Quite a few people appear to be playing this game and its sequel for the photo mode, which isn’t surprising, given that the gameplay is nothing special, contrary to the visuals.
In order for Sony to sell the game again and a PS5 (or PS5 Pro) to you - or at least, in a couple of years, the remaster to those who bought the original PC port. There are still about twice as many PS4 than PS5 consoles due to a lack of both exclusives and actual reasons to switch over to the newer system. It doesn’t help that more and more people are realizing that one should replace any mention of “the economy” in the media with “rich people’s yacht money”, given how little average people are benefiting from it anymore, which means disposable income is down. The PS4, despite being almost 11 years old now and still relying on a mechanical HDD (unless you upgrade it), is simply “good enough” in the eyes of many. Microsoft has the same issue, of course, except from a much weaker position in the market. The law of diminishing returns makes newer consoles a hard sell.
At the same time, PC gaming is highly accessible, PC hardware is lasting longer for gaming than ever before (in large part due to the longevity of the previous console generation keeping hardware requirements of most multiplatform games in check) and now that former exclusives are finding their way over at a reliable pace, there are fewer reasons for those that are primarily playing on PC to get a console just for the exclusives. As fantastic as Astrobot looks and as much as I appreciate the return of the classic 3D platformer with physics and shiny new graphics, it won’t make me purchase a PS5 any time soon or ever.
Sony is still producing both PS4 and PS4 Pro (whereas Microsoft discontinued both Xbox One consoles four years ago; they are still supporting the previous gen though), games are still being developed for them, despite first party studios having switched over to PS5 by now. Third party developers who were once happy about the low number of hardware variations they had to deal with now have to handle up to nine different systems if they want to release a game on all currently supported games consoles (ten when Switch 2 comes out) - plus PC and Steam Deck, which might just as well be another console as far as developers are concerned. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen cross-gen games that aren’t just yearly sports titles being made for this long into a new generation at such a large scale. We certainly haven’t had such a wide variety of systems since the early home computer era, even if their architectures and capabilities are much more similar now than they were back then.
I wouldn’t call €1300 (cheapest 8K TV where I’m living) outrageously expensive. You can easily spend this much on a 4K TV without straying into true high-end territory.
I remember when the first “mass market” flat screen TVs came about around in the late '90s. The earliest one I saw with my own eyes was still years away from HD, hardly even flat by modern standards (I think it was a plasma TV), but cost a cool 20 grand. The store had it behind a small fence so that people wouldn’t accidentally damage it. I was not impressed by the image quality and it was actually smaller than the largest CRT TVs I had seen. Maybe 30" at best.
Either way, even with a handful of games now supporting real or upscaled 8K, the issue of a lack of content remains. Streaming services rarely support it beyond the odd demo video on YouTube and even if they did, they are hardly what you go for if you want good image quality, given how mercilessly they compress their content to save on bandwidth costs. There’s no 8K Blu-Ray yet and there might not ever be one. By the time there is a decent amount of 8K content available, the current lineup of 8K TVs will be hopelessly outdated and likely not even support future standards.
Really the most useful application for these I can think of right now is showing photos in all of their glory to bored relatives and friends. 8K is slightly more than 33 megapixels, after all, whereas 4K is just over 8 megapixels. Landscape photography in particular benefits a lot from being seen at higher resolutions.
I have seen people (in person and on the Internet) click tutorials away, proceed to utterly fail at the most basic tasks only to then blame the game and the developers, including in reviews. I don’t blame developers for trying to prevent this from happening.
The difference with Atomic Heart is that it wasn’t just made by a Russian developer, but that it also promoted a questionable outlook on the Soviet Union that closely mirrors the one the current Russian government is promoting.
Whataboutism isn’t a good look, but it’s consistently the only defense that people who defend autocratic hellholes like Russia and China come up with. You know it’s not even remotely the same.
And once the game has become a breeze, with 100% of your runs being a success, install the Captain’s Edition mod and suddenly, it’s a pleasantly challenging title again. The add-on that turns it into an endless game in particular is so good, I spent dozens of hours playing it.
Does the writing ever get good? I played it for probably six or eight hours, which isn’t a lot in a game like this, but it and the world building felt painfully generic and bland, to the point of being increasingly off-putting the longer I played the game.
Let’s be real: I doubt many people are playing the Uncharted games for the gameplay. These titles are doing the bare minimum to meet AAA action-adventure standards with some technical flourishes here and there, but that’s about it. You get by the numbers cover shooting, by the numbers occasional easy stealth, by the numbers climbing, by the numbers (and by that I mean really small numbers) puzzle solving, etc. The appeal lies in the spectacle, the artistry, the technical excellence by the standards of the platforms they are on, experiencing what are essentially slightly interactive Hollywood adventure movies that manage to keep the player hooked with expert pacing and characters that are straddling the line between psychopathy and charm just right.
One might also argue that it’s more fun watching footage of these games than actually playing them. The best example of this is the car chase sequence in Uncharted 4, which looked amazing when I first watched it years before being able to play it, but once I got to actually experience it first hand, this was the moment when I dropped the difficulty down, because it was remarkably (and surprisingly) frustrating and irritating to play. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an astonishing technical achievement, but not one second of playing it was fun, at least in my opinion.