Completely trivial point, but a non-USAist I don’t think I’ll ever stop finding the phrase “the Holiday Season” weird. If you mean Christmas because you want people to buy it as a Christmas present, then just say Christmas! I guess it’s to be non-religious but I just find it funny to say “the holiday season” to mean winter when the season that everyone goes on holiday is summer.
In the US, there are multiple holidays people get together for. Halloween (to a lesser degree), Thanksgiving, Christmas (or Hanukkah), New Years. Extended families will often get together multiple times for these and then not see each other again until the next year. Thanksgiving really kicks off the retail season with black Friday, but there’s also a lot of time off during the winter time from school and work.
It really is a season with Christmas at the center of it. A lot of our “Christmas” songs don’t even mention Christmas. It’s just songs about winter.
That much makes sense, but when it’s companies releasing products they hope will be bought as Christmas presents then it’s just odd to hear them skirting round the word “Christmas”. Unless you guys buy each other PS5s for new year?
It’s also somewhat inclusive of Lunar New Year and Diwali. More broadly, it’s a public recognition that not everyone celebrates Christmas to make it clear they’re accepting of diversity.
Maybe it’s the Canadian in me, but I don’t wish anyone a “Merry Christmas” unless maybe if I specifically know they celebrate Christmas; I almost always say “Happy Holidays!”
Yeah it makes sense, just sounds odd. Maybe it’s because here in Britain Christmas is kind of a thing for everyone almost entirely independent of religion. Cultural differences and all that.
I think it could also be cultural difference in the use of the word “holiday”. In Britain a holiday is what you’d call vacation, whereas our bank holidays are what you’d call public holidays. We don’t generally refer to Christmas and New Year as holidays, even though that’s when you take time off work, because you’re not “going on holiday”.
I think of it like there’s more than just Christmas being celebrated at the end of the year, so to include them all it’s easier to just say the holiday season
In a lot of countries (Northern Hemisphere) Summer is the holiday season, but that has never been my experience in the US. So it might not be as strange from that perspective.
As I said in another reply, yeah it makes sense, just sounds odd. Maybe it’s because here in Britain Christmas is kind of a thing for everyone almost entirely independent of religion. Cultural differences and all that.
Wait a second, you can add on the Bluray drive to the slim PS5? Meaning you're not locked in to an all-digital console, but you can still upgrade later? That's a great idea, why is no one talking about this?
Sony finally gets to join the ranks of add-on-disc-player consoles: the Sega Megadrive, the N64DD, and this... thing.
So this is a de facto price increase? From a manufacturer that just reported a record high annual profit? 175GB (the slightly increased storage) hasn’t been worth $50 in years.
This generation sucks. I was already annoyed that we probably weren’t going to see price drops with this or the Switch, but I certainly didn’t see a price increase for an unproven hardware revision coming.
At least for the US, the price increase is just for digital version. And honestly, I’m certain the old digital had a profit margin hit in comparison to the disc drive version. It was probably worth it to lock people out of discs. This version will have a disc drive attachment option, so they’ve just given up on their all-digital endeavor.
Aside from that, $50 for 175 GB SSD isn’t a great value. The extra 175GB SSD is a significant increase. And for the disc version, that’s purely an upgrade.
They literally just announced three more cover colors, (got the announcement email yesterday), I doubt they’ll phase them out that quickly. Even if they decide to go fast, I’d think they at least be smart enough to wait until after the holidays.
Saw that but these won’t work on the new model so I doubt they make more. Unless of course they’re for the revision but I don’t know how that’d work with the new design.
Would you normally replace a perfectly functional console with a smaller but otherwise identical machine? Do what you want with your own cash but that’s a very decadent purchase!
If the launch of these is anything like the original launch, I think I’ll pass on this one too. That launch experience trying to get ahold of one really soured me on the PS5
I’m in the same boat. I used that money and saved a bit more and just built my first gaming PC.
I still want to play Ghost of Tsushima but I will not buy a PS5 just for that game. Don’t think I’m going to buy any more consoles in the future, sadly. The last release soured me on these releases too.
Funnily enough same for me, I already had a prebuilt gaming PC but after spending the time trying to get ahold of the PS5, I just started saving and made my first PC build as an upgrade to what I already had, feel like it was the better choice in the long run.
In early 2021 I, like so many people, wanted to build my first gaming pc. As I’m sure you can guess, I had a hell of a time trying to get my hands on a decent graphics card. In the end I purchased a prebuilt pc. The whole gpu buying attempt was so stressful and giving up was so disappointing. Should I never try to build a pc in the future? Of course not! Mostly I learned to be patient and accept that I might not get exactly what I want. The large PS5s are currently readily available, just get one of those.
The thing i like most about pc is the wide array of games that require different specs. I have a pretty powerful pc but I could easily entertain myself with the lowest end pc.
It’s not just the lack of availability but that was a part of it. Microsoft and Sony’s lack of proper response is part of the reason.
I remained “patient” to some extent as I only just got to build my PC this year. The GPU “shortage” was a part of it too.
But I felt that Sony and Microsoft could have done more for customers. Sony had a program to get actual PS users a PS5 but that too was still sold out. Scalpers had no issue buying pallets of consoles but actual fans couldn’t. It was insane.
But besides that, I’ve since realized that, at least for myself, a PC is the better way to go. Consoles are a waste of money for me in the long run as a PC will be used for more than just gaming and the longevity of the parts and upgradeability is incomparable. I likely wouldn’t have felt this way had I just been able to get a PS5/Xbox Series X like I wanted.
But Microsoft and Sony don’t seem to care about their actual fans and them getting consoles in their homes, which is what soured it for me. Though, yeah, same could be said about Nvidia and AMD as well to an extent too, but there are more manufacturers under them that make the actual cards and you had some like EVGA that had programs that tried to get a GPU in actual customers’ hands and not the greedy scalpers.
Good to see all the rumors finally confirmed, feels like there's been speculation about a slim model since the PS5 launched. Hopefully, they've sorted out the worst of the supply issues and the PS5 Slim won't be as hard to find as the PS5 was when it first launched.
I mean nobody wanted this game in the first place, couple that with this sewage outlet and there ya go. They really had a follow-up game planned for this? Like it was gonna be a hit?
And thats a movie based on a legendary book. Hell yeah it made that much. Now turn around and say, “hey, bud. You know the split-personality leper following the protagonist? Ever wanted to be him?” Fuck, no. And it was never advertised as anything more than that. You have to relate a little to who you are controlling in a game, otherwise it doesn’t sell. Who relates to smeagol? People who wish they sold knives that don’t whisper to you?
Well, Smeagol is an interesting character because he is tragically relatable underneath it all. He was consumed by his greed, and completely lost his mind to it. His flashes of innocence and weakness make him at times sympathetic. But, then he reverts to Gollum and you see the consequences of his weakness, again and again.
That being said, being at times partially relatable does not make me want to be him, even in a video game. I think an interesting game where you play as Smeagol is absolutely possible, but that's an unnecessary uphill battle if I've ever seen one.
I mean, I get it from one angle - Gollum is one of the longest lived characters in LOTR. The issue is that even being 500 years old, he doesn’t really witness or interact with it all that much. Someone like Galadriel or Aragorn or Gandalf would be far more interesting.
Probably the least important of all these problems, but really, the publisher issuing a blanket chatGPT-generated apology, in the name of the studio without their knowledge, not even getting the name of the fucking game right.
The idea that only having a €15M budget is what caused this game's issues is ridiculous. It's not a game that had good ideas and just failed to execute them properly; it's fundamentally bad on a conceptual level.
The setting and story concept are bad. When the game was first announced, I don't think I heard or saw a single discussion where someone was excited to experience playing through the story of Gollum in that time period in the story. Or even playing as Gollum at all - he's a great secondary character in the books and films, but he's hardly a character you want to play as in a video game. There's no room for character development either.
The game design is bad. It's just bad. No amount of time, money or polish is going to fix the terrible basic design principles the game is built on. And even if they had 10x the budget and hired a world-class lead game designer from the start, it still would have the issues with the story and character.
The whole project is one that shouldn't have left the brainstorming session it was conceived in.
I have no better source than the person I replied to. I was on Reddit when the game was announced and it was clear that the game was about being gollum. Plenty of people were excited.
You can go back on reddit and look. Calling it revisionist is a bit of a stretch. The temperature on this game was very much mid to uninterested. Sure there were people who were excited, but it wasn’t a majority at all.
I was excited when it was first announced. I was hoping for a stealth game with gameplay like souls games or the shadow of mordor games. Sadly the game wasn’t even close to that so I didn’t buy it.
Those were your go-tos for gameplay expectations for sneaking around as a pretty weak little goblin man? I would’ve gone for Styx instead, a game about sneaking around as a little goblin man. (Which I think actually belongs to the same publisher)
Obviously combat would have to be balanced for Gollums powers. 1v1 an orc could have been fine but anything else would overpower him. I didn’t play Styx so I can’t compare it. I played the Splinter Cell Series and Dishonored, but both offered technology and weapons with range to help with sneaking. So I opted for games with a high fantasy setting. A game with controls like Souls, balanced for sneaking and ambushes as a focus, using the environment as your asset? Feels to me like it could work. Well, nothing like Souls, Shadow or Styx happened and we got whatever the Gollum game was.
I only played one for maybe like 2 hours, but they seem like pretty good games, you could probably pick one up for cheap on sale.
Also when I think of Soulslike Gollum, all I see in my mind is this gormless little creature wielding a 6 foot axe or something and that just makes me laugh.
Anyway, yeah, Nacon/Daedelic had several studios that had more experience making stealth-action games. I mean, besides the guys that made Styx, they also have the Shadow Tactics guys. Isometric tactical stealth could’ve been another option.
It’s honestly like they just made the absolute wrong decision for all things during development.
I could have seen it as a Stardew valley-esque Hobbit farming Sim, you start with simple farming, interacting with lore accurate villagers, fishing, cave gathering as Smeagol.
Then after a certain point of the game in a quest you find the Ring and your memories start getting hazy and your farming skill starts deteriorating and your cave gathering skills improve and the Ring blanks out part of your days and suddenly you find Deagols body and get flashbacks to what happened.
In the epilogue you start your usual day in the cave ‘bed’ instead of your Hobbit hole bed and you go gathering and meet Bilbo. Then cut to black
What was released was a disaster that hadn’t had anywhere near enough thought and consideration put into it. However, frankly if you don’t think a gollum game couldn’t be good I’d have to blame it on a lack of imagination.
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Aktywne