theheadofabroom

@Nowings @UltimateOtaku91 it feels like an acknowledgement that the Chinese games industry sure have made a AAA game that's on par with a lot of what the western industry puts out. That's certainly an accomplishment, and deserves to be celebrated, but it doesn't feel like the same thing as being Game of the Year, and I think there'd be more controversy if it won than Shadow of the Erdtree which doesn't really belong there either.

I'm looking forward to playing this one once the sharp edges have been sanded off. Probably on PC, as I'm hoping someone will make a mod for slavic accented English dialogue. The English dub is atrocious, and otherwise I'm going to end up playing in Ukrainian with subtitles

Honestly the launch model seems fine still to me. It may no longer be the best place to play AAA titles, but it certainly runs them reliably. I've recently built a new PC though, in preparation for Windows 10 End of Life next year, and I'd get prefer to put £700 towards a graphics card than marginal gains on a console that works fine. I anticipate holding onto the launch PS5 until it either dies, or the PS 6 Pro comes out.

I don't think the value proposition is anywhere near as bad though for people who only have the PS4 or PS4 Pro

Feeling pretty vindicated in my sluggishness to play Sifu

I feel like a good strategy would probably be to release one tentpole AAA per year, accepting that it may be a loss leader, and release the PC port 2-3 years later, and maybe 3 live service games per generation, forever exclusive, hoping that one of them becomes a must-play. The rest should be smaller titles that are developed at a price point they can sell for £30 day one, drop to £20 6 months in, and add to PS+ after a year, and on the same day release on PC for £30.

That gives people a push to play on PlayStation, it gives players on PC a taste of what they're missing, and it vastly reduces overall development costs from what you see now. The lower budget games should be a reasonable constant trickle so people aren't complaining about there being no games, and if the first party stuff brings players to PlayStation the third party sales should stay up, which is basically free money for Sony

Obviously the issue with PlatinumTrophy is that it's PascalCase and it would be better in camelCase or snake_case

Depending on implementation, this could finally be what gets me to buy into VR, as one headset to play games on both platforms would be a much better value proposition than just one or the other

For those going on about cost, I'm pretty sure the smart move nowadays is going to be to upgrade every 1½ console generations, unless you have money to burn. PS4 Pro owners can probably get away with waiting another 3 years for the PS6, and then wait for the PS7 Pro after, and there'll only be a handful of games you have to wait for the new hardware on. As someone who bought the PS5 at launch rather than upgrading my PC, and who's now about to finally upgrade my rig, I'll probably hold out for the PS6 Pro before buying a new console as the PS5 is still great.

I for one am still very happy with my launch model PS5. Given I'm about to spend £1000 on bringing my desktop up to date, I can't see wanting to replace the PS5 until part way into the PS6's lifecycle so long as it will still play recent releases at 4k/30-60 FPS. If it weren't for Windows 10 approaching end of life, and wanting to install mods, I would be quite happy playing everything on PS5, but seeing as I need to upgrade to be able to keep using my PC for productivity tasks and retrogaming, I may as well give it the grunt to play some more modern games too.

Maybe it's just me (although given how many tutorials called for the move controllers, I suspect it's not) but it seemed pretty much impossible to control in creation mode with the dualsense, because it needed the extra axis provided by the gyro, but the gyro drifts like crazy (which is a common issue with the technology in general, and I tend to see it as more of an addition to stick assuming, rather than another 2-3 axes) on both my controllers making it impossible to be precise. A PC release would have been great, and could have just used similar controls to Unity/Unreal/Godot, while I wonder what they could have done for PS5, other than giving it psvr2 support

I used to think Yorkshire tea was ok, until I tried their loose leaf, which is better than a lot of premium teas

I mean if you compare multiplatform stuff to how it's priced on Steam, especially more than 6 months after release, PlayStation is generally more expensive, especially when stuff is on sale.

I don't know whether there's anything illegal about it though. There's also the fact that you can buy discounted PSN credit, which muddies the waters for me, because it suggests that they could sell credit with less of a retailer profit margin, and reduce prices, and things would work out about the same for Sony while being less complicated for the consumer.

@RudeAnimat0r do you have more than a year left on your current sub? It's been suggested that you can make use of the discount if and only if you have less than a year until it expires.

@Americansamurai1 sorry, Amazon, it's their stock ticker (and after checking, it's actually AMZN, which is hardly quicker to type 🤦)

Just checked and I'm already subbed until 2024-12-03. I guess there was a deal earlier in the year.

@Americansamurai1 didn't AZN just lay off 180 videogame developers?

@Member_the_game sure, and my answer was about the limits, in theory. Realistically in real-world scenarios you'd be looking at about 1fps

@Member_the_game eh, the further away you are, the greater the latency, so you'd have a pretty bad experience playing from the other side of the world if the software allows you (⅒ of a second minimum, for a signal to travel 20,000km, ⅕ of a second for a round trip)

(Imagine trying to play a game with a maximum frame rate of 10fps but with frequent drops and hitches)

@QBGaming12 that would be awesome, especially, hear me out, if you could switch between them at will, with all three characters playing differently and providing the key to different puzzles.

@nessisonett you think they're funny?

I was about to say I was looking forward to trying the Aliens game, but I was thinking of Aliens: Dark Descent

Mafia 2 is good for anyone who still hasn't played it, but I can't think too many people who are interested won't have found time in the past 12+ years to give it a go.

My favourite fan theory so far is that the stand-alone DLC which adds a 6th clan is a finished version of the story Hardsuit Labs were making, where you start as a Thinblood

Apparently the name is traditional in Greece and Armenia. I don't know the Armenian pronunciation, but in Greek it's like Fee-ruh.

The more I find out about this game, the less it feels like a sequel to 2004's VtMB and the more it sounds like a decent but wholly unrelated game based on the modern iteration of the same franchise. If I can convince myself not to compare it then I think it'll be great, but if I try to consider it a sequel I expect to be disappointed.

Alas I was stuck on a 80486DX4 until around 2001 when I got an AMD Thunderbird with 12x the clockspeed. I played Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2 and Mysteries of the Sith while waiting for Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast, but I don't think I've played this one

So he's probably right, but also, if you're the director for a game and you release it thinking it's not worth the money, that seems like a problem, rather than the norm

@Gaia093: I would guess it was edited for the reasons @Hyena_socks suggested

I'll probably try this out if it was on plus, but it doesn't scream "purchase" to me

@lindos the main problem was that it was around a metric that is both unpredictable and not tied to revenue, so with the initial plan it would have been possible to owe Unity more than you'd made in revenue.

@RedPlay44 I just went to the blog to read it carefully and it says

A horizontal stand will be included with the new PS5 model. Also a new Vertical Stand compatible with all PS5 models will be sold separately at 29.99 USD | 29.99 EURO | 24.99 GBP | 3,980 JPY.

That seems pretty indicative that the vertical stand isn't included, unless there's somewhere else where it's stated?

It's cool that it supports itself horizontally, but paying more for vertical? Gross

@rjejr AOL did make an appearance at some point, and I seem to remember friends on AOL could use the phone at the same time as the internet somehow, whereas I was on a pay-by-the-minute ISP where essentially you got your internet via a premium rate phone number, so we'd pay BT through our phone bill, and BT would pay them for the time we were connected.

@rjejr it's a big box hardware store, I think it might be similar to Lowe's or Harbour Freight?

As for domains, co.uk had been around as long as I've been around, and I remember 28k dialup. Technically though .uk is the tld and domain name registrar's are free to create whatever subdomains of that as you want (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.uk)

I feel like which of their people are on the team may be less important than whether this I've is given enough time in the oven before release. I don't think anyone on the original team were happy that it was released in the state it was

@rjejr eh, I mean if you know you know, but if you don't... like the URL for B&Q is diy.com, which nobody would guess without a search engine.

You also get websites where the .com is singing completely different to the .co.uk or .org or whatever

@rjejr it's pronounced Coe dot Ewe Kay. He specified dot-com because that's the URL. If it was co.uk they may or may not have said it anyway for completeness (I don't think they even mentioned that it was a UK website), but what I was saying is that .com isn't the default. amazon.co.uk, google.co.uk, ford.co.uk - they're all American companies but the UK facing websites are .co.uk because that's the default here. If you tell someone from the UK to go to the website for Amazon, Google or Ford, those are the sites they'll have bookmarked, or type in, or find in their search results. In Germany it might be .de, in France it might me .fr. Some sites use .eu for all of Europe.

@rjejr you evidently didn't read my message fully. I said we default to co.uk for most things, so .com is worthy of note

@rjejr nobody here shops on amazon.com because shipping from the states is extortionate (we have amazon.co.uk, which we just call amazon). Did you forget that the rest of the world exists? The default over here is co.uk

@rjejr well otherwise how do you know it isn't .org or .co.uk even .io, .tv, or whatever the latest TLD hotness is?

@knowles2 I'm not sure which people you're referring to. I certainly don't expect gamers to navigate it all, it should be irrelevant to the players, but I'm talking about it because there seems to be some interest at the moment.

When it comes to studios and developers, a game takes an incredible amount of time and effort to make, so yes it's reasonable to expect a bit of due diligence in picking the tools you use to do so and making sure that they'll be able to produce an acceptable compromise on your vision (no creative vision manifests uncompromised, reality always imposes itself one way or another) and that the end product will be financially viable.

In addition to the handful of engines mentioned here (Unreal, Unity, Godot, FNA, MonoGame) there are plenty of smaller projects which are working to indie studios like Construct (uses web technologies to make 2d games like Vampire Survivor), GameMaker, CryEngine, Lumberyard, Cocos, Marmalade, Panda3D, GameSalad, Phaser, Defold...

There's too many to evaluate them all individually for a given project, but there's enough out there to consider a few alternatives to Unity.

To me it looks like a ⅜ of an ipv6 address, but each segment could be up to 4 hex digits while these are all only 2, and the second is zero-padded, so it's certainly not that. The parts translate from hex to decimal as 255:6:181 which doesn't make anything any clearer.

@Cherip-the-Ripper as far a I'm aware, the only link between AnvilNext (the engine used for the AC franchise) and Unity is that AnvilNext was the engine used for the game called Assassin's Creed Unity, but that there's a load of confusion that's come from that.

AnvilNext is based on Anvil, which was called Scimitar until 2009. All of that time its been Ubisoft's engine.

@OmniHawk that's certainly the perception, but anyone who's worked with Unity will tell you of its many frustrating shortcomings. Unity's strength was in being a default option. That's something it has now lost. Some people will stick with it, but a lot of people are choosing alternatives for their next project and that's going to have an impact going forward.

@Powerplay94 there's been a lot of chatter going on in indie dev spheres about Godot, which is an open source alternative 3d engine, and also FNA or Monodevelop, which are both basically XNA but cross platform (FNA aims to be a strict reimplementation of XNA 4.0, but doesn't support Android or PlayStation. Monodevelop aims to be "what if development had continued after 4.0")

[Edit for more info:] XNA was the Microsoft framework all the indie darlings on the XBox 360 used, designed to be a lightweight .Net alternative to DirectX, and retained popularity until it was discontinued around 2013 because Microsoft were moving towards all the silly Metro App stuff they introduced with Windows 8.

@RainbowGazelle I think the confusion here is partly coming from naming. There's no such thing as the PS1, but the original PlayStation (released in 1994) is often referred to as the PS1 following the naming of the PS2, PS3, PS4, PS5. There's also no such thing as the PS1 slim, but some people, it seems including you, use that name to refer to the PSone (released in 2000).

Some people consider those to be the same console, while others don't, hence confusion, and hence why I've been very careful with my wording, so as to be understandable to people with either opinion.

@RainbowGazelle I sent a reply to both of you which I believe outlines all of this with the arguments either way. At some point the argument becomes one of semantics.

@stassinari @RainbowGazelle the first DualShock controller, as well as the Disk Analogue Controller (earlier, larger, no rumble outside Japan) were optional accessories for the original PlayStation, launched after the console's release, and the console came with the simpler controller lacking analogue sticks.

The relaunched PSone, which was the mini version released around the same time as the PS2, came with the Dualshock, and the difference between that and the Dualshock 2, which came with the PS2, is that the DS2 has analogue triggers.

Ape Escape required analogue sticks, on the same way that Will Sports 2 required the upgraded Wiimotes. The original PlayStation didn't come with a controller with analogue sticks, so from that perspective the original PlayStation's controller didn't have analogue sticks. The PSone did come with the Dualshock so you can say the PSone's controller did have them.

You can argue that because there were two controllers available for the original PlayStation which came with analogue sticks, that those were also its controllers, but given that they didn't come bundled with the console it's not really clear cut either way, and I'd say that no, they were add-on peripherals rather than an intrinsic part of the console's ecosystem, in the same way as the various bits of plastic Nintendo sold to go with the wiimotes (like the steering wheel, for instance)

I just finished the main campaign in The Witcher 3 and I'm playing Heavenly Bodies before I go back in for the DLC

@Maddie47 I'm not sure I agree with "almost always", but it seems to be pretty common. The controller that came with my launch PlayStation 5 developed drift after about 1800 hours of play, but was luckily within warranty, but it's also the only controller I've owned this millennium which has suffered from drift (some controllers in the 90's used to allow you to offset their deadzone with little sliders around the sticks), although it's with noting how small the deadzones are on the dualsense.

I've not put much wear on the RMA'd replacement as I bought myself a midnight black controller and relegated the white one to a spare which is paired with my phone for remote play, but the black controller now has well over 2000 hours on it and it's going strong.

I give it a big fat maybe. I bought the game second hand when the PS5 version released and was kinda disappointed. I'm not sure I see these changes making it not boring to me, but if I run out of other stuff I'm looking forward to then I'll probably give it a go

The best X according to Apple, and their fans, will always be the Apple X.

There's also a common expectation that the most expensive X is the best X, and Apple have that in the bag too.