Comments 1,590

Re: Upcoming PS5, PS4 Games for April and May 2021

leucocyte

pass on all of these. ratchet & clank rift apart will probably be my next purchase. i might give oddworld a go since it's coming to PS+, but i've not played any of the other abe games. the only oddworld game i played was stranger's wrath.

Re: PS4 Remake Ratchet & Clank Getting PS5 60 Frames-Per-Second Patch

leucocyte

due to a trophy not unlocking on a second run, i played this through 3 times to get the platinum - not sure i could play through it again, even if the last time was nearly 5 years ago. hoping for a 60fps + 1080p+ ray-tracing performance mode though for Rift Apart.. it worked great in spiderman remastered.

Re: Reaction: Sony's Storefront Closures Put PS5, PS4 Backwards Compatibility Efforts Back in Focus

leucocyte

@get2sammyb - where's your evidence that there is a large enough audience?. to be blunt, PS4 had no backwards compatibility of any kind and yet it sold 120m (ish) units. outside of a small'ish diehard group and making some kind of PR statement, i don't think it really matters all that much. sony will have all sorts of metrics on how well its remakes did, what the uptake of PS2 classics on PS4 were, and so on.. backwards compatibility was mostly an irrelevant conversation last gen, to say that the current and a new generation of gamers will suddenly find an interest in 15+ year old games in their millions is a stretch.

infamous festival of blood is available on PS now. it doesn't run on the RSPC3 emulator for PC - pretty much like most of sony's first party PS3 games. PS now is running them on racks of PS3 boards.. if it was easy to get them running on non-cell hardware, they'd have done it by now to improve the capability of PS now if nothing else.

Re: Returnal Goes Gold Ahead of Late April PS5 Release

leucocyte

still not convinced this is for me. i just hope the reviews rate the game based on its own merits and not just fixate on the price and perceived value for money (or lack thereof). the concern is it becomes PS5's equivalent of the order 1886 - not on game terms, and i'm not pretending 1886 is a classic game, but it's nowhere near as bad as average/typical review scores made it out to be, as the dominating view was that it was far too short and insubstantial for a AAA game (which is a fair point) and typically knocked a couple of points off a score to the detriment of the game's positive aspects.

Re: Talking Point: Would You Buy a PS1, PS2, or PS3 Emulator for PS5?

leucocyte

having looked over RPCS3 emulator catalogue, it currently lists 48 of the games i own on PS3 to be "playable".. 114 are not playable, and the rest presumably untested (or takedowns issued). more than half of the 48 that are playable have been ported/remastered/remade anyway.. almost all of the sony games i own are in the 114 that are not playable, so PS3 emulation seems like it would present more hassles than it's really worth. it'd probably be easier to run some kind of wine-like compatibility layer or an equivalent of SteamPlay on PS5's unix O/S to run the PC version of a game (where it exists) and use PS now for first party games.

Re: Talking Point: Would You Buy a PS1, PS2, or PS3 Emulator for PS5?

leucocyte

PS3.. but it is very unrealistic in my opinion. i didn't own a PS1 or 2, with no great desire to play anything from that era, even if it was free. i would guess that acquiring licences for old software that isn't currently available is such a massive hassle in a lot of cases that it wouldn't be worth the effort.

i'd be more interested in remakes for PS4 or PS5 of the vita exclusives that never made the jump to consoles. golden abyss, killzone mercenary, little deviants..

i'd rather they focus on the future than trying to live off the past though. it seems to me that backwards compatibility always comes up at the start of a generation then quickly disappears into the rearview mirror as people can't keep up with the amount of modern games they have a backlog to play..

Re: Sony Must Communicate Its Plans for PS3, PS Vita, and PSP

leucocyte

i would guess the amount of hours spent on PSN from PS3/vita/psp must be exceedingly small these days.. personally speaking, i only played killzone 3 (i continued to play the multiplayer for quite awhile after PS4 came out - shadowfall wasn't nearly as good) and resistance 3 on my PS3. it's now in the attic with a box of about 150 physical discs.. i literally have no idea what i bought digitally. another of the reasons i don't buy digital often.

is it legal to take it away? depends what you mean by "take away".. you never owned anything more than a licence in the first place, so no longer providing it for download is perfectly legal. at the same time, it's not going to be deleted from your harddrive. though if it were the case that future downloads were removed, it would a big problem for vita owners with a decent size library given the size/cost of the memory cards.

i doubt the clamour for PS1 and PS2 games on PS5 is that big. i never owned either console.. can't say i've any particular desire to play them either. for the success of crash bandicoot (which was a remake), shadow of the colossus remake (fantastic as it was) hardly sold at all, neither did parappa the rapper remaster, medieval remake, wipeout collection, jak and dexter bundle.. etc. and the number of people who would play gran turismo 1 instead of any modern racer is exceptionally small. and i suspect for all the third party games and jrpgs that people get rose-eyed over would be more hassle to sort out licences etc than its worth.

Re: Sony Must Communicate Its Plans for PS3, PS Vita, and PSP

leucocyte

sony MUST blah blah... people demand news, updates, responses these days like a ticker-tape of social media posts. "according to a source close to the situation..." - whether or not it is true, responding to every bit of "news" from a "source" is a dumb way to run an organisation. if and when it does make an announcement on its own time regarding closing digital stores, analyse the information that is provided then.

Re: Soapbox: PS5 Has Turned Me Into a Total 60FPS Snob

leucocyte

dunno, smoothness and stability seems more important than a specific framerate to me.. and some style of games it's hard to tell the difference. i played control on performance mode, nothing about it screamed "60fps" to me. in fact destiny on PS4 at 30fps feels a lot more fluid.. i've tried the native PS5 version of destiny 2 at 60fps, it's very smooth and fluid, but i can't really tell the difference on that either.. maybe if i swapped between the PS4 and PS5 versions while they were both running it might be easier to tell.

Re: Soapbox: Why Do You Replay Games?

leucocyte

i generally don't replay games, though i never get rid of them. i'll sometimes replay if it's for an achievable platinum (last of us 2, miles morales) and it's not too long (i struggle to persist once through games that are excessively long). sometimes, i even go months not playing anything, rather than replay old games.

slightly different angle is that sometimes i will try to go back to a game i didn't finish for one reason or another and give it another go.. but this almost always gives the same impression as the article's. for example, a few months ago i tried to go back to mass effect: andromeda.. basically thought it was s*** at the time of its release, but wondered maybe if i'd been a bit harsh on it and revisit it. it was a mistake, 90 mins later, i'm questioning my sanity.. it's still dreadful.

Re: Outriders Is Going to Be a Commercial Crater on PS5, PS4

leucocyte

@JJ2 - a lot of the "reaction" and "soapbox" stuff here seems to be about pitting playstation against xbox.. it's pure populist baiting that generates the hits.. it's pretty easy to see that the comments sections on those are much much bigger than anything else. it sometimes got so toxic last summer (particularly when there was a notable lack of news about anything really) i stopped reading here for months. i really wish there was a filter for articles..

Re: Outriders Is Going to Be a Commercial Crater on PS5, PS4

leucocyte

deleted the demo after a couple of hours, thought it was dire and pretty juvenile too, and wouldn't play it for "free", even if they have fixed the nausea-inducing reach-for-the-toilet camera. i suspect it wasn't going to sell well on PS4/5 anyway, even if it wasn't on gamepass.

a month ago MS was out of touch, the villain of the industry, yadda yadda when it tried to up the price of xbox gold to £85 a year.. now it's all momentum, blah blah. make no mistake, gamepass is about turning service style games into hidden subscription games, where people are paying monthly without ever thinking if it's actually cost beneficial... i'm guilty of that with amazon prime. i watch stuff on it so intermittently, i probably don't really get value out of it. saying how much quantity is on a service never really made that much sense to me..

besides, sony probably blew an absolute truckload of money on getting next-gen GTA-V exclusive on PS+.. i doubt they're losing much sleep over outriders.

Re: Over Half of Players Completed Ghost of Tsushima's Campaign

leucocyte

played it, platinumed it, finished it on new game +, and got to level 20 on legends mode and finished all the legends levels solo on bronze level.. from 3rd level on it was just too difficult (for me) to do them solo on silver.. but overall played about 90 hours.

as for a sequel.. i don't know, it depends where they take it. Jin's story feels pretty self-contained to me.. i felt the same about the last of us. as much as i liked GoT, i'd be just as happy for sucker punch to try a new IP than do a more-of-the-same sequel, though that's not how the game industry rolls unfortunately. i would like to see more of Yuna's story, but the combat heavy gameplay doesn't really lend itself to that. on the first play through, i played with the japanese voiceovers.. on new game+ i tried it with the english dub, and hated it, so switched back.. the inflection/emotion in the voices for the main protagonists just seemed so much better on the japanese dub.

Re: CDPR's Blockbuster RPG Cyberpunk 2077 Now Nearing Three Months Missing from PS Store

leucocyte

"Sony removed the role-playing game from its storefront on 18th December, after it was forced to revise its refund policy due to the technical issues with the title"

saying it was refunds is pure conjecture that it was the reason for it being removed from the store.

would have bought it on disc anyway if i was going to get it, since it was sub-£40 even before launch compared with £50 on PSN. the city looked fascinating, but most of the rest of what i saw left me unimpressed..

Re: Soapbox: How I Would Handle The Last of Us Factions

leucocyte

it won't be free to play, it just won't imo. it might be a free update if you own TLoU2, otherwise i expect there to be a cost. arguably predator: hunting grounds and destruction allstars make a better case for F2P, but they're not.. sony doesn't seem to favour that model.

secondly, i have a strong hunch that horizon forbidden west will include some kind of robo-monster-hunting co-op , a franchise where co-op would work better, with greater variety, compared to the world of the last of us. so i don't think it'll be that..

a possibility could be to turn it into some kind of survivor version of MAG (not necessarily 256 players, but large enough scale). MAG had the SVER, Raven and Valor factions with battles between each that was supposed to feed into some kind of shadow war for supremacy - though it never really felt like you were part of anything bigger. but i could see something similar by setting a Factions game at some point between the events of TLoU and TLoU2.. where you could have a fight for dominance between various groups like the seraphites, the WLF, fireflies, whoever.. with different strengths/weaknesses/play styles. people have split off into various tribal factions, fighting both various infected and for limited resources, pitting them against each other - just what mp is about.

Re: Guerrilla's New Amsterdam Office Will Leave You Green with Envy

leucocyte

volgens mij zijn er veel mooie plaatsen in nederland maar helaas is amsterdam er niet een van...

anyyyyyway, yeah, they moved a while ago, i passed where their old office used to be in winter of 2019 (used to be right next to the main booking.com office just off rembrandtplein) and the guerrilla signs had gone. they had a big imposing helghast soldier in the foyer which was pretty cool. typical narrow amsterdam building though.

Re: UK Sales Charts: Spider-Man: Miles Morales Remains Sony's Hero in the Top 10

leucocyte

@TheDudeElDuderino - sure HFW will look better, run better, and maybe use some of the controller haptics, but fundamentally its design will be a compromise based on what is possible on a PS4. you can see this quite clearly in a cross-gen game like outriders for example - where the placing of (very frequent) cutscenes are obviously designed to hide background loading.

Re: PGA Tour 2K21 Swings Much Smoother with 60 Frames-Per-Second

leucocyte

@dellyrascal - leaderboard was a classic. i don't think i've played any PGA games, since tiger woods 2012 (or maybe 2011) on PS3. everybody's golf is fun, but i do wonder if there is somehow rampant cheating going on when you look at the leaderboards.. it seems as if somehow people have got a hole-in-one at every single hole on a course.

Re: Bogus Leak Dupes Web with Purported PS4 to PC Ports

leucocyte

why didn't they get DriveClub ported years ago to PC, and possibly save Evolution Studios from the chop, if all this new revenue stream is going to be reinvested in PS games (which i doubt)?. HZD sold 10-11m on PS4.. does anybody really think it needed more revenue for sony to greenlight a sequel?. all it's done is waste guerrilla resources on nothing that benefits PS4/5 gamers.. it hasn't even bothered to put minimal resource on updating it for PS5.

Re: Call of Duty's Season 2 Update Juiced UK Download Record

leucocyte

Cold war does not do this unpacking thing on PS5. Not sure about MW but since it's a PS4 game I doubt its patching/update mechanism is going to have changed when it's installed on a PS5.

there were updates for cold war and modern warfare last week, totalling 40gb or so.. if you have them both. the update sizes on these games are ridiculous, particularly MW, infinity ward needs to sort it out..

how many people own GTA V, about 2 squillion? just need rockstar to put out a 50gb for GTA online and wait for Internet to break...

Re: Last Year, the UK's Gaming Purchases Were 85 Per Cent Digital

leucocyte

considering most retail stores were closed for at least 7 months of 2020 (and for all but 2 weeks of the busiest period), and large supermarkets (at least that i saw) seem to stopped stocking up on games, it's surprising that physical games went up 7%, especially with the likes of CEX closed where most trade-ins seem to end up.

i bought 3 PS4 games in 2020 — all on disc - 2 at launch, significantly cheaper than PSN. i bought 3 PS5 games, also all on disc (savings weren't as big as PS4 games, but still about five quid per game). i did renew my PS+ (which i wouldn't subscribe to if it wasn't needed for online) and i thought i bought a destiny 2 dlc pack cheap during one of the lockdowns - which presumably counts as a "digital purchase" — but since there's literally no other options for those, it's daft to compare them with physical purchases.

Re: Call of Duty: Warzone Gets a Third High Resolution Texture Pack

leucocyte

@Would_you_kindly - could not agree more, this has annoyed me immensely since warzone was added into MW. even though i do have plenty of space, I don't want it, just want the option to delete it. there is already a standalone warzone install, so there's no need to force massive updates on people who only want to play operations or the odd round of 6v6

Re: Why Does PS4, PS5 Copying Update Files Take So Long?

leucocyte

@Voltan - probably, since the patching mechanism for any particular PS4 game isn't going to change just because it's on a PS5. it should still be able to copy the data back and forth a lot quicker though. and a lot of PS4 games don't do that anyway.. ghost of tsushima doesn't, updates just download and install immediately. it's the only PS4 game i have installed on my PS5 though, since its the only one i've bought post-PS5.

Re: Why Does PS4, PS5 Copying Update Files Take So Long?

leucocyte

i've yet to see an update on PS5 go through the copying phase at all much less take an absolute age to do so.

there was an update for destiny 2 yesterday on both PS4 and PS5 - it had finished and installed on PS5 before PS4 had even finished the pre-checking before starting the download.

Re: Hands On: Incredibly Rough Outriders Demo Kills Our Hope for This Looter Shooter's Launch

leucocyte

felt like a cross between anthem and the division to me, with all the issues described in the article and a shedload more.. it plays like a cover shooter but taking cover is pointless, as is moving if you play solo, as there literally a constant stream of bullets hitting you from all angles.. plus the loot looks like generic stat based guff lacking identity - the same problem as anthem and the division. based on the demo, it's one to skip for me..

Re: PS Plus March 2021 PS5, PS4 Games Announced

leucocyte

the FF series does little for me, so another pass next month for me. hated destruction allstars (though i kind of expected that, so it wasn't a surprise).. didn't really care for control either, but at least it saved me 30 quid from finding out i didn't really care for it.

Re: Housemarque on Returnal's Price: We're Doing Our Half of the Value Proposition

leucocyte

@MrGawain - absolutely.. which is why in general i preferred PS3 to PS4. much bigger variety of AAA and AA (which have practically disappeared in modern gaming) games (that cost usually 40 quid at most), and usually getting new games from studios every couple of years. now studios are taking 4-5 years or longer to make games, because they're trying to crowbar every mechanic they can think of into them and bloating them out with hours and hours of filler.. giving more opportunity to sell DLC, MTXs, and other stuff. you look at the trophy percentages for games on PS4, and even hugely popular games don't often have more 30% complete the campaign. skyrim on ps4 for example is 18%.

Re: Worry No Longer, Kena: Bridge of Spirits Is a $40 Game

leucocyte

@Hyperluminal - there's no physical release confirmed yet.

i generally don't buy digital games, and £33 is way over my threshold for such, so i'll probably wait til it's cheap or wait to see if it does get a physical release later on - i think sony's missed a trick here, by not using its experience to step in and help out emberlabs by publishing it for retail.

Re: Talking Point: Did Sony's State of Play Livestream Meet Your Expectations?

leucocyte

did it meet my expectations? yes, in that i didn't have any, and that's what i got. kena looks pretty nice, but gloss wiped off that with the reveal it's still 6 months away. almost everything else, i don't care an iota for, exactly as expected. returnal still doesn't look like a 70 quid game.. and the whole "every time you die, you come back and the world is different" mechanic sounds like you need to finish the game in one life.. which could get pretty frustrating and/or repetitve, and doesn't suggest to me that it's a long game.

Re: Call of Duty: Warzone Players Already Hate the New Intro Video

leucocyte

@Rob_230 - MW and Cold War take up a total of 320gb for me (and i don't have the 4k texture packs). i suspect the issue people might be running into is there's not enough space for updates (which are often huge) to be downloaded and applied. hdd's described as 500gb are only really about 450-460gb, then a chunk is reserved by PS4, so there's probably only about 400gb usable on a standard PS4. i'm using a PS4 pro, and still have about 260gb free on it so haven't seen the issue myself.

Re: Talking Point: What Do You Expect from This Week's State of Play?

leucocyte

i expect there to be very little new or particularly exciting.. but will still take 20 news articles here to cover 30 minutes of nothingness. then another 3 soapbox articles about how little was learned, what wasn't shown, how it failed to deliver, or how it needs to improve its game.. each with a long comments section about how underwhelming it was, where was "<insert expectation>?" without any justification for expecting it.

Re: Poll: How Do You Feel About PS4 Exclusives Being Ported to PC?

leucocyte

@Col_McCafferty - because you can almost bet that the PS5 version of Horizon Forbidden West will come in a special edition that includes a "remaster" of Horizon Zero Dawn and priced at sony's new £70 RRP (since HFW is on PS4 and has a free upgrade, the base version will be less). i don't think it'd be as easy as just patching the PS4 version to run with the PC enhancements if played on PS5, but i agree a PS5 version should have been made available as a free upgrade at launch of PS5.

if you want specs similar to a PS5 in a PC, it will be about triple the price.. the most basic RTX20* is going to cost the price of a PS5 alone. plus sony's proprietary ssd tech is a little bit ahead of anything in the PC market. but i'll be honest, apart from spiderman where the loading is lightning fast, "improved load times" haven't been that impressive in some games.. so i don't know how well optimised games have been for this up to now.

Re: Poll: How Do You Feel About PS4 Exclusives Being Ported to PC?

leucocyte

don't really care that much, but conversely, couldn't care less if they never went to PC either. you could always choose to buy a PS4 or not..buy a nintendo or not, play on PC or not. any choice inevitably means missing out on some games, and accepting the choice.

still think it's a dumb idea.. but no skin off my nose if it all blows up in sony's face. it's too early to tell whether there is any "massive adverse reaction" to it.. and once they're on the slope, reversing gear is difficult.. a lot of the decisions taken lately are baffling. a bit like some of the justifications espoused - horizon was 3 years old, days gone is 2 years old, death stranding wasn't a first party game anyway.. etc. etc. what happens if (when?) its £70 pricing strategy backfires spectacularly, and the messaging changes from "new audiences" to "recouping development costs" and the releases are much closer together.. even if i can afford it, i'm not paying 70 quid for returnal — so if you've got a lot of dedicated playstation gamers willing to wait 6 months to get it on a sale, they'll wait 12 months to get it on PC instead. selling games on PC doesn't bring them into the playstation, quite the opposite. and really what's the point of PS Now on PC if they're just going to release native ports?

i don't play on PC (because windows), so i'm seeing little benefit to playstation gamers.. money to make more playstation games?.. it's already taking much much too long to make games these days imo as it is.. studio bend has been porting days gone for PC. it's not going to be done once it's out.. it's going to need a support team on the PC version for months. when's the studio's next game gonna be, 2023, 2024?? there is also an aspect that some games actually do better because they are exclusive games. sony's more likely to use the $$$ to moneyhat exclusive content from third parties.. so on the one hand you've got "expose great games to a wider audience" while on the other keeping non-sony content from a wider audience. wtf???

Re: Days Gone Is Coming to PC

leucocyte

it's a bit of a waste of first party resources.. are bend working on PS5 development, or porting a two-year old PS4 game to PC? sony needs more PS5 games from its studios sooner, not simply more $$$ in the short term. while PS now exists, there's no reason for this. it was always possible to play sony games later on other platforms - maybe it should promote and improve PS now more so that PS4 games can run with higher resolutions and unlocked framerates when streamed.

Re: Sony Sounds Bitter About the Cyberpunk 2077 Debacle

leucocyte

@SZRT_CIC_Ice - that's half the site's modus operandi - hyperbolise something to generate clicks.. i'm not sure we need 7 articles on a single interview either.

and these quotes were already mentioned in a prior article. the sentiments regarding delaying games til they're ready have been echoed in many other sources, not just by jim ryan. i'd imagine he's not as bitter as all the gamers who feel they've got badly burned by the game.

Re: Soapbox: There's a Nintendo Direct Today, But I Wish We Had a State of Play to Look Forward To

leucocyte

not sure i see the point in having an SoP for the sake of having an SoP, to be honest. and creating either CGI trailers or gameplay content for games that are still quite a way off is a waste of developer resources at the minute, imo. just let them get on with finishing the game, and show something nearer the time. after ratchet & clank, i would not be hugely surprised if the rest of 2021 for sony is at best unknown.. what's next after R&C — horizon?. it may or may not get a release this year.. why show it now, only for it to be the only thing they've got to show 2 months from now, and maybe 2 months from that.. then the rhetoric changes from "show us anything" to "yeah, we've seen enough of that, how about something new"...

games have simply been announced too early or when they're not ready, which has fuelled an info-cycle that cannot be sustained in my opinion. we've already seen PS5 titles with "coming 2022/2023".. why?!? what possibly could change in the next 6 months to make it look more like a finished product that just needs another 18-24 months? maybe we can hope that after the utter fiasco of cyberpunk is a watershed moment, and publishers/studios will spend more time polishing their games and showing them when they're ready, and can deliver what is shown rather than showing some target 2 years early.. i think many anticipated games will be delayed, some targetted for this year, until 2022.. so what's the point in showing them now?. as a consequence, there will be an extended news lull.

GT7, Horizon, GoW delayed out to 2022 wouldn't surprise me - perhaps by then, PS5 supply constraints will have eased and there'll be an install base justifying releasing games with up to $100m in development costs.. it also leaves them less exposed to first party studio titles drying up for a while.. as several of their studios such as sucker punch, naughty dog, bend, etc.. are only just in the early stages of PS5 game development.