leucocyte

@LiamCroft "Launching on the US PSN Store at $59.99 excluding VAT, that roughly converts into £43 — meaning I had to pay an extra £17 to gain access to exactly the same product"

your maths is a mile off. $60 is about £47. you paid £50 plus an extra £10 in tax. the difference is £3, not £17 when VAT is accounted for.

no offense, but you've broken a fairly complex topic into trivialities. prices are not comparable simply by converting one currency to another. it's not how it works. you might as well ask how many big macs does it cost?.

also, the US prices are exclusive of sales tax. you should really be comparing £50 (CoD's £59.99 exclusive of VAT) with $60 (which is roughly £47 at today's rate of 77.5p). so the difference is nowhere near as exaggerated as you make out.

i honestly would not be surprised if game prices are hiked again in the UK for PS5/Xb2. i have never bought a PS4 game on PSN that exists on disc format, i don't expect that to change for PS5.

@GADG3Tx87 @RogerRoger - in which direction would you see a sequel go though?. you've already become pretty powerful by the end of the game, so i don't think the same premiss would work, without it feeling somewhat artificial. i thought the game was fine but not stellar, and story did improve after the first couple of planets, but for me there were a few gameplay frustations, so it's a one-and-done for me. there's a huge star wars universe ripe for picking for almost any game genre, it's whether EA has any studios that would do it justice.

MS were practically giving away the xb1 on BF, most of them bundled with sea of thieves and minecraft. i didn't really see that many discounts on PS4 specific games.. spiderman was £15, but is it not part of the playstation hits range now anyway?. days gone was £35.. compared to division 2 which came out around the same time and i saw for £17. ghost recon breakpoint was massively discounted as well, and didn't trouble the top 10. black friday on the whole, not just for games, was very underwhelming, it seemed quite half-hearted by a lot of retailers this year imo.

if it's a bunch of cosmetic tat, i couldn't care less.. i generally don't even bother with the customisations you can unlock for free. as long as the gun works the same whether it's a default skin or pimped out gold bling ultra camo, no big deal.

must be a retailer promotion, because the price hasn't been reduced on the UK playstation store, it's still £25.

you can currently buy PS+ for £30/yr (in fact i got my last year for £28) which is £2.50/mth - i pay more for a coffee on the way in to work. it just seems like people want the earth for nothing. there is literally nothing sony could realistically put on plus that would make it a 'good' month for me, no matter how big or small its value is. i get that running the psn infrastructure costs money, so they should just ditch the monthly games altogether, which would stop all the gripeing. two tiers would solve it: a cheaper ps+ basic - multiplayer/cloud save only. a more expensive ps+ premium - which includes ps now.

"lengthy campaign"?! it's about 4 hours long. it's decent, and the mechanics are really good, but the campaign follows a fairly predictable template, and the story is forgettable nonsense.

i still buy it most months, and occassionally they do have access to stuff or more early exclusive coverage of games, or developer interviews that you just don't get on websites. i generally put issues in the recycle bin after a couple of months though, so they don't build up into an unmanageable pile.

there are 36m+ PS plus subscribers, and titanfall 2 sold roughly 2m copies on PS4. so there's at least 34m+ people don't have it, regardless of how cheap it's been in the past. somehow the few who already have are more important than everybody else...

i still think sony should just scrap the monthly games completely. have 1 tier for multiplayer only at say £25/year, and another tier which is multiplayer + ps now for £75/yr. at least then people would have more options on which games to play.

impressive, most impressive. better hope he doesn't shank one and 'rip the cloth'!.

for some inexplicable reason shopto will only accept payment via a PayPal account for psn codes/vouchers/subs, rather than use my visa card, so it's a hard pass from me. i've bought about 75% of my PS4 games from shopto, but this policy for psn stuff is fairly irritating.

final fantasy vii remake 2 makes it sound like a remake of final fantasy vii remake. coming to PS8.

first platinum was uncharted 2 on PS3, most recent was modern warfare. I have 50-odd i think, though some of them are doubles got on two platforms. i have about a half dozen games I'm missing one trophy (eg God of War, just can't beat that queen valkyrie or even close to beating her even with the difficulty dropped to easy!) there's a guy i follow on psn who has 399 platinums.

if you have my name is mayo, shame on you! . easiest one i have is super destronaut dx - just over 20 minutes to platinum it. .

isn't there supposed to be some proprietary tech in the SSD that makes it faster than the standard off-the-shelf drives? which if true, is maybe why they want a simple upgradeable option, as it's possible games might run into buffering problems if trying to read from standard drives or external drives.

i can see the issue though with the Base model drive getting full very quickly, even on PS4 plenty of games are 50-100gb, and some well beyond that. modern warfare is 125gb and it's still got 10 months of content to come.. 3 games like that and a 500gb drive is full.

i'm only on the third planet, but largely i've found the characters to be rather forgettable. i'm just not warming to cal as a jedi at all. first planet was just rubbish, really they could have excised that from the game and lost nothing, imo. it improves a great deal from the second planet.. even at this stage though, a fast travel system to return to previously visited areas is sorely missed.

weirdly my light bar only comes on briefly when I hit the ps button to power up the PS4, thereafter it's always off no matter what i do.

framerate is not that stable with 64 players in ground war. 200 seems like too much of a stretch..

@Flaming_Kaiser - well if you bought 20 already, then another 4 or 5 that you might want releasing within a few weeks of each other isn't going to help either your wallet or spare time.

@carlos82 - yeah, cal looks a bit bandy-legged when running. overall, i too kind of expected the visuals to be more impressive - even the facial animations in cutscenes lack a certain visual sharpness, though like yourself i'm coming from death stranding. so far i haven't had any performance issues on the pro, but i've not come across/been in combat with that many enemies at once.

i'm about to hit the third planet.. the second planet is better than the first - since there was an empire presence, it was more densely populated with enemies, so you could at least slice through a few stormtroopers, or listen to their banter, and some interesting puzzle elements when you reach the tomb area. after completing the objective, i found it a bit confusing how to escape.. it's one area that's a bit frustrating, it's not at all obvious on occassions how to progress, and the holomap isn't always that helpful, and that was one looong track back to the ship to head for the wookie homeworld.

@Flaming_Kaiser - this arrived on my doorstep the day before release, i don't even remember pre-ordering it to be honest. and there were no bonuses or anything.. it's EA, so for that of course you need to buy one of the fancy (i.e. even more expensive) editions. but yeah, i only bought two games this year, and they released a week apart (death stranding and this), and i played modern warfare just before that (fortunately it's very short). i'm currently using the death stranding bonus theme, which is very nice.

@David187 - i didn't mean lifetime numbers, i meant selling right now. switch has been selling better in the US and Japan lately.. but to be fair, for a 6-year old machine, the PS4 is putting up a respectable showing against it.

my main problem with xbox is that it's made by microsoft. it could be twice as powerful and half the price, i still wouldn't buy an xbox2 because it's microsoft.

@carlos82 - i felt the same about cal's animation, it just doesn't look/feel right.. it's kind of like he running with a limp. hard to explain.

@Mergatro1d @MattyHammo - i'm pretty sure that early on in the game during the intro mission when i let go of L2 i fell to my death, so i just assumed it had to be held continuously.

i'm only about 8 hours in. i'm drawn in by its uniqueness and its apparent lack of regard for typical AAA-gaming etiquette and just wants to do things its way at its own pace. i'm in no rush to finish it to move on to the next thing, so i am just taking it at my own pace and enjoying the zen of it.

overhauling anthem, developing DA4, and working on a new mass effect at the same?. call me sceptical. even if it's true, it would need to be a reboot.. because i wouldn't play a sequel that follows on from andromeda. most of it was rubbish, and i literally didn't care about rider or any of her crew. shepherd and her/his crew were a hard act to follow, and the characters in MEA came up well short.

microsoft already has the most powerful box, it also has the cheapest box, yet look at last week's console sales. US: PS4 80k, xb1 46k. EU: PS 138k, xb1 23k. the switch is king worldwide at the minute (still beaten by a 6-year old console in europe though). power and price are not that big a factor really. some of MS's struggles are historic. not sure how he knows they're going to be at least as powerful and as cheap as PS5 either. any bets on Game Pass/xCloud ending up on PS5 and/or Nintendo?

the gameplay (for the first 2-3 hours at least) seems a bit derivative of other games to me. the environment traversal seems to have taken a lot of cues from uncharted, though having to constantly hold L2 makes it more cumbersome than it should be, especially with occassional camera annoyances. the wall-running obviously feels a lot like titanfall. combat seems a bit souls-light i guess, with it's reliance on parries/timing and dodging and attacking at the right moment. for me, it seems fairly tough on normal. when it takes three of four solid strikes with a lightsabre to take down a swamp-rat, the jedi illusion is dissipated somewhat. the saving-system might get annoying, especially losing all XP if you die before you hit a meditation point where you can save (and when you do save, everything you killed respawns). the backtracking slogs are terrible design decisions imo, and that's early on when you might only have traverse 20 minutes through the environment to reach the ultimate mission marker. goodness knows what it's going to be like later on going back to the same planets and having to go much further. the slog back might not be so bad if you felt like a jedi badass, but that doesn't appear to be the case. it doesn't actually look as good as i thought it would either (maybe it's because i've been playing death stranding), it's certainly decent looking, but because it's a star wars game i kind of expected a bit more visual wow. i think battlefront looks better. not sure about the story because i haven't seen a lot of it, but so far none of the characters are particularly interesting.. there's a lot of exploration and secrets to find it seems though, the environment exploration is pretty good, it's better than the combat so far (ymmv of course). so far, it's been bug free (on PS4 pro) for the intro mission/quest and first two planets. still too early to tell if it hits that star wars itch, or if i'll lose interest.

@Flaming_Kaiser - day 1 patch is 342Mb, fairly small by typical standards these days.

@LieutenantFatman @Rob_230 @naruball — i've used them for about a decade also, and almost always get my games next day and new releases before release date. but their customer service is practically non-existent.. i've raised tickets with their helpdesk that didn't even get responded to about pre-order dlc codes. a couple of times the codes have materialised in my digital items - but i've only noticed this later after going to into complain about not getting update to my original complaint.

@rjejr - the RRP is £34.99. shopto's prices are almost always less than the RRP (i'm currently a 'silver' member, so Dreams is listed as £31.86 for me), and usually something quite random. Jedi Fallen Order for example is £48.35 (RRP: £59.99)

Call of Duty: HDD and Bandwidth killer.

there may be some concern among publishers that games released in the final year of a console don't perform to their potential, which is why perhaps there is a lack of releases announced for all but three months of the year. there were quite a few great games released in the last year of the PS3, and the last of aside, a lot of them like tomb raider and bioshock infinite didn't do nearly as well as expected. if i recall, TR sold more on PS4 than it did on PS3 or xbox360. maybe a lot of gamers will have the sentiment that the games will be remastered or enhanced for PS5, so might as well save the money now for the PS5 and buy the better version later. i'm sure games like cyberpunk and tlou2 will go on to be hugely successful, just a matter of how much crosses over to next gen rather than this year.

@1_W1NG3D_4NG3L - the controls and the combat in HZD are exceptional imo, the combat is among the best in action rpgs i've played. there were many times where i just took down a giant robot t-rex just for the hell of it, because it's so much fun. i can't speak for rdr2 as i haven't played it, but i didn't think the combat was a particular strongpoint of the AC games i've played (all of them up to black flag + origins).

that'll be pretty impressive if/when he can add some racing mechanics.

the biggest patch was the first 57gb one that installed most of the game that isn't on the disc.

@Flaming_Kaiser - most of the main production team/talent from the original ME trilogy is gone. the quality of the writing dropped from ME2 to ME3 imo, as drew karpyshyn wasn't involved, but it still had many of the established characters to work with. the quality then dropped off a cliff for MEA (nobody from the originally trilogy worked on the writing as far as I can tell).

i've read on trophy guides that using ziplines as much as possible, once you have them, really reduces the amount of time to get around, and to place them everywhere you can. reduces the time to platinum considerably from the estimated 250hrs that was suggested.

"forget about mass effect andromeda 2"?? i did that a few hours into MEA.

Even if there were remasters of the original trilogy, I just can't see EA tasking bioware with the job. It'd farm the responsibility out to another dev. It'd rather bioware turn anthem around in the hope its in-game monetisation pays off.

they'd need a remake, not a remaster, at this stage.. the UE3 engine is starting to show its age quite a bit.

it's a remaster of ME2 and ME3's multiplayer modes packaged together and launched as Mass Effect: Anthem.

has there been any indication/reason why shawn layden left?. he may have stepped down for personal reasons that he doesn't want to disclose, which he has every right to do.

i'd thought for a while that hermen would be a good choice for a high-up position within WWS. i've always found him to be very articulate in interviews, and very open to new ideas and tech, but also has that dutch sense of pragmatism. it'll be good to have more european focus for WWS as well.

j-b and michiel have been at GG for a very long time. michiel's a very smart guy, he's been involved in guerrilla's technical direction for a long time. he's one of the reasons for guerrilla's technical prowess starting all the way back when they somehow managed to get KZ2 running on a PS3. together with angie, the studio will be in good hands.

the last digital item i bought was the frozen wilds expansion for horizon zero dawn. i might have bought a physical copy of concrete genie if anywhere close to me had stocked it.

are disney removing the marvel shows from netflix and amazon prime?. though to be fair, jessica jones is the only that i bothered to watch more than a couple of episodes of.. and i still need to watch the whole last season of it. that might have to be sooner rather than "i'll get around to it" if it's about to disappear.

well that's one way to make your avatar 'exclusive'....

@sanderson72 - i agree, i find the DS4 very comfortable to use for long periods. asymmetrical sticks just don't work for me, since my arms are the same length! and my preferred shooting layout uses the shoulder buttons for aim/shoot, so using the offset left stick, with the L1 to shoot requires some unnatural contortions for me.

"go-to pad for hardcore players" — 90% of pro eSports players use scuf, not the xbox elite.

no hype for me. i thought the first gameplay video looked RAF, and i didn't like the witcher 3 at all. so i think personally, i can only be pleasantly surprised by it.

the head of live service leaving the live service is a bit more significant than other development team members leaving or moving to new projects though?. it wouldn't shock me if there's external pressure from EA to try and turn anthem around, but there's only so much CPR you can give the game before admitting it's dead.