Same, if only to keep fulfilling a childhood commitment to myself of owning all consoles after seeing some friends of mine having a Sega AND a Nintendo.
I could see the appeal of consoles back in the day, when they were weaker specs but much cheaper and the games just worked right out of the box. But nowadays it seems like they’re just as expensive, still not as good for specs and the games are just as bug-riddled as PC games half the time. And Sony has been releasing all their big hits on PC anyway so yeah really no reason for me to get a PS5 that I can see.
But nowadays it seems like they’re just as expensive, still not as good for specs and the games are just as bug-riddled as PC games half the time.
No they aren’t ‘as expensive’, LTT did a video a while back where they tried to build a PC that could beat a PS5 for a similar price. They had to buy used parts to match the price and the PC did not include a controller ($69). If you’re going to use used parts, then also compare it to the price of a used PS5.
And Sony has been releasing all their big hits on PC anyway so yeah really no reason for me to get a PS5 that I can see.
Sure, if you want to play old-ass games, get a PC.
Not sure why you’re being downvoted. Gaming PC’s are expensive and a luxury! It makes sense economically. With consoles there’s an incentive to sell hardware cheap to get people into the ecosystem. With the exception of the steamdeck, there’s no such incentive for PC’s: if the hardware is worth x amount, you can bet your ass you’ll have to pay at least that. Yeah games are generally cheaper on PC, but not by much, and the barrier to entry is much lower for consoles. Hell, the PC I just built from used parts and Amazon deals cost me $800 (not including accessories), and while the processor and ram is almost certainly better than the ps5’s, the graphics are about on par, if anything slightly worse. You can find used ps5’s for less than $400. Is there really a used PC out there that can touch that?
I think the offsetting cost factor basis is that a PC is a computer that can be used for more than gaming and the console is pretty much useless after 3-5 years (considering the PS4 @ 2013, PS4 Pro @ 2016, and the PS5 @ 2020, and how PS4 Pros are beginning to struggle today, and OG PS4’s being obsolete). Are PC’s more expensive upfront now? Sure. But you also don’t have to re-purchase your games each generation at the whim of the publisher, like you’re likely going to end up doing with Sony and Nintendo, with the added benefit of being able to use it for other projects after its contemporary gaming lifespan.
Basically, if you built a PC in 2013 you’re probably still able to use it today as a server or hobby project PC (digital art, music, etc). PC’s were also cheaper back then before NVIDIA made GPU’s cost $1,000. Good luck re-using a console.
I see you don’t replay games, so why even own a console if you only play a game once?
For self-hosting I have several Linux and *BSD machines, but that’s server-grade hardare, not gaming hardware. None of those machines even has a GPU.
Drawing I do on my iPad Pro, for everything else I have a MacBook Pro. If I got a desktop PC it would only be used for games, I have no real need for non-server PC hardware.
Sounds like what you enjoy are shallow, linear story games. To each their own, of course. Glad you’re happy with what PS5 offers you in that regard. But the industry has a lot more to offer than that.
How are story games shallow? They are much deeper than the next generic multiplayer shooter. I happen to like stories in all forms, books, movies, series and video games. Video games are unique in that they allow you to be part of a story. For me the story is the single most important thing of a game. Often I simply play games on easy or story mode, mainly to keep up the pacing of the story.
I never said story games are shallow. But if the games you like are ones where you can feel like you’ve experienced all the game and the story has to offer in a single playthrough then they are, by definition, shallow. Even a great movie is worth watching multiple times of its story has any appreciable depth. Video games, even more so since there should be more to the story to experience.
I guess it’s possible you are correct and like the bulk of people who have ever studied film, literature, and art more generally are wrong. That seems unlikely. More plausible is that it’s common for people to experience a given work multiple times and get different things out of it.
That’s not even accounting for the “Reading Lear as an old man hits differently than reading it when I was a teenager” factor. That is, who you are changes over time and that affects how you experience art.
More broadly, games with different narrative choices (eg: Witcher 2 has two mutually exclusive middle acts).
And also more broadly, games with different mechanical choices (eg: many RPGs).
There’s also games where the process itself is fun (eg: Tetris).
Also, as many humans have imperfect memory, after enough time has passed a game may feel fresh playing it again. It may also land differently playing it at a new stage in life.
More broadly, games with different narrative choices (eg: Witcher 2 has two mutually exclusive middle acts).
I kinda like it that it makes my decisions in the game more impactful. If you’re going to go back and play the other option anyway, then it kind of makes the decision meaningless.
I hâte to agree with the other person here, but I’m a big roguelike fan and I rarely dust-off one that I have played before. I go through a period where I play a game quasi-exclusively until I burn out, then I will probably never touch it again.
I don’t think that’s especially common for roguelikes. I played a lot of crawl: stone soup and it was pretty common for folks to go for a win with every species, god, and class.
Out of curiosity, what about games that update? Crawl gets a new release like every six months where they often make big changes. New gods, species, other changes (like when they removed food, or added shapeshifting talismans)
Hmmmm. Not sure I’ve been in that situation too often. But honestly, as a young parent, my gaming time is very limited. Even if there is an important update to a game I’ve played in the past, chances are I’ve got my eyes on another game I’ve been waiting to play instead.
I’m not sure why I’d want a PS5 when there are zero games that interest me on it, and most of PC games I do want have very modest requirements. A Steam Deck is overkill for most of them.
Because my pc uses 4-5 times the power to run the same ps4-era game. (Especially nice when it’s hot in summer)
So I play it on my ps5, which offers me quick resume as well.
I love pc gaming, been building pc’s for over a decade at this point, but I do also see the advantages my ps5 has over my pc.
Could I build a more efficient and quiet pc, attach it to my tv and use that? Probably, and it’d be quite good with steamOS on it, but it’d be finicky to get sleep/resume working on it, and it’d probably cost me more.
ARM isn’t more efficient than x86 at that scale. Below 15W or so, it is, but not scaled up. I think there are other good reasons for it–like having more than three companies that can produce them–but not that.
Exclusives, simplicity, ease of use. I had a gaming PC, but switched to the PS5 only because I realized I’ve been using my PC like a PS5. I only play like fifa and gta now since most new games don’t even excite me anymore.
I’m a technical person and I’ve tried a lot of different methods to do couch gaming with a PC. From having some sort of lap tray to various wireless mice and keyboard solutions. I’ve currently landed on having my gaming desktop just stream with Steam Link to my living room. As long as I’m selective about which games I want to play, I can usually get a good experience. But I still have at least 60% of my steam library that isn’t a good experience doing that.
Having a dedicated piece of hardware with a custom OS that is designed around a controller is a huge difference maker. Plus you add in how ridiculously expensive it is to get either a USB external optical drive or internal SATA drive to watch DVDs and Blu-Rays. Heck, even just watching Netflix or YouTube in the living room is easier on PS5 than a media PC for the average user.
There’s a reason Valve tried to make the Steam Machine.
What a dystopian world we live on where my 32 thread CPU with 8 channels of 64GB RAM is “obsolete” for Windows 11, because it lacks a fucking TPM of all things.
Then who is at fault? Security? For doing their job? They wouldn’t be on stage if he hadn’t broken the rules. It wasn’t over-use of force, from the looks of things, just unfortunate placement.
Saying the resulting damages aren’t his fault is like forgiving the person who caused a pile-up for driving reckless.
Yes, the trophy was security’s fault because it was from excessive force. He was already restrained! I’m not saying the guy wasn’t in the wrong for climbing on stage, but people climb on stages all the time without security breaking the centerpiece of the event while apprehending them.
The security guy who pulled him down towards the trophy sure seemed to cause the trophy to get knocked over though. The stagerusher was pretty far away before that.
I can see why that would be a bummer. In my mind, the perfect video game-ceo position would be for a company that makes enough profit to pay its employees well and self sustains the business to keep making more games. Having to constantly report a higher user base and profitability growth year after year on a global scale would be a total drag.
Yeah, Gabe’s son is entirely focused on his own business, not related to gaming at all. Once Gabe is gone, his son will probably just sell it for an acceptable price and Steam will go public fairly soon after.
Alyx was incredible though! Way more than a tech demo (though I get the argument that it was a test to see if folks would pick up a VR Half-life 3). I played it on a cheap, used WMR headset and an old PC that could barely keep up, and it still stays in my top five videogaming experiences.
It’s a great example to bring up though, because I’d bet it wouldn’t have been made if the studio was only chasing money instead of trying to innovate.
It was absolutely a tech demo. All Valve games were tech demos of one sort or another. The problem with that model is, if Valve doesn’t have some new tech to show off, there’s no Half-Life sequel. I actually predicted the we would only get another Half-Life game when Valve finally decided to get into VR about two years before they did. What I didn’t predict was that it would be VR Only or that it would be a prequel that reconned the timeline.
Valve has a fuck around with money that they could just let the devs make games on their own schedule, but instead Marc Laidlaw left the company and the fans have had to pick up the story lines and world. Honestly, Entropy Zero is a better game then Half-Life 2. Really take a moment to think about the weapons and combat in HL2. The maps weren’t designed with the enemy AI in mind, so many encounters just have you and them shooting at each other in empty rooms and hallways. So much focus was on the Gravity Gun, so all the other weapons save the Crossbow and Rocket Launcher were boring. Hell, why did they get rid of the mode switch on the Rocket Launcher? You have to take fire to your face if you want to hit anything with it.
Considering that Entropy Zero came out about 13 years after Half Life 2, I would hope it was better. It doesn’t really seem fair to compare the two. They were developed in different times, with different tech, and different games to draw inspiration from. That’s not to mention that Entropy Zero is a mod built on top of Half Life 2, and requires HL2s code to even run in the first place.
Entropy Zero uses the same engine as HL2, which is why I used it as an example. I think HL1 is a better game then HL2 for the same reasons EZ is better then HL2. Better weapons and better enemy engagements. Whenever I do a franchise replay, the HL2 stuff is always a drag and I end up skipping the HL2 stuff eventually. Seriously, episode 2 has terrible driving in it. Other games had that figured out by then.
Juice is a nickname I go by and I was born in 1988. Also yes, this is a new account, I started looking for a Reddit alternative when they started public trading last week. Where are the nazi symbols? I’m Mexican and Native American.
Well then I’m old and unoriginal Mr Dragon type. My screen name is what it is. I gave you an explanation that I didn’t owe you in the first place and this is all the effort that I’m willing to put in. Have fun being weirdly paranoid over usernames I guess.
You sound like the kind of person who would just assume Hindu temples were made by Nazis because they contained swastikas. Just because some assholes used a symbol as a dogwhistle doesn’t mean that the rest of the world should stop using it.
Look, I definitely don’t hate you, and hate racists as much as anyone other upstanding citizen should. I honestly appreciate you looking out for them, and the username you called out could be seen as sus, for sure.
Just don’t let assholes steal the symbols for themselves, fuck them. Don’t disparage someone for not knowing about the dogwhistle and/or using a symbol non problematically. That was really my only gripe.
I’m internet poisoned as hell but I’m surprised that that’s not common knowledge. Its also often 1488 with the 14 referring to the 14 words of the following neo-nazi slogans:
“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”
“because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the Earth.”
This should be a legal requirement, imo. It’s unreasonable for them to sell a game to people, and then make it impossible to play because they weren’t making enough anymore. That’s like making a movie unwatchable because dvd sales dropped
I would use the term “licensing” rather than leasing. A video rental store “leases” the license.
But the point is, they’re selling you a license to play the game, and then at some point after sale, without you knowing when or why, they rescind the license without compensating you. Any reasonable person would think that purchasing a game means a license to play it indefinitely, especially if you received some kind of binary in exchange for money at the point of sale.
It’s the difference between Uber offering a subscription model, but then a year later suddenly saying they don’t offer it anymore, vs Tesla selling you a car, but a year later disabling features on it, saying, “you were merely licensing/leasing those features”.
Building games that are actually fun is going to make you the most money, that’s it.
Say it louder for the publishers in the back.
It’s infuriating how game design is devolving into engagement treadmills instead of simply being fun, concise experiences. The industry needs more Hi-Fi Rushes and less Suicide Squads.
What gamers want is innovation and overall fun gameplay, sequel or not. I’ve heard rather little coming from AAA studios of interest to me as of late 'cause they’ve all gone to creating endless battle royales, action RPGs or looter-shooters that all play near identically, all with the same military or techno jungle aesthetic that just doesn’t appeal to me. It’s all gunning for their game to get big on that e-sport sponsorship money or find some way to load their games with micro transaction pay to win gambling BS. For the most part, small and indie studios are doing as well as the AAA big boys because they are able to put more creativity into their games on smaller budgets. When a big AAA game such as BG3 does succeed, it’s because they put as much or more effort and care into innovative and entertaining gameplay as they do into fancy ray tracing graphics and cash grab mechanics. Games like BG3 are as praised as they are because they are complete games that work like they should out of the box, no day 1 patch/DLC or extra money required for the full intended experience. We get the quality we expect for our $60-$70. Whether that’s a brand new IP or a sequel doesn’t matter much.
My only quibble with this is that I’m not sure I’d classify larian as a AAA studio. Not when you’re comparing to Activision or Bethesda or something. The game is absolutely amazing, I’ve put over 700 hours in and am still playing it. I can’t think of any of the big AAA studios releasing a game that comes close anytime in the last decade.
Not to mention a lot of them are still crappy at best: Fallout 4 is ridiculous, Fallout 76 is even more ridiculous, Assassin’s Creed turned into a conveyor joke, Cyberpunk 2077 was just insultingly bad at launch and remained that for a long time (haven’t played 2.0 yet, so I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt), Starfield is another sandwich full of lies, Redfall is not even worth talking about akin to Deathloop, Diablo 4 is a machine to vacuum money on a schedule, online FPS has been nothing but battle royale for what feels like almost a dozen years and now they’re testing the waters with “extraction shooters” looking at Escape From Tarkov (the extraction aspect alone won’t bring them the same fame), and all of that is coupled with ever-increasing system requirements and prices, making gaming the most expensive it’s ever been for really no good benefit.
The only AAA game that left me satisfied on launch in the recent years, like in the days of buying boxes, was DOOM: Eternal; to a lesser extent, Hogwarts Legacy was good, but the story felt lacking and really took away from the fun.
I personally blame the managers in the AAA gaming for not managing the scope creeps that obviously happen in many of these games, stretching the development resources, yet resulting in another “mile wide, inch deep” discourse time after time. Again, DOOM: Eternal is a great example: no crafting, no open world shenanigans, no multiple choices all leading to the same outcome (while not being a conceptual story-telling instrument) - just a focused game with multiple elements that make up the linear progression and gradually increase the possible complexity of one’s experience, finally culminating in a complete FPS sitting atop impressive optimization and great visuals.
AAA is just not worth it these days and hasn’t been for several years, neither in terms of hardware, nor software.
You make some true points, but it's hard to take them seriously when you blanket dismiss entire games that are enjoyed by many as crappy or entire franchises as a joke.
That can’t be the sole metric. The POSTAL series is widely regarded as one of the worst franchises to ever happen in video games, and yet, I and many others are big fans of the entire series in general and are especially fond of some entries in particular; but it certainly doesn’t make these games less janky and subpar in many regards - at the very least, none of them was advertised as something “for the next gen” or “groundbreaking” or any of the big words the AAA industry likes to throw around when advertising.
entire franchises as a joke
Thanks for that, though, I didn’t meant to call the entire AC series a joke, only multiple of its entries after the first games.
I'm just particularly fond of Assassin's Creed Odyssey due to it being the only open world game that is playable as a stealth game with stealth game specific mechanics and a world designed for stealth traversal, there has not yet been any other game designed that way that isn't just light stealth elements that fall apart when you inevitably get caught in two minutes, until someone shows me another game like that, I honestly feel that game to be pushing the stealth genre, which is honestly not hard to do because of the dire state it's in.
And I'm glad you expand on Postal particularly, it goes to show that even games that are despised by many have their own meaningful aspects to be gleaned with the right mindset and with their flaws in mind. I think that when it comes to games of this size it is very hard to be able to say they are crappy, full stop, especially ones like these, or even Deathloop, which I enjoyed. Not as much as Arkane's Prey or Dishonored, of course, but it was still an enjoyable game with an excellent art style and soundtrack that heavily tapped into my love of the 70s, and featured a very nice multiplayer mode that simply doesnt exist in any other game.
I’m totally fine with you enjoying whatever games you enjoy, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. My opinion is that of the corporations and their practices only, not the consumers that happen to find something dear to them in the final product.
Granted, we, as consumers, have - or at least should have - certain ways to leverage the industry and let it know explicitly what we appreciate and like, and what we absolutely hate, but that’s much easier said than do on the scale of modern gaming in general, let alone the AAA gaming, the massive beast it is and the sizes of its many audiences. I do what I can to influence the industry, whenever I can, and that includes talking about it with my fellow gamers to maybe spark the same tendencies in them - but I certainly don’t want to discourage anyone from having fun.
Off the thread topic, yeah Prey and Dishonored are definitely one of the greatest games we’ve seen in 2010s, especially Prey.
I think you do bring up some good points about how a lot of the weakest AAA games now are either extremely over-iterative and lose appeal by virtue of sharing large parts of their design with their past iterations, diluting the novel good bits (Assassin's Creed), and trend chasers (that most popular online FPS games chase battle Royale and extraction shooter genres, though battle Royale seems to be finally dying off.
It takes something like Doom, a game that bucks the trends, but doesn't stumble on the execution of something fresh, but rooted in strong game direction and execution. Or something like Hogwarts Legacy, a rote-on-paper genre of game (open world) kept fresh and interesting because of its long-time-coming incredible choice of setting and the ways that it uses that setting to benefit the gameplay and immersion (the magic combat system, broom riding, and lots of sprinkled bits of lore that reward long time fans of the world)
But even then... imagine ten years down the line if there's a Doom 6, and they let history repeat itself...
Its not AC anymore though, they should have made a new IP instead of using an existing one on games that are completely different to the originals in the franchise.
I would agree with that, but then there's a whole debate to be had about whether Odyssey would receive the same funding if it weren't an AC game, and whether it wouldve been executed as well or has as much content in that alternate reality Odyssey.
I guess. I mean thats why they keep using the AC name though isnt it, they had no faith in their products to stand on their own.
I think all the recent AC games could have been a new franchise, they all are pretty much the same base game. I wouldnt even count AC4 as a AC game personally, I guess I just crave that beautiful AC2/Brotherhood experience again that we will never get.
You can enjoy stuff that’s objectively bad. Like fast food. The problem is less the individual games and more the state of gaming as a whole.
It’s not that one game launches as an unfinished buggy mess, despite having a paid for early access period. It’s not that one game increases the cost of entry, and further augments that with season passes, microtransactions, preorder bonuses, always-online requirements and all other bullshit that is modern AAA gaming.
The problem is that it’s the norm. If someone who doesn’t play a lot of games picks up a copy of the Ubisoft game they will probably have a blast. The systems in the game were fun when they were novel fifteen years ago. It’s when you see the same games released year after year, with the same issues, and the same predatory monetisation schemes that it gets trite.
It’s perfectly fine to enjoy Starfield. I hope those who waited so long for it do. For me personally there’s just nothing to get excited about because it’s just another version of the Bethesda game. I have already played it a dozen times before, and while twelve year old me enjoyed it immensely, thirty year old me can find better things to do with his time.
In short, it’s not that fast food is hard to enjoy, it’s just that every restaurant serves the same boring old burger.
What it's really about now is the combination of certain game mechanics. You've played a Bethesda game, and you've played a space sim, but you haven't played a Bethesda game in a space setting with ship construction, planet exploration and resource extraction outpost building, or really any light space sim with solid first person shooting at all.
To me, that combination is novel. Just like AC Odyssey's fusion of a true stealth game and an open world setting is novel and doesn't exist. The particular parts that make up the whole are not novel, the combination and execution are. There is still new ground to cover there.
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