language there, buddy. I agree. And I like that analogy about construction projects. It sounds like you’ve dealt with building construction contractors and subcontractors and all the layers of people who never communicate or do anything correctly the first time around and take 3-4 times longer to complete a project compared to the estimate. Or any sort of road construction crew who take years to fix a stretch of road and every time you drive by there’s 10 guys standing around watching one guy work. 😂

But I’m sure the game development industry is delayed for other reasons and I know someone who works in the industry is highly offended by my comparison to a road crew right now 😅. I’m sure they all work hard, as I’m sure the road crew is also. But project management is often the Achilles heel to these things and the rank-and-file are spinning their wheels whilst management keeps messing everything up. Look no further than the canceled Naughty Dog multiplayer project to know that was completely a management screw-up and all that wasted time wasn’t the creators’ fault. It’s like a contractor getting their crew to build a road and then canceling it in the middle and trying to change it to a house.

I’m no expert but AI is probably the only hope — Selling our creative souls to AI. Computers don’t need time off and develop things in seconds as opposed to hours, and don’t care if you change their project midstream. 1-2 year game development timeframes will be back, but at the cost of the project’s humanity. Or to return to your original metaphor, we’ll get a replica of the Sistine Chapel, but will we be able to tell? 😄

@Fiendish-Beaver Here’s where I like Sony’s approach — the Miles Morales, Lost Legacy, First Light type of approach of having a lower cost ‘expandalone’ is a great way to treat a quick turn around game with additional content that’s not quite a full sequel. I’d like to see third party explore this ‘in-between’ space a little more. Of course Sony has done the free route lately with GoW Ragnarok, Returnal, and GoT post release add-on content too. As well as more traditional DLC that is attached to the base game like the Horizon games had. But my preference is the standalone 7-8 hour game that is $25-40 to follow up a big hit game the next year or so. And in the case of SM2 I think it’s the worst kept secret that we’re likely to get that again, whether this year or next.

But when millions plop down $70 for the “new” FIFA or Madden, then I guess they’d be stupid not to continue to charge full price.

@Nekomichu I agree that part of what SM2 accomplishes is that you do have the option to spend more time with Peter if you like him better or with Miles if you like him better. Obviously you have to push each protagonist’s story forward eventually, but if you like the style of one over another you have the freedom to choose.

Personally I split my time fairly evenly but I leaned a little more toward Peter because of his new moves and powers, even though I liked the Mile Morales ‘expandalone’ game more than SM1. But I think that was mainly because the MM game felt tighter with fewer annoying puzzles and fetching activities than SM1. I think SM2 balanced the puzzle and stealth sections and Mary Jane stuff a lot better than the first game. It flowed better and the new set pieces (like the Coney Island sequence for example) also added some flavor to the experience. The characters were good, imo, and I especially liked Peter and Harry’s relationship.

@Fiendish-Beaver Sure, a genre and a theme will inherently be consistent and similar. I think my issue with the annualized retreads of COD, Madden, FIFA, NBA2K, etc is that they drop every year for $70 for what is often very little change from the year prior. It would make more sense to be a $20 roster update instead of a full priced release. This is probably a lot less true of COD, but like I said above, every FPS I’ve played feels very samey, no matter which game it is. 😅

I’m not a fair judge of any of these popular annual franchises and obviously don’t buy them, so I fully admit to my own ignorance there. But I’m going off of reviews, videos, and secondary impressions. Perhaps many of the complainers of SM2 are also not connoisseurs of the superhero third person action genre. I suspect a lot of the SM2 hate also comes from those who never played the game and just watched gameplay (like me with COD).

But anyways, my point is that I don’t think SM2 wasn’t any more samey than Black Ops 3 vs. Black Ops 4, but I could be wrong.

@Specky Like I said, there’s some truth to the ‘more of the same’ complaints, I just think it’s a little overstated. There were nice wrinkles with the different set pieces and modified powers. But yeah, it is similar to the other games.

By no means does it deserve the technical admiration of what innovation BG3 brought, and perhaps even TotK (although I even heard some complaints it was too iterative from BotW). But I think the SM2 complaints were a smidge exaggerated. But I also think every FPS I’ve played feels the same and can’t understand why people keep playing them, so maybe the problem is with me. 😂

@UnlimitedSevens Yeah, but were Michelangelo (or Da Vinci) limited by 40 hrs/week anti-crunch labor laws? 😜
I’m kidding of course. Because we all know these studios don’t adhere to those rules anyways. 😅

But I love your post. Made me laugh. Mostly because I’ve been wondering the same thing. COVID notwithstanding it seems like game development progress is walking is quicksand lately.

Those numbers are impressive and higher than I thought they’d be. Personally I loved the game, but it got buried in the hype last year of Baldur’s Gate 3, Tears of the Kingdom, etc. The online narrative that the game was just ‘more of the same’ is really only partially true and I thought it expanded just enough and yet kept the solid fun gameplay elements from the first two games. It was third person action gaming comfort food and certainly not any worse than the recycled releases of other franchises we see all the time. [cough]COD[cough]Madden[cough]

I hate hearing these nightmares about stick drift. I’ve been lucky that all 3 of my DualSense’s work perfect still and have a fair amount of mileage, especially the 2 originals I got with the PS5 over 3 years ago. My Portal is only a couple months old and so I’m crossing my fingers that it doesn’t become my first casualty! Has anyone actually had stick drift with their Portal yet? The sticks feel slightly different (I think they’re a bit smaller anyways and seem to have a longer stem) so maybe the issue is fixed for the Portal?

I did have stick drift on one of my DualShock 4 pads, but man, that was after many years of heavy use on the OG controller that came with my launch PS4. So that controller didn’t owe me anything. I even still use it because the drift is pretty minor and can be managed for a lot of games with adjusting sensitivity settings and dead zone, if I feel the urge.

@Littlejack You absolutely got your money’s worth, and then some. By my estimates, if I play 5-6 games from PS+ per year then I at least break even from what the games would usually cost. That assumes the average game would have cost me around $20 a piece, and I think that’s being conservative. And that’s not taking into account picking up your subscription on sale or through discount loopholes, as others have pointed out.

And people forget that if you have Extra, that part of that subscription fee is also getting you the online access, cloud saves, and occasional extra sale discounts on games.

But yeah, my list is a little shorter than yours, but over the last 12 months I’ve enjoyed multiple PS+ games (about 11 if I am counting correctly). Some I played and never finished though, but most of them I did complete and thoroughly enjoy, such as Tchia, Life is Strange 2, Inscryption, A Plague Tale: Requiem, Disco Elysium, The Quarry, and Stray. Currently enjoying Midnight Suns as my side game and it’s been good too.

I do have a hybrid approach because I also buy games too, so the PS+ Extra catalog is merely a supplement to playing other games that don’t go on the service, like the FromSoft games, big new releases, and niche titles. Like you say, there’s no wrong way to do this, but I do think people are sleeping on the value PS+ can have. For $100 a year (what I paid to stack a couple years on sale) I get a lot less value from my stupid Netflix account. I really need to just cancel that. 😅

For me it’s a ‘meh’ month, but I might try Streets of Rage 4 and Dredge.

Is this everything being added to Extra or are they having another mid-month refresh too?

@twitchtvpat I agree with that. When the floodgates open and we find out what Bend, Naughty Dog, Bluepoint, Housemarque, Santa Monica, Sucker Punch, and Guerilla are working on, it will certainly be exciting.

@twitchtvpat “…they never stopped making single player games and have plenty of studios making single player games.” Of course. I don’t think anyone has felt they stopped making single player games. But outside of Wolverine, none have been confirmed (unless I’m forgetting something). Everything else is rumors, speculation, non-committal vague quotes from developers, or leaks. And Wolverine is 2025. Sony was able to rely on second and third party to do all the heavy lifting for the first half of 2024 (and most of 2023 also, outside of SM2). We’ve had a grand total of 1 new AAA single-player game from Sony since Nov. 2022. That’s a year and a half with only one new single player game. It would be something if that year-and-a-half had some announcements of new single player games, but we’ve had… zero?

18 months with 1 AAA first party single player release and 0 AAA single player game announcements. I’d call that a desert.

Personally I’ve not been too concerned as there’s plenty to play, especially with Square-Enix and Team Ninja towing the rope. But if Sony remain silent whilst Xbox and Nintendo have big reveal events to create hype, then they are definitely conceding some ground, especially when Xbox already has the better release line-up for the rest of 2024.

I do think Sony will have a Showcase type of event to let us have a peek into at least something coming out. But if they don’t, it also won’t surprise me, the way they’ve been going lately. Either way, I’m not ready to buy an Xbox and I trust Sony, but the players are getting restless.

@twitchtvpat As someone who doesn’t own an Xbox, I hope you’re right, buddy. If not for Death Stranding 2 and Wolverine (both probably 2025) I’d be even more concerned. I know Sony has games coming out, but it appears there’s going to be a small desert of single player games because of the live service push.

@twitchtvpat [see comment #61]
And as an aside, the huge lead Sony has means it won’t take much to gain some ground, especially in just hype for first party output. There’s nowhere to go but up for Xbox 😄

@Bez87 “I wouldn't say the dualsense was a novelty? I'm still in the mind set that the game is still the greatest use of the controller we have had to date…“
When I say ‘novelty’, what you’re saying there is what I meant — Astro’s Playroom was the greatest, most ‘novel’ use of the controller to date. As in ‘new, unusual, and interesting’ and has yet to be replicated with other games that use the DualSense. I’m still waiting for a game that will match its use of it.

I love the DualSense’s features. I find it strange when people shut off the adaptive triggers for games that utilize them. The haptic feedback can really enhance a game. And although the Astro’s Playroom base gameplay was good, if it didn’t have the DualSense features it would have been a 7/10 instead of a 9/10.

@UltimateOtaku91 I like the sound of that — having Astrobot run through different levels based on famous PlayStation IP. Could be cool to see what they could come with for that. Horizon, GoW, TLoU, Spider-Man, Bloodborne, GT, Ratchet & Clank, GoT, etc, etc.

I loved Astro’s Playroom but part of the allure was the creatively woven in nostalgia though the PlayStation generations. It was a love letter to players like myself who’ve been with PlayStation all these years. The new DualSense features was the additional draw for the game. So if you take the novelty of those two things away I’m not sure how a new Astrobot game will land with me. I hope the game comes up with new hooks to keep it fresh.