Th3solution

Whew, the monthly sigh of relief that nothing is leaving that I care much about. 😅

@Luigia Unfortunately the U.S. store sells out within hours of a supply drop.

I’ve been wanting to buy a Portal but I haven’t been quick enough to purchase it when the supply drops. Feels like trying to get a PS5 during the pandemic all over again. I refuse to pay at 30% markup to a scalper though.

Glad to hear they are exploring ways to increase stock. I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to keep the $200 in my pocket from burning a hole. 😄

I continue to be perplexed at the shortsightedness of how Destiny 2 has been handled. Even a couple years ago I was interested to give it a try but they actively locked out new players and made the barrier to entry so high by removing access to the base content and leaving no enticing entry point. So naturally each subsequent expansion was going to be less productive from a gradually shrinking player base.

I suspect they learned their lesson for Marathon and should be taking notes from Helldivers and other successful ventures that are much more welcoming for new players to join in.

As far as the shift to a more hero shooter genre rather than custom characters, that automatically makes it sound less enticing to me and like more of a desperate move to reduce development time and cost. But I don’t know - they do need to get Marathon out the door, so I can understand that. Either way, I have a bad feeling about it.

@BookhouseBoy That was my first thought — how is this going to affect game development cost? After hearing about the skyrocketing cost of development and the unsustainable current trajectory of big budget games, will this type of targeted resolution and performance be utilized to any significant degree? I’m not a programmer or technologically savvy, so maybe DLSS (or in this case PSSR) makes it easier and cheaper to squeeze out performance, but I have a feeling it will just push teams to aim for higher and higher graphical targets which will mean longer and longer development and higher and higher budgets.

I also find it interesting that they appear to be targeting some synergy with GTA6. It could be a system seller for PlayStation if it runs at 60-120 fps and is 30 fps on everything else. (Which makes me wonder, will it even run on Series S? 😅 Could be a Cyberpunk type of issue where it barely functions on lower end consoles)

It’s weird how they totally missed the projections on this and PS Portal. Way overproduced VR2 and are underproducing Portal such that it sells out within a few hours everytime they drop a supply.

I have been confused between this game and High on Life, since both games dropped on Xbox at the same time. Why publishers seem to always release similar titled games right next to each other I’ll never know. It’s not quite as egregious as The Outer Worlds and Outer Wilds, but still, as an outsider I didn’t know High on Life and Hi Fi Rush were two very different Xbox exclusives. 😄

@Fiendish-Beaver Yeah, I think what they’re trying to say is “You can’t please everyone all the time.”

I haven’t played the game, but it does seem very focused and restrictive in its vision, I think. Games that try to do too much and cater to everyone will inevitably be “jack of all trades, master of none”

Interestingly, the early impressions are that Rise of the Ronin might be falling into this trap. It is reported that it tries to mix Nioh and Wo Long combat with open world exploration like Ghost of Tsushima and it does neither genre quite as well as its predecessors and comes across a little bland as a result. (This is me interpreting the previews, I’m not saying I feel that way)

But as far as Helldivers 2, I think they did stick to their philosophy and not try to please everyone; I’m a case-in-point since the game really doesn’t interest me that much because I prefer single player story driven components to my third person shooters. If they would have tacked on a SP campaign, perhaps I would have been more hyped to try it, but in all likelihood that would have made it a weaker game and not seen this amount of success. But who knows.

Perfect! I was tempted to pick up Midnight Suns a couple weeks ago and decided to wait. I had an inkling it might be a PS+ game soon.

With all the layoffs, he has plenty of potential staff out there looking for work.

Although this seems a reasonable idea, it’s a good point that the two recent DC co-op/MP projects have been met with tepid response.

Reads like a solid 7/10. Maybe an 8.
I can’t help but think it’s just a stop-gap until Ghost of Tsushima 2 (or Ghost of Koshikishima, or whatever island we go to next)

Oh no! The dreaded con bullet point of “…won't be for everyone”
Surprisingly those that complained on the Pentiment review about being triggered by that phrase didn’t show up here, so we won’t have to change it to “an acquired taste” 😅

Starfield, Tears of the Kingdom (among others) did fine and got plenty of praise without people losing their minds about 30fps. It still seems a double standard to me.

The sound of steel, crunching bones, squishing organs, and squirting blood.

To the surprise of no one.

Coming to PS+ in 3, 2, 1….

As much as I really enjoyed Hogwarts Legacy and as much as I detest online live-service games in general, a Harry Potter universe open world online game sounds pretty awesome.

@BeerIsAwesome That’s a great contrasting observation — Suicide Squad and Skull & Bones vs. Helldivers 2. All three have been in development for an age, but vastly different budgets. The jury is still out on the long tails of each of these, but the first few weeks seem like no comparison. I’m not sure why, since I’ve played none of them and probably won’t as the online service arena is not my bag, but from the outside it seems like gamers want fresh ideas. Not that Helldivers is completely fresh — it is a sequel after all, but is a reimagining and just doesn’t feel like a setting that has been beat to death (superhero DC/ Marvel, and pirate seafaring, respectively). I guess alien Sci-fi shooters are a dime a dozen too, but HD2 seems to take a novel approach.

@Intr1n5ic It’s been suggested that Forspoken and maybe even Foamstars were part of a package deal with Sony for the rights to FF7 Remake/Rebirth and FF16 exclusivity. Like, “if you want FF then you have to also take these other games over here that we’re less confident in…”

@Drago201 Yes, every now and then I look at my spam folder and it’s just a total mess of garbage. But the scammers methods are getting better that they can get past some of the filtering protocols.

I’m with you - I block those numbers and then “delete and report as spam” but they just keep coming. Also, about 80% of the phone calls I get are marketing or scammers. If they aren’t on my contact list, I don’t answer. I always regret it if I do.

I don’t know what society needs to do to clean this hogwash up. Imagine how bad hackers and scammers will be 10-20 years from now. They seem to constantly staying one step ahead of the cybersecurity world. See Insomniac hack as evidence of that. Probably some poor employee clicked a link and that’s all it takes.

This looks pretty egregious, but unfortunately is something that happens A LOT. I get scam emails and text messages posing as everyone from AT&T to Amazon. Wanting me to click a link about a recent purchase or bill. It drives me crazy. Most of the scammers are easy to spot because of spelling errors, weird invoice numbers, strange formatting, etc. but I hate that this is the world we live in now where we have to constantly assume every online purchase or interaction is a scam until proven otherwise.

It strange how we just had all these articles about layoffs and the rising cost of games and a bunch of users were coming out saying we focus too much on graphics and performance and that developers need to just make fun games and not worry so much about fidelity and all the costly parts of development… and then those same people come out and blast a game because some of the textures are blurry. No wonder developers are flailing around having to cancel projects because they don’t really know what people want. Some players don’t even know themselves what they want.

Rome is burning.

Another solid month. Sifu is the real star of the lineup for me, but actually it’s nice to have the F1 and Witch Queen just as something else on the back burner.

Great article, Sammy. It really outlines the state of affairs and puts things into perspective.

Unfortunately people are usually the greatest expense, and so lay-offs are the way these companies trim the fat when poor executive level decisions have been made like overestimating revenues, investing in failed projects and ideas, and chasing trends that are too little, too late.

There’s a lot of classic “survivor bias fallacy” going on that affected their development plans, ie. success of an idea cloaks the similar multiple failures of that idea. So, for every Genshin Impact and Fortnite that we see, there’s dozens that fail miserably. And as someone said above, there’s only so many players and so many hours in the day. Their game development plans had projects that were set to cannibalize each other. Thankfully they discovered that and shut down some of these projects but wasted a lot of time, resources, and good-will in the process.

Ready to buy one now… and can’t find one.

@Max_the_German @bpomber @Pat_trick The Pure XBox review which has been up for over a year doesn’t have a single comment complaining that “may not be for everyone” is a bullet point on the negative side. I suspect the outcry here is overcompensating to try to seem like we aren’t picking on an XBox studios game on a PS site. But in reality, the XBox review says the same thing.

@PsBoxSwitchOwner The Pure XBox review also had “Starts off slowly, absolutely takes it time in conversations and may not be for everyone” in its ‘Cons’ summary too. So I don’t think this was a PlayStation site specific comment.
https://www.purexbox.com/reviews/xbox-series-x/pentiment

I don’t have Hulu, unfortunately, but this does look interesting. It’s great press for Kojima productions also.

@breakneck That’s interesting. (I hadn’t read much of the leak info) I guess I’m not surprised. There’s definitely a difference between total unit sales and profitability. Like movies, games make their money mostly on launch success. Nevertheless, I think any sales that Bloodborne could garner at this point would be icing on the cake. The investment for creating a PS5 patch is likely pretty low, I’d suspect, even if potential sales at a $20 price point wouldn’t make much money.

But like others have said, the flip-side is that a PS5 patch likely cannibalizes potential remaster sales for later.

I actually love the title of this game. It looks to be a solid game too, but just wanted to give props to the name “Unicorn Overlord” 😄

As others have said, I’d prefer just a PS5 patch, like what was done for God of War, Days Gone, and The Last of Us Part II (before the recent remaster). Just a few little performance optimizations like increase in frame rate and that would be enough for me to play it again. I do think that might be enough to sell a few more copies on PS5 since so much time has passed, although it wouldn’t sell enormous numbers like a full remaster with PC port would. But I might buy the DLC if they did the PS5 patch, so perhaps there some money to be made from it. I never got around to The Old Hunters and a 60 fps patch would be all excuse I’d need to go back to it and try a different build.

I’ve never played a Tales game. It looks like this is a good place to start? I suspect there’s no contiguous storyline in the franchise, but is there game world features and knowledge that would be required for me to enjoy this?

The fact that it’s on Extra lowers the barrier to entry for me to give it a try.

Makes me want to go back and try the first game. I think I already have it in my library through PS+

Although I’ve heard this game’s name bounced around, I knew nothing about it until I just now watched this video.

I’m not quite sure based on the video what the game really is, although I can see that the quirkiness of it is likely intentional. Looks a bit like an old PS1/PS2 JRPG with a Western indie coat of paint and a more updated action combat rather than turn based. And there might be some survival mechanics…?

Anyways, my interest is barely piqued after watching the video, but 3D isometric games don’t always appeal to me. I tried Death’s Door last year and didn’t end up sticking with it very long.

Sounds like the game might be better than expected. I still have no temptation to buy it. If it were on PS+ maybe I might try it. I really felt like AC Black Flag was overrated and actually my least favorite from the series. It essentially killed my interest in the franchise until I finally jumped back in with Origins. I already felt like Black Flag’s naval content was excessive, so a whole game of that just sounds like a slog. But more power to those that want to tap into a pirate fantasy! 🏴‍☠️

I voted “I’m not fussed either way” but the more I think about it, I am leaning “No”. Not because it’s confidential information, but rather because I think it has the potential to distract from smaller games which actually need the bump in visibility.

The PS5 Home Screen UI isn’t all that great, to be fair, with the way it approaches things. In its effort to highlight and curate information that it thinks is relevant to my preferred games, it becomes a mess of random pop-ups about updates on games I don’t play anymore, and thumbnail links to gameplay videos that I really don’t want to watch because I’m actually playing the game and don’t want to spoil bits I haven’t seen yet and don’t really care to see the parts I’ve already played.

I have to constantly go and update my “games followed” list to remove games I don’t care about. It automatically follows a lot of the games I claimed with PS+ (but weirdly not all of them) and so every couple months when I have to do a spring cleaning of my follow list.

But yes, all this hassle with intrusive pop-up highlights about games I’ll never play like Nobody Saves the World or Black Desert is definitely better than getting beat over the head with a “Most Played Games on PlayStation” banner that shows me Fortnite and Madden promos constantly reminding me how far I am from the average gamer’s interest

@gymratAmarillo “…once again someone from the industry thinking they know the concept of universal fun when the concept of fun depends directly of who is playing the game”

This is an oft misunderstood concept. As someone in the industry has said (it wasn’t Neil Druckmann but he alluded to something similar) — “fun” is too diluted of a concept. It doesn’t distinguish the unique psychological experience of gameplay that leads to sustained engagement. And to be fair, I think that’s what Walgrave is trying to say here, that they try to anticipate the specific wants of their diverse player base.

“Fun” is difficult to define, but I like the breakdown by Marc LaBlanc who said there is eight different kinds of fun: sensory pleasure, fantasy, narrative, challenge, fellowship, discovery, expression, submission. And if you think about it, Baldur’s Gate 3 probably taps into every one of those. Compared to a lot of other games that are less widely appealing because they assume people enjoy the same kind of “fun” that they do.

If they are ramping up production for a Pro this year, maybe that is why I can’t find a PS Portal.

It’s interesting how this passive-aggressive approach from Xbox of “we’re releasing some of our exclusives onto PlayStation so we expect a reciprocal gesture” is coming only after the lackluster results of their own first party output. As they not only released Starfield, Redfall, etc as console exclusives, but even going so far as to cancel existing PlayStation builds that were in progress. Now that those games have performed middling, all of a sudden there’s this narrative that Xbox needs to go multiplatform, so naturally PlayStation should too.

I get that Helldivers 2 is a multiplayer game, and so there’s this idea that ‘more players would make it better’ but it does seem a little suspect to make these demands after the big reveal that Xbox are porting over some of their library

@MrMagic Yeah, I did see GoWR on sale currently (and pretty frequently to be fair), and I have no problem paying for it, but my backlog is big enough that I’ve been fine to wait. Kind of glad I waited since the DLC just released. I actually paid for Spider-Man 2 full price on release and have it sitting unplayed still as I make my way through FF16 which I also paid full price for. And also Baldur’s Gate 3. Not to mention several other new releases that I’ve bought over the last year. So I don’t have an absolute aversion to buying games. I buy one every month or two, depending.

It’s just we all know the sting of finally buying an older game, only to have it drop in price or drop into PS+ the next week. So after first party games are past the 6-9 month point on the market, I tend to just prefer to wait and see, unless I really, really want to play it right away, or really, really think it isn’t coming down price wise. It’s sort of like going to see a movie in the theater after it’s already been out for 2 months. Might as well just wait at that point because it’ll be on streaming or available to own on 4K disc for the price of those two theater tickets. 😄

I will tend to go for a purchase of even an older game if it’s one that I want to show a little extra support for, so usually a smaller game or indie. If it’s a blockbuster then I don’t feel the obligation necessarily.

Is there’s still some rumoring out there that Bloodborne 2 is actually what BluePoint are making?

@liathach You’ve articulated some of my thoughts there. There’s been a substantial drop off in “newish” first party PS+ inclusions. I was just lamenting that I had expected GoWR to be on the service by now so I haven’t bought it yet, it being still full price to boot (when it’s not on a temporary sale). There’s some comments here that say apparently they extrapolated losses by putting HFW on PS+ too soon. (Loss of $85 million?) I don’t know how they could possibly calculate that… maybe by seeing how many people played it on PS+ Extra and then calculate from there? But I don’t know how reliable that metric would be since not all those would have bought it. Also, certainly having access to the base game on PS+ has boosted Burning Shores DLC sales? Maybe this is why they felt obliged to give the GoWR DLC for free since they are still charging full price for the base game. Anyways, as you, I’d like to see some of the older first party games come to Plus, but indeed the cupboard is bare so they have to stretch these out.

I will just say that I only partially agree on the notion that the third party content on PS+ and PS+ Extra is subpar — yes, there’s a lot of garbage on there, but there’s some quality titles still being included. A Plague Tale: Requiem was fantastic, imo. Also Disco Elysium. Both I recently played. I see AC Valhalla is coming this month which is a huge successful AAA game (albeit quite old at this point). Others I’ve enjoyed recently from the service like Humanity, The Quarry, Power Wash Sim, Stray, as well as others I still need to get to like Nier Replicant, Gotham Knights, LiS True Colors, the aforementioned HFW and ACV all are either successful or highly rated.
The real blockbusters on service I’ve mostly played already because I bought them. The real value of the service does seem to lie in those interstitial games that you don’t quite feel like you have to play asap, and can either wait a year, or just discover on a whim. It works for me and I absolutely still get my value. I count 9 games I’ve played from the service in the last year. Not too shabby for $100 (bought and stacked my sub on sale).

And I guess many may interpret my positivity as “corporate cheerleading”, which is fine. I’m not offended per se, I’m just saying I like the service. Am I supposed to lie? 😅 Of course I would like to get TLoUP1 and GoWR and other first party games. Or even get Stellar Blade and Rise of the Ronin on day 1, but I mean, I’d also like to win the lottery but I can’t let it ruin my happiness with what I already have.

Still yet to play it, but I am surprised that Spider-Man 2 edged out Tears of the Kingdom for Outstanding Technical Achievement. I’m not a programmer, but getting ToK to do what it does running basically on a potato is mind blowing, according to what I’ve been told. Still, Insomniac does great work and I have really loved how they have the different RT performance modes in their games to give more technical options.

The other awards SM2 won sound like they’re certainly reasonable, despite the revisionist phenomenon that occurs a few months later after the shine has worn off.

@Jey887 I’m wondering if they haven’t permanently discounted or included it on PS+ yet because of the lack of first party games coming out to replace it. Since the release schedule has been slow, then they probably have to stretch out their PS+ output. And with Xbox struggling to include much first party support to GamePass, there’s probably not much pressure to keep the service stacked with consistent input.

I’m not sure if this was intentional or not, but the in the recesses of my mind I seem to recall that Feb 14th, Valentines Day, is Lara Croft’s birthday, so props for the unveiling of this on such an appropriate day! Happy Birthday Lara!

On subject, I like the artwork of the “new”/“old” style Lara. I can definitely see the inspiration from the original PS1 character design, not only in the iconic outfit, but the facial features do harbor back to what the OG face looked like, in a way, just modernized and up-res’ed.

I missed Valhalla the first time around. Maybe I’ll get to it this time. Probably not.

As a consumer, I don’t necessarily like hearing the new head of PlayStation say this kind of corporate speak when discussing the future of the company. While I recognize the need to keep the company viable financially, at the end of the day all I want is good games! And preferably single player and without microtransactions. 😅

A few from my wishlist have popped up, but nothing earth-shattering. Maybe God of War Ragnarok on sale for $40… but I feel like it should be permanently discounted to that price by now, if not already placed on PS+ Extra… 🫤
I have plenty others in my library to play so I can continue the waiting game.

@DeathlySW @Ravix Yes, I’m thinking along those lines. As someone who lives in the U.S., I don’t really comprehend the full impact of historical relations on the other side of the world (similar to how I feel about the Palestinian conflict) so am uncomfortable formulating any firm opinions. But I do suspect that the comments by Yasuda about Yoshida were less about glorifying the Japanese state’s war crime atrocities and more about defining the influence of one of characters of the time (I’m not sure if Yoshida is actually in the game itself though)
As a comparison for my Western brain to understand it, I also thought of the treatment of the Native Americans over here, or perhaps the atrocities of American slavery (which incidentally is a little more contemporary with the time period for this game). Either subject stirs painful (and relatively recent) historical feelings and controversy, so I think that’s why they are mostly left alone in the video game space and even characters adjacent to the events have to be handled cautiously.

But back on subject with Rise of the Ronin, I was reluctant to commit to the game anyways, and so now I more so want to wait for reviews to see how this all plays out. I doubt the subject matter is mishandled in the game, and honestly I have piqued interest now in learning about the time period in question.