gaston

@Dweich02 games can only become effectively cheaper via a service like game pass if more people are subscribed than there were people who would have bought individual games. If the player base does not grow and if the games become effectively cheaper i.e. the total number of players pays less in total for games that would mean less games are developed or the development cost is reduced (which presumably means lower quality or shorter games).

@Dweich02 "Less choice" because never will all games be on the service in contrast to a free market where the consumer can chose between all offers. The provider will limit the choice "for" You..

@Sakisa gamepass does not make game development cheaper. Somebody has to pay the bill or the games have to get cheaper. The other problems: the "game pass" provider curates the list of games which are available on the service, thus the consumer has less choice (assuming that the consumer has only the money to subscribe or buy but not both); the games just have to be good enough to keep people subscribed (there are no incentives to create the "greatest game of all times").

@Octane I do. Death Stranding, Origins in VR would be awesome.

@get2sammyb there is the led stripe around the touch pad which might be trackable by the headset.

@Octane I hope one can climb tall necks. In theory they could inherit a lot of stuff from the cinematic horizon games (even npcs), so it could feature an "open" world. But I am pretty sure that the scope will be smaller since the target audience is only a fraction.

@lolwhatno I am living in France but I am not French. I get along but my French is unfortunately poor.

If the rumour of the hybrid games is true, then it is not necessarily very distracting, I would say. For example in Dreams a large fraction of the games work reasonably well in VR. There are likely a few things which are less straight forward to translate. At least in PSVR1 games the cutscenes typically do not translate well to VR, motion is typically slower compared to "cinematic" games, and often one can peek or grab through walls. Would be interesting to know how much effort it was to bring hitman3 to VR.

Nowadays people seem to talk about games as experiences, so it is not clear whether here experience means an immersive fully fledged game or just a tech demo. Though, it is hard to believe that Sony just shows on a big stage a tech demo leaving everybody disappointed afterwards. Sony also mentioned, if I remember correctly, that they think fully fledged games are needed for next gen VR to gain mass appeal (and they showed this at the CES not in a state of play. So they are advertising this to the grand public not just die-hard fans). It is also hard to believe that it will just be a ride à la rush of blood. That would not show off the full potential of the controllers.

They should have access to all the assets of the flat Horizon games. That should cut down development time considerably. I would expect a fully fledged, small open world game with the length of e.g. Blood and Truth (likely longer since You likely won't rush through the environments as quickly as in Blood and Truth).

Great that the specs of psvr2 are finally officially announced ! To me that sounds all awesome ! Obviously, one still has to see the image quality. Hopefully, the image quality is at least as good as psvr1 (yes, despite everybody bashing psvr1 because of the low nominal resolution, the image quality of psvr1 is quite good) with higher resolution and HDR colour space. A wireless headset with long battery life would obviously be better, but a single cable is and no breakout box is already an improvement, and if You play seated it is hardly limiting. Anyway the biggest short coming of psvr1 is the limited tracking space and the controllers which should be a problem of the past with psvr2. I am really looking forward to it and hope that we do not have to wait until the end of this year and that the rumour about the push for hybrid games is true.

I expect psvr2 to also be usable on PCs given Sony's recent investments in the PC domain (aren't there official drivers for the dual sense controllers? And already psvr1 was unofficially usable on PCs).

I won't expect backwards compatibility with psvr1. Sony mentioned, if I remember correctly, that psvr remasters are in the works, which sounds to me like backwards compatibility will not be there, since games like Beat Saber, Blood and Truth, Astro Bot rescue mission or Moss (to mention a few popular games) would not benefit much from a remaster, in my opinion, if there was backwards compatibility. I have no idea what information developers get from the psvr1 headset and controllers. If they would just get position and direction then it should be simple to implement backwards compatibility for all games which use the DS4 on psvr1, but it seems difficult to achieve backwards compatibility for the move controllers, since the new psvr2 sense controllers will have very different buttons. I also would assume that the gesture detection needs to be carefully tweaked for the move controller to realise a "satisfactory" experience. I would be very sceptical that a similar experience could be realised through backwards compatibility without any updates from the developers (I am happily proven wrong). There are certainly a few very good psvr1 games, and it would be a shame if they won't be available on psvr2, but a large fraction of the games will just pale in comparison and won't find an audience other than the people who already played these games.

Concerning VR being a gimmick, the popularity of the occulus quest (or how it is called nowadays) with its close to 10M units shipped clearly shows that VR is not the niche people try to push it to.

I hope this is kind of representative of what to expect from the next iteration of PS VR (i.e. similar form factor and image quality, but at lower resolution).

Concerning VR in general: I tried an early occulus during a film festival and was immediately sold. That wasn't even interactive. Now, it is always difficult to go back to flat games. I always think, it would be so great in VR. It is certainly an expensive accessory, but could eventually replace a TV. Though, I doubt that it could ever replace a monitor e.g. for work (an 8k HDM might have a good enough resolution, but it would still be less comfortable).

I only played a small fraction of the titles on this list. And there are probably more than 5 great titles here. Anyway my picks in no particular order:

• death stranding DC, I have not played the original version, looks great on PS5, I enjoy the story, and it has a unique gameplay.
• final fantasy 7 remake, because I have not played it before, looks wonderful on PS5, it is a fantastic fairy tale with adorable characters, and I also really like the score.
• hitman 3, mostly because of being one of the few AAA games which dared to add VR support, which is mostly great, despite only having DS4 controls and teleportation when climbing. Also it has great level design which offer an incredible variety (excluding the last level).
• Returnal because of the awesome atmosphere, in particular the sound design, the fantastic controls, and great gameplay. It is presumably my favourite title In terms of gameplay and atmosphere.
• Kena: bridge of spirits, mostly because it is developed by a small studio which came out of nowhere, but still delivered big times.

Obviously everybody wants great games for cheap. But, in the end somebody has to pay for the work (programming, graphic design, motion capture, musicians, actors writers). If the games are offered for cheap on a service then either development costs have to be reduced i.e. lower quality, shorter length, the player base needs to be expanded, or the subscribers are "tricked" into in game purchases. It is highly unlikely that MS's gamepass in its current state is profitable. It is more likely that it is subsidised under the promise to expand the player base to hundreds of millions of players, which does not sound like a realistic goal to me. Hundreds of millions of players play candy crush (i.e. mobile games you get for free or pennies) but not forza or halo.

The other problem with such services is that it reduces the influence of players. The content is curated by the service provider. Subscribers are likely not searching outside of their bubble. Thus, games which are not on the service will have a hard time to compete, which may give the provider too much power.

I did not have high expectations after the teaser ... and I was so wrong. This is fantastic!

VR: from a technical point of view it might require quite a few optimisations to get this into shape for VR (e.g. image reconstruction when turnings). Otherwise I do not share the concerns that this would be too much in VR. At least the parts I experienced were not too far away from what is possible in reality, in my opinion. Anyway who knows, maybe this will get a psvr2 treatment.

I would absolutely play it again on ps5, if it would get together with a high frame rate mode psvr2 support.

I like the selection. I always wanted to try Saints & Sinners (and also The Persistence). I have not bought neither, mostly because I am not sure these are my type of game. Great, that I can try them out for cheap. "Until You Fall" is great but I already played it, not sure whether I will try any of the flat screen games.

To all the people who always complain about the selection:
one should not forget that the psplus subscription is also for the online infrastructure. I have no idea how much that costs, and some people argue that it should be for free, but somebody has to pay the electricity bill, network infrastructure and the equipment. I typically get the subscription fee back due to the extra discounts on the ps store. Everything else is a bonus. This year, the psplus collection alone was worth more than a 12 months subscription to me. In addition this year offered me a few great games, and many games I always wanted to try out. Altogether I get my money's worth.

I don't understand all the negativity. On one hand people complain about playstation only focusing on big budget block buster games, and then people complain about playstation putting smaller lower budget games, people typicallly overlook, into spot light. I would rather say combining all of the show cases and SOPs playstation showed a nice variety, there should be something new for pretty much everybody despite the extra difficulties due to the still on going pandemic.

I would also love to see old games getting a psvr2 treatment. I would love to revisit, ancient Egypt (origins), Gotham City (arkham knight), the world of read dead redemption 2 in VR. Actually there are too many worlds I would love to revisit ....