theheadofabroom

I've done Thebes in San Francisco, as well as the companion quest that follows, but currently I'm working through rebel camps etc. Hit level 50 today, and I'm not sure whether it's where I'm at in the rebel camps, or having hit the level cap, or the latest patch, but the enemies have suddenly become much tankier for some reason? As in two piercing sharpshot arrows to the head with maxed out valour, infiltration, stealth coils on a max upgrade bow etc etc are now under half some human enemies health bars on normal difficulty? IDK, just an unexpected difficulty spike which means I have to be a little more tactical with my ammo.

Hoping to do most of the side content before I finish the campaign. Only got 42 trophies so far, so probably still plenty to do

8/15, but I have to admit a couple of those were educated guesses, and another couple were sheer luck

Still Horizon Forbidden West. I'm working through all the side missions and upgrades because I don't want the game to be over yet, but soon I'll be doing [[main line story mission]] Faro's Tomb which I assume starts the slide into the endgame.

Some people didn't sit through the credits to Bastille Day (2016) and it shows 🤣

https://youtu.be/0WShPOyXyW4

@Palleon or just a couple of weeks delay to release? I'd rather play a game which hasn't done lasting damage to the team's mental and emotional health, their relationships, etc.

I'm a little disappointed with the state this released in, but only because my expectations were set so high by the previous game. I feel like this buggyness is the true cost of cross platform development. It's still vastly more stable than the average third party game on release.

The fact that enemies are less bullet-spongy is a positive, but I'm still kinda burned out by BL3. By the time I played it the second season pass was out, and a load of stuff just wasn't viable without paying for it. The kreig dlc for example, highlighted how much the original Zane skill trees had been nerfed, leading to a situation where soloing the end boss isn't possible at high mayhem levels without the 4th skill tree, because you can't carry enough ammo even with all the SDUs and an optimised build using things available from the main game.

@thebizniznizbiz technical babble? I was trying to keep things simple 😅

Apologies if I caused any offence, it very much read as an earnest statement, so it felt worthwhile pointing out the logical errors it seemed to elude to. I guess what I could have pointed out is that it'll run AAA games from a decade ago (that aren't crysis) at 60+ FPS easily, and a fair few which are more recent. Unfortunately having to figure out what games will run on your hardware as an acceptable experience is the reality of gaming on PC if you don't have an unlimited budget.

@thebizniznizbiz AAAs made how recently? It you mean "all AAAs made within a year of release", we're probably talking about waiting at least another decade. Low power computing is always going to come at a performance penalty. Mobile computing has to be low power. You're also talking about a performance target that generally requires spending a minimum of £700 to get on desktop (more with current price issues), and for mass market you need a <£500 SKU.

Ghostrunner is one of those titles that I never would have bought, but I'm excited to try out. The sonic racing game is one of be glad to have in my library for couch coop if it's supported. I have no interest in the carved-off multiplayer parts of full games.

All in all this month is fine for me. It's not spectacular, but it's not terrible either. I gave it a "Meh"

@PenguinL I'm only probably ⅓ of the way in, I've had

• A small handful of insignificant visual glitches (missing particle effects, models clipping through scenery, pop-in during the intro, and sometimes the focus later being incorrectly active/inactive during cutscenes). None of this has been persistent, maybe one to three examples of each, I proudly wouldn't have noticed a lot of it if I hadn't used to work in QA.
• One (physics) clipping problem which made me reload a save to complete a puzzle (kept falling through a box which I needed to put something on, which meant I couldn't pick it up)
• One area with major slowdowns where it became a slideshow. I had to save and reload mid-mission as the frame rate was literally unplayable (1-4 FPS) (seems to be a specific mission set around Plainsong, as part of the main quest-line, probably not unloading an area used in the previous cutscene before loading the next area which is combat-heavy)

Other than those issues of varying degree, playing on resolution mode, I've barely seen it ever dip noticeably under the targeted 30fps, the graphics and artstyle are stunning, and you really appreciate the effort they've put into dialogue scenes, fabric meshes, etc etc if you look back at the original.

Still taking my time in Horizon Forbidden West, and just got past the Base, so I can't imagine, other than the rugby, I'll be doing much else sofa-based with my weekend.

I highly suspect that "premium" will only be available in selected territories, like PS Now

@__jamiie what big words and foreign phrases?

I knew it, I thought I said in the earlier article that it would be about whether you are the one doing it, or whether you just watch it happen, but I can't find that, maybe that's a discussion I had elsewhere. I definitely said though that it mattered whether the content is optional. I think a lot of people will look at this and say "what's the point?", but interaction is the crux of what makes videogames feel so much more personal and immersive than films, and I don't think this was necessarily handled poorly.

Shocking, the rumours were right on the money, who'd have thought?

@Apfelschteiner as for why I don't have gamespass: I want to play the Sony exclusives, and I can't afford to pay two subscriptions as well as either upgrading my PC or buying an XBox. I play AAAs on my PlayStation and indies on my PC - that works out for me pretty well. In 2021 I spent over 1700 hours on my PlayStation, for less than £300 spend, which makes it fairly cost-effective as hobbies go.

@Apfelschteiner to support the studios who make the games I enjoy most. Also it's nice to get to play stuff before the internet has spoiled everything.

Surely it doesn't really matter why I buy new games, just that there are people who buy new games, but also care a lot what they get as part of their subscription?

@KeldorTheCursed I didn't start it yet because I knew that by the time I finish Forbidden West I would have forgotten the controls and any story I'd got through. Next in my queue!

@jbreez00 my only disappointment with the soundtrack is that it doesn't include the licensed tracks. At the price, that seems kinda mean.

@Arasumian that would be enough to make this a decent month

@Apfelschteiner as someone who pre-ordered HFW Special Edition, and would be disappointed with this selection, I beg to differ. I'll buy 1-2 full price games per year, the rest have to be on sale because I'm on a fixed income, and PS+ games fill the time between sales.

@FatalBubbles it would be nice if a game of that length had some extra replayability, or post-endgame content, because otherwise I feel it struggles to justify its RRP (yes it's discounted regularly, but what outside of first party titles isn't?)

Other than that, I totally agree - my first playthrough was great, and if you can pick up the game for £15-25 that's all you need.

@voogles sure, except a load of us have already bought it (I'm just playing Forbidden West first)

I had an absolute blast on my first playthrough of this. Getting the platinum was a little laborious though, as the alternative paths were generally not that different (other than Hellbender's palace), and I generally found it lacked replayability.

@voogles thanks for breaking the illusion for everyone who's been waiting to play on PS5! /s

I feel like part of this is because there's a time and a place for bad films. I wouldn't go into this, or a Marvel film, expecting peak cultural enlightenment. It feels like critic reviews try to put a single score on films that reflects how they compare to every other film out there, and by that metric, these films deserve their low scores.

People who go to see these films, on the other hand, are looking for something big and dumb and joyful, which these films do great, and if they rate them for that, they're justified in getting a high score.

Without agreeing what metrics matter, there's always going to be disagreement, especially for what might be described as low-brow entertainment.

@Liverbirdsarego Seems highly unlikely, but you could always remote play?

@Roqka The best I could get is 300Mbps, but I'd have to switch provider, and I wouldn't have use of that extra speed more than a handful of times per year, so it's not worth going from £24 pcm to about double that 🤷

(All unmetered, I would never pay for a metered broadband connection, otherwise I'd be better off upping my phone contact and tethering 5G)

@Roqka I usually get 72 Mbps down, which should be about 9 MB/s, 540MB/min, or 31.6GB/h? It seemed a lot slower so I'm guessing either server problems, or a higher contention rate than usual with all the storms (people staying in and streaming)

@UltimateOtaku91 That and a source for the install data. It took many hours to download off the internet as the servers were quite busy.

@UltimateOtaku91 Those of us who bought digitally had to download the whole 98GB off the internet - definitely makes me reconsider whether I'll go physical for GoW Ragnarok because that took hours. Disc would have been so much faster (assuming you bought the PS5 version, rather than using the PS4 version to get the free upgrade)

@gollumb82 heh, I guess maybe the original controls might have been too precise for some tastes.

Disco Elysium is weird. I'm not sure how best to describe it. There's aspects of it that remind me more of older Lucasarts point and click adventures, there's a fairly clear system of stat-based difficulty dice rolls. The story is nuts, and there's a lot of freedom to play it your way, even though the details of the case are the same in every playthrough and you'll always hit some of the same exact story beats.

Holding off on Horizon: Forbidden West until my wife's back tomorrow. In the meantime I'm be playing more Disco Elysium, trying to finish off the platinum.

@gollumb82 glad to hear someone enjoying Mafia: Definitive Edition - the original is one of my all-time favourites, and the remake is a competent update (the story tweaks are great, the graphical updates are good too, but I found the controls a little mushy compared to how precise they are in the original (on PC), and there are some missing gameplay mechanics which make things ever so slightly shallower). It's a great game, and if I hadn't played the original it would have blown my mind!

@Waa-Laa it's not that it's impossible, it's that there are many other things that effort can go to which are likely to be appreciated more by the player-base. I'm sure that in your profession there are plenty of things which would only take a couple of person-months of work to do, but are never going to be a priority versus a worse solution that can be slapped together in a few hours at the end of the project, and will be good enough, if not indistinguishable for 99% of customers.

@Waa-Laa It's all that hard, what games have you made?

@Waa-Laa Synchronising between two save formats is inherently a harder technical challenge than a one-time mono-directional transfer. It's not so much laziness as prioritising stuff that more users will get more out of. There's always more to do, and there are always budgets and deadlines.

I'd bet good money that the only reason Hitman 3 does bi-directional transfer is because VR is only available on the PS4 version. Generally it's expected that 99% of people with both a PS4 and a PS5 are upgrading, never to look back - they'll upgrade their saves on the games they're playing, and then only ever play the PS5 version from then on. The fact that the PS5 version of Hitman 3 is missing a major feature is the only reason they expect players to dive back into the PS4 version in between playing the PS5 one.

[Edit:] I appreciate that some people will have a second console in another room, and that with the pricing and availability of the PS5, there's a strong case for having your second console be the PS4, but this is the exception, not the norm. It's also possible to stream PS5 gameplay to the PS4 over your home network

This is pretty cool. I'd bet a TAS could break 22 minutes, but anything less probably depends on how deterministic the AI is (I caught maybe a handful of unforced errors, which is already superhuman over this length of play. If the AI is deterministic I could easily see there being strategies to exploit some of the behaviours on display, but if not, I can't see anyone gaining more than a minute on this)

@lindos While I'm not a fan of how you phrased a lot of this, I think you're completely correct - I'm also not sure why there aren't mirrored controllers out there.

Fundamentally I feel like Sony have left an open goal in still not not having a hardware accessibility initiative to rival the XBox Adaptive Controller (which would necessitate software level support also)

@feral1975 [Quickly hides location]
Yeah I know I can be guilty myself of forgetting from time to time that the whole country isn't London, but that feels less of a big deal when I'm not managing supposedly-national advertising campaigns. Mostly it's associating a large organisation solely with the local branch and then being surprised by photos of people I don't know in news about it.

@feral1975 It's unusual though that they've hit Glasgow but forgotten that Cardiff exists - at least then it would be Britain, without having to venture off the mainland to Belfast. I mean will Belfast even be in the UK a couple of years from now? [ducks for cover]

😉

@Kidfunkadelic83 @ApostateMage Sunday for me, my wife's away and she'll want to watch all the story beats

@cladinshadows I don't know whether you need it to transfer your saves, but once that's done you should be free to delete the PS5 version

@Solidcloud Seems to be working for these folks, hope that helps for you.

@cpalmer1184 @Danloaded Thanks guys, I assumed as much, but given it doesn't say in the article, I thought it best to get it near the top of the comments for other readers.

Just to confirm (I can't see how it wouldn't be): the free upgrade is also available for those who have the PS4 disc rather than digital download? And it's it the usual thing of having to keep the disc in the console to play?

Great initiative, but would be even better if it was more than a month's window after release, no?

@shadow2k I'm not sure whether we have that in the UK? It's certainly not as common as loctite superglue. A+ movie reference though 😉

@render super glue, you say?

@TopG821 same (although I'm waiting for PS5 versions to play either) but it's worth remembering that TW3 port is being worked on by a different team, so the two don't affect each other

@Voltan I bet some people will pay this just for the Aloy minifig!