AV_Gamer

Out of that list: I pick the PS Plus price increase out of nowhere. Unity becoming greedy. Blizzard's Overwatch 2 con job. And the Redfall flop as the hottest messes so far.

2K Sports screwing people over with their basketball game is nothing new. And the sports heads will still buy the game and spend hundreds of dollars on microtransactions and ultimate teams. At this point, the fault is on the players. You can't blame 2K for milking them for all they're worth at this point.

Ray-tracing in Elden Ring making the game harder to run is no surprise. RT is very taxing on the system and it happens in almost every game its used on. This is why many console games that use it are forced to perform in 30fps mode.

The Nvidia RTX 4060 being a terrible budget card for the money is an honorable mention.

I also agree Final Fantasy XVI doesn't fit as its a solid game, whether some people like it or not. But Square-Enix constantly overestimating how well their games will do financially, and getting mad afterwards for it not meeting expectations certainly does.

Most people knew Gollum was going to be bad. No surprise there.

And Embracer is not a surprise. As I said in the earlier thread, as many people saw them failing with all of those companies coming a mile away.

That's all I can say based on the current list. I would say something about Twitter, but many people are still using it as I figured they would. So why bother.

The Unity thing is a hot mess, but the Embracer debacle many people saw coming and predicted, doesn't make it any less of a hot mess, but there are many people saying "I told you so" right now. There was no way they could buy up all of those companies and anything good come out of it.

I will throw the PS Plus massive price increase into the pot, since nobody has mentioned it yet. And sure, some can excuse it by saying "well, inflation", but it seems to me that this is an act of greed more so than anything else, given that many people are now using subscription services to play games instead of outright buying them. Having to pay nearly one hundred dollars just to play games online is a very hot mess, not to mention the other tier prices. Especially, since online gaming on PC is still free. You just need an internet provider and a PC powerful enough to play the latest games.

I always choose both at a BBQ, why would you only choose one. That's no fun, but I guess if I HAD to choose, it would be hamburger before a hotdog.

Thanks to PS Plus, I played the Saints Row reboot for the first time, because I was never going to buy it. And from what I've played, the game isn't terrible or bad, but it isn't very good or great either. It's right in the middle. Even though I could've gone crazy with the character creator, which is one of the best things about the game, I decided to just go with the default skin, which is the woman model they used to advertise the game.

I see what Volition was trying to do. Because there hasn't been a mainstream GTA campaign in many years, because of Rockstar using most of their team to support GTA Online, Volition tried to capitalize off of this by making a basic GTA type of campaign instead of the wild, zanny, stuff they did in Saints The 3rd and Saints Row 4. The problem is, its too basic, to a fault. The missions are okay, but nothing about them really stand out. Some of them kind of capture the Saints silliness, like the murder island missions, but even those are tame. In a way, Volition is a victim of their own success because of those past crazy Saints games. The storyline is okay, but again nothing special. Its about a group of criminals from different gangs who are friends living in a beat up apartment that is too expensive and they need to pay rent, until reasons causes them to reform the Saints. The characters are likable, but not memorable, if that makes sense. I won't even address the stupid "Woke" backlash from bigots because the Saints games always had a diverse cast.

I can see why this game outside of the nonsense didn't do well. It's a very basic "one of those" and on top of bugs and glitches, which for the most part seem to be fixed now, I see why many people were disappointed. Pity. I plan to finish it, because the campaign so far has kept me interested, but I likely won't change my mind about it being just meh... One thing I will say about the game that is positive, is how very good the driving mechanics are. Some of the best in a sandbox game, reminding me of Sleeping Dogs.

I started listening to podcast while playing. The sound design is fine, but yeah, I'm spoiled from those Fallout games and those classics songs on the radio.

@bigsocrates: When they can get Cyberpunk 2077 running smoothly on a PS4/Xbox one, let me know. There is a reason they pulled that game from being sold to those consoles and why the story DLC release is current gen only. You point out how the 30fps is happening because developers keep pushing the envelope with the graphics over framerate, but that is the point. The PS5/Series X was supposed to be able to handle this and still have games played at 60fps with room to spare. I have no doubt that the PS5 Pro, which will happen, is for profit. But I also have no doubt that its also because they underestimated how demanding some of these games would be for their console. Don't get me wrong, I'm having a blast playing my PS5 and do so hours a day, but can clearly see how the lasting power of the console is no where near that of the PS4 or even the PS3. And PC might not have made a huge leap, but one thing it did do was made it clear that when it comes to graphics to framerate ratio, PC is still king. Starfield is much better to play on PC than a Series X.

@ll_exile_ll: I was talking about how far developers could take game development compared to the PS4 when it comes to massive AAA games. And yes, many people believed that they'd be playing 4K games at 60fps at least, with 120fps being for special cases, and the mandatory 30fps thing that is making a comeback wouldn't happen, or at least not happen for a long time. Even the fast, instant, SSD loading of the PS5 is starting to fade, as proven by Jedi Survivor, which loads like a normal game. Fast, but normal. Overall, tech wise, the PS5 is a huge jump which I pointed out by upgrading from a based PS4 and using Days Gone as an example. It still doesn't change the fact the tech seems to quickly becoming out of date, hence why this PS5 Pro might be happening. Game development is becoming bigger and more expensive every year. So console life spans likely will become shorter and shorter as time goes by, not to mention more expensive.

@glots: Ah, thanks for letting me know.

Given how it seems like Sony is ready to make a PS5 Pro already, its looking like the difference between the PS5 and PS4 wasn't as distant as we were led to believe. As someone who upgraded from a based PS4, not a PS4 Pro, I quickly noticed the improved gameplay on many PS4 games, especially ones with unlocked frame rates. The difference in Days Gone is night and day between both consoles and that is one example. They recently gave The Order 1886 a PS5 upgrade and I plan to go back and play it again, as I'm one of the few people who liked that game. And now we have so-called AAA games that are now back to running at 30fps, and developers aren't even bothering with a performance mode anymore. I believe this is one of the reasons were are still seeing games being released for both consoles still, as its now possible to walk into a store and buy both a PS5 or Series X these days. So at this point, the PS4 should be left behind.

Then again, we are living in a time of bad inflation. Almost everything costing twice as much as it did before, and there are a lot of other stuff people are worried about besides gaming. This could be another reason why developers haven't abandoned the PS4 completely. People today still can't afford to get a current-gen console. People talk about the negatives of the Series S, but it really is a great deal, especially these days, even though I personally don't have one.

Its interesting how people are talking about lowering the difficulty to easy during certain situations, because I did that recently in Jedi Survivor. I was playing most of the game on the default option which is Jedi Knight. But around the time I fought Darth Vader as Cere, the game's combat got pretty brutal, for me at least, so I lowered it to story mode to get past it, then I notched it back up to Jedi Recruit to finish the game which was still challenging enough for me to enjoy it. The difficulty is actually similar to the default mode in Jedi Fallen Order. They actually made the game harder in Survivor at default. So yeah, I do this quite a lot myself, and I don't have any regrets. I don't have the time to try and master a difficult game, unless I go in knowing this is what I'm in for, like a Souls game, or a Soul-like, like Lies of P which will be coming out soon. I know its going to be brutal, but I'm ready for it because I liked the demo a lot.

To quote the SNK Neo-Geo language: Level 4. (Default)

Even though this was a lie. The difficulty for their arcade games was never on Level 4.