Topic: The PlayStation Fan Thread

@Haru17 Delilah.

You must love books then, don't you?

I don't know what a face would add to the game, it would only take away part of the mystery. The themes of the game are after all loneliness, mystery and self reflection.

@Octane And anti-climax, apparently. Again, there was a whole suspense portion of the game that is undercut by the realization that nothing will ever attack you because nothing can attack you in the program they wrote. Books can describe a person's face, Firewatch cannot. It's just such a basic thing. They commissioned a graphic artist to design the skybox, they could have just had him make billboarded cutouts that animated like Away: Journey to the Unexpected (below). Just... something, some sort of effort.

And really @Octane, 'faces would take away from the mystery' is the most ridiculous extreme of the 'voice acting removes charm' argument I've ever heard. Of course the game would be better if the developers could animate NPCs besides the deer that ran away in the intro and that one turtle. It is a video game after all; that's art, animation, and sound. If you start stripping categories away of course it'll begin to compare poorly to other games that are capable of making things like, y'know, people.

@CanisWolfred While I liked RDR (certainly not as much as most people did, but it was still really good), I don't think it would have suffered very much at all if it was a totally linear game and not open world. The open world did very little for me. There were some cool looking areas, but it also suffers the Breath of the Wild problem where the world is huge, but there's not a whole lot to actually do in it.

I swear westerns are criminally underused in the games industry. There really aren't many mainstream AAA games that use the setting. Compared to medieval fantasy games, it's almost none existent.

This is true. Granted, a lot of AAA games nowadays are trying to go for big exploration-heavy games, which...RDR at least single-handedly occupies a niche for. Call of Juarez is another one, but the last few games weren't very good, last I checked, excluding the download-only entry that is personally my favorite of the series. Personally the biggest draw for western-themed games is to feel like I'm a star in a western flick, rather than just being a cowboy during the Gold Rush/Post-Civil War eras. I'm not saying RDR is too realistic, but I agree with Kirby, the open-world didn't add much, it just made the whole game slower.

@CanisWolfred
I never played the original. How big actually was it? How many towns and whatnot.

@Haru17 Completed a hard mode run of Persona 5 a month ago or so. Fantastic game. I loved the Dostoevskian theme of the final dungeon!

Not sure if it's my GOTY, but definitely top 3, and one of my favorite PS4 games.

@Dezzy, I want to say there were about 12 or 13 towns (3 were ranches/farms) in RDR, across 3 regions. One based on the desert southwest, one based on northern Mexico, and the last one was everything else (they crammed the south eastern swampland, the midwestern plains, and Rocky Mountains into one area).

@RR529
Sounds good.
I have great memories of visiting some of those old western towns out in the california/nevada desert. Such a cool time and place in history.

@Ralizah I think I get what you mean about the last palace, but what is meant by Dostoevskian exactly? Haven't read much of him.

I think Persona 5 is a classic RPG in that the story is just so much better than the mechanics, which can feel kinda clunky in places and are only really there as a vehicle. That dynamic has (often for the better) been lost in more action-based modern RPGs. I didn't find the turn-based combat particularly engaging, but I didn't mind it much either. It boils down to the fact that I haven't played an AAA game with as much thought put into building its story and world since like Skyrim (I guess Deus Ex was good too, but it was also cut so much shorter than either of them), so Persona 5 is easily my GOTY so far. P5 is a game with so much to say about modern culture that, even if the execution isn't always ideal, its true qualities still shines through.

@Dezzy I had no problem with the number of locations/sizes of towns...it just felt too spread out. I know that's meant to reflect historical accuracy, but I quickly found that I stopped caring about anything RDR had to offer when it just felt too slow paced and that wandering its areas outside of the early towns was not entertaining for me in the least, and traversing the increasingly vast distances hurt any appeal the story might have for me.

...you know, I'm reminded that Call of Juarez: Gunslinger really nailed what I wanted out of a cowboy game: the entire thing was presented as a tall tale being told to the player by a gunslinger at an old western bar. So it could still have a steady pace and plenty of setpieces while still having an old western feel to it. I mean, the whole thing was clearly exaggerated to begin with, and if it was a movie or a book, the person he was talking to would have to consider how much of his tale was true, which just added to the appeal for me. Really seals how these old cowboy legends got passed around back in the day, and how they'd turn into wild tall tales as they went from person to person.

And all of this without having to spend 30+ minutes riding a horse in the most dull and uninteresting biome nature has to offer!

...Assassin's Creed Origins might be a tougher sell for me now, too, unfortunately...

@Haru17 The central idea of the last dungeon (people throughout Tokyo are allowing themselves to be spiritually imprisoned in order to escape from the anxiety that comes from freedom and the concomitant personal responsibility) is similar to ideas explored in the famous "parable of the Grand Inquisitor" from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.

I can't agree about the gameplay feeling clunky: if anything, this feels like the first Persona game that I can enjoy purely AS a game. The palaces are exquisitely designed, as opposed to the boring hallways of P3/P4 and the senselessly labyrinthine environments in Persona 1; guns and demon negotiation add an extra bit of depth to enemy interactions that were sorely missing in recent games; and even if it isn't flawless, I thought the stealth mechanic added a nice bit of spice to palace navigation.

Granted, this all might not have been so compelling if the game's sense of style weren't so omnipresent and overwhelming, but I think that can be said for most good games: the experience SHOULD gel into one cohesive, compelling whole.

The game's commentary on modern culture is disturbingly relevant in ways I would never have expected. It really did come out at the perfect time in the Western world.

If I had to criticize it...? I'd say:
A) Persona's take on the press turn combat system has never been as compelling as the classic system first employed in SMT: Nocturne. Pretty much every battle ends with an all-out attack, even on higher difficulties. It gets tiresome.
B) While the gameplay advancements are fantastic, many of the story beats and characters made P5 feel a bit too much like P4: Part Two at times. I realize this was also the case with P3/P4 to some extent, but the similarities feel much more prominent here. Almost like they're settling into a strict narrative formula, which is a disturbing thought to me.
C) The game is bloated. It could stand to be tightened up a bit.

Still a great game, though. I think I had a better time with Breath of the Wild, and we'll see how things turn out with Super Mario Odyssey, but it's definitely the best PS4 game I've played this year.

I wasn't really talking about the combat, it's serviceable and the visual, audio, and rumble feedback on hits feels polished and satisfying (and has at least since P3 IMO). The dungeons are definitely a lot better, but there are still whole wings of the 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th palaces that are grindy hallways without enough scripted story events or unique traversal elements to break them up.

My point about the gameplay is that turn-based combat is just turn-based combat. It's nothing new or interesting, in or out of Persona. You can feel how every action in Persona is a separate reaction to the button input like the attack animations that play out. It's not something you're really directly controlling so much as walking up to and activating the contextual event. This goes for the cover system, minigames, and even just walking/running.

I'm not picky about art styles, but at the same rate Persona's attractive menu doesn't make it a profoundly functional one, with separate submenus for your personas and your party member's personas and three separate menus that have to be entered into separately for deciding what you'll do in a day. And of course their 3D character models for the main cast have unintentionally creepy eyes in some scenes.

Of course those are all nitpicks, but I really would love the series to acquire a budget. God knows what wonders this team could create if they had the technical capacity of Naughty Dog Square Enix's FF team. A Persona game with facial animation would be so nice. Or more realistically, just voiced dialogue for every line in the game. That feels like something that should have been in this game. But yeah, it's still far and away the best game to come out this year to me by virtue of 1: having an interesting story and 2: not having a pitifully short central campaign — qualities not else to be found almost anywhere else in the AAA open world wasteland.

The game's commentary on modern culture is disturbingly relevant in ways I would never have expected. It really did come out at the perfect time in the Western world.

Heh, I kind of wish we had gotten the Japanese release date summer last year, but that ship has sailed...

@Haru17 Just been away on a camping holiday for four days, which is oddly funny timing given our Firewatch debate!

I am with @Octane on this one.

Firewatch captured that sense of loneliness and what it is like to have your only company over a walkie-talkie.

It begun as two strangers at two different outposts, and their stories are gradually told as we follow their adventures in the woods, as well as finding out a little bit about their (previous) lives. Personally speaking, I do not see what adding faces (to people’s names) in this particular game would do to improve it. If anything, I believe it would lessen the overall experience, especially the ending itself.

As I have already mentioned to you before, you can see a photograph and hand drawn pictures of Henry inside his firewatch and modding the PC version allows players to see Henry’s face, which refutes your claim that the developers couldn’t draw/model a 3D face!

p.s. On another note, it would probably be wise for you to avoid the likes of Dear Esther, Gone Home, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, because these games are the kind that is left to the players imaginations. They are a similar kind of experience too, much like what Firewatch sets out to do.

Just not one they were willing to show us within the first-person game. And if you've read my post you'll have seen that I talked at length about facial animation too, which could be the real sticking point and reason Firewatch is so devoid of animal life.

@Haru17 Well, there's a deer, turtles, raccoons, various small critters. What else did you expect? It's a forest, not a zoo.

@Haru17 I did read your post, and despite showing you that the game has a fully modelled 3D face, you kind of ignored that you had originally refuted it. Firewatch is a first person game set in the lonely wilderness; why are you expecting to see your own face let alone facial animation?

I think even if I went out of my way to get in touch with the developers (Campo Santo) themselves and they were more than happy to organise a get together with you in person to explain their design choices, you would still continue to bring up the (non-issue) about faces and whatnot.

I’ve shown you Henry’s fully 3D modelled face, as well as posting a link to the Firewatch wiki however, it seems like this conversation is only going to go around in circles regards of what I have to show you.

There’s that too.

I have done my bit. Go and see Firewatch for what it is - or isn’t - from your own point of view.

Since I need to justify owning this box and there is an EU sale on right now, recommend something from the sale for me, since yall know whats good.

Just remember I dont have PS Plus so I dont get online or additional discounts

Also, no Bloodborne. Ive seen footage and I cabt distinguish the player from the world or enemies due to my colour problems so unless it has a Deuteranopia mode, I cant play that comfortably, sorry.

@BLP_Software Gravity Rush 2, GR 1, Nioh, The Last of Us, Journey (I know those two are obvious), and Beyond 2 Souls are all cheap in the UK right now (not sure if that's shared with mainland Europe). I haven't played Nioh outside the — very long — demos, but I've beaten or extensively played the rest of them and would recommend them all if you're into the respective genres / playstyles.

@Haru17 Yeah Im in the UK.

GR2...with the online dying im doubtful ill bother with that sadly. Thats not something ill jump into knowing itll be missing stuff very soon.

TLOU is...I mean Ive considered it? But thats a game Ill need to know if it has colourblind modes.

The rest Ill mull over thanks! ^^

Man it sucks needing to check a game first to see if it has a CVD mode, or if its even playable to me