theheadofabroom

It would be even better if the cheater wasn't aware they were being penalised, for instance they do low/no damage, but on their end it looks like they're getting kills, still have weapons, etc. Meanwhile everyone else sees them armed with NERF guns, running straight past other players or breaking off engagements where they've barely tickled their opponent. I'd guess it would mean more comedy value for legit players, and the cheaters are more likely to stay on so their exploits can be analyzed.

I kinda wish it had a different visual style. This doesn't look to have the "soul" the Portal games did, and I can see the visual nods just leading to a constant low level feeling of disappointment.

That said, if it eventually supports psvr2 I could see it setting itself apart in a way that makes up for it.

For me, whether I buy this depends on how the extra buttons appear on PC - I'm fairly happy with the Dualsense on PS5, but it doesn't quite replace my Steam Controller on PC. The Steam Controller feels kinda cheap and nasty in comparison, but the rear paddles and the fact the left stick is a trackpad (as is the right "dpad") make it 100% better for PC games. If the Dualsense Pro (or whatever they call it) exposes the back buttons directly, rather than just duplicating other input, then I'll forego the easy-to-reach left trackpad (because mouse aiming is superior for FPS, and it works better on the desktop/in RTS type interfaces too) for the premium construction and the fact it'll likely still see support of years to come. Using it with the PS5 too would be a bonus.

10, would have been nice to see what the next category was called

@Victor_Meldrew I'd guess because cover doesn't feel very heroic, and a lot of the enemy attacks would likely shred straight through it anyway?

Nothing will ever beat

Lies!

She dies!

Basically what @get2sammyb said. It's not what I was expecting/hoping for, but it looks awesome.

@thefourfoldroot: the guys in the video seemed to think no microtransactions, but I'm not sure how much they actually know/what they're basing that off - they didn't say whether they'd asked the devs or whether it's just that the current build (which was still buggy) didn't include them.

Can't wait to see some reviews of this. I want to believe it's going to be something really special.

@KundaliniRising333 all the leaks I've seen report that it'll release early September on PS5 but not PC until later.

@Milktastrophe I think the difference with GoW is that not only has it been in Now for ages, not only is it part of the Collection for PS5, bit it's also one of the titles that was always going to be part of Extra. So on top of being frequently under £5, it has already been part of two giveaways, and was already scheduled to be (or in some regions already) given away a third time.

The fact that it's in the Collection means it's irrelevant for PS5 owners, which means that you can ignore 20 million people with a higher than average attatch rate for PS+ subscriptions, of which there are <50 million globally, so that's likely 30-40% of subscribers who already own it through that. Now is likely responsible for another 5-10%, especially when that translates into Premium or Deluxe with the switchover. That leaves you with 50-65% of Plus subscribers who haven't been given it through one of those channels, or 25-30 million subscribers on PS4. A load of those will have bought the game long ago, and a load of them will have been planning to upgrade to Extra or Premium. Out of those who remain, how many of them do you expect have any interest in playing the game?

I'd guess maybe 10% of subscribers will be receiving a copy of GoW that they don't already have access to and are interested in eventually playing. To those 10% it's worth £5, which means that to the average plus subscriber it's worth £0.50.

I won't complain about months where games I don't like, but which others are looking forward to, are given away, because I can recognise that on average it's valuable to the subscriber base, and eventually these things shake out, I'll get mine some other month. This however devalues their other offerings and provides very little value on average. As usual I'm not going to say "it's a crap selection", but I'm certainly "not very happy" and "not looking forward to any of them".

Getting the house onto the market, so when I find time I'll be relaxing with some Planet Coaster, it's a lovely bit of stress relief that doesn't really ask much from you.

@KundaliniRising333 Sony's only comment about day 1 releases on PS Plus was about first party games, which makes sense to me. As much as I'd love to be able to pay my sub and never have to buy anything else, it's not a good business model for Sony. Striking a deal for third party games to appear on day 1 is a very different proposition and one that has precedent.

I think a lot has been made of day 1 releases on the sub without people appreciating the distinction, especially with an indie game versus one which takes a team of many hundreds around the globe the best part of a decade to put together.

Can't wait to jump beck into the Forbidden West, I'd already done everything and needed an excuse

@Bismarck I can see the headset itself perhaps being a loss leader, try and keep the price down near that of the main console.

@Elodin yup it looked like the classic Doom-style sprite animation, with some deliberately-left-there outline aliasing

@NEStalgia as long as they don't change the actor and models for Kratos?

@Hypoman eh, the collection makes sense as a lure for people buying a PS5, because there aren't really enough current gen only games to entice people right now. It's a value-add for your £450 or whatever it costs in your region.

Of course the inverse of that is also true: if the best games are given away for free to Essential tier customers, what's the value of Extra? And what's the value of Premium beyond streaming (which was why Now never did very well)?

My plan is still up upgrade the rest of my subscription to Extra until it runs out at the start of December, possibly even upgrade again to Premium for November, but if the games routinely come to Essential, that's where I'll end up when my subscription lapses. Previously I'd been assuming I'll end up on Extra for most of the year, upgrading to Premium for a month or two at the end of each sub.

It's only disappointing because it's the flagship game this month, leaving anyone who has access via any other avenue without anything of value from this month's Essential tier offering.

@Max_the_German of an article doesn't interest you, you can always just not open it?

Honesty IDGAF, I'm just waiting for Extra tier to release, there's at least 5 or 6 games there that have been on my wishlist for a while, along with a few I own already.

@feral1975 except that you can't stream the PS5 games?

@guntam sure, it's just that generally you do it during development of the game, when you're going to have to do a lot of testing anyway. In these cases though you've got a game that's in a known good state (any existing bugs are part of the retro experience of playing that game, and are probably part of a known strategy), and an emulator which one would assume is tested against the actual hardware, so there's no likely much testing required for each individual game. As soon as you add trophy support you're either changing the game's code, or changing how the emulator interacts with that game, so you go from needing to do a cursory "kick the tires", if that, to needing to test everything.

It's not that it can't be done, but that it's expensive.

Places I worked then coding trophies in was fairly easy, and 9 times out of 10 they worked right out of the box. The problem is that if you code it, you have to test it, and that means essentially paying teams of testers to spend the time to achieve the platinum for your game in every possible way to make sure things work, so less than a person-hour's effort of writing code results in hundreds of person-hours of effort in testing, and then if bugs are found, hundreds more hours of re-testing.

I have to admit that I'm holding off buying anything right now in anticipation of the new tiers.

@Barryburton97 nah, the actual render resolution had been increased, upscaling is where you take an image at a lower resolution and apply filters to make it look better at a higher resolution

@Perturbator @Elodin I think I'll have to try out pressure points, so far I've been trying to combine Miracle+, Alpha/Beta/Omega, and lots of draw/scrying to loop through my deck ASAP. It works great through Act 2, but the damage doesn't scale and elites and bosses have too much health in act 3. Wrath builds seem to be too much of a glass cannon to be reliable, and mantra takes too long or too big a deck to build.

It's certainly a fun character to try and strategise around, but I might switch back to Defect to go through the Ascention levels - takes some thought and planning but you can build some ridiculously overpowered engines with that character.

More Slay the Spire - struggling to get the hang of the Watcher - made it to the Act 3 boss many times, but can't seem to beat them without sacrificing the keys I need to ascend

@oldpeculiar imagine how much you'd enjoy a remake of the (vastly superior) original?

@GeneJacket I'd guess the answer here is "people who didn't have a
PlayStation before", it's less about existing customers and more about tempting people who are currently playing on XBox or PC?

@Jaz007 I guess it's a case of preference - I liked it, but then I also like TTRPG so I'm probably in the minority 😉

@NEStalgia fair, missed that part. In that case I guess it's just advertising (but still in a way that puts something publicly visible on his portfolio, which helps with getting the next job)

@Jaz007 so basically I feel like moving the camera, adding stuff to click on, basically anything that changes what you see and interact with, but leaves the underlying systems around how things are calculated, how turns with, etc how it was, is mostly a UI change, I guess it might be more accurate to talk about it as a change in presentation, while any changes to the underlying systems, like implementing turns such that they occur differently, would be a systems change.

I'm slightly confused what you mean by an action system, as that could be taken to mean things in real-time, no underlying turns, or 'ticks', but it could also mean the opposite where you have a number of actions you place into the timeline and each character takes the actions next in their timeline, with a default having been set.

The latter is what I recall being in the original games, and I was discussing doing that, but presenting it differently?

@Jaz007 I mean it feels like we agree but are using different language? As you say, D:OS2 did a similar thing with better UI and it worked better, right?

The problem is that with the original implementation things were far too chaotic to make sense of unless you already knew what was going on. It seems like a given that they won't keep the original camera system, so I could easily see them pulling the camera to something like an isometric view of the battle, displaying the timeline, etc etc, and without changing the underlying system at all, you make it much more readable and manageable.

@trev666 because it's quicker and easier and not everything is about immediate profit? I'd guess this is going on the artist's portfolio and will make getting a job rather easy. Learning tools only takes time, companies will pay you to learn. Talent is another matter and this shows it in spades.

It could even just have been to prove to themselves they could do it.

@zupertramp Xbox are easy to find in the UK, hardly anyone can get a PS5 because they're in higher demand. What Ryany fails to account for is the supply side issues with the silicon shortage (which is also why buying a car at the moment is a nightmare, if you want something specific you have to buy it before it even leaves the factory. I got one through Motability at the end of 2020 and had to settle for a ***** colour because otherwise I'd be waiting 6 months)

@Ryany because they can only buy as many Xboxen as MS are behind.

PlayStation 5s are still selling as fast as they can reach the shelves. The fact that people can waltz up and buy the Xboxen that are arriving on shelves at the same rate does not magically create new Xboxen. If both parties are supply-constrained to about the same rate, and one party is selling its whole supply, there is no way for the other party to overtake it, is there?

To make things obvious with numbers, let's assume each company makes 1,000,000 consoles per month, and ships them to stores. For one of those consoles 1,000,000 sell within minutes of hitting shelves, for the other clears about 70% of what's on shelves in a given month. There's still only about 19-20,000,000 consoles out there, but over 19,000,000 of the PS5s are sitting in people's homes, while there's barely more than 14,000,000 Xboxen (split between S and X) in people's homes while around 5,000,000 sit on shelves in stores and warehouses around the world. Selling that 5,000,000 that are sitting around in boxes will only allow them to catch up, never overtake, unless either:

A) MS manage to increase supply while selling their stock,
Or
B) Sony stop managing to sell every unit that hits shelves within minutes

@trev666 honestly it was simultaneous-turn-based with the option to skip turns, and the ability to queue stuff up, but the UI didn't make any of that obvious.

I think you could fix a lot that people disliked about it by fixing the UI, but I wouldn't be against adding a second mode that's more like a modern ARPG. The classic mode, with or without UI improvements, spoils absolutely still be available.

@Ryany I don't think they means XBox will "win" the generation, supply isn't any greater, it just means it has a chance to catch up, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, given that competition generally drives innovation.

@Kooky_Daisuke it's not a spin-off of Bloodlines 2, it's just another game based on the same tabletop RPG. Think siblings, not parent and child. Same publisher, but the studios have nothing to do with each other.

Still radio silence about Bloodlines 2, unfortunately.

My nostalgia glands will burst if it ends up being the spiritual successor to Jurassic Park: Trespasser

@Gbarsotini for an open(ish) world?

Extra looks good to me, although I can see myself upping it to premium for the last couple of months of each 12 month period, and then switching back to extra come renewal time.

My biggest question is about mod support, and whether it's likely to also be on console. The original game greatly benefited from being able to swap out various systems such as aerodynamics, so you could explore designs based on real world craft that otherwise weren't viable in the game.

If there's the same level of mod support across platforms I'll likely pick it up on PlayStation. Otherwise I need to figure out whether my PC will run it without upgrades, and if it needs upgrades, I'm probably going to wait a while before picking this up.

@pharos_haven I highly encourage it, and if you like it, see if you can get mods on there without access to the Steam Workshop. Pretty sure there's an alternative launcher out there so you should be fine.

@Rafie at least generally trials don't currently give trophies, it's why I don't have any of the trophies from the beginning of Far Cry 4

I'm pretty sure you can delete a game from your trophy list, if it has 0%, would be nice if they change it to also be possible to remove games you only played as a trial too.

@GorosBat sounds about right. I think the people ragging on the use of cards are forgetting that there's not much difference between that and the traditional buttons-at-the-bottom-of-the-screen approach of XCom. (Some of which would be specific to a soldier or soldier class, and some of which would be disabled or enabled based on timers)

I also want this game released already so they can concentrate on XCom 3, which has to be out some time soon, given the first game of the reboot was 2012, the second game was 2016 and teased more to come (more teasing in 2017's WotC expansion), and then since then all we've had was 2020's Chimera Squad (which wasn't supposed to be part of the main series, not definitely canon).

@naruball I also can't imagine Nick Fury played by anyone else now - casting for the character is so much more important than casting for the look. Henry Cavil in The Witcher it's another example. He's far too good looking if you go by the source material, but he nails the character and that makes it so much more compelling.

Lance Reddick does great complex yet slightly sinister characters, he could easily be the best thing in this show (which doesn't look like the height of intellectual programming), so he seems like a pretty good choice.

I'm playing Slay the Spire and having a great time with it. I recently finished Cyberpunk 2077 (did take the different endings just to see how they approached it) and only have 6 trophies left, but I really can't be arsed playing it any more.