@janman You sounded a little blown out on this episode (to me, at least). Love listening to you talk about things you're passionate about so I'm all in on this feature.
Thanks for turning subs on! I quite like those flashbacks at the end edited in and editing out the runs towards a boss if you have to fight one like 12 times would be quite nice too. However, i can't say that i'm a fan of editing out the characters dialog. You have Tam spend a few minutes gushing about the background story you can find at the item descriptions, and how the Phalanx boss relates to that great archer, but at the same time you've have made the call that the main story is of no importance. Now if this was heavily edited footage where 3 hours of playtime has to be converted to an hour of video, i can see where you're coming from. But right now, we pretty much see the whole journey, except for the storybits. It feels off to me.
This is 100% how I feel. Tamoor clearly has a deep knowledge of the lore of this game, so skipping main story beats like the Monumental's dialogue is super weird to me. This is a series that has been played to death by streamers (including Brad and Abby) and it feels like they're throwing away their big potential differentiator. Maybe that's not what they want this series to be, but watching someone competently work their way through this title without any additional context just isn't appealing to me in 2021.
Something about this QL feels like it could be an ad for Giant Bomb. Hilarious antics, genuinely informative criticism, Vinny goofin in an open world, and everyone doing their part to keep things moving along. They made covering this beast of a game look easy.
Completely agree with Jeff and Vinny about performance modes, but you can't put that toothpaste into the tube now.
That's also my gut feeling. If you're not familiar with all the options a modern PC game provides access to and haven't had the ability to make your games look or perform subjectively "better", the definition of which will vary from person to person, a lot of people are going to end up frustrated and annoyed. I think this will be compounded by the fact that many of these games purposely obfuscate what the difference is between a "performance" or "quality" mode for the sake of simplicity.
The closest example I can think of is picking up a PS4 pro and a 4K HDR TV together a few years ago. I boot up my fancy new toys, turn on HDR in my game, and the colors don't look right. They don't look bad, but they're off. Turn off HDR in the game, now they look wrong in a different way. Hours later I'm digging through forum threads with conflicting information on black levels, dynamic contrast, some of my hdmi ports may not support HDR, and on top of that they might be adding input lag?! Between then and the end of the 360 era I only played games on PC, and it was still an exhausting exercise.
This whole thing just makes me feel good. I didn't think I had much nostalgia for PlayStation as a brand, but this just comes across as so lovingly crafted and sincere I can't help but be completely drawn in. I'd love to see them use Astro (Astrobot?) as a vector for cool and unnecessary things like this going forward.
It radiates a sort of polish and reverence for it's history that's usually reserved for Nintendo in my mind. I can't help but wonder, what if Nintendo put together something like this for the Mario anniversary, or any of their major franchise's anniversaries?
At the end of the day, Sony is a bunch of cowards for not making the PS5 main UI theme a playable version of Vib-Ribbon.
GiantRobot24's comments