I mean I stay away from the mtx games as well. But then I was raised in an age where you paid the price on the box and that was it.
New gamers don’t know better. And kids especially have all the time and hardly any of the money, they’re happy to throw $10 pocket money at a “free” game they already enjoy for an outfit now, rather than save $70 for a new game they might not like in a few months.
There’s a lot of games that go with the free with mtx model that flop as well. eFootball comes to mind. They had decades of experience with Pro Evo Soccer, their only real competitor costs $70 and is still laden with microtransactions, and it still couldn’t get off the ground.
None of these games are cheap to make, and they’re certainly not cheap to market.
Didn’t we also learn this from Tears of the Kingdom, or God of War, or Horizon Zero Dawn, or Dark Souls, or indeed hundreds of great selling AAA single player games?
But we also learn from the repeated success of Call of Duty, FIFA, Fortnite or any successful multiplayer games that people fucking love microtransactions.
Different players? Maybe, but I’d suggest there’s also a lot of overlap. I know lots of people that play both. People consume. Some games support the microtransaction model better than others, and those are typically the ones designed to be played in fits and starts all year, rather than completed and shelved.
They’re all big companies. They’re all shitty somewhere. If you want to play something just play it. I find the worst of them are also making games that don’t interest me in the slightest, but even Activision put out the Tony Hawks Remaster and EA put out It Takes Two so I was all over them.
If you spend all your time worrying about shitty companies, you’ll be living in a cave eating moss. It’s OK to lament the state of things and then do them anyway. It’s on the workers to unionise and shaft the management back, because without them there’s no product and no money.
If you didn’t enjoy it the first time I don’t see why you would now, even with a better framerate. It’s still the Assassin’s Creed Kurosawa Edition it always looked like, just smoother.
I didn’t mind it, but if you don’t like AC gameplay, you won’t take to this.
Try Days Gone instead, that one actually feels like the better gyro and framerate of the PS5 improves it.
Pretty sure the PS5 drive can’t actually read CDs, so that’s the PS1 library and most early PS2 games gone right way, even though they can be emulated pretty easily. The PS3 should be possible, but they haven’t bothered when you can play it streaming.
I guess the awkward truth here is that there’s no real business need to have it. Most of us into retro games will have a way to play them already, either via PC emulation or old consoles. And if you show a Gen Z kid some of the horrors we used to enjoy on PS1 (although I maintain Sheep, Dog ‘n’ Wolf is an underrated classic), they’d run screaming back to Fortnite and CoD.
It would be nice to have it, but nobody is not buying a PS5 because they can’t run Terracon. They’re still selling them as fast as they can make them, even with the economy in shambles.
I’ve already told my wife that if I suffer a brain injury and lose all memories, to not bother showing me pictures of our wedding day or any of that guff. I want to play The Outer Wilds again.
Although having said that she might take the opportunity to pretend she never met me.
Stray - There’s not a massive amount to it, but what’s there is charming, with just enough storytelling to drag you in. Plus you’re a cat. Who doesn’t like cats?
Guardians of the Galaxy - The gameplay feels a little rough around the edges, and the characters have an extremely irritating habit of starting to talk just before you cross the invisible lines that stop them talking again (and unlike God of War, that conversation is now lost), but it felt like a Marvel game should. More fleshed out than the movies (especially Drax and Mantis, who are just fucking moronic on screen). I feel everyone (including me) ignored this on launch because of The Avengers, which is a shame because it deserved to do better.
Ghostwire Tokyo - Definitely unique. It’s kind of a shooter, but not. They’ve added a (free?) update to it with a school, so if you played it before and wondered where the horror element was, go back and play that bit.
Death Stranding - The first strand type game. I’ve certainly never played an apocalyptic Deliveroo driver before. I recommend mostly just mainlining the story here, as the payoff is the best bit.
Humanity - Neat little puzzle game. Not especially challenging. Somewhere between Lemmings and an obscure Amiga game called Timekeepers.
Endling - Come for the cute foxes. Stay for the sudden realisation that you can actually lose those babies and this isn’t what you thought it was. Like Stray it’s not overly long, although somehow even bleaker.
Sure, but none of it is as simple as just saving what you need to at fixed points, and letting the console handle the suspend function.
Oh, and additionally: what happens when you softlock yourself by saving just as you’re about to die? Is the player to blame? Sure. Will they blame you anyway? You betcha.