Topic: The PlayStation Fan Thread

Okay, I think I'm sold on Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise now.

Joining Red Dead Redemption 2 with large file size is Black Ops 4 at 100GB.

100GB with no single player campaign seems a bit extreme.

Lol I bet some developers are just thinking 'this is so big, you won't be able to install Assassin's Creed or Battlefield at the same time.'

@CanisWolfred Cagey isn't the half of it. Sony's announcement statement on Fortnite made Reggie look like merely an amateur spinster. There was more hedging than the Queen of Heart's tea garden.

@Dezzy You know, I'm starting to wonder that. We went from 25GB or so being huge at the start of the gen to constant 100GB installs, while ISPS have 1TB caps commonly? Huh? I really am starting to wonder if you have a point.....if you buy one game you may very possibly be unable to buy another game that month. If you're selling the most popular game it helps you lock out your competition. Either that or the publishers are lazy imbeciles. AC:Odyssey is ~45GB. Forza Horizon 4, a large open-world game, on X1X is ~64GB. How the heck is BLOPS4 even on Pro 100GB without a campaign?! Spider-Man was what, 80? And that was with a full city, and tons of spoken dialogue. And even that was kind of insane.

I mean at one level you can say "this doesn't affect me so I don't care" but some problems start becoming so excessive that even if they don't affect you now, they probably will sooner rather than later, and the market at large really can't escape that impact.

@NEStalgia Spider-Man is 45GB. Most of Sony's big games are a little under 50GB (Horizon, GOW, UC4). You know why? The original game is probably bigger than that, but they just optimise the code until it's less than 50. Get rid of the excessive code, unused textures, voice lines, etc. And 40-50GB is still a lot in my eyes if you compare it with Nintendo's compression magic (admittedly, their games rarely have voice acting, or detailed 4K textures, but still). It seems like some publishers don't even care.

Why do you think $100 editions are a thing now? If you spend all your money on Assassin's Creed, you can't spend it on COD or RDR2

@Octane 45? I swore I remembered it bigger, but that's great! I suppose you could say they reduce texture and audio quality and such as well, and I'm not sure, is it bigger on Pro for the larger textures? But yeah, most of these 3rd party games just have ridiculous duplication and garbage, and I really can't possibly imagine what could make this game that large. Destiny 2 with Forsaken clocks in at 70-something GB. But that's a massive semi-open world game with 3 expansion packs. RDR2 looks like 50-something. Huge open world. AC: Odyssey 45GB or so, huge open world. That's way too large but it's more than just a base game, it's a bunch of other pieces too. Until now the most bizarrely egregious game sizes I've seen were all X1 exclusives on 1X: Horizon 4 open world at "only" 60-something GB. Quantum Break is easily the biggest game in the collection at 130-something but that has half an hour plus of FMV in there. Master Chief Collection is over 100 but that's 5 22GB games really. How is BLOPS 4 even approaching those gargantuan games in size with a single non-open world campaign-less game? Even those big open world games are too big.

"Digital future" my foot. 4 years ago games were 25GB at biggest most of the time. And that was huge. In that time now they've quintupled sizes, while ISPs have choked back on caps, and they keep ranting about an all digital future. I hope these guys are investing in flash storage and BD disc printing. They're going to need it for a loooong time. No wonder they want streaming. They're not actually streaming. That's just how long it takes to transfer the texture updates.

I have to admit that while the $100 edition thing is really disgusting, they did sweeten the pot and mitigate that price by making it sound like the DLC includes several campaign extensions, plus the full retail AC3 remaster and Liberation remaster, so you're paying $40 to get two remastered retail games and a DLC season pass...that's a lot better than some of the other $100 editions (cough RDR2). Ubi did the same with FC5: Included FC3 remaster in the Gold bundle. However, overall yeah, the $100 editions are a joke. A really gross joke.

I don't get the industry's cannibalization of itself with wanting to make games scarce so you play only theirs.....you'd think they'd benefit from people buying as many as possible. They're more fixed on "engagement" numbers like social networks than they are on sales. That is probably the biggest worrying thing at all. What are they getting from engagement that they're not getting from sales? What are they selling, and to whom are they selling it?

@Dezzy I could see the large size also acting as believable excuses for no Switch version. "Sorry no Switch version, our game is so big that not even Panic Button could get it running on Switch with a reasonable file size."

@NEStalgia Yeah, Spidey says 45GB on the box. But you need double the amount of free space for installation. Because it needs to unpack the game on your PS4, so the data is extracted and copied and it temporarily exists twice on your PS4.

Well, the biggest isue is that regular blu-rays cap at 50GB, so physical can't continue like this. If the game is more than 50GB, the rest needs to be digital (which also sucks for long-term replayability, I generally dislike anything that relies on an online service to be playable, knowing that support is going to end at some point). Either way, I expect we'll move on to UHD Blu-rays for next gen, which support up to 100GB. Though last gen survived mostly on 25GB Blu-rays, so 100GB should be enough for most developers. There's also HVD, an interesting technology, but that never got out of the testing phase, because it couldn't compete with Blu-ray, but it supports up a few TBs. However, Sony is part of the group behind Blu-ray, so they're not moving to another format I'd imagine. Maybe there's a new Blu-ray disc by the time next gen roll around the corner. Let's hope so.

Of course, the simplest solution is for developers to decrease the size of games. But you know, that takes time and resources and the big publishers don't seem to be interested in that. In fact, they seem to avoid anything that takes away resources and they seem to be streamlined to make as much money as possible, in any legal, or illegal way, shape and form.

I suspect the $100 editions are going to get worse now that most people look down onto loot boxes, and a good handful of countries are examining them.

The biggest irony of course is that whilst they all seem to be fixated on making as much money per game sold, they don't have a problem dropping the price to €40 or even €20 mere months after release. It's as if they aren't in this industry for the long run; make the money now, worry about later. But even Nintendo is moving away from the €40-45 ''budget'' titles to full on €60 titles for everything, from a small 2D platformer like Kirby, to a big 3D game like Zelda and Mario. If it weren't for the €60 price tag on a lot of the ''smaller scope'' Switch games, I would've picked up a lot more games I think. That's one thing I liked about the Wii U Nintendo, and what Sony is currently doing. Captain Toad, Kirby and the Rainbow Curse, Shadow of the Colossus, Splatoon, Ratchet & Clank, Yoshi's Woolly World, Tearaway Unfolded, etc.; All of them were easy purchases due to their low price tag.

@Octane Not in North America. YWW, Splatoon, Rainbow Curse, etc. were all $60 games here.

Maybe they were pricing their games down in territories where Nintendo's sales weren't quite as strong?

@Ralizah I remember the Splatoon price difference, I don't remember the same for the other titles though: https://www.technobuffalo.com/2015/02/05/kirby-and-the-rainbo...

They were definitely budget titles in Europe and Japan. I don't think I could ever convince myself to pay €60 for a 2D Kirby game when there's a wealth of good games that offer far more quality content for the same price, or less. And to get back to my original point, that's why I can't ever see myself paying €100 to play a broken Ubisoft three days earlier!

@Octane I thought for sure Rainbow Curse was full retail.

Guess I was mistaken. YWW and Splatoon definitely were, though (although YWW came with an amiibo, which makes the price point more palatable)..

NoA is cheap as heck. We almost never got cool special editions of first party games on Wii U, either.

I want Fatal Frame V on disc, dangit!

@Ralizah Now it's not just America missing out on cool 1st party Nintendo special editions but rather everyone. The only ones Switch have gotten so far are BotW, FE Warriors, XC2 and Smash Ultimate. Not even Odyssey got a special edition.

@Ralizah Yeah, I do recall a ''special edition'' of YWW with the amiibo for €60, but I got the ''standard edition'', and that was around €50, I think I paid €45.

Yeah, it seems NOE is a lot better at managing their brand than NOA; just look at the Club Nintendo rewards we got. Still nowhere close to their homeland, they get all the cool stuff.

@Grumblevolcano

I think games like Red Dead 2 probably have better reasons for not releasing on Switch though.

@Grumblevolcano That's not surprising though. ARMS is a new IP, Mario & Rabbids did actually get one worldwide. Mario Tennis has never gotten one I'm aware of. Pokemon is getting one with the Pokeball Plus worldwide. Super Mario Party has one everywhere other than NA. Octopath Traveler has an amazing one. And the rest are Wii U ports, right?

EDIT: I forgot Star Allies, but I don't think Kirby has ever had a special edition either.

@Octane PS4 was weird because it's the first Sony console ever not half designed to push an optical format. PSX pushed CD, PS2 pushed DVD, PS3 pushed BD, PS4 was just another BD....I wonder if PS5 will introduce something new?

I'd like to forget UMDs though

The funny thing though is physical medium currently doesn't fit the whole game, and they try to push it to digital but....that implies digital can accommodate such huge data....and consumer internet in most locations simply doesn't. They let their ambitions of what they could do overrun what's actually feasible to do for the large market.

But yeah I really don't get why publishers are fixating on $100 today, $20 tomorrow. That seems a disastrous business model. Even Sony: HZD was $60 the day before Switch launched and by May it was $30. I mean it's cool as a consumer but I'm not sure how that exists.

It's sad though that Nintendos' going all in o $60 for everything. That scattered value pricing really helped. And with the end of all the 20% discounts that's like a 30-40% price hike in games. that's going to dramatically reduce the quantity of games purchased....I'm not sure how they see that as good.

@Grumblevolcano There's a certain point in texture resolution where one has to ask: Did we really need the .DNG files out of the cameras that took the shots in the game archive?

@NEStalgia At least Sushi Striker and Captain Toad had reduced prices, as did 1-2 Switch. I think they're still doing it. DK:TF should have been reduced though, and maybe Mario Tennis.

Just finished Spider-Man and I am blown away by how damn good the game is! Can't wait for the next one although I want from the team to take their time and do it right like this one.

So much care has been put into this masterpiece. I hope it receives at least one GOTY award for one thing or other!

@NEStalgia What PS4 games does not fit on the disc? We had this discution before and we agreed that there are no games are not playable off the data on the disc.

@Zuljaras Possibly Red Dead Redemption and Call of Duty, but the latter is online-only anyway, so I don't think it really matters for COD.

I enjoy Spider-Man, it definitely gets better over time. I'd say it's an amazing game, weren't it for the rather cookie-cutter Ubisoft approach to open worlds. I've done most of the side quests so far, but I just got to the point where the main story is picking up steam, and it feels weird going off track to do a those challenges or getting those last few base tokens.