leucocyte

they need to fix the multiplayer on PS5 first, before adding more stuff to it. it's been unplayable since the season 1 update before christmas

whether or not schools should be open right now, doesn't change the fact the govt's vaccination strategy to allow them to reopen is utter bananas.. wherever they're getting their advice from, it's not mathematically justifiable. starting with the over 80s makes no sense, since they're not the most likely to be superspreaders.. i don't know many over 80s that might typically interact with huge numbers of people on a daily basis.. unlike younger people like school kids. vaccinate them, they're not going to catch it to spread it to granny, or any of the other 200 people they might see in a school. vaccinations used to be given regularly in schools when i was kid.. why not the covid one?.

@LiamCroft - FemShep is the only way to play the original mass effect games imo. i only needed 15 minutes of the first PS3 demo for ME2 to realise that, the voicework is much much better for FemShep..

Ratchet & Clank, God of War Ragnarok and Horizon Forbidden West - though i don't think either of the last two will make it out in 2021 - i think horizon will get delayed to march 2022, and i'm half expecting it to have an 'ultimate edition' which includes a remastered PS5 version of HZD. haven't played the first mass effect.. but as great as the second one was, i really think they need remade, not remastered.. unreal engine 3 is ancient at this point, and it really shows. i just don't think EA will make that much of an effort.

uncharted doesn't work as well without nathan drake in my opinion, and naughty dog did their best to draw a definitive line under drake's story. continuing the series with side characters, or cassie, or young drake, especially if naughty dog is not involved, will probably invite unflattering comparisons.

sony has the (multiplatform) publisher rights for MLB, but i suspect that MLB: 2021 for the xbox and nintendo will have been outsourced for porting to other studios (as i'm not sure that sony san diego has the resources to do several versions all in-house).. so the quality between console editions may vary.

i think guerrilla will eventually delay horizon forbidden west until march 2022, and the PS5 version may have some kind of ultimate edition that comes with a remastered version of horizon zero dawn (similar to spiderman) which includes some of the enhancements of the PC version, and a 4K graphics mode or 60fps performance mode, etc.

three good games at the top, though probably the game i had the most fun with was spiderman : miles morales. TLoU2 and ghost of tsushima are both excellently made games, for different reasons, and i did platinum them both, but both of them (for me) had some niggling issues.. i thought the story for TLoU2 was really well handled for the most part (some videogame cheesiness aside), and [spoiler alert] it was good to see that there was at least a plausible way that ellie could take on abby in a bare fight, after abby was captured and became emaciated. and at the end, the poignancy for the final cutscenes, that ellie's unquenchable thirst for revenge cost her everything meaningful in her life. the combat was also really good.. but for me, there are a lot of tedious sections, the open (ish) worldy bits didn't really work, they just drag the pacing down painfully (especially the pre-day 1 seattle bit). it took me 2 full playthroughs to platinum it, which took 52 hours.. about 30% of the running length could have been trimmed, and not much lost in my opinion.

as for ghost of tsushima - combat was excellent, it was different than i expected it to be (and i'd avoided the game since it came out based on those expectations). i started the game on boxing day and finished it a couple of days ago. for the first 30 hours or so i thought the game was great.. the atmosphere was fantastic, i played it with the japanese dialogue with subtitles [the japanese voicework is much much better than the english dub in my opinion]. the campaign was good, the allies side quests, and mythic tales were interesting diversions, even some of the of side missions were fun.. but then the open world bloat kicked in. too many side missions where the pattern got a bit predictable, how many sets of tracks can you track in one game... and i wasn't a huge fan of the waypointing system, or the "search the area" objectives. after awhile the postgame cleanup for the platinum started to feel like an ubisoft game - icons and collectibles question marks all over the map. i'd generally tried to clear stuff as i came across it on the open world map travelling between missions/quests, but there was still quite a bit of post-campaign activity. 50+ camps to liberate, another ubisoft hallmark.. the bonus objectives at least gave some incentive to try different approaches to clear them out, and inventive ways to slaughter a bunch of mongol warlords was entertaining for the most part but after soooo many camps and no story to fall back on, it got a bit repetitive. trim the bloat and this would have been one of the top 5 games on PS4 for me. i should mention, this ran superbly well for me on PS5, framerate was great, and not a single bug/glitch in the entire experience.

started it on boxing day, about 20 hours in and i've only just hit the second part of the island. everything is just so polished, the aesthetic, atmosphere and attention to detail is fantastic. i'm playing on PS5 so the combat is really smooth. i'd avoided it til now thinking the focus on combat would really put me off (and my general aversion to open world games) but the combat is really well done.. the timing is a bit more forgiving than i thought it would be (though maybe on hard/legend difficulty it's not!). every frame is unbelievably pretty, easy to see why so many screenshots from this game were entered in the community screenshot of the year competition. i actually like that at the heart of most of the side quests is a simple premise and that is to care about your home and its residents, none of them have ever really felt like a chore (yet).

you don't need to worry about black ops cold war this season, it's an unplayable mess on PS5 after the last update.

according to the game time stats shown on PS5, i played more than 2000 hours of destiny 1! (mostly in its first year), the next highest is battlefield 4 at about 300. by comparison, if i add up all the games i played in 2020, it's under 200. most service games are built on a model that (to me) is just not very interesting..

it's a great controller, but since i use R1/L1 for shooting, the haptics don't really work.. you end up getting weird feedback on throwing grenades which doesn't quite work the same. i've only played 2 FPS's on PS5 (cold war and destiny 2) though. while astro bot demonstrated a lot of the features of it and how they could be implemented, apart from the tactile nature of different surfaces, i found most of it to be fairly annoying, particularly the sections where you had to spring about.

now if it'd only port the remote play app to linux. it already works on PS4, OS/X and android, which are all linux variants.. can't require that much effort.

haven't used the new website at all, barely ever used the old store website much.. never saw the need to, because generally i don't buy much digitally.. and if i did, i'd be downloading it from my PS4, so i just buy it from the PS4. i always use redeemable codes anyway. as for sales on the PS5, it is literally two buttons presses to see the latest sale (or at least the first twenty featured titles.. bit of scrolling required to see them all). still cheaper to buy many of the big AAA games on disc than the digital sale price, making the store irrelevant in those cases anyway.

@RobN - maybe it would be easier if there was a "Deals" tab to go along with "Latest" "Collections" and whatever the other one is.. but i've found all the other sales easy enough - death stranding was there the other day on the collections page.. i assumed one sale replaced another, but i since i buy so little digitally (i think i've only paid money twice since 2017) i didn't take that much interest in what happened to the previous deals to be honest.

as for having to scroll across a bunch of games for the view all button - yeah a bit inconvenient, but i wouldn't be surprised if some publishers have paid for prominent placement - you're going to have see their products before you see any others. it's not just sony that does this.. and with limited screenspace available, UI design choices aren't going to be great. pretty much every app store, particularly ones that use tiles, has utterly terrible UI/design, not just sony's.

@RobN - for me in the UK, the sales have always appeared under the "collections" tab on PS5. right now, if I'm on the store home screen, I press R1 and then down on the PS5, the January sale is right there.

it took all of 5 seconds to find the sale on the PS5.. i don't use the website store (didn't use the old version much either) so i don't know how that is. search seems to be better on PS5 than PS4 for me anyway.. out of curiosity, decided to see if final season of walking dead was finally on sale, typed 'walking dead' and it came back as the first hit (and it's on sale!).. on PS4 i have to scroll through a bunch of fluff before final season appears.

the general UI on PS5 has been pretty stable for me, but downloading/updating games on PS5 has been massively buggy. the last destiny 2 update didn't download - just got stuck "calculating time remaining" for several hours, despite it being only 100mb or so. the only way to fix it was to delete the entire game, and re-download the latest full version from the store, which is 62gb — that's double digits hours for me on my connection - or would be, if it didn't randomly stop with a non-descript error, requiring a manual restart — but i usually download stuff that big when i'm asleep, so i wake up to find that instead of being almost finished, it stopped at 8% or something.. if i wasn't constantly monitoring it, it would probably take days to download. the same for spiderman remastered, the download kept stopping for no apparent reason. i had to re-install miles morales (from disk) 3 times, due to an update error - 1.03 just wouldn't not apply, even after downloading - i played the game for about 25 hours with pretty much no issues at all, other than the trying to get the damn thing installed.. no way in hell am i going to be paying money for digital games at present.

last of us 2 is currently 25 quid in tesco, as was ghost of tsushima when i picked it up last week.. how is £39 a "bargain"?. it was £41 from shopto prior to release. not that i'll be buying any digital game in the forseeable future, it's such a massive ball-ache to do so at the moment..

i pulled the trigger on Ghost of Tsushima.. boosting those sales figures right there.

while big declines are typical for AAA games, not sure they're often that big, and at this time of year at peak buying time, i would suspect this is way more than CDPR would have anticipated.. especially with the amount of TV-advertising they've been pumping out. then again, there are plenty of used copies available at CEX for anybody who wants to pick a physical edition.

if 41% of pre-orders were on console, that's more than 3 mill pre-order sales.. probably safe to assume about 2m of those were on PS4.. even if half wanted a refund, that's still 1m people continuing to play it.. continuing to patch it on PS4 for those people is the least that should be expected.

microsoft probably should de-list it, though as a marketing partner hoping to attach the IP to the xbox brand, that might not look good. as bad as it is on PS4, it's basically completely unplayable on the base xbox one - along with all the bugs, most of the time it's sub-720p and barely gets above low-20s fps, often tanking to low-teens.

it would be interesting to know how many people held off pre-ordering/buying as they'd planned to get it on a next-gen console? CDPR has its work cut out, as getting the current versions to an acceptable level might be the standard by which people decide whether to pick it up on PS5.. it would need to be pretty damn sure the same flak doesn't come its way when the new console versions launch..

i noticed the last day or two, i've been seeing cyberpunk ads on TV without the microsoft marketing.. (distancing itself from the s**tshow?). the metacritic average for the console versions was in the low 50s the last i saw, probably not many usable soundbites from the reviews.

i wonder if sony's decision to remove the game was based on what's in the crash report telemetry. as people get further into the game it seems to crash even more often, maybe there's potentially a risk to system stability, even if it is small. also, maybe there's not much point in continuing to sell the game, if the percentage of refund requests is high.. it's not going to be that much more playable for the next couple of months at least., so if somebody buys it at xmas, chances are they'll be asking for a refund by January. it's also not a consistent message.. "this game is in a terrible state and we are offering refunds to all purchases if requested. please feel free to support us by continuing buying cyberpunk from PSN".

thankfully i didn't like the witcher 3, so had no expectations for it.. the aesthetic looks good (on high-end PC settings), but i had a feeling it would buckle under hype.

@Rob_230 - i played miles morales for 25 hours without a single hard crash — i did have one instance where it seemed to bug out, when i was in the map.. i couldn't get back out of it, and had to manually restart, was the only issue i had. i never suspended the game though and always properly closed it after a session.

@wiiware - i disagree, it was always clear that ellie would be the main protaganist in TLoU2, and ND admitted that - and she still is, even if quite a chunk (probably more than was necessary to be fair) you play as someone else — that's to add a lot of context, for ellie's motivation, etc. it was a "Part 2", in which the consequences of the choice made at the end of the original game are played out, not a sequel where it's a buddy adventure across clicker country. the story was really well done in my opinion, one of the standout aspects of the game.. and technically it was flawless (or at least it was by the time i got around to playing it in september). i did have some other issues with the game (didn't pace well in places, it was too long, and had sections that were tedious).. so overall i enjoyed the original game more, but to say that ND deliberately lied about what the game would be is false.

a game announced in 2012, was designed for PC hardware that would be available in 2020?. i wish i had CDPR's crystal ball...

regardless, personally i think people are overestimating CDPR's ability to fix it.. it looks like a loooong road, which may delay a native PS5 version even longer, so don't get your hopes of playing in the near term, imo. at the end of november 2019, they announced it was in final stage of development, and still believed it would be ready for april 2020 — so more than a year ago, they thought it was 4 months away from the finished product. (https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2019/11/cyberpunk_2077_is_in_final_stage_of_development) - within two months, it gets a 5 month delay to september, so it would be 8 months to release. then in june it gets another 2 month delay until november.. game goes gold in october, only to get delayed for another few weeks.. if CDPR thought the game was close to finished over 12 months ago, then mandated ridiculous amounts of crunch.. had 4 more delays, and still pushed put out a product in that state.. either they've not made that much progress on performance/playability in 12 months, or the game was so atrociously bad 12 months ago, they've been straight up lying about it... either way, it looks a long way from acceptable.

i'm struggling to see the point in sony continuing the timed exclusive deals for deathloop and ghostwire at this point to be honest.. presumably the intention is to align a product in public consciousness with your brand, but seems counterproductive if you're not going to get any of the sequels. sony'd be better spending the money on something else.

@Toypop - the sony's in dire financial straits rhetoric is from about a decade ago.. it's a broken record. its music and movie divisions just posted revenues of $8bn and $10bn. it has its own financial services division in japan which is in fine health. spiderman homecoming, once upon a time in hollywood and jumanji next level had bigger revenue than the whole of the xbox division in 3 months. do they have microsoft (the parent company) levels of capital.. of course they don't. but equating corporate level finances with specific divisional ones, doesn't work.. apple and google have bigger finances than microsoft yet both have dropped support for products/services.. microsoft's billions got them absolutely nowhere in the mobile market. they closed their digital bookstore and had to refund everyones purchases, after it was a huge failure. eventually the xbox division will have to justify its massive expenditures to its corporate overlords..

as for the pre-orders. you have no idea how much stock was made available.. "just a handful of units" is laughable.. if they're breaking pre-order records, then it must be more than were pre-ordered for PS4?.. considering that broke sales records... the reality is neither sony nor MS might be able to meet their respective fanbase demands, since production runs have been hampered this year so that less will be produced than is optimal. the likelihood is they will be outsold by the nintendo switch in the christmas period.. if sony got real aggressive on PS4 price and dropped it to $99, i think a $149 PS4 with SM:MM bundle could see it outsell the next-gen machines as well.

@Toypop - estimated manufacturing costs of XsX - $525, estimated manufacturing costs of PS5 - $425/$450 - who's making the bigger loss per unit?.

also, the playstation division makes more than $20bn in revenue per year, compared with the xbox division's (including PC) $10bn a year.. in fact PS's revenue is holding fairly steady, while xbox has already declined 21% this year. yes, Microsoft as a corporation has deep pockets, but do you honestly think the parent corp is going to perpetually fund losses for the gaming division?. satya nadella is not that accomodating.. spencer will be expected to deliver profit/sustained growth from the investment. they bought mojang for $2bn and have not had a single new IP from them.. maybe they don't need one, if they're milking minecraft on every single platform imaginable including the 'competition'.

can't say i really noticed the heaviness of the operators to be honest.. the guns are a massive step back from modern warfare, they feel less weighty and impactful to me.. they're more in line with the 'typical' CoD floaty weapon feel. plus the netcode seemed to be all over the place for me.. makes me wonder just how much of the core game engine code is shared between releases. the biggest issue for me was the map design of the included maps.. pretty much all of them are terrible. absolutely hated the miami map.. the armada map had more of a battlefield feel design, and the ziplining across ships was an interested idea.. but the A to E flags are so far apart from each other, most of the action ends up taking place between B and D, and even then it still feels sparse with 24 players.

@AdamNovice - activision's total asset value is way beyond sony's means. it's way in excess of what zenimax is worth, which MS look to have paid way over the odds for. $7.5bn seems like a bit of a financial gamble if they're betting solely on gamepass as the revenue driver.

is there a full list of games available at launch anywhere?.. i don't just mean the sony published stuff... call of duty: cold war, assassin's creed valhalla, destiny 2, etc. etc. all have native PS5 editions ready for day 1, but there must be a load more...

that series x looks fairly chunky in width. i will probably box up my PS3, move the PS4 to where the PS3 is, and put the PS5 (when i eventually get one) where my PS4 currently is (if the size is accurate, it'll fit with room to spare).

25% is roughly about what brand new AAA games sell digitally in the UK (though it can be more or less depending on the type of game and its content delivery method), and with £60-£70 games, the option to trade-in will still be attractive to some. most polls i saw suggested 70-80% would prefer the flexibility of having a disc-drive, though that was before any prices were announced, and whether the £90 difference would persuade people to change their mind..

i would have selected the option "No, because I always buy games physically at less than RRP", and this will continue. i think these prices could halt the rise of digital sales.. in the UK, for AAA games (at least prior to coronavirus), physical sales counted for 70-75%.. i can see this going back up as people make use of the trade-in market more than ever if games are £70.

during PS3, games here used to be £50 RRP, though you could regularly find brand new at £40 and under (though we were benefitting from an exchange rate that was 2:1 with the dollar). for PS4, it was £60.. but pretty easy to buy brand new at £50 and under. i'd expect that trend will continue on PS5, £70 RRP will be retailed at £60 and under (or will be outside of the first month or two of console launch). this is the price you're currently paying for new PS4 games on PSN. i got TLoU2 at launch, day 1, for £41. this is still less than it was on the recent PS store sale.

i prefer the black packaging but wouldn't buy the digital edition even if it was the only option.

the chances of sony showcasing the PS4 version of HFW at any point are probably pretty slim, so the difference between the PS5 and PS4 versions might be apparent until it's released into the wild.

maybe the game is closer to being ready than anticipated.. and is already running on PS4.. otherwise they could run into a situation where they built a shiny PS5 version, only to run into huge optimisation problems on PS4 and have to scrap it, even though they said it would be coming. that'd be embarrassing.

i pre-ordered on shopto about 4-5 months ago, however their website says they have not been told their allocation yet by sony, so even though my pre-order is confirmed and no longer the princely sum of 1p, shopto says confirmed orders are not guaranteed for day 1. I'm not overly fussed to be honest, but plenty of friends and colleagues have been trawling every retail site going today to get a pre-order sorted.. so i might take it anyway if shopto comes through, as i'll have no trouble selling it on.

@JohnKarnes - the difference in production costs between the two models is reportedly about $22.

@TooBarFoo - most third party games are also going up in price. i think ubisoft (so far) is the only one so far to commit to keeping current-gen pricing for now.

if people are expecting loads of brand new games to go on game pass they are fooling themselves.. MS stuff yes, but most of their output is extremely weak in my opinion (or not proven to be anywhere near top tier talent yet). if you hadn't played on PS4, the PS collection for PS5 has much better stuff imo. but services are not really my thing. i look at game pass and see 200 games of (mostly) rubbish or stuff i played already. i look at PSnow and see 800 games of (mostly) rubbish or stuff i played already.

@Fuzzymonkeyfunk - add 20% VAT to £55.

realistically horizon forbidden west is going to be end 2021, so personally i would expect god of war 2, if it is indeed coming next year, to also be on PS4.

i don't care that much about higher resolutions or framerates, and both HZD and GoW looked and played really well on PS4pro, and to this point HFW and GoW2 would have been the only reason for me to buy a PS5. very bizarre strategy to "transition PS4 players quickly".. this is basically giving me good reasons not to bother. you really do wonder if the global situation has resulted in a production capacity and logistics problems so projections are nowhere near as optimisitc as they had originally hoped. even if they did sell 10m consoles first year.. horizon, spiderman, GoW were all individually 10m+ sellers on PS4.

@belmont - no, they don't, because sales tax varies per state. so prices don't include sales tax.. i've only been to the US once, but i found the practice in shops to be massively frustrating to be honest.

@belmont - because depending where you live in europe, the sales tax is up to 25%. if you were to add 25% to $70, it'd be $87.5

the only PS5 physical game pre-orders i seem to be able to find at the minute are AC:Valhalla and Watch Dog: Legions both for £47 (RRP: £55), and CoD: Cold War for £58 (RRP: £65).

suddenly it becomes clear why the disc edition is 100$/€/£ more - to try and ward off a resurge in the used market...

nobody is going to pay £60+ for sackboy's adventures. it's probably only a few hours long. even if you did really want it why wouldn't you buy the PS4 version of it for much less, and just take the free upgrade?. don't understand this at all...

@JohnKarnes - yeah, but a standalone player come with all the additional gubbins required to make it operate, the actual disc unit itself is about $20-$25 in costs.

ehh?.. this strategy has lost me. "we believe in generations"?!?. little big planet 3 released on PS3 and 4, so the sackboy thing i understand somewhat.. but horizon is one of those tentpole system sellers. if it's true of horizon forbidden west, expect the same from god of war 2.

i guess when you sell 14m copies.. that PS4 install base is too lucrative to pass up.

sony exec 1: how do we lower launch price of PS5?.

sony exec 2: we'll sell 2m copies of MM on PS5, but we could sell another 10m @$50 a pop on PS4 for hardly any extra development costs.

£90 extra is exorbitant for a disc drive. unless there's some decent retailer bundles that make it more palatable, i'll probably skip it.. and wait til next year and go for the duty free option.

nothing was really my cup of tea, but that's a personal preference thing.. bluepoint have done an amazing looking job on that demon's souls remake. here's hoping sony ask them to polish up a few more classics from the PS3 era.

if you didn't own a PS4, the PS+ collection for PS5 is massively more attractive than gamepass imo.. that's a lot of quality there. it does seem to be aimed at either people who didn't own a PS4 though, or people who may decide transition from disc to digital - so not having to re-buy at least some titles they may have already. i suspect that it's going to replace the 2 "free" PS+ games a month though.

@Rudy_Manchego - i just don't get the bruhah about gamepass.. maybe it's because i have zero interest in either service, but compared to psnow - it's access to ~200 of (mostly crap) games for £100/yr (xbox), or access to ~800 (mostly crap) games for £50/yr (PSnow). even if you only count the downloadable games on PSnow, it's still probably more than 200. i know you get "day 1" games on gamepass, but unless you like forza, microsoft studios output throughout XB1 has been utterly abysmal, so that's not really much of an attraction imo.. and whatever their new studio acquistions will put out is still a big unknown. none of them have proven they're top-tier talent yet.

@NEStalgia - i don't really buy that argument that inherently sony will be able to make so much more money out of people who buy the digital edition. for people who do want to buy the physical version - PS+ costs the same, PSNow costs the same, other services, DLC, virtual currencies and microtransactions all cost the same - sony's not making any less there.. they also get the licence fees for every (new) disc sold. the idea that everyone who wants the flexibility of disks is somebody who's going to buy used games play them for a bit then sell them on and repeat the cycle (especially at a launch) is unfounded. quite frankly it would feel like being asked to give a $50 subsidy to the digital version just to make its launch price look more attractive.

@KathyQ - maybe, though shopto has already confirmed my pre-order, and since they are very reliable, and i have their gold membership, i fully expect the only thing to change about it is having the price confirmed, not having to wait hours on a website queue to re-pre-order it. that'd be a sure way to lose customers fast. since my card won't be charged until dispatch i have time to cancel if i don't want it.