gaston

Let's hope they ship a finished product which exploits the features of psvr2 rather than a half baked unfinished one (of which there have been enough already during the last two months.)

Surprisingly for once some good news !

@aj21009 I really liked resogun a lot, but I would not put it over returnal.

what about celebrating this with vr mode for returnal ? that would be something !

@BeerIsAwesome Certainly for the staff it is awful if the studio gets close, even if they do not loose their jobs. It still means being moved out of the comfort zone, I suppose. From a business perspective, it presumably makes a lot of sense to occasionally reshuffle things, to keep things fresh.

@SuntannedDuck2 concerning the studio reshuffling, maybe in order to keep the output interesting one has to constantly bubble up and burst studios once their creative life time is reached ?

concerning Jim Ryan, maybe his biggest achievements are on logistic, and marketing side and on nothing else who knows. Certainly playstation is doing good business-wise. Whether playstation is also doing good on the creative side we may see some years in the future, I guess.

@colonelkilgore It is hard to believe that bungie would have so much power over playstation to put a very good game by every other persons standard on ice. So, what ever Bungie did not like about it must have been quite convincing. Anyway nobody wants another redfall, or how all these mp games are all called .

@Tielo I also would rather see a VR mode for TLOU than a multi player, but a lot of people have been crying for the tlou 2 factions multi player for a long time. There is definitely a market.

@BeerIsAwesome I understood that they mostly worked as a support studio, and less as a development studio at the end. In that sense it made sense to put the part which was still developing games into one group (asobi) and the rest into xdev. At least that is my understand what happened. If I am not mistaken Fumito Ueda left before the reorganisation.

Yes, it is the "gamers" which are to blame for the closure. They played too much cod and fifa, and not enough of the more interesting stuff.

Also looking forward to this one. I hope, it delivers.

@StylesT most games can be played seated. No man's sky for example works very well seated. For most games You need a chair etc. which allows You do move Your arms a but more freely, though.

@ArcadeHeroes "Big Push for Games as a service": Playstation is late to the game I would say. Everybody was already quite successful in this domain but playsation. This narrative "thanks to jim ryan playstation will give up on single player narrative games in favour of GaaS" is presumably everything but correct.

"Closure of Japan Studio": Wasn't the studio reorganized and rebranded as asobi studio ? Were there great, novel or interesting games in development that got cancelled ?

"Increased the price of ps5": true. But show me a price that did not increase during the last two years. In the console space ps started, but didn't pretty much every other manufacturer followed suite ?

It is hard to tell what is Jim Ryan's doing what was demanded by share holders, what are requests from Sony. He likely has his hands in the items You are listing, but I am pretty sure that some of the actions had been inevitable. And then ps5 sells really well. So it was seemingly well marketed, which on the long run means many games for ps5, because why would a developer want to miss out on a big chunk of the market ?

@WolfyTn or maybe rather "... watch what ima do next year ” ...
It is still very possible that the most beloved ceo of gaming companies will steer the ship to success maybe by buying even more publishers? So, far one cannot say that it was very successful. But, yes maybe next year ...

@MagisterMagi that would be a bit disappointing. But it still saves a click

@KillerBoy yes, a physical release would be very cool. A digital complete addition just saves one additional click (unless the extra material is unique to the complete addition, that might interest some people) ...

@Fyz306903 The reality is that a lot of people play WoW, cod warzone or how it is called, destiny, genshin impact, FF14, GTAV online, etc. . This seems to be a huge market and produce a lot of revenue from in game purchases. "Nobody" understands why, but it seems to interest a lot of people.

Assuming there will be a physical release, good to have a version with most of the bug fixes.

@number1024 IF You just use stock models and use the out of the box templates, I suppose You can quickly put something together. But If You try to create something according to your vision i.e. something that does not look like the stock assets and does something "unique" it is work, and a lot of work because of all the detail that needs to be taken care of. Yes, modern tools make it easier. And that is why it only takes 5 years to make a AAA game and not 15. Anyway there does not seem to be a single game studio which mass produces one visual spectacle after the other. Most struggle to get out a single game in twice the time compared to the preceding title. It is unlikely that all devs just got lazy and greedy, I would say. if it was as simple as You depict it then there would be more "ground breaking" indies.

Not even a tiny vr mode for the remake ? snif

@number1024 if studios would still make exactly the same games as 20 years ago then the better tools would allow the devs to make the same games faster. But they do not make the same games. More detailed, more complex graphical assets with more realistic lighting, and just more. Richer sound environments, more complex music scores, more complex haptics, more complex game systems. more complex animations, more complex game worlds. I suppose also it gets more complicated to manage these large teams. So, I guess there is some efficiency loss. But other then that I doubt that the development teams got lazier over the years, but it is just that the more fancy tools allow for more ambitious projects. If You just look at a single character. Nowadays they are full of tiny little details.

It seems that the market gets flooded with these types of games which are presumably taking over Your live. Hard to believe that putting out three of such games does not cannibalize the company's own market.

I just hope that these consolidation attempts turn out not to be beneficial and make companies like embrace, tencent, MS rethink their strategies.

@Beerheadgamer82 Already the zenimax acquisition was more than what playsation spent ever on all acquisitions combined (may be with the bungie acquisition ps evened that out, but presumably not)

@Godot25 10 or 15 years ? Anyway gives MS some time to prepare the take over ....

@Martsmall there are probably ways around that. Anyway there must be a reason why MS has chosen ubsisoft other than pleasing the CMA.

Hahaha. And in a couple of years, MS will buy ubisoft. Given the much smaller volume compared to the ABK deal, this will pass through without any scrutiny. Money wins.

For me it is a much better game (now?) than it is reviewed here.

I am in the process of playing through on ps5. I should be close to finishing the main campaign. It is certainly not a perfect game but a very serviceable game. London looks fantastic, the soundtrack is great, I actually like most of the cast and am also mostly fine with the dialogue. Sometimes the dialogues are even very good in my opinion (but maybe not being native plays a role here). In general I enjoy the story and story bits. In terms of game play, I very much enjoy the spider-bot stealth game play and platforming, the stealth game play in general. The, driving around while listening to the sound track, enjoying the scenery and taking a lamp post here and there is also not too bad.

I don't like so much that it is typically possible to play the first part of a mission either stealthy or guns blazing, but in most cases in the second part, when trying to escape an area, one needs to be armored, and have fighting power. I was often overwhelmed by the number and firepower of the attacking guards and drones. I would not exclude that is due to my lack of skill. I would agree that it would have been nice if the abilities of different operatives would play a larger role (a skilled driver could handle the cars better, a hitman could have a steadier aim or scope with zoom, some operatives could have a better chance of not being detected i.e. less suspicious, and there could be larger differences in hacking capabilities. And why not bring multiple operatives to a mission? Anyway lots of unexploited opportunities. But maybe that was all tried and turned out not be fun?

I also did not like that it is impossible to retry a mission or part of a mission. Also many mechanics feel underutilized. Driving mostly serves to get from location a to b. There are few interesting car chases. Also the road blocks are hard to use effectively. That was much better in WD1, if I remember correctly, which had road blocks, allowed to explode gas pipes and control traffic lights. But again maybe I just lack skill and there is fun to be had with auto drive and hacking into the surrounding.

But all in all, I quite like watch dogs legion. Obviously a VR mode would make it even better. But somehow I still think up to now the best in the series is still WD1 besides its ridiculous story, and besides the main character trying to portray himself as the good guy while mass-murdering half the population, because it had the most tense atmosphere. It is very possible that this is just my memory and because it was the first game with such mechanics and it might pale now in comparison to the more modern iterations.

In my book not a bad game, and better than average.

Sounds like the only thing that is missing to turn this into an absolutely outstanding game would be a vr mode.

I hope other studios have a look at what capcom (and polyphony) does and add a VR mode to their existing games.

Very well curated show with good pacing. Obviously no surprises, but not surprising if a show is announced as a no-surprise show. In my opinion the opening was very funny, since it depicted half the reactions to this sop.

Personally, there was nothing in there that would change my mind. The only flat game of those I will likely play is ff7 (looks awesome) but I don't really need a trailer for that (or maybe I needed a reminder?). Same for the Re4 VR mode. Ghostbusters still does not pique my interest. Presumably I would play most of the other games if any of those added a VR mode. But that is not going to happen.

Anyway I am not disappointed by this sop. I would call it certainly good if not very good, because of the pacing, despite not containing any enticing, new announcements.

I got it on sale and I really like c-smash. For me it is the VR arkanoid I always wanted. I haven't checked out the update.

@Amin1998 Maybe because Sony's first party games are hit by delays as it was rumored ?

A physical complete addition with all DLCs is great because it would contain the majority of bug-fixes, I am definitely interested in that.

Concerning the PC port, I would be more interested in a VR mode even if it is just a VR camera and the game would play identically to the flat version. Also most PC ports do not seem to run all that great. But, then most games seem to get reasonable VR mods on PC. Maybe one day I will have a PC compatible headset and a powerful enough PC that I would be able to play those in VR with these mods? So, yes there are benefits of PC ports. Also in terms of backwards compatibility, it is more likely that a PC version would still work in a few years time then that the PS5 version would work on PS7.

Why would one want to play death stranding on a phone ? Or does one get a decent experience when connecting an iphone to big screen ? But of course there is the untapped potential of billions of people just owning a phone.

Personally I can only think of: listening to the songs using the in game player, or reading the story told in emails.

I guess nearly as good as a psvr2 in cinema mode

I buy it once there is a psvr2 mode

@NeonPizza Yes this part of resident evil village was truly amazing.

Concerning 90fps, I personally do not mind the ghosting from reprojection much. I'd rather have that than quest2 graphics at 120Hz. If there is a pro model, the easiest would be to just bump up the resolution.

@Mythologue I cannot say anything about ultra. I only played firewall zero hour solo when it was on ps+ and that is not much fun I agree. The "fun" seems to come in multiplayer matches from the tension of not knowing where the opponents are and how they secure their position, and the strategic part i.e. planning how to achieve the objective.

@NeonPizza Clearly psvr2 is a compromise. Still there is no headset + compute unit combo on the market and will be in the near future which will give You the image quality of psvr2 and its feature set at that price point. It depend pretty much on what is more important to You. Is free movement more important than everything else ? Is image clarity more important than a complex image (i.e. texture detail, high poly count objects, number of objects on screen, lighting, effects) ? Is price not a deciding factor ? Are audio and advanced haptics also important to You to be fully immersed ? Is HDR important to You ?

• PSVR2: If eye-tracking assisted foveated rendering is used: high detail, high resolution complex HDR images; advanced haptics in the controller and headset; if the PS5 ssd is used: many high resolution textures and no load screens; if PS5's tempest engine is used: advanced 3D audio. But a PS5 is not a 4090, and to get the price, weight, form factor down sacrifices have been made to the lenses and screens. And reprojection is used in many cases to improve the framerate (at the moment it is not fully clear whether the quality of the reprojection is limited by PS5+PSVR2 hardware choices or purely software i.e. may improve over time, given the variations from title to title it is likely mostly software).
• Deckard is not out, has no release date and the feature set is not known (it might be awesome, it may come out soon, but it may be expensive (apple vision pro?) and only release in a couple of years).
• Quest3 standalone will produce ps4 level images (?) or most likely below since images need to be rendered at much higher resolution (compared to ps4 at full HD). Has no HDR, can only do pseudo foveated rendering i.e. render a higher resolution in direction of the head but not exactly at the position which is looked at; memory and storage solution will limit the resolution and number of textures and world complexity. Quest3 standalone will likely have a clearer image, better sweet spot and no mura, but won't have HDR, the image complexity will be much below ps5+psvr2 (if the power of ps5 is exploited), and there are no advanced haptics and most likely the audio quality will be lower (less processing power to produce sound).
• Quest3 + PC + 4090: much more expensive, image quality lowered by compression artifacts and additional latency from encoding+wifi streaming+decoding. There are solutions in the PC space which would allow to stream data directly from an SSD to the GPU vram, But there is no solution which would stream and decompress on the fly. Though likely the PS5 IO solution can be outperformed by even faster SSDs + more ram + vast GPU processing. Anyway You don't get this for free, but You pay.

So, any VR solution will be a compromise in the foreseeable future. Pick and chose what You can effort and what is important to You.

@SgtTruth Glad that You are happy about not having invested into PSVR2. But, maybe it is not DOA and there actually will be titles in the future which may change Your mind? Who knows? In the end whether PSVR2 is a worthwhile investment or not, depends on everybody's preferences. Some people prefer to play games on a tiny screen on their phone. Some people prefer to enjoy games in their multi speaker dolby atmos home theater. Some people prefer to be surrounded by the game.

I personally would disagree with everything You wrote, Re village and gt7 are, in my opinion best played in VR and for me it would be very worthwhile to play them again in VR (though again is presumably not something I would use when playing GT7). There are fantastic exclusives (recently Synapse!). Most ports are best played on PSVR2 (e.g. Star wars: Tales from the galaxy's edge). Sometimes, it would be nice to have the extra freedom from a wireless solution e.g. quest. For example beat saber would be such a candidate, but to me it looks so much better on psvr(2) (also the rumble feels better) that I would rather take the extra fidelity than the extra freedom. Yes, there are also not so great games, but there is a constant influx of new quality games. Given the track record of capcom with re7 and re8, I am pretty sure also Re4 will be best played in VR. But yes it is a nearly 20 year old game (and who would possibly want to play that again?). Vertigo 2 looks intriguing . And the situation with No Man's Sky may indicate, that it takes developers some time to create a version that looks and plays really well on PSVR2. So, to declare a new product DOA after 6 months, because there was no last of us part 2 day one, feels premature. Anyway You have Your opinion I have mine. And that is perfectly fine.

@Perryg92 I am also mostly playing story driven games, and I spend an embarrassing number of hours in NMS. Though, I would dare to say that one presumably has to look quite a bit for an engaging story in NMS. There are stories and the latest expansions, which I have not played, may have even better stories. But, the majority of the gameplay is resource management and exploration. The procedural generation has its advantageous and disadvantageous. One hand it allows to create the billion planets which all look different. On the other hand the generators are not as sophisticated as developers, and the generated planets appear in the end very similar. It is still a fascinating game which pulled me in for a quite some time. I quickly looked at the latest update, and it plays really well on psvr2. But, I also was fine with the state it was in a month or so ago.

I did not know that ubisoft was a relevant player in the streaming market. ... [ redacted ] ... Weird, MS dictates the price and ubisoft (in addition to MS) can chose which platform is allowed to stream (but not digital distribution) ? Or does this just mean that MS will snack up ubisoft next ?

Looks awesome. If it plays as good as the dojo of the first vader immortal, then I would be interested. Though, I could imagine that it feels a bit lite on content.

Most people presumably would not care, but if there was only a single platform there would for example not be advanced haptics in the controller, no VR, no dockable handheld.

And presumably games would still be played in VGA resolution with 16 colors and on a device with 640 kB of RAM.

@LtSarge xbox is not buying publishers left and right because they want to prevent ps from making marketing deals. Xbox could just do the same. Content is needed to feed gamepass. I don't really know how xbox is trying to bypass the android and apple store, but I could imagine that they want to put gamepass on mobile to attract 200m new customers (which then can play candy crush for "free")

@VRjunky I am also pretty happy with the sound quality of the momentum 4 when using aptX over bluetooth. And the battery life is fantastic. I do not have any comparison with "high-end" wired headphones. But wrt. the headphones I had before they sound very good (parrot Zik1?, momentum 2, ear plugs). The negatives are the price, they are a bit bulky and do not fill well together with a psvr2 headset (it works but not super well), also the sound over the analog input when not switched on is very disappointing (the momentum 2 did much better in this regard).

@JohnnyShoulder It is not tempest over atmos. It is more stereo, dolby 5.1 or 7.1 over atmos. Tempest is a stripped down gpu tailored for general audio processing. It can handle up to, if I remember correctly, 1000 channels and it can render 3D sound. But it can be used for much more than just mapping channels into 3D sound. Atmos can mix up to 128 channels with spatial information and map it onto the speaker set it typically does not have the processing capabilities of a tempest engine, there might be additional filters etc. an atmos system can apply, but it is not programmable.

[edit: it seems the sound format used for games which is send over hdmi to an atmos system only supports 32 channels]

@Northern_munkey T2 enabled the port to "modern" platforms. I would not call this "not showing any respect". Personally I neither see enough value in the quake 2 remaster at 8 quids, nor in the RDR port. Though, quake 2 can be played on many platforms, where RDR could only be played on XB360, ms' xb360 emulator and ps3. In that sense there might be more value in the RDR port.

@Cashews Still the effort of the quake 2 remaster and the RDR port are very likely not the same and the RDR port was likely much more tedious (There are all kinds of ports of quake 2. For example nvidia made a version with raytracing in 2019).
I am not defending T2's price and I am not interested at that price. But I would say the same for a game from 1997 at 8 quids (despite the upgrade to 4k etc. it still looks very much like a 20 year old game. In comparison RDR looks like a 10 year old game — and a very good looking one).

@nessisonett fully agree, concerning play length and fun !

But it also does not make any sense to compare the effort of porting a game that was already ported to many platforms to a port of a much more complicated game that was only released on some more or less exotic platforms.