crossbit

I might have tried it if not for (a) it being dropped into a month with so, so much competition, and (b) the whole "part of an expanded media universe" part. I'm sure someone thought that would function as a selling point, but...no. No.

The price point was/is pretty reasonable though, and almost made me reconsider at one point.

@ShogunRok I'd argue also that an issue with their use of some North American accents/actors is that they've handled it inconsistently here with regards to franchise at large.

Previously, they followed established rules for the accents based on culture and origin. The American accent belonged to the City Elves and the Dwarves, particularly from the underground (and later the Qunari?), English to Ferelden and the Free Marches, Welsh to the Dalish Elves, French/Spanish/German to Orlais/Antiva/Nevarra, etc. I'm sure there were slips here and there, but it mostly stuck.

For Veilguard, they've thrown the American accent in particular all over, and if you've come from the older games it feels quite jarring for it.

@ThomasHL As others have been saying, yeah, the game can definitely start off with enemies feeling spongey (for reference I've been playing on the second-highest difficulty) but this gets heavily offset over time. Between the skill tree, upgrades to your gear and their passive effects, and companion synergies, by the time you hit the mid-game (and with a clear-ish vision for your build) you can pretty easily melt anything outside of intentionally challenging side-bosses.

In other words, Hermen doesn't acknowledge or recognise that said mindset played heavily into the Concord disaster - that mistake of him and the studio thinking that they had the perfect product for their audience behind the scenes, when being more outward with it much earlier could have shown them what was wrong and given time to fix it.

Sony really, really needs to bench him, pronto.

@Deityjester But... the only limit to how many super credits you can get is how many drop-pods/shipping containers/etc you're willing to crack open.

I'm not that far ahead at 250 hours or so, and I've picked up every warbond and new armour set within a day of release, just by merit of an hour here-and-there running around low-difficulty maps farming them. It's not exciting by any measure, but I've done much more for much, much less on any MMO Rep grind.

I was always going to play Wilds with peace of mind, though.

This, meanwhile, I still won't play at all.

With the bizarre fact that to even be able to purchase it on the UK PSN store, unless it changed in the last day, you need to;

• search for it by name (it's nowhere to be seen in the New Releases, even if you sort by New>Old)
• go into a redundant listing which still marks it as only for Wishlist and makes it appear that is hasn't launched
• from there, switch to the 'bundle' that actually allows you to buy the game, which additionally offers nothing in the description as to what said bundle contains

.....yeah, no, maybe a bit down the line, but they'll need to re-inspire some confidence first, a messy first impression before they've even sold the product is a bit much. Especially with Helldivers there to scratch that itch and a very busy month filled to the brim with very polished games.

EDIT: Well as a quick test, no, it has not changed since launch. Nothing in the release listings, and a search on either the console or app will still display "Starship Troopers: Extermination - Announced" as the only result. It really is baffling that they managed to release a game that you would be almost certain hasn't released if you hadn't read/heard about it elsewhere.

I think one of the best selling points from the demo was just the sheer confidence of it. With this sort of prologue approach, you'd usually expect maybe the opening hour as a gentle tease of the story, and then to maybe be given the option to catapult into a short segment later in the game to see the battle system in full swing.

But the mad ***** just straight up handed over the first 5-10 hours of the game, depending on your playstyle (I spent 12, with a lot of meandering around to see, talk to and loot everything). Plenty of time for people to really get stuck in and decide that it's definitely up their alley, or to find that the formula doesn't quite work for them in one way or another.

After almost 12 hours with my demo save, no further assurance of Metaphor's quality is required.

Currently a split between Darkest Dungeon 2 and the endless torture of a good run being scuppered by an encounter from hell, and the Metaphor demo. The goalposts of "okay, time's almost up" are finally there, but I've been genuinely impressed by the scope of it; the runtime is easily two or three times what I'd expected, and each time I thought it surely had to be coming to an end... nope, it just kept going.

Still not for me personally - I've played it twice in full, and with the time investment involved in that I am not likely to go a third round even with a glow-up - but the pricing certainly saved it.

Let's be frank; any game that released prior to the Pro shouldn't need to be 'fixed' by it. They launched on the base PS5, when it was the only option, and they should damn well be optimised for it.

Sharper graphics in combination with frame rate, sure, the Pro deserves that, but there's really little excuse for games in the last year not successfully targetting a 60FPS performance mode and these statements really do beg the question; "Did you even try, or were you encouraged to hold back to help shift more hardware sales?"

@ATaco To be fair, at least it's now coming before something, instead of shortly after Metaphor, CoD and Dragon Age. Whether they're the general gaming crowd or more specific audiences, there was lots of hard competition lined up for the original date.

Interesting, for changing the first expac to be a preorder bonus and ditching the "early access" as much as anything. Evidently they must be seeing that their years-running approach of making their "Gold/Ultimate" editions more and more expensive with the hope that people will fork out predominantly for those 72 hours just isn't - for various reasons - doing them any favours. It'll be interesting to see how the price of the deluxe editions changes respectively with these things cut out.

No love for Shadow of Doubt on the 26th? When you list an advent calendar as a release, that, sir, is criminal.

@get2sammyb Definitely. If there's truth to this then whatever happens to Firewalk, Hulst really needs to share the same fate - if they're laid off then his metaphorical head needs to roll with them, and if they're reshuffled to support other teams, he needs to be bumped back down to a creative/support role too. If there's one thing that seems to have been made very clear about Hulst in all of this, it's that he's not cut out for that level of executive, financially-responsible role, and likely never was.

A false equivalency with Nintendo's Wii U ports is one hell of a straw man, however you look at it. The defence there, as it happens, has little to do with lack of back compat and much more with the fact that the Wii U was a catastrophic commercial failure - and in turn left most of its titles to a rather small, super-loyal audience. Note the difference in how their fans react; there's often a significant outcry of relief that they can finally get to play it, or that it can finally get the audience and exposure that it deserved, as opposed to the "seriously, again?" that follows Sony's affairs.

Sony, by contrast, is rereleasing games that originally sold well on a console that sold well. That is the difference, and that is the problem.

@PapaGlitch Playing with randoms is generally fine - quite enjoyable even. I can't speak for voice chat as I've opted out of it in every multiplayer game over the last decade, but for the ingame experience, HD2 really surprised me by having (for the most part) a really quite wholesome playerbase. I'd advise anyone playing with randoms to avoid the highest difficulty tier - 7/Suicide Mission or higher - as that's where you're much more likely to run into toxic players, but that's all.

And yeah, even when the game's quiet you usually still have a few thousand players active on each hotspot/objective world, to this day I've never struggled to drop into a squad on a world and difficulty of my choice.

@PsBoxSwitchOwner Is "the same game you played a few years ago, but a bit shinier" really expanding an IP in any meaningful way, though?

The problem here is that, far from "losing our minds", for the most part we're ambivalent. We're not annoyed or angry at Sony, but we're not excited either. We just don't care for or about the product, and that's arguably a worse outcome.

I mean, the developers are jointly owned by Sony and Bandai Namco and mostly publish under the latter, so...

Still, as precedents go, I don't disapprove.

I replayed Zero Dawn in the weeks before Forbidden West launched and it still looked great - hell, better than many PS4 games that followed it. I really can't see the point of this, it just feels like another line to this generation's running joke of "PlayStation; for the remasters". If it's one of those flat £10 upgrades, fair enough, but if this is another Last of Us situation they're just taking the mick.

Looking forward to trying it out later after just dropping in to check the new weaon stats/adjustments last night.

A lot of interesting notes; Thermite definitely sounds like the weapon I always wanted it to be finally, and while I didn't have an issue with the role of antitank weapons before, it'll be interesting to see how the rebalances feel (Spear aside, they were just slight variations on 'line up headshot, fire', so Recoiless seemingly switching to more of a 'get a solid hit on the body, job done' may feel refreshing) and how the other support weapons fare against the bug heavies now.

Not sure if I'll be sold on the gas changes ahead of the warbond, though; I was looking forward to spraying chemical death, where the patch notes make it sound more in line with a chemical flashbang now. I suppose it will distinguish it more from fire weapons, but I'll have to see - I hope it still does a reasonable amount of damage on top of the blind/confuse effect.

@Ludacritz I went a few hours with it and unfortunately I have to agree. It definitely has a unique charm about it, but the "an adventure for everyone, whatever their age or skill level" marketing tagline doesn't stick. Astro-bot gets that, Mario gets that, plenty of other games have gotten that, but between the gameplay, story and over-tutorialisation... no, Plucky doesn't manage it, mostly just coming across as "My First Videogame™". The early nod to Punch-Out put a grin on my face but I just came away from it thinking that I'd rather redownload Tunic, Link's Awakening or Scribblenauts.

@symmetrian In the similiar boat of needing her but just about managing to pull both Qingyi and Jane from this cycle, I'm glad she's up second or I'd have no chance at getting her in time. xD

With Jane being able to trigger her team-up passive with other Anomalies, I can imagine her, Lucy and Burnie making quite the trio in those Phys/Fire matchups.

I would just hope that there's no (or at least minimal) truth to the recent rumour that they won't have much to show outside of third party titles. Not that it would come as any surprise with the precedent they've been setting over the last year and change.

I just hope this doesn't mean that they'll end up optimising Threemake for Pro and/or PS6, and leave it running even worse on the base PS5. I don't personally have any complaints about Rebirth's graphical fidelity (and I played it in performance mode), but given that Sony would've had Pro dev kits out in the wild for some time, it does make me question whether they genuinely focused on pushing the best out of the base console.

@MFTWrecks On that train of thought, an approach similar to the recent Hitman trilogy might have been the way to go about it; the old stays in a static state, while a copy of it is adapted into the new. IO set a decent precedent with that, updating the levels to fit new/adjusted mechanics where possible, while adding new features to the fresh batch. Hell, they even handled the rocky situation of being dropped by Warner pretty well in the "you have to unlock it all again, but it's still here for you" approach to Hitman 1's content in 2 under Square.

Granted, Starbreeze have a lot more to repack and/or reset so that approach likely wouldn't have been as feasible, but even just borrowing from that and adapting the "highlights" of 2 to slot into 3's systems might have led to it all playing out better for them. It says a lot that their immediate response on free content was effectively that on a very small scale - redoing 2 missions from Payday 2 more or less shot for shot.

@Yagami It's pretty well-balanced for it. I played through solo, completed most of what was there and even gave some of the higher difficulties a shot and had a great time throughout. I'll probably dip back in when this launches, this was the location I was most waiting for more of and with all 3 dlc locations in play, it'll be like getting to play 80% of a fresh campaign again.

"Where did PAYDAY 3 go wrong?"

For my two cents, aside from the launch issues, it has less to do with anything that 3 did and just everything to do with their business strategy for 2.

When you spend ten years pumping updates and DLC into a game (to call PD2 bloated nowadays would be an understatement) you can't easily pull committed players away - least of all to a new entry that's starting over again at square one.

For my part, I first played PD2 in beta and enjoyed the first few years much more than the chimaeric behemoth that it grew into, and as such prefer PD3 for the fact that it goes back to basics and mostly improves on the core gameplay... but even I can't help but feel that it's too slim on missions, weapons, etc compared to 2 a year in.

(And as such only bought it in the most recent sale, which put it comparable to early 2 in price.)

@PsBoxSwitchOwner Fair point, I forget that the US doesn't include their equivalent of VAT in any of their pricing.

As far as the UK goes, If they'd converted the price in USD to an equivalent price in GBP, it would still have been fairly pricey for the barebones no-disc option but at least somewhat tolerable.

Expecting us to pay effectively 25% more for it by lazily transferring the price 1:1 though is just obscene, and will kill all interest for the general market.

Like the PS4 Pro before it - nope. These are products for the hardcore fanboys/whales, noone else in their right mind would pay that much for a mid-generation upgrade.

@Westernwolf4 What also gets me with the vast majority of the forced-stealth missions is that they inevitably end up in a forced shoot out. It feels cheap on both sides to punish players for slipping up and then forcing the character to slip up for the plot, and in dumping players who had meticulously stealthed the whole thing into a shootout that they'd worked so much to avoid. I enjoy most of the game, but that's archaic design, through and through.

Also somewhat ironic that it's easier to go in guns blazing and kill anyone with a bell icon over their head than it is to be caught out by an overattentive guard in a corner and end up in a firefight with no line of sight on 90% of the enemies. The "nobody can set off the alarm if they're all dead" shouldn't be a better first-option path for a stealth mission than getting caught in the act.

@MikeOrator
They knee-jerked to the simple "fix" rather than dealing with the actual problem that makes those stealth sections more punishing than they should be; infrequent checkpoints/autosaves and no option to save manually during set-piece missions. Proper saves are all the game needed, instead of a system that would've felt out of place ten years ago.

@ZeroSum My thoughts exactly; I haven't played D2 in years, but from the outside looking in this just seems like one more way of trying to milk more money-per-user out of the ever-dwindling playerbase. I imagine the full package of expansions and season passes will cost substantially more than the equivalent 'full package' edition of Final Shape.

"I understand people are going to bristle at this article; they’re going to point to the calamitous launch of Concord and claim what Team ASOBI did here doesn’t count."

No, Sammy, we're going to take issue with you being a pedant.

Games receiving permanent updates or additions at no extra charge to players isn't what anyone associates with the term "live service" nor any of its connotations, so don't try to be clever - it's not the same thing. No more than Baldur's Gate 3 is "live service" by merit of its extensive patches. If you're to follow this argument to the illogical conclusion, you're suggesting that any game that does anything after launch is a live service.

@AverageGamer The thing is, given the choice, I would 100% agree with you and use manual saves. I regularly do for the more open-ended stuff, knowing that they'll put me mostly back where I want to be.

It was in fact through trying to manually save within the game's opening hours that I found that you couldn't - manual saving is completely locked out during story missions, which is why the terrible autosaves for them are such an issue.

Oh, right, one more thing. Never reload a checkpoint from the moment after making a reputation-changing decision; as it stands, it will tend to load you back to the moment before the decision, but will keep your reputation from the moment after... and promptly lower it even more.

@RubyCarbuncle Same here - as I say, it's decent and for the most part I've had a very enjoyable time with it. On a more positive note, the atmosphere and characterisation is very well done - the little character moments between Kay and Nix are probably one of my favourite things.

But boy, the game definitely had me grumbling "who designed this?!" under my breath in those opening hours, especially coming from other recent games that have handled checkpoints and progress so, so much better, allowed manual saves at all times, etc.

@RubyCarbuncle It's decent. I'd say for the most part it does feel less like "standard Ubisoft open world" and more like an Uncharted-but-space setup with the open areas there really just to connect it together and give you extra loot to find.

My main complaint about it would be that the checkpointing system for those missions is abysmal, particularly in the early sections and any forced-stealth setups. The game will not save your progress except for at very specific trigger points, and will quite happily throw away all your progress on completing challenges, looting chests, etc. Early on I had a moment of exploring the first (second?) city, accidentally falling into a pit in a side area... and suddenly found myself back outside the gates with the entire area reset to square one - and later spent quite some time meticulously stealthing my way through a large compound during a story mission, opened the Load menu to see if the game was keeping track... and the last autosave was over an hour ago. And even on loading the rare mid-mission checkpoints, it will do so while respawning every enemy in the location, relocking doors, etc - essentially reintroducing every obstacle that you'd cleared.

So, yeah, that's my biggest "buyer beware" warning if, like me, you prefer to fully explore areas and complete side content alongside the main quest.

It looks dire, frankly, but it has one advantage over Borderlands that will make it a success regardless.

Its target audience is children, who won't care about a cliche story and terrible script, because Jack Black as Steve will do a funny sometimes, and maybe even dance. And there will be at least one Creeper that explodes.

...Actually, yep, a lot of what made Borderlands terrible for the PG-13 market will make this perfect for one of Minecraft-obsessed children. Still, spare a thought for their parents.

@Boxmonkey Why should they? If it were a formal accusation from Microsoft itself, then yes, they should. But it's not, and they shouldn't. This is just a guttersniping journalist who pulled a rumour out of thin air, quickly had his "information" discredited by a number of his peers, and is now trying to draw non-commital corpospeak out of context to save face.

Ignore him, blacklist him, job done.

@PuppetMaster I mean., it occurs to me that if they'd merged the two ideas and made Concord into "light-hearted spacefaring Payday with hero powers" instead of... well, Concord, the game might have actually found an audience.

Or at least more of an audience.

The Beatles: Strawberry Fields Forever

Randy Pitchford: Duke Nukem Forever

@Dalejrfanfreak "horizon forbidden west didn’t do as good as the first one, God of War Ragnarok not as good as the first, same for the last of us part 2."

In fairness, these have nothing to do with diversity and everything to do with the unwritten law of (high profile) sequels - they will rarely match up to the first entry, especially when they're a straight-shot continuation. With a sequel you're retargeting the same audience who bought in the first time, but in the case of a hit game that audience is generally going to shrink - people who didn't enjoy the first, decided that it was just "okay" or simply didn't finish it for whatever reason are much less likely to come back.

God of War '18 sold so well because it was a new take on the franchise; Ragnarok sold less (though still plenty) because, for better or worse, it was more of God of War '18.

@kuu_nousee "This is a huge negative dent into that and who knows might delay or take some single player games from AAA to AA quality."

Is a reduction from AAA to AA - however you'd quantify that - really such a bad thing, though? All this nonsense, ongoing price hikes on games and services, when the realistic answer to "games keep costing more to make" is probably to stop making your studios bigger and bigger, and stop burning time and money on graphics and gameplay features (Yes, you can pet the dog! And it has fully physics-modelled fur!) that don't add anything beyond a split-second of novelty.

Ultimately they're in the classic monetarist trap of continually spending more in the hopes of making more, and if they don't adapt to a more realistic model of making games the AAA industry will implode on itself sooner or later - whether from sinking fortunes into doomed projects like this, eventually pricing their own customers out of the market, or so on.

I feel like the only way that Concord could have been saved would have been for Sony/Firewalk to be more open about its development. If they'd shown off the game and talked about their monetisation approach earlier, they could have had time to take on feedback and course-correct to some extent.

At this point, the damage is done.

"...but at least shows Capcom’s growing awareness of how messed up the premise of “let’s hunt to extinction Indigenous life in foreign lands” of past games has been."

While the gameplay loop often comes to that, you couldn't be much further from the overall story premise of why the Hunters and their Guild exist and what they canonically do.

I'm looking forward to it, warts and all. You know what you get with Ubisoft games, even if it it's just "variations of average".

That, and with the horrors that Disney continues to enact on the IP, the games are practically the last bastion of the franchise at this point. This won't be a scratch on Jedi Survivor, but just by merit of being average it'll be infinitely better than The Last Jedi, Rise of Skywalker, and everything on Disney+ since Mando S1.

Sorry, but putting "Jeff Grubb" and "reliable" in the same sentence made it immediately impossible to take this article seriously.

An understandable delay, though fronting late reviews for three high-profile releases in a row isn't the best look.