Yeah, it’s still there, but it’s from a different era. If Naughty Dog could make TLOU Online for $2 million like UT was developed for, they’d have just done it. I suspect they’ve spent more than that just on market research, and the answer has been “gamers aren’t really interested”.
I mean, I like the TLOU and Uncharted games, honestly don’t think Naughty Dog has ever released a bad game since the PS1, but I can’t see my self playing some online multiplayer only bullshit version of it. The players that do want that have already got enormously successful games that they already play. Muscling one of them out of contention seems like a monumentally hard task for a small team to do.
The flop of high profile titles like The Avengers showed that it’s no golden bullet.
Some gamers love a game they can play forever. Maybe others gamers dabble in it, but it’s time that becomes the limiting factor. I know people that every year buy CoD and FIFA and nothing else, and sure, they make unreasonable amounts of money, but there’s plenty more on the table to be had from gamers who don’t like that.
Makes sense. The world moved on from Unreal Tournament for better or worse. You can’t just release and leave an online-only game any more. It has to be supported with years of content, or it’s never going to be popular and make it’s money back.
I’m going to guess it was always a small team ticking over in the background of Naughty Dog anyway. Their minute to minute gameplay is solid, but their stories and bombastic set-pieces are much more interesting and separate them from a crowd of pretenders.
Even most console games run at 60 now, with an option to turn on some RT graphical wankery and run at 30.
I often turn it on to see what it looks like, and then decide it’s not worth it. Ratchet and Clank actually played decently at 30, and one of the Ghostwire Tokyo options allowed you to have RT and decent framerates with a minor hit to resolution.
Gsync/Freesync/VRR is a game changer for lower end hardware, because then all those dips below 60 get smoothed out to an even 45 or so. I’ve spent a lot less time fucking about with setting on PC since getting a monitor that supports that.
We’ve only just got to the point where games don’t run on PS4 any more.
Current gen has good SSDs, 16GB RAM, fast CPUs and 4K (or at least scale to 4K acceptably) graphics. Most stuff runs at 60fps (with an option to turn on the graphical wankery and drop to 30-40), and when it doesn’t there’s VRR to paper over the cracks.
The only area it’s really lacking is RT performance, and only nVidia are there right now. The pricing for cards capable of dropping old lighting paths entirely (e.g. for Cyberpunk Overdrive mode) is obscene. Frame generation is a red herring. It won’t make games feel more responsive. Only real frames can do that. We’re a long way from dropping traditional lighting.
I’ve no doubt that Steam, PSN, etc can avoid complying with the spirit of the law on this, but the writing is on the wall as far as subscription services go.
Since I got my PS5 just over a year ago, I own 2 games for it. GoW Ragnarok that came with it, and BG3 that was only available digitally. PS+ has provided all the rest. I’ve spent the last week playing Teardown which is great. If this law actually happens, then all devs, not just indie ones, will be relying on game subscription service revenue.
I can only assume that you never touched co-op, or started playing in the last week, because that absolutely was not the launch experience for me and many others.
It is much better now, but it’s clear it was rushed out with a few months of development still to go. Which allegedly they did because they were worried about Starfield.
Even broken it’s probably the GOTY, but it did make certain things a lot more frustrating than they should have been and we spent a lot of time doing saves and waiting for the save to finish before continuing such was the prevalence of crashes to PS5 desktop. There was more than one fight we had to do from scratch because the following cutscene shat the bed.