Comments 1,590

Re: Talking Point: What Will Be Announced at PS5 Showcase Event?

leucocyte

i've been on a pre-order list for months.. for some places, i think if you've been waiting for sony's official announcement, you might already be too late. if the price/line-up doesn't appeal to me, no problem, i cancel and my spot goes to some other enthusiast.

i'm still not convinced sony will bring out upgraded versions of TLoU2 and GoT.. maybe there'll be a patch (or update) to increase (or un-cap) the resolution or framerate of the PS4 version if played on PS5, but i wouldn't expect anything more than that. either way i wouldn't play TLoU2 again. i haven't tried GoT, not sure it's something i'd enjoy a lot to be honest.

Re: PS5 Price May Dip Below $400, Analyst Speculates

leucocyte

i find it totally unjustifiable that a $20 bit of additional hardware means $100 (or worse £100) in retail costs. the cost difference between the digital and regular xbox1s models was about £30-£50. i understand why people think sony would do it, it's just not a justifiable reason in my opinion.

i'll throw out a guess of:
DE: $399/€399/£379
PS5: $449/€449/£425

also i think people are getting a bit overworked about the base price.. how many people just spend the cost of a console with nothing to go with it?. for the disc version at least, i expect there to be plenty of retailer bundles on offer for launch. even if sony does underprice MS (or vice versa) there is still plenty of scope for one or the other to even out the playing field with a decent pack-in of software/extra accessories... certainly for sony, who might actually have first party stuff on launch day. PS4 launch price was £349, but i got a bundle with killzone shadowfall, battlefield 4 and an extra controller for £429. i'm sure by christmas, total spend for me was probably closer to £600. the base price is not really the big picture. generally people who buy a console at launch are much more likely to bulk load on new games/accessories, which can quickly help offset some of the losses per unit..

Re: Talking Point: What Do You Want to See at PS5's Showcase Event?

leucocyte

rather a lot of expectations for 40 minutes.. it's really not that long. if it's true that sony has been splashing the cash for 3rd party exclusives (full/timed/content whatever) then there might be a few publishers/studios wanting their moment in the spotlight as well.. i think CoD:BO:CW will get a showing where whatever sony's partnership with activision has secured will be disclosed (7 day early access to new zombie maps or something along those lines).

anything that's a year+ away is pointless being shown or even teased in my opinion... never mind horizon forbidden west, i'm more interested in whether the original game will get a patch (or whatever) that will give any of the PC enhancements if played on PS5 through bc.

if the price is revealed, i think it'll be left to the very end personally. if it's high, then if it's announced straight up they risk lots of people tuning out without even bothering to watch, and lose the opportunity to try and convince them why it's worth it.. if it's low (or at least lower than XsX), then i suspect they'd want to leave it to the... "oh, and one last thing... coming dd/mm/yyyy $399/€399/£349" moment.

Re: Sony Has a Mystery Event Planned for PAX Online Next Week

leucocyte

sony's issue on prices is not necessarily how much more or less than the $499 of the XsX the PS5 can be.. imo, its gaming division is in a much better financial position than the xbox division (yes, i know the MS corporation is minted to the hilt, but generally most conglomerates don't funnel vast sums of money from one division to help another with losses), so it might be a matter of how much loss sony are willing to absorb per unit to meet or better the XsX price. sony has another problem on what to do with PS4. undoubtedly PS4 still featured heavily in their plans for the holiday season, and possibly they still expected it to sell well.. however, it's current RRP is $299/£249 and the pro $399/£349, and the existence of the XsS is a larger spanner for PS4 imo, and one they might not be able to resolve overnight.. do they ditch PS4 (even though there might be a lot of manufactured units shipped/ready to ship) and make the PS4pro the defacto base unit, and then somehow find a way to lower the price to $249/£199.. or do they aggressively target the PS4 at $199/£149 budget, and leave the pro.. it's plausible that if somebody was willing to stump up £349 for the premium PS4, they might as well get a PS5 for £50-£100 more (if that's what it ends up retailing at). balancing where/how to align the PS4/PS4pro/PS5 DE/PS5 is not going to happen a day after MS announces prices, no matter how much people insist sony has to announce a price now.

Re: Poll: How Much Are You Willing to Pay for PS5?

leucocyte

£399 for the disc edition , but not if it's more than £50 above the digital edition, then i'll not be buying any edition. the fact the PS4 pro is still retailing at £349 doesn't bode well for optimism on PS5 price though. i think sony are going to have to find a way to slash the PS4 pro price to £199. nobody's going to pick up a current gen console for £100 more than a new-gen one, even if it is the weakest by some way.

Re: Explaining Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War's PS4 to PS5 Upgrade Transition

leucocyte

all that maths in sammy's gif seems a lot easier to understand.

would have been easier to say buy the PS5 version which costs a £5 more and get the PS4 version for free to play early. all upgrade options for people who prefer to buy games physically are a real balls..

interesting it mentions higher framerates for PS5, it's usually a pretty reliable 60fps on PS4, so wonder if there's going to be a 120fps option, or whether performance on PS4 will be pared back to 30.

Re: Indie Dev Demonstrates How Bad PS Store Discoverability Can Be

leucocyte

it took all of 10 seconds to find the game, it's third in the Games/New/See-all section. if the previous game "barely sold anything" to 100m+ users, it's rather patronising to assume it must be the store's fault and nobody has figured out how to view new releases. like any store, the stuff that sells big and sells best is going to get a more prominent display. maybe they should just put an option in the menu along with Featured/Whats Hot called "New Releases".

As for the search - the algorithm might be using a weighted score, which is pretty common.. though not exactly perfect. in this case because the game is new, it might not have received that many "hits", so weighting produces an ordering that seems at odds with what is searched. a lot of fuzzy text search algorithms would probably assign the same value to descend, descendant, descender. if he had searched for his studio name, "no more robots", his two games come out first and second in search order.

Re: Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales Will Use PS5 to Convey Spider-Sense

leucocyte

@playstation1995 - i don't know if i like miles better, as i simply don't know anything about him at all. but every film/animated series portrayal of peter parker spiderman that i've seen, i've found the character to be immensely annoying, and from the clips i've seen of insomniac's spiderman it looks like they tried to remain reasonably faithful to that personality.

Re: Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales Will Use PS5 to Convey Spider-Sense

leucocyte

didn't play spiderman on PS4, nothing to do with insonmiac's ability to make the spiderman mechanics good, but rather the thought of spending a 20-30hr campaign with spiderman, or more specifically peter parker's spiderman was quite off-putting. i'd be more interested in this, since the mechanics look good, it's not as long, and it's not peter parker.

Re: Demon's Souls PS5 Remake Rated for Release in Korea, Japan

leucocyte

official playstation magazine's latest issue had about 100 games in its upcoming PS5 games feature.. about 30 were listed for "launch window" which was up til 6 months, demon souls wasn't one them - it was estimated 6-12 months. from my point of view, there isn't anything really desirable within those 30, and a lot of them are cross-gen annual/franchise releases. now that deathloop has been pushed, it's leaving the 'next-gen only' pile a bit bare for the first few months.

Re: There's Been a Big Scandal About Whether PS5 Can Run Games in 4K

leucocyte

there are games on PS4 pro that are 4k.. with a 4Tfps GPU and a CPU that would barely power a tablet. PS5 has about 2.5 times of the number of teraflops (and it's much more efficent) and a much superior CPU.. what something is capable of is a matter of priorities. you could throw all the particle effects, ultra settings, ray tracing, a million NPCs and everything else and cause any GPU to chug no matter how powerful. 1080p would have been possible on PS3, if developers had chosen to use pretty low polycount models and low detail settings. if horizon forbidden west used all the same settings as zero dawn, everyone would still think it looked great, and i'm sure it would easily hit native 4k. the quality of an art department and its assets can make a huge difference than mere resolution.. look at halo infinite, that reveal was hugely unimpressive, even 4k didn't save it. the epic games demo on PS5 looked years ahead of it, even if it was "only 1440p".
also destiny 2 has been confirmed at 4k60fps on PS5. isn't dirt 5 4k60fps or 2k120fps on PS5?

i more interested in what kind of games and new experiences the PS5 can give, not whether it will play the same old s**t in eye-bleeding details or nausea-inducing framerates.

Re: Everyone's Talking About PS5's Price Again

leucocyte

yes, the PS5 has a proprietary SSD which is probably more expensive to manufacture.. but the xbox x has more CUs on its APU which costs more, and produces more power/heat so needs a bigger cooling solution. PS5 has a consistent RAM setup across the board, rather than xbox's mismash of faster (than PS5) and slower (than PS5). so both consoles have parts which are cheaper/more expensive than the other. it seems to me that both could potentially be expensive, but microsoft is desperate to be cheaper than sony, and sony is desperate not to be more expensive than microsoft.. but neither wants to take the scale of losses of the xbox360/PS3 era. it's probably why we are seeing a game of price chicken.

sony's revenue forecast for G&NS for this year looks to be about $4.9bn (1977bn yen to 2500 bn yen) up from 2019.. what's unknown is whether or not its revenue from existing sources is projected to be up or down. from a simple view, if all other revenue was more or less the same, and it expects around 10m sales.. that would be $490 per console. other revenue up by $1bn would be $390 per console, other revenue down by $1bn would be $590 per console.

Re: PS5 Moneyhat Speculation Rumbles On

leucocyte

total shot in the dark, but Diablo 4?. even for a few months timed exclusivity. sony and activision have been pretty chummy all through this generation. it's massive, but not unaffordably massive like CoD. it's probably a pretty safe bet that, marketing rights for FIFA aside, it's not going to be moneyhatting anything from EA. in fact, except for the fact the FIFA sells about 5 times more on PS4 than anything else, EA probably wouldn't give them marketing rights on that either..

Re: Poll: What PS5 Information Do You Want Most?

leucocyte

games available on day 1. if that's massively unappealing, then its price and when it's coming out are irrelevant to me. so far, there are only a few games that are piqueing my interest and i'm not convinced they'll be available straight away. the third party cross-gen stuff seems like the usual annual/bi-annual snoozefests i wouldn't be buying on PS4 anyway if next gen wasn't happening.

don't really care about backwards compatibility (i'd be more interesting in it playing PS3 games than PS4 ones to be honest).. and having seen so many terrible UIs over the years, so long as it's not as horrific as some versions of Windows, i doubt it'll be something i can't figure out after 5 minutes.

the only issue with price for me is if the disc version is massively overpriced compared to the digital version. do they think we're idiots not to see they would be asking us to part subsidise the digital version to make it a more attractive price?.

Re: These Are the Five Best-Selling PS4 Exclusives in the US

leucocyte

the list is based on total dollar revenue, not number of copies. uncharted 4 launched in mid-2016 when the number of PS4s was probably about 10m less than when most of the other games launched.. so a much smaller base to get those initial $60 sales for the first couple of months.

NPD also includes digital sales..so if digital % has been growing year on year, which are more likely to be full price sales, than discounted store promotions, stands to reason massive newer releases are top of the list. i'd expect TLoU2 to reach number 2 before the end of the year.

Re: The Big PlayStation Store Summer Sale Starts on Wednesday

leucocyte

the only one i'd like to see is a discount on the final season of the walking dead.. just to see how clementine's story ends. but unlike every other telltale series, this one seems to be absent from virtually every sale.. after 2 years, it doesn't even look like it's ever going to be on sale.

Re: Poll: Would You Still Pay for PS Plus if Online Multiplayer Was Free Elsewhere?

leucocyte

yes, but grudgingly, only because PS is currently the only option for me. there's nothing sony can do to make PS+ better value to me, i am not really interested in any of the options like adding PSNow, films/music downloads, bigger discounts - i still prefer to buy games on disc. if multiplayer went free on PS5, i'd stop subscribing, but even though i don't play a massive amount of multiplayer any more, as long as i can continue to get it for less than £2.50 month, and i get a stable ad-free experience, i'll not cry about it.

there is literally nothing that would entice me to buy an xbox.. even if sony shut down and sold all its studios and IPs to them.

Re: PS5 Fans Are Pondering the Future of PS Plus

leucocyte

even if they had free multiplayer and gave away the XsX free, i still wouldn't game on it.

i've yet to pay more than £29 for 12 months of PS+ - and i've subscribed for most of PS4. last time i got it when it was sale for £34.99 and bought a £35 credit code for just under £29.. personally, i think if you'd bought a year's worth of PSNow for £29.99, it offers much better value than GamePass.. you get access to 800-odd games, even if 75% are only playable as streams, there's still 150-200 PS4 games that you can download and play natively. though personally, i wouldn't subscribe to PS+ if online was free like it was on PS3.. and i imagine that's probably true for at least 35m of the 40m subscribers, so i can't see sony changing it anytime soon. i get that the infrastructure costs money to build, support and so on.. and i'd probably prefer to pay a small cost (currently less than 1 coffee per month) than see advertisements all over the home screen, or the alternative of putting prices on games and other services up.

microsoft have made players have xbox gold subscriptions for free to play to games, whereas sony has not, so i'd be surprised if they intend to drop the online fee entirely, without absorbing it into some mandatory service. there were also rumours that due to the potential price of XsX (and by comparison PS5) that microsoft had intended to roll out a subscription plan similar to mobile phones.. where a single monthly payment gets the console and the xbox services, without the big upfront one-off hit.. if they release an XsX elite or some such with 20Tflops three years in, you'd get the upgrade whilst continuing to pay the monthly fee. it could be argued that it actually would keep people locked in, rather than drifting off...

Re: How Well Do You Know Sony's First-Party Studios?

leucocyte

10/15. to my knowledge, guerrilla's engine wasn't known as decima when KZ shadowfall was released.. and was only given the name in 2015 when horizon zero dawn was revealed. yes, the two games share a large chunk of code, but then shadowfall shares a large chunk with killzone 3, so.....

Re: Xbox Boss Takes More Shots at PS5 Exclusives Saying Fans Won't Be 'Forced' into Next-Gen

leucocyte

Spencer: "fans won't be forced into next gen".
Sony: "we're doubling production of PS5 to meet demand"

"investments in gaming should move to the next generation" - PS4 games will be playable on PS5, presumably most if not all the peripherals will work too.. so it's not like you have to dump it all. also sony will continue to support PS4 for the next few years, even if first party moves onto PS5. this year PS4 owners have had ghost of tsushima, the last of us 2, dreams, final fantasy vii remake, persona 5 royal, nioh 2, MLB 20.. all exclusive (or console exclusive) to PS4 and all at least mid-80s on metacritic, which says more about sony's support for PS4 than spencer's snide remarks about continuity do about xbox one support.. sony could have held back GoT, and TLoU2 and released them for PS4 and PS5 on launch PS5 day.. the fact it hasn't i think says more about their confidence of pushing forward with PS5 than dwelling on designs of the previous era.. Spencer's focused on the teraflop race that nobody was really running. they were expecting the same old games from two the last generations. so what if you get gears of war at 1080p/120fps, it's not bringing anything fundamentally new to the table. whereas sony's focus seems to be on hardware that allows what would be hitherto impossible on console, of course whether that's leveraged to its maximum potential remains to be seen.

Re: Xbox Boss Implies PS5 Exclusives Are 'Counter to What Gaming Is About'

leucocyte

spencer must be under a lot of stress.. he's swinging widely from the gob in the hope of landing a hit. nobody's talking about MS's "moah powweerrrrrrr". and satya nadella's priority is microsoft, not xbox - he's not going to throw billions at a division if it's failing and not looking like it can turn it around - this is the reason the xbox does not have truly dedicated xbox one/x exclusivity - the model would be nowhere near as financial viable for it as it is for sony..so MS throws its stuff and services on more devices. it's got nothing to do with being "pro-gaming".

Re: Far Cry 6 Leaks for PS5 and PS4, Launches 18th February 2021

leucocyte

far cry 4 was just crap.. and 5 looked worse, so didn't go near it, probably wouldn't even play it if it was free. and reading this.. warlord/villian/tyrant blah blah, fight the oppression... could be any plot from the far cry or modern (terrible) ghost recon games. ZZZzzzzzzzz.... but they keep selling relatively well so ubi will just keep churning them out.

Re: Unravel Horizon Zero Dawn's Mysteries from 7th August on PC

leucocyte

don't think this is a good move at all, but regardless... it looks like quite a bit of development effort has been put into this. effort that should have been used on PS4/5 game development imo. guerrila will have managed to release only 1 PS4 game in 7 years, and that's not good enough imo.

Re: Sony Considering Bid for Warframe, Brink Developers

leucocyte

i quite enjoyed dark sector. whilst i understand there was a bit of publisher interference that resulted in it being a bit different from DE's vision.. i still think that franchise has potential (independent of warframe), especially with a sizeable development/budget.

warframe filled a hole early in the PS4's life for me.. i found it quite enjoyable, even if it was a bit grindy. yes, there were mtxs and it was obvious paying real money was a shortcut to better stuff, but the game didn't shove it in your face. i tried it again about 18 months ago and it had had a large revamp/overhaul, and i wasn't really in the mood to learn it all over again from scratch. if they update it for PS5, it could be something i'd try again.

Re: PS5 Games Could Cost $10 More Than PS4

leucocyte

always felt this was an inevitability. games being £40 and under on PS3 was partly an artifact of the dollar's low value around 2006/7 when PS3 released as the GBP was worth more than $2. accounting for sales tax, it's almost 1 for 1 these days. whilst the biggest PS4 games have tended to be at £54.99 or £59.99 RRP, it's usually been possible to find them in the £40-£45 range on disc. might be struggle to find new PS5 games on disc for less than £50 though.

Re: PS Plus July 2020 PS4 Games Announced

leucocyte

don't own any of them, though to be honest, not likely to play any of these either.. still bitter about RoTR in the first place. by all accounts 2K's NBA series is supposed to be top notch sports sim, and unlike american football/baseball, i'd watch basketball, but i just don't have the time to invest in it.. managing your player/team sounds like it has many of the characteristics of an rpg.

Re: Ghost of Tsushima Cinematic Trailer Brings the Hype Ahead of Release

leucocyte

the aesthetic really really looks the part.. but it looks too much like assassin's creed (with different combat) to me.. and AC bores me. if the game has really trimmed the fat of usual open world fare, and a pretty forgiving easy mode (i doubt i have anywhere near the reactions/skill to succeed at the fighting style normally) i might get it later on and play it on PS5.

Re: Poll: What Is Your Preferred Game Length?

leucocyte

generally, the longer a game is the less likely i am to finish it to the end. the only single player campaign more than 40 hours that i managed to finish was horizon zero dawn. i played 60+ of skyrim and got bored of it.. too many side quests and sub-plots and map filled with more "to-do" icons than pixels.. couldn't remember what was happening in the main narrative and lost all interest. can't speak for the witcher 3, since after about 6 i'd had enough.. hated it. with a 15-20 hour campaign, i can plan to set aside 7-10 days a couple of hours a night and get it finished.. For a game 100+ hr, it'd start to feel more like a second job project...

Re: Ex-PlayStation Boss Wants to See 15 Hour AAA Titles Return

leucocyte

i agree with him.. big studios making AAA games are making fewer of them with less new IPs than before. it's why i've found this gen to be largely a disappointment compared with the last.. from the launch of PS4 to launch of PS5, guerrilla games has managed to make one (admittedly great) game. apart from milking GTA V to death, did rockstar release anything other than red dead redemption 2?. i'm sure it took 5+ years to make.. but if 100hr open world westerns aren't your thing (and personally it has no appeal at all for me), then essentially rockstar has released nothing new of interest for a whole gen. ubisoft's made their games packed full of fluff and so big that they have 5 or 6 of the studios working on parts of the same game. then use the same template in all of their IPs. so instead of having different modest games from their studios that take a couple of years to develop, it's mostly a bunch of identi-kit open world crap.. there are so many really good 10-15 hour campaign games from last gen that probably wouldn't get made nowadays.