Playstation 4 Catch-All

ccesarano wrote:

If you still didn't understand why Sony's skipping E3 this year, their first direct presentation "State of Play" will certainly clear it up for you.

Holy cow was that a dumpster truck full o' nothin'.

Speak for yourself, No Man's Sky on PSVR? For free? Hell yes!

Valmorian wrote:
ccesarano wrote:

If you still didn't understand why Sony's skipping E3 this year, their first direct presentation "State of Play" will certainly clear it up for you.

Holy cow was that a dumpster truck full o' nothin'.

Speak for yourself, No Man's Sky on PSVR? For free? Hell yes!

There are dozens of them! Dozens!

ccesarano wrote:

If you still didn't understand why Sony's skipping E3 this year, their first direct presentation "State of Play" will certainly clear it up for you.

Holy cow was that a dumpster truck full o' nothin'.

That seems to be the consensus of the reactions, although I'd say some of that is simply Sony not merely failing to manage expectations, but completely failing to provide any idea of what to expect at all. This is clearly going to be a periodic release of trailers for upcoming games - think of it as a digest of the Playstation Blog.

On the other hand, as Valmorian alludes to, it was great if you have a PSVR. No Man's Sky on PSVR is huge, and honestly part of the reason I bought at launch PSVR was the slimmest sliver of a hope for that, a hope that I'd kind of forgotten about as I got lost in the steady stream of PSVR titles that have come out in the ensuing two years. Plus release dates for the very eagerly anticipated Blood And Truth, a release date for Falcon Age, the announcement of a PSVR Five Nights At Freddy's game, and reminders that a slew of other PSVR titles are coming down the pike.

I'm no stranger to expectations for this sort of thing. I've seen Nintendo Directs that have been received warmly and coldly. Nevertheless, this State of Play kind of left me feeling... why now? Why start it now? Yeah, if you had PSVR then it was nice, but outside of a few updates exclusively for PSVR users there was nothing fresh, so to speak.

As an example, two highlight games would be Concrete Genie and Days Gone. The former we've known about for... over a year now? and it only just got a release window. No release date, just a window. In the meantime, the more they show Days Gone the less people seem to get hyped. Not everyone, of course! I've seen plenty that are excited for it, but not many. It's going to probably have a lukewarm sales reception. It doesn't help that the "new" footage didn't really deliver any new information to entice buyers. It was... stuff.

A lot of the reactions are over-dramatic, but to me this just feels unusual in its timing. I have no doubt that Sony has a ton of stuff in development for after the PS5 announcement, but they can't let any cats out of the bag until then. The best I can imagine is that Sony is testing the waters for their own sort of Direct style presentations, so that when the PS5 does come around they've ironed out the kinks.

I, personally, am not disappointed. I was just surprised at how little I cared about everything they had shown. I was smart enough not to be expecting as much as some folks on the Internet.

To them I say: welcome to the world of direct presentations. Don't worry, you'll learn to keep your expectations checked at the door.

Spoiler:

No, you won't. Instead you'll get all kinds of leaks and rumors, some of which will be totally wrong, and others that will be surprisingly accurate.

Oh, I agree, overall-platform-wise. This was no substitute for an E3 press conference (even last year's, which certainly had some massive missteps), but it clearly wasn't intended to be and Sony should have prepared people for that. I guess it's hard to say "Hey, we're going to start doing periodic announcements that most of you won't care about."

A week ago I would have said that the lack of anything interesting means Sony's holding a huge amount back for the next generation, and is focusing all their energies there. In the wake of Google's Stadia presentation, and the certainty that Microsoft is going to have exactly that kind of news at E3, though, I wonder if people at Sony are currently scrambling and trying to figure out how to turn PS Now into something on an equal footing with the PS5, and how to present that sooner than they ever expected.

Eh, I don't think so. As I laid out in the Bold Predictions, I imagine Sony is waiting for Microsoft to show their hand at E3, and then will close out the year with a PlayStation 5 reveal at PlayStation Experience in December. So Microsoft gets all their info and features out, and then Sony gets to tweak price and other additional features and messaging afterward. If my memory isn't total trash, I believe they did something similar with Xbox One and PS4, where Microsoft announced all their info first and then Sony had special events for their system reveal.

Now that State of Play is a thing, the PS5 reveal could happen any time, but I do sincerely believe it will be a decent time after Microsoft has already given the world their first look at whatever they've got next. So I don't think they're scrambling. I think 2018 they were trying to distract everyone at E3 with presentation and hype to forget that, yes, we're mostly seeing the same games again this year, but 2019 I think they're just biding their time and suffering any bad press, knowing that the reveal of the PS5 and all upcoming projects for it will erase any bad will and memory in the time leading up to the announcement.

Sony is still playing it smart, and I don't think the State of Play format is bad (I mean, it's basically taking one of the Nintendo Direct templates and adding a blue filter over it). Nevertheless, I can't help but wonder if they could have planned something a little more special to cap off the presentation. The biggest, most positive talk I saw about State of Play was the concluding Mortal Kombat 11 trailer swapping between old West Coast rap to new West Coast rap to help illustrate the two generations of fighters being shown off.

Sony has to have something in development that could have generated more excitement, especially on a first-party level. See the latest Nintendo Nindies Direct, which saw positive buzz over a Crypt of the Necrodancer crossover with Legend of Zelda. You're not gonna have huge announcement in an Indies presentation, and yet that made a bigger splash than anything in Sony's presentation.

Sony announced they've sold over 4.2 million VR headsets. Seems to be steadily trucking along for them.

Amazon yesterday had a deal where you could buy a year of Playstation Now for $60. Coupled with some Amazon Prime rewards I had saved up, I decided to hop on that train and try it out. There are a bunch of games I added to my list, and my wife is excited to play Civilization Revolution again. With gigabit internet from a local ISP I'm not too concerned about meeting the minimum speeds required. Once nice thing is that starting a streaming game doesn't exit a local PS4 game you have running. I assume that changes if you download a game locally.

Playstation Plus games announced: The Surge and Conan Exiles.

I'm in the mood for something 'Dark Soulsy' and I've been fancying trying 'The Surge' so I'm happy.

Damn it, I just bought The Surge!

IMAGE(https://media.giphy.com/media/3oEduO4hD4KjTLlj2g/giphy.gif)

It's on sale in the UK and I nearly bought it. Bit cheeky to have it in a sale knowing you're imminently going to give it away.

Higgledy wrote:

Playstation Plus games announced: The Surge and Conan Exiles.

I've been fancying trying The Surge so I'm happy to give it a go.

So, two months in, the general take-away here is that we now have tacit confirmation that Sony won't be replacing the free PS3 and Vita games with PS4 games of higher value and/or monthly PSVR support of some kind.

Higgledy wrote:

Playstation Plus games announced: The Surge and Conan Exiles.

I've been fancying trying The Surge so I'm happy to give it a go.

IMAGE(https://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/1302192)

So is Conan, for that matter.

I wonder if I can convince my wife to play Conan with me...

doubtingthomas396 wrote:

I wonder if I can convince my wife to play Conan with me...

Is this the game where you can crank up the size of your gentleman's sausage?

vypre wrote:
Higgledy wrote:

Playstation Plus games announced: The Surge and Conan Exiles.

I've been fancying trying The Surge so I'm happy to give it a go.

So, two months in, the general take-away here is that we now have tacit confirmation that Sony won't be replacing the free PS3 and Vita games with PS4 games of higher value and/or monthly PSVR support of some kind.

Not that I know of but as long as you have them downloaded you can still play them.

Path of Exiles (free to play) is available now on the PS4 as of yesterday. I don't know much more than that but was interested in giving it a shot after hearing about it on the podcast.

Rahmen wrote:

Path of Exiles (free to play) is available now on the PS4 as of yesterday. I don't know much more than that but was interested in giving it a shot after hearing about it on the podcast.

That was an awfully quiet rollout... I knew it was coming and even looked up the release date a couple weeks ago, but with everything else that has come out and is scheduled to come out in the next month or so, I had forgotten about it and expected something more than crickets.

Anyway, thanks for the heads-up - adding it to my Download Queue now.

Baron Of Hell wrote:
vypre wrote:
Higgledy wrote:

Playstation Plus games announced: The Surge and Conan Exiles.

I've been fancying trying The Surge so I'm happy to give it a go.

So, two months in, the general take-away here is that we now have tacit confirmation that Sony won't be replacing the free PS3 and Vita games with PS4 games of higher value and/or monthly PSVR support of some kind.

Not that I know of but as long as you have them downloaded you can still play them.

Never had a Vita and now that my daughter has upgraded to Xbone and I've been running PS4 for several years, I'm not real worried about the loss of PS3 and Vita. I was just quietly hoping we would start to see a surge in PSVR games.

On the rare occasions they include a game I actually care about and/or enjoy, the freebies helped to take a little of the sting out of paying an additional service fee for games I already paid full price for i.e., Destiny 1/2, Division 1/2, and possibly Anthem, if BioWare/EA ever decide to get their sh*t together. Granted, in decades past, I was known to pay a subscription a various points for Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, Dark Age of Camelot, WoW, and maybe one or two others, but until Destiny changed the paradigm, I had hoped those days were behind me.

vypre wrote:
Higgledy wrote:

Playstation Plus games announced: The Surge and Conan Exiles.

I've been fancying trying The Surge so I'm happy to give it a go.

So, two months in, the general take-away here is that we now have tacit confirmation that Sony won't be replacing the free PS3 and Vita games with PS4 games of higher value and/or monthly PSVR support of some kind.

And the pattern so far is one single-player game and one multiplayer game. So if, like me, you eschew multiplayer games, you get one free game, and of course one of the other primary benefits of PS+, the ability to play multiplayer games, has never been of value at all. I've had PS+ since the PS3 days - it was a great value back then, especially if you owned a PS3, a Vita, and a PS4 - but at this point Sony is working hard to overcome my inertia about finally bailing on PS+.

Very good review of The Surge. I suspect I know where my play through will end. Skill Up spends the first four minutes talking about how he's not going to mention Dark Souls in the review so skipping to the four minute mark might be an idea.

I've been toying around withe Playstation Now while sick the last couple days. When streaming, the graphical fidelity is fine, but there's a definite lag on input. Playing anything requiring fast inputs like DMC or Sonic Generations seems to be a recipe for disaster, at least so far. I'm a little surprised since I've got gigabit internet and have the PS4 hooked up via wire to the network.

Of course downloading games there's no issue with that, which basically means the problem is relegated to PS3 games.

Anyone using PS Now had the same issue and managed to resolve it?

I'm actually looking towards The Surge, I have it on pc, but I suspect playing on the Recliner on the bigger screen might actually work out, I actually liked the Devs previous work on Lords of the Fallen.

Fastmav347 wrote:

I'm actually looking towards The Surge, I have it on pc, but I suspect playing on the Recliner on the bigger screen might actually work out, I actually liked the Devs previous work on Lords of the Fallen.

I mostly enjoyed Lords of the Fallen as well. The primary issue I had with it was the disconnect between the physics of the world and the character. I wrote many paragraphs about this game.

The Surge evolves for the better, though I don't think it quite solves some of my issues with the character's physical connection to the world-space.

beanman101283 wrote:

I've been toying around withe Playstation Now while sick the last couple days. When streaming, the graphical fidelity is fine, but there's a definite lag on input. Playing anything requiring fast inputs like DMC or Sonic Generations seems to be a recipe for disaster, at least so far. I'm a little surprised since I've got gigabit internet and have the PS4 hooked up via wire to the network.

Of course downloading games there's no issue with that, which basically means the problem is relegated to PS3 games.

Anyone using PS Now had the same issue and managed to resolve it?

I've used PS Now quite a bit to stream games, and unfortunately, my experience is just that it's sometimes laggy and sometimes isn't. I've been able to play timing-sensitive games just fine over streaming, but I've also had evenings where I couldn't even play turn-based things because the menu lag was so bad. There just doesn't seem to be an easy solution here.

I really like the look and feel of the melee combat in The Surge. That's the main draw for me and the fact that it's Dark Souls style gameplay in a fresh science fiction setting.

Higgledy wrote:

I really like the look and feel of the melee combat in The Surge. That's the main draw for me and the fact that it's Dark Souls style gameplay in a fresh science fiction setting.

From what I've played of it, what I like most about The Surge is that it has an interesting and creative loot system. Basically, you can target the individual limbs of the enemies that you're fighting and those limbs are either armored or unarmored. Attacking an unarmored limb deals more damage; attacking an armored limb will cause your opponent to drop their equipment from that limb when they die. So if you want better right leg armor, you can attack enemies' armored right legs until you get a piece you like, but if you want fights to be over a bit quicker, you can attack their unarmored limbs.

I don't know how this bears out over the course of the game. Most of my issues with Lords of the Fallen were in the arc of the game's progression rather than anything moment-to-moment. But the basic concepts of The Surge are at least intriguing.

Yeah Sony is really trying it's damndest to push me back towards Microsoft next gen. The plus offerings haven't been great lately not to mention (my own fault) I've owned most of the games they have on offer. MS on the other hand is offering these fantastic games every month not to mention the games with gold and backwards compatibility is knocking it out of the park. Even when I owned one of the big games Sony had on offer for plus they usually had some interesting Indie game but now even they are gone. And when the do offer a game it's so far after the fact and missing DLC that is pretty essential to the game now it's just disappointing.

Exclusives are still much better on Sonys system but there doesn't seem to be a hell of alot coming out this year besides Last of Us 2.

The fatalist in me says if we all move to MS next generation then MS will be disincentivized to offer these deals and Sony will step up their offers in response, and we'll all be in the same spot.

That said, this generation Sony has had FAR more exclusives that interest me, and since I canceled PS+ anyway and shunted the funds towards buying what I want to play, rather than just accepting what I'm given.

imbiginjapan wrote:

The fatalist in me says if we all move to MS next generation then MS will be disincentivized to offer these deals and Sony will step up their offers in response, and we'll all be in the same spot.

That said, this generation Sony has had FAR more exclusives that interest me, and since I canceled PS+ anyway and shunted the funds towards buying what I want to play, rather than just accepting what I'm given.

Haha I was going to say something similar in my post. Sony's exclusives have been great this gen no doubt, I just find some of the customer practices a little behind the times still. Truth be told I will still likely follow where the exclusives I'm most interested are and MS just doesn't have that offering.

Oh, absolutely - PS+ only became worthwhile when Sony seized on it to incentivize people during the PS3 era, when XBox pretty much clobbered them. IIRC, toward the end of that generation Sony had closed that gap, and PS+ was a big part of that. When the tables flipped and Sony was the clear leader in the current generation, the writing was on the wall for the PS+ value proposition, although if you owned all three (including Vita) consoles you still got a decent assortment of games for a decent stretch of time.

Right now, though - wow, they just don't care, and they're not hiding it. As for the future - I really have no idea what the next generation will bring from Sony, Microsoft, and now Google. Things are going to get interesting.

imbiginjapan wrote:

That said, this generation Sony has had FAR more exclusives that interest me, and since I canceled PS+ anyway and shunted the funds towards buying what I want to play, rather than just accepting what I'm given.

Completely agree on exclusives - I have no regrets about my investment in PS4 (and PSVR), given what I've gotten out of it. But Microsoft pretty much handed that to them on a platter, too, as their exclusives have been almost nonexistent. That's also something that's very much up in the air now, though, given MS's recent spate of studio acquisitions. I'm really annoyed that they bought Team Ninja, as I'm pretty much guaranteed to be on board with anything by the company that produced Heavenly Sword, Enslaved, DMC, and Senua.

Microsoft has recently won me over with Xbox Game Pass. Since they started adding day-one releases for indie games and recent AAA releases, the value proposition of it has improved considerably. I've been able to play Mutant Year Zero, Ashen, Below, and Operencia at launch, plus Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Just Cause 4 just a few months after their releases, plus a nice back catalog of games like Hellblade, Vampyr, and We Happy Few. It's been a solid subscription, and Sony's semi-equivalent in PS Now hasn't been able to get me nearly as excited.

Evan E wrote:

I'm really annoyed that they bought Team Ninja, as I'm pretty much guaranteed to be on board with anything by the company that produced Heavenly Sword, Enslaved, DMC, and Senua.

Ninja Theory.

Team Ninja makes the Dead or Alive games and Ninja Gaiden.