Definitely any of the showerthoughts communities

Chasing the “best version” is a fool’s errand, though. Unless you’re buying top-of-the-line hardware every cycle, you’ll never have the best. And even then, there are games that seem to target future hardware by having settings so high not even top-end PCs can max them out comfortably, and other games that are just so badly optimized they’ll randomly decide they hate some feature of your setup and tank the performance, too.

Everyone has their threshold for what looks good enough, and they upgrade when they reach that point. I used my last PC for 10 years before finally upgrading to a newer build, and I’m hoping to use my current one as long as well.

But just based on the displayed difference in performance between the base PS5 and the PS5 Pro, it doesn’t seem like a good investment for what benefits you get. It’s like paying Apple prices for marginally better hardware, and with overpriced wheels disc drive sold separately.

Now that’s a hot take.

Trying to be the Adobe of game engines is fine, but their online service is the line in the sand?

My memory may be hazy, but I recall the mainstream acceptance of the digital distribution model on PC as more of an early 2010’s thing. People hated Steam at launch, having yet another launcher you had to download which was basically just DRM for Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike.

It wasn’t until their marketplace opened up and they offered very attractive sales that people came around to it eventually.

The side-by-sides are definitely diminished returns compared to earlier gens where hardware bumps had very noticeable gains.

I am sure the performance is measurably better than the base PS5, but I don’t think it’s $200-plus-separate-disc-drive better.

I also found the game choices they used for some of these comparisons to be odd picks. Sure you have “Made for PS5” exclusives like the new Ratchet and Clank, Returnal, and Spider-Man 2, but they also heavily showcased:

• The Last of Us Part 2

• God of War: Ragnarok

• Ghost of Tsushima

• Horizon: Forbidden West

• Control

All of those are last-gen games that received PS5 enhancements. Being on a base PS5, I already feel like I am getting the “better” experience compared to the default for those games, so why upgrade?

I’d say Mario Kart 8 deserves recognition, but agree with the other ones.

The DNA example might be a bad comparison to make, though, when hereditary illnesses are also a comparison you could make to an engine that has the same flaws as it’s predecessors.

Hopefully whatever they do next with their engine moves away from the cells and worldspaces model of their previous engines. After all of Starfield’s criticisms, they need to move away from loadscreen triggers as much as possible.

None of their games are as good as Morrowind, yet that hasn’t stopped them from selling like hotcakes.

RIP this dev team, they can join Campo Santo in the “doing shit all” club.

I think there is some merit to using it in a critical sense, just based on what happened that one time it was used.

To me, AAAA means a game that was given way too much budget for its scope, to its own detriment. Take what should be a niche, mid-budget game and pump it full of cash. The game becomes too big to fail and needs to use every “play it safe” strategy the MBAs demand in order to recoup its budget. So it aims for broad appeal, which makes it fail at being the niche game it was supposed to be, and it ends up flopping.

They want to pay less than they were to whoever was in that spot before.

That or it’s one of the essential positions they didn’t want to downsize but the previous person left for other reasons.

To me that just looks like adulthood.

I don’t think it’s a texture bug, I think they just took the same model they use for the enemy unit, put them in poses, and then stuck a burn shader on there.

Between last generation and this one, though, we’re at the point where consoles are more like prebuilts. Games have performance targets, it’s up to users to decide when they feel like an upgrade. The only difference is that games (usually) won’t release for models that can’t run them well, compared to some people who try to squeeze out every frame they can from their 10-year-old potato PCs, though every now and then you still get a Cyberpunk 2077 on consoles.

But there’s a reason why some games still target the PS4 in 2024, because if you’re a small-budget indie game that doesn’t need the full hardware of the PS5, why not? Since you don’t get locked out of older stuff when you upgrade anymore, which enables newer stuff to keep releasing on older systems, anyone can hold on to a console until they run into a game worth upgrading for.

Having switched to FF14 a while ago, I always thought that game’s early access model for preordering was unnecessary. Since you could still “preorder” during the EA window and start playing right away, why not just call it what it is, the official launch of the expansion? Never liked the taste of FOMO, even when it’s artificial/unimpactful.

But having a separate paid EA window on top of the game’s subscription cost and cost of buying the expansion? That just doesn’t sit right at all. I can’t even complain about FF14 now.

Hot take: WoW never had a good story in any expansion. Just a few good moments scattered around like islands in a sea of grind.

The closest they got to a good cohesive story was Legion, but that was only if you were playing from the beginning and got to see everything develop live before they just started shoving people into catch up points that made no sense without context.

They always were. Thinking back to Legion invasions and whatever the fuck they did for BfA before I deleted my account following the Blitzchung incident.

I agree, but that’s what the courts decided. IANAL but I’m assuming it hinges on the pretense that Android is supposed to be an open ecosystem where partners and OEMs are given fair treatment, while iOS is a top-to-bottom “product” controlled by a single company that makes their own business arrangements.

In short, Apple deciding to block Epic from having their own app store, fine. Google bribing/coercing Android OEMs to prioritize the Play Store and not pre-install or facilitate the Epic Store, not fine.

I don’t think the courts would have cared if Google locked down their own Pixel phones to block out Epic, but it’s the act of throwing their weight around as the OS provider to their business partners (the OEMs) that they took issue with.

It’s a bit more than that, though. Epic lost their lawsuit against Apple but they won theirs against Google.

Google was colluding with OEMs to stifle competition on Android, and that practice was determined to be anticompetitive. Sure you could always jump through the Google-mandated hoops and install a third-party store, but then you could also always install other browsers on Windows even when Internet Explorer was the default, and that was also determined to be anticompetitive.

I feel like Elder Scrolls was the model being followed for open world RPGs. Assassin’s Creed didn’t even have RPG mechanics until the later games.