Sony Consoles and Updates

[one-armed dwarf]

I don't think they will be doing lots of PSVR remasters, I don't know if people know how far PSVR is from what VR is right now. Current VR has completely vindicated motion controls. Whereas a lot of the PSVR stuff seems to be like putting a normal game very close to your face and playing it with a dualshock. I hear Astrobot gets a little bit more creative with it, but stuff like REVII is basically that. 

 

At the same time expectations firmly in check, I really don't expect much big AAA stuff. The hybrid approach might just work as a decent compromise, but you can't have an Alyx-tier game on hybrid imo. Really hope we get some decent horror games for those OLED screens, it's been such a bummer to discover there's fuck all good horror VR games cause it's such an obvious thing that should work really well. Even something light weight like Walking Dead Saints and SInners with its Tell Tale graphics can actually be scary when you see the zombies up close, imagine a proper horror game. Dead Space VR, with dismemberment mechanics and it's immersive in-game UI being one particularly obvious candidate that will never happen sadly

[one-armed dwarf]

I got a pre-order for digital ps5 stock, aka my psvr2 machine.

 

Tho for the time being when it arrives I think I'll be hardly using it at all bar like 5 hours of playing the FFVII dlc. System badly needs its Bloodborne moment.

 

Also I will be installing the ps4 version of strive on it cause sony have the controller api weirdly locked down for ps5 stuff. Ain't playing that without my hitbox, can't go back. never

[DisturbedSwan]

Congrats on getting one!

 

I think you'd like Returnal, it seems the most in your wheelhouse out of the PS5 releases so far from what I've heard, the Bloodborne moment has already happened from my perspective with MM, Rift Apart, DeS and Sackboy, but I get our tastes are very different. Although I think it's massively overrated you do get Astro's Playroom included too, it has some cool moments and is free so give that a go.

[one-armed dwarf]

TY for those recommends but I think Returnal is a definite no-no, a really hard roguelike which crashes, doesn't have checkpoints and deletes progress in rest mode when you udpate, deletes saves and has really dark visuals. The PS5 would be getting chucked out the window. If I want even an iota of that frustration I'd load up Hades again lol 🤣

 

Maybe I will try Demon Souls again because I'm on my Berserk thing right now, def not my favourite From game tho

PSVR2 is going to be pog as fuck tho so I wanted one for that at least.

[Maryokutai]

That's a hell of an early purchase then, I mean surely PSVR2 won't come out for at least another 12 months?

 

[one-armed dwarf]

And the supply issues probably won't be relieved by that point either

https://www.polygon.com/22428683/ps5-restock-playstation-5-supply-sony-sales-figures

 

Can't find the article I had before but some experts were speculating another 18 months of stuff being hard to pick up

 

There's an article ITT about them ramping up production for hitting shipment targets but that's more them talking about how much revenue they want to make rather than how much easier it will be to obtain one of these things (so not extremely relevant for non-investors)

[Maryokutai]

Phew, good thing SF6 will be multiplatform.

[OCH]

That reminds me, I must go back to Returnal at some point. Or turn my PS5 on at all, as I think it's been a few months?

 

Meanwhile..

 

1 hour ago, one-armed dwarf said:

a really hard roguelike which crashes, doesn't have checkpoints and deletes progress in rest mode when you update, deletes saves and has really dark visuals. 

1) Of course it doesn't have checkpoints. It is a roguelike.

2) To be honest, aside from the bullet hell type spray from enemies, it feels more like Metroid than say Isaac or Dead Cells.

3) To date, I've had zero crashes or glitches of any kind. The Rest Mode thing is a temporary save feature, to pause a session. As it is a roguelike, you don't play it like other games. Go for one run at a time.

4) Currently, Bloodborne is unplayable with where my TV is. I simply can't see any of it. That isn't the case with Returnal. The enemy fire and scanning feature makes the first area very visible. The second area is out in the open so there isn't an issue there either. 

[one-armed dwarf]

Hades has checkpoints and is a roguelike, I'm talking about being able to turn the system off entirely and pick a run up mid-run. If I can't power a device down to do that then it's a problem

 

But anyway, I'm not going to play it. I know I will dislike it so why bother, there's other stuff to play or wait for

[OCH]

1 hour ago, one-armed dwarf said:

I'm talking about being able to turn the system off entirely and pick a run up mid-run.

 

That's basically "Easy Mode" for roguelikes. Can't think of any I've played that did that. 🤔 There's not really a need for it either. Roguelikes are structured around cycles/runs. It isn't a World 1 - 8 run through, like a Mario. Each to their own, much in the same way I wouldn't touch DMC or Guilty Gear after giving up on the earlier ones. 

Returnal does give you abilities to bypass early sections of the game, though. The further in you get. Just like how Space Jump and Screw Attack open up Metroid.

[Maryokutai]

It's not easy mode, it's "some real life stuff can happen" mode. Fire Emblem had these too back in the day, you could save mid mission to pause and go away and if you loaded the save file it got deleted. It's not meant to be a back door for cheating or something, just be able to put the game down because not everyone has an up-to-2-hours window at their disposal whenever they boot up a game.

[one-armed dwarf]

And the lack of said 'easy mode' makes it extremely unappealing to me. I don't think it's that controversial to not have to organise my life and time around a game needing to be played for set number of hours.

 

So that's one reason why I won't ever play it. Man, you should see what I did to get my first clear in Hades. Backed up the directory and just fought the final boss over and over cause I got sick of starting again and being too tired by the time I got to the last boss to actually learn how to fight it. I got legit clears in that game too (posted one on here), but I don't have patience for that kind of repetition where nothing new is ever going to happen.

[DisturbedSwan]

3 hours ago, one-armed dwarf said:

TY for those recommends but I think Returnal is a definite no-no, a really hard roguelike which crashes, doesn't have checkpoints and deletes progress in rest mode when you udpate, deletes saves and has really dark visuals. The PS5 would be getting chucked out the window. If I want even an iota of that frustration I'd load up Hades again lol 🤣

 

 

I get you, and I can't speak from personal experience but I believe it has been patched a hell of a lot since its April release, and is in a much more stable condition now. 

[Maf]

Returnal is great. I don't know why people are down on it without even trying it. It isn't a game for everybody but if you like 3rd person shooters, alien horror games and high stakes risk/reward it's really good. 

 

The only downside is how expensive it is. It's hard to try things on PS5 at £60-£70 a pop 

[OCH]

4 minutes ago, Maryokutai said:

It's not easy mode, it's "some real life stuff can happen" mode. Fire Emblem had these too back in the day, you could save mid mission to pause and go away and if you loaded the save file it got deleted. It's not meant to be a back door for cheating or something, just be able to put the game down because not everyone has an up-to-2-hours window at their disposal whenever they boot up a game.

I totally understand that. I think the SRPG genre has had that since the beginning too. I might be misremembering, but I think Shining Force on Mega Drive had that? 

That said, with roguelikes, progress isn't the end of the world. Turning off your run after clearing three rooms or playing through for hours. Sometimes the result is the same. The perks and weapons can be different, but it is always RNG anyway.

I recall playing through miserable RNG loadouts in Isaac and Rogue Legacy. Only for the next run to be completely OP. It is the strength and weakness of the genre. 

[one-armed dwarf]

2 minutes ago, Maf said:

Returnal is great. I don't know why people are down on it without even trying it. It isn't a game for everybody but if you like 3rd person shooters, alien horror games and high stakes risk/reward it's really good. 

 

The only downside is how expensive it is. It's hard to try things on PS5 at £60-£70 a pop 

I'm down on Returnal the same way Nag is down on MMOs, I know enough about it to know it will annoy me. I don't need anymore information than what I have. 

 

It isn't like a guilty gear situation where I ignore a genre forever and then give it a shot, the only way I would ever consider playing it is with cheats to let me play it as I want. So I need a PC port. It doesn't matter what the progression system is like in it, I can't stand doing 'level 1' over and over. Even in games I like like the Souls ones I can't stand the runs back to boss fights so Returnal is anathema to me

 

The only way I could be convinced is if Och says that the power that makes the early game go fast is a literal teleport which completely skips all of it

[Maf]

15 minutes ago, one-armed dwarf said:

The only way I could be convinced is if Och says that the power that makes the early game go fast is a literal teleport which completely skips all of it

 

lol

 

The game does get super tedious after doing a level 100 times (Grinding for Platinum). But actually the game is not that repetitive. I think I had under 10 deaths or something by the time I finished the game fully. Or something I would have to check the thread. 

 

it also plays so good. Based purely on the third person shooting is the best one there is (More criticisms as judged as a full package however)

 

Also if you have played 1 game in a genre you have still effectively ignored it. I've played a pinball game before. Ask me anything about pinball games. I'm an expert. 

[one-armed dwarf]

If you played a pinball genre game and hated the act of hitting a pinball or found pinballs themselves odious for some reason then you're in the right to give other ball hitting games a wide berth.

 

As am I with the whole 'repeat mission 1 over and over to progress' genre of gaming. I got further into Hades than you did and it made it clear to me why the genre doesn't work for me. Because I love pushing things mechanically in games and making them harder and getting that rich reward of having to use more obscure mechanics to find a way through. But these games don't give me the space to explore that as I like because they are designed to make me repeat hours of content over and over that I did already, that I have no interest in every looking at again.

 

I don't like playing games because they are difficult and punishing, what I like is the space in them to be creative. Just making a game hard is of zero interest to me, I've had this argument so many times it's like a meta roguelike now lol

 

You're never going to convince me to get back into games like this, not that I think you are trying to convert me but more like you're trying to tell me my feelings on the genre are wrong when they aren't. They just don't work for me

[Maf]

Mild mechanical spoilers for Returnal here but 

 

Spoiler

You do effectively get to teleport in Returnal. Once you get the right power up, which is usually after beating a boss for the first time, you can use it to skip to the next bit. For example once you get the grapple hook next time you see the entrance to world 3 from world 1 you can grapple hook to it, etc. Once you beat the mid game (The 3rd boss) you get to start from World 4. There's only 2 sections in the game. W1-W3 and W4-W6. But you can always skip from the start to the end once unlocked. 

 

Some of this depends on RNG. Maybe the skip from W1-W3 might be half way through W1, maybe it's in the last room of W1, maybe it's in the first room. But once used to it running through the first world is mostly free except for the odd room that goes in to lockdown. I found the combat such a joy in it, though I didn't really mind.

 

Also if you skip levels it's going to be harder because you won't have picked up the upgrades. Which is a big difference to other rogue lites I've played. There is extremely little character progression in Returnal. Very, very little. But it's also much easier to get a build going, ironically because there's far fewer tools to play with. It's kind of short on guns and items. Which is both a downside to the rogue-lite nature of it but a + if you want consistency. 

 

Also I just didn't die that much which helped with the repetition. But it might just be because I'm awesome I dunno. 

 

This is not trying to convince you to play Returnal or to like Rogue-lites, just pointing out that some of the reasons you're saying you won't like this game don't exist in this game. 

 

I also don't hate pinball games, they just don't do much for me. If there was a unique take on a pinball game i would still give it a try, though. 

[one-armed dwarf]

4 minutes ago, Maf said:

This is not trying to convince you to play Returnal or to like Rogue-lites, just pointing out that some of the reasons you're saying you won't like this game don't exist in this game. 

The bit you have spoiled mentions not carrying upgrades if I choose that route, which I suspected (cause when I saw the 'lol' I got the clue but expected that to be the trade off)

 

Anyway that's my RL rant. Would rather invest that time into being a Zato-1 champ. Something much more rewarding in a tangible way, Eddie is a good boy