In Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, the world is ending, and the 13-day timer is very real. You basically get told “do as much as you can before the world ends” and let loose. So there’s urgency AND side questing.
And of course you have the opportunity to spend that time doing things that are completely irrelevant to making progress, like collecting silly outfits and forcing Lightning to wear them so that Hope can laugh at her.
It kind of works in Elder Scrolls games. You’re typically just some random dude getting roped into stuff you barely understand so it makes sense that you don’t have much of a sense of urgency. And the main quest usually has parts where you’re encouraged to go do other stuff to build up skills and join factions.
It works in Morrowind. When you go to do the main quest, the guy in Balmora says you look like a scrub and to come back when you’re not so green. Oblivion immediately tells you to take the amulet somewhere. Skyrim requires main quest progression for a few things like the civil war.
In Skyrim the main quest constantly tells you about how urgent it is for you to do the next steps. You must heed the summoning of the greybeards, you must hurry along to the dragon graveyard. Time is constantly of the essence.
And then every other part of the game encourages you to goof around.
Oblivion is the same with this. Morrowind went the opposite direction with the story at times pretty much telling you to goof around for a bit before continuing the main quest (probably because people were less used to open world games maybe?).
I think daggerfall had you on actual timers so if you weren’t at the correct locations in time the game would be impossible to complete. Which sure is a way to resolve the false sense of urgency lmao.
!To be honest, I kind of wish they just hadn’t bothered with portraying the ending. They set up such cool lore, and I didn’t really need the avant-garde film at the end. A cut to credits would’ve been fine.!<
I don’t really think it’s a problem at all. It’s on the level of game mechanics being taken too seriously like “why does a sword in my backpack weigh enough to slow me down but not a sword in my belt?” or “how come these vegetable merchants are willing to buy random crap I found in a cave?”
Fallout 1 has a hard timer you have to obey before it is too late to do your main objective and you lose the game. That shit stressed me out so much I just didn’t continue playing.
For me it becomes an issue when I try to make decisions from my character’s perspective. If I try to lean into the RP part of RPG then I often feel like I have to leave a load of content behind because it just wouldn’t be a high priority.
I agree with the FO1 timer though. I ended up beelining to the necropolis and got trapped in an endgame bunker because I didn’t want that timer hanging over me.
This approach is so common in RPGs it’s like dwarves with Scottish accents; a better question to ask would be whether there’s an RPG that doesn’t do it - one that hurries you up instead?
I mean…Dark Souls is the obvious answer, but that’s almost a different subgenre of RPG. Dark Souls does have side quests, but they are obscure and often incidental to the main quest. They also skirt this problem by having “time” be a loose concept in the lore - in every game, the world is in the process of slowly ending, in a literal way that fucks up the flow of time.
I agree with the other user who said it’s a writing problem e.g. choosing the immediacy of end of the world plot device. Unless it’s done with very specific circumstances, like Overcooked 1 where the first level is the Spaghetti Monster Apocalypse and then you jump back in time through a portal. I think Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a good example of this exact problem the article raises though. It’s a relatively short game, but there is no end of the world. There are 2 major events, your destiny as the Arisen to fight the dragon that killed you, and the in-world politics of a government and some corrupt individuals working to prevent this event for their own plan.
I mention this game primarily because it uses a mechanic that many completionists tend to dislike - there are “timed” quests. Not all of them, usually ones that make sense to run out of time on (but again, not all of them.) So for example, at one point there is a quest to attend a masquerade ball, which is a permanent main story quest until you choose to attend. This is the exact issue the premise of the article brings up, where time is infinite until you decide to continue.
And yet, at the same time, there are a few quests where you may encounter a random NPC who is asking for help for someone who goes missing, and if too many in game days pass by, well… They die.
Ultimately I had other pacing issues with the story, but I did really enjoy how it goes about “solving” urgency when an in-game world timer exists. I’ve never been the biggest fan of time-managed items, (for example, raw potato, ripened potato, rotten potato over the course of 1-3 days), but Dragon’s Dogma 1 and 2 both did it fairly well since the items that do expire 1) make sense, it’s food, and 2) are in fair abundance. It helps solve the hoarding of your items, gives you a little extra money if you sell it as the right phase, and allows for varied item combinations as well (raw+item = curative, ripe+item = stamina, rotten+rotten = oil for lantern or status effect combinations).
I think really the issue just comes down to what is fun gameplay mechanics? Batman: Rise of Sin Tzu for PS2/Gamecube had timed levels, a mechanic that makes sense for a game centered around saving people before they kill hostages. Star Ocean had an in game timer matched to clocks, so the only way to stop the timer was to turn off the game. After (24?) hours, it’s game over. Quite frankly… timed mechanics are usually seen as gimmicky and are not very popular - they may have moments of appreciation, but I’m not sure if it’s a beloved mechanic.
Which in turn results in, “I have you now Spider-Man! In just 8 hours my bomb will blow New York to high heavens!” And then the player goes to help every child get their balloon back before the main story progresses.
You are right, the description on the product page is only talking about Home Wifi and playing at home. Which led me to believe it cannot be used remotely. Only when looking at the FAQ they clarify it can be used anywhere.
A lot of the initial criticisms have been fixed in further updates. Now the connection is very stable, works with outside networks. They just implemented PS Plus PS5 streaming (so without connecting to a console).
Are you really cherry picking some big media outlets like IGN? It was another IGN moment where most peoples opinion did not match what IGN rated. They gave the Steam Deck 7/10…
At launch it was not well received, with many issues, being overpriced and the only compatible earphones being very expensive and not available too. It was an embarrassment through and through at launch across almost all media and users. I’ve read and watched reviews and opinions. You are not being honest here, as some of the biggest issues are fixed just recently and some over the course of 1 year since it launched.
Eh. They’ve been great at that but I dont see this as it. Handheld stuff is cool and popular right now. Don’t get me wrong, they definitely could self sabotage here. They 100% did with the vita and their egregiously expensive memory cards…
But the PSP and Vita were great devices aside from that. I could see this working
Vita was technically impressive, far more capable than the DS. I’ve got an OLED Vita and I’m amazed how nice it still looks.
But the Vita inevietably lost to Nintendo because it struggled with popularity, and therefore struggled with number of games made for it. It’s a catch 22.
If Sony can make a portable that plays all your PS5 library (without needing to buy any of it again) then they might actually be on a winner.
The Vita was a 3DS competitor, not a DS competitor. They kind of tried to outgimmick Nintendo with this one, unsuccessfully, I might add, because they didn’t build the system around these features, but slapped them on in such a way that developers and players could just ignore them.
The PS5 controller is somewhat of a descendant of this device, although its features are a bit better supported - and it would be trivially easy to integrate them into a handheld.
As for processing power, they need to find a way to get the same CPU power as a base PS5 and enough GPU power for somewhere around 1080p (since going any lower would render many games designed for the home console unplayable) into a cost-, heat, space- and power-efficient package. Most of this work is on AMD, Sony just has to package it. Maybe they can get away with a system that simply forces a lower output resolution for existing games so that less GPU power is needed - or they wait long enough for it to be possible to miniaturize a full-fat PS5 into a portable device. I think the latter is unlikely though, at least within a time frame that would allow for a PS5P to coexist with the PS5 instead of the PS6.
I genuinely think it’s already possible. The PS5 doesn’t exactly have a very new processor, it’s a 4000-series (desktop) Renoir, 7nm, Zen 2 architecture. The Z1E (the chip in the Lenovo Legion Go & ROG Ally X) is a 7040-series (mobile) Phoenix, 4nm, Zen 4/RDNA3 architecture.
The Z1E is basically 10% less performant for about 1/4 the juice. You could easily keep the same resolution, whilst dropping things like particles, shadow effects, etc that aren’t going to be as missed on a much smaller display. I’ve got a Legion but I believe the Ally X has a docked higher TDP mode that would push it to being competitive with the PS5, or at least it would certainly be possible with an active cooling dock.
AMD literally designed the Z1E for handhelds, so Sony would be remiss not to use it. That or a potential “Z2E” successor chip seen as this one is pushing over 18 months since it was announced.
You could easily keep the same resolution, whilst dropping things like particles, shadow effects, etc
This would require per-game adjustments, which is not something you can ask of devs mid-gen, especially not retroactively. Developers already hate that they have to optimize for Xbox Series S - and that console was available from the start. This portable PS5 can only be a success if it “just works” and the only way to do that is by having the exact amount of CPU power as the home console and reducing the output resolution automatically, perhaps with the help of PSSR. Until there is an efficient APU that can pull this off, the console can’t be released.
PS5, kinda famously, has no exclusive games. I doubt it would be that taxing on devs to essentially create a build that changes it from Ultra settings to High equivalent to the PC versions when they’re all running on an x86 platform. The Series S is just garbage hardware that Microsoft should have never released, the Z1E already outperforms it handily.
This chip would be more than capable of matching the PS5’s APU. But the Z2 they’re releasing alongside it will be decently cheaper while matching the Z1E’s performance. So it’ll come down to whether Sony prioritises cost or performance. My money’s on cost though, they’re going to want this thing to be cheaper than a Steam Deck, and the Z2E will put it in Legion Go/Ally X price territory.
Microsoft has the Edge here (see what I did?) when it comes to handheld, because they already have a weaker hardware that games on Xbox must be able to run, the Series S. This baseline could be used as a handheld compatibility (at least from performance perspective). Sony on the other hand has a monster console and no weaker version of it. So there is much more and longer to developer. For the coming years, I’m not convinced Sony would be capable of doing that. Also imagine the price it would have.
I don’t think Sony wants a PS4 handheld while Microsoft has the newer generation Series S based handheld. Sony wants to sell new games, not the old one.
Read my comment if you like speculation and future prediction.
It’s a bit too early to talk about this. First the Switch 2 will come out, then probably Steam Deck 2, then Xbox Portable and only then Sony is ready to release. At that point its already in the middle of the Switch 2’s life cycle and the market is full of handhelds. If Sony comes up with expensive prices again, it will be a tough sale (in the long run) and it ends up being a similar failure (for units sold) like the Vita.
The Playstation Portal just streams and is already 200 Dollar. It’s basically a tablet with controllers attached to it, but less capable. If Sony goes the route of Apple and markets the Playstation Handheld as a premium device for hardcore fans, then do not expect it being cheaper than 500, around same price as the original PS5. I hope Sony will surprise me.
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