Topic: The PlayStation Fan Thread

Since when? The lack of competence, and usually the general ignorance of the main character is a driving force in quite a lot of widely loved stories. To name just a few: The Hobbit, Oliver Twist, Catcher in the Rye, Northanger Abbey, Atonement, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Prince and the Pauper.

I dont even want to think about the money I've used on gaming games this year. Much less the games I've started and never finished. I'm still puttering around Lucis despite completing the story a few weeks ago

I bought very few games for full price this year (at least as far as £40-50 'AAA' games are concerned) despite buying many and enjoying quite a lot of them. I just found it hard to justify spending £40+ on DOOM for example in May when I bought Overwatch, Fire Emblem Fates and Witcher Blood & Wine DLC day 1, so I waited less than a month and got it half-price, and I'd argue I ended up enjoying DOOM the most despite never playing any of the previous games in that series.

When EA are doing complete boneheaded decisions like releasing Titanfall 2 when they infamously did I just can't fathom giving them £20 more than the game would cost 2 weeks after launch after it inevitably bombed. Never mind these 'early access' things for games like Battlefield 1 and Gears of War 4 that are essentially just artificially delaying the game by a few days just for that extra dough.

And it seems a large part of the market, at least in the U.K., are thinking similarly to me as the amount of underperforming day 1 games here was amazing. Watch Dogs 2 being the best example, selling a fraction of the original's preorders but preforming well once the game was slashed down in price. Which I capitalised on myself and am looking forward to playing soon after what I've heard about how improved it is over the drab original.

Then there's episodic games like Hitman that I ranted about recently and Telltale's Batman and the tons and tons of 'fee-to-pay' games and the magic of buying into games day 1 has definitely left me. Which is a shame because as I said the quality this year has been consistently great but screw paying the prices some games are nowadays.

I'll never get over how EA thought Star Wars Battlefront was worth upwards of £110 for the complete game and how they had the gall and got away with the £40 early access version. That was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.

@Octane Given that you said you spent 'about 500 bucks' this year, are you an American by any chance? I always had you down for somebody who lives somewhere in Europe!

I really wish I could play and enjoy The Witcher III just as much as you do however, for me, the combat is so finicky and joyless. It also doesn't help that I played Bloodborne beforehand too, given that that has the best combat mechanics in the business.

Thanks for introducing me to a new game that I have never heard of before; Manifold Garden. It is shaping up to be another pretty looking puzzle game similar to The Witness, albeit in an Escher-esque world.

@Shinion Although I was gifted Star Wars Battlefront for Christmas last year, I actually felt bad knowing that my friend probably paid full price for the bog-standard edition. It had none of the new levels that were gradually introduced in the past twelve months (Death Star and the beach landing in Rogue One, for example), which I believe is the one that was £109.99 (!)

Not a fan of those 'pay more to play early' games either, but thankfully Sony doesn't 'offer' these. Just EA and Microsoft the last time I disapprovingly looked.

I also bought DOOM for £25, and given that I had absolutely no interest in the multiplayer, I was pleased to pay 'half' for the surprisingly excellent single player campaign. I may feel compelled to replay the game on a tougher difficulty one day - it's that good!

Apart from Dark Souls III and Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, I didn't pay full price for any of the big retail titles this year. As you already mentioned, games seem to be dropping in price an awful lot quicker these days...

@Peek-a-boo Nope, but growing up learning British English in school and watching American English on TV, I honestly can't even tell the regional differences anymore! I guess it's an American English term then, but iirc it can also be used as a more general term for money. Let's just say it was around €500 then!

I still don't know why I keep coming back to that game. I agree that the combat is everything from perfect, but it doesn't seem to influence my enjoyment either. I've also started reading the books. I don't know, there's something that draws me back every time! Plus I've heard that Blood & Wine is great too, and that's great, cause I'm still not bored of it after all this time, and that's a rarity.

At first I thought Manifold Garden was made by the same dev that made Antichamber, turns out it isn't, so I hope that this one is a bit more interesting than that. Antichamber had some neat concepts, I just think they weren't utilised very well. There was definitely more potential in that game, so I hope that Manifold Garden is able to fully utilise its ideas and concepts.

Edge - arguably the most respected videogame magazine in the world - gave The Last Guardian a 9/10 in their latest issue (technical issues were the only reason given for not getting a 10) along with it being chosen as their 'Game of the Year'.

It's great to see Rez Infinite in some of those categories, as it really is the poster child for Virtual Reality! If anybody doubts that VR isn't worth anyone's time, Rez Infinite is where you will eat your words.

I am not overly sure what Quantum Break is doing on the Xbox list though. Outside of the pretty physics and visuals, it is by far and away the most forgettable game I have played all year.

Quantum Break should've been replaced with ReCore personally.

As for the whole list in general, it seems decent even though I disagree with a fair amount. I have to admit though, it's disappointing seeing VR games so high up as I personally don't want it to become the future of gaming (I honestly even prefer the specs war to the concept of in the future VR being the main way to play games).

The best outcome for the future of gaming in my opinion would be that the Switch does well enough that the concept is something that's built on and technology gets good enough that you will be able to say run something on the scale of Uncharted 4 without any downgrades and still have a decent battery life. Of course it's nowhere near possible now but of course technology advances.

@Grumblevolcano Just asking, but have you played a game in VR?

I was very sceptical about virtual reality, and I once considered it to be the 'next big fad'.

It only took me to play around with the absorbingly interactive menu on PlayStation VR for me to understand why it is going to play a prominent part in the future of entertainment.

And then I put Rez Infinite on and was given that same feeling of tingly excitement that I haven't had since playing Super Mario 64 for the very first time, what with it being my first 2D (SNES) to 3D (N64) game.

It's that good.

@Peek-a-boo what's there to look forward to on it next year? Apart from the obvious RE 7. It's going to be quite worrisome IMO if Sony only have more 20-30 minute demos to show off at E3 next year.

I agree with the people who point out how fitting it is that the best VR can do is a game that was already considered excellent years and years ago. It's not as apparent a game changer as your comparison to me from the outside.

@Peek-a-boo No but I hate the concept of not being able to see my real life surroundings while playing a game hence VR will never be for me.

@Grumblevolcano That's fair enough. I believe that that is a perfectly valid reason!

It's a similar kind of thing when I bemoan about the lack of split-screen co-op and/or multiplayer in today's games. I don't particularly wish to play against strangers online, and would much prefer to play with (or against) somebody who is sitting in the same room as me.

The times, they are a-changin'.

That's not really saying much anymore, all things considered. When your biggest competion involves a sell-out magazine that's paid by a Video game retailer to shill their products, you kind of lose credit by proxy.

Granted, I don't exactly have a high opinion of "game of the year"-type stuff, mostly because the only reason I ever payed attention to them in the first place was to fullfill my childish need to have every single opinion of mine validated by everyone else around me, back when I was a stupid teenager. I'm not sure if that's how everyone else feels about it, mind you, I'm just putting my bais out there. Full disclosure.

GOTY awards are stupid, as you know those game reviewers aren't reviewing every significant release across all platforms every year and, more often than not, publications seem to drift toward the same set of big budget blockbusters, leaving most indies and smaller Japanese games unconsidered.

Even with that said, GOTY "awards" are more a reflection of popular taste than anything, with more popular genre blockbusters winning out over games in less popular genres. I can't imagine, for example, that a point-and-click adventure game, or a turn-based JRPG would ever win such an award from Western critics, who tend to be drawn toward more action-y fare.

More broadly, video game reviews are becoming less and less useful as resources for information, considering both how politicized many review outlets have become and the number of avenues that exist for more directly obtaining useful information about almost any given release.

As to VR, I don't think it's necessarily a fad, but it's expensive, a pain to set up, and has very limited usefulness in games, from what I've seen. Maybe RE7 will make a good argument for why VR can be a useful way to experience substantive game experiences, but so far, I don't think it has demonstrated that it's relevant to the wider gaming scene. A cool bit of tech if you have lots of disposable income, but not really worth investing in for the normal person.

Also, as someone else said, I'm not a huge fan of blotting out my senses when I'm playing a game, as I have a busy life and it doesn't mesh well with the existence of children and pets. Perhaps, if the Switch takes off, we can finally see a true divergence in the gaming market: hardware for people who want immersion and people who want more convenience. I don't have faith in the future of VR, though, and God only knows how the Switch will go over.

With only a few hours left, it finally arrived: The Post of the Year

I wasted $100 this year on No Man's Sky ($60) and The Witness ($40), two boring games dry of mechanics in every sense.

The lesson I've learned? Judge a book by its cover / call a spade a spade and don't have confidence in indie games that look like 1: A walking simulator that is occasionally a flying simulator and, 2: A walking simulator with crosswords everywhere. Minus the words.

Bayo 2 was robbed that year dammit!

And 2017 is already off to a good start. But yeah, I'm learning that "don't judge a book by its cover" is not always true. If anything, what's most decieving is what's written on the back of the box...

But a pretty cover can be decieving as well. In my case, at least, I gotta trust my instincts more, and always ignore the hype. No Man's Sky sounded "too good to be true", and it was. The Witness, well...I think I've seen enough evidence there.

And with that said, The Last Guardian can win all the awards it wants, and maybe on some levels it'll deserve it, but I know my tolerances when it comes to AI behavior - I can tolerate uncooperative AI or even just straight up bad AI, so long as my progress ultimately relies on my own actions. An AI partner in an action RPG won't pull his own weight? That's fine, I'll just do what I can on myown, and either swap him out, or stop giving him potions and leave him for dead.

But a game where every puzzle has to involve training and commanding a fickle AI creature? And leaving him behind or doing the tasks on my own is not an option? No. No, I won't bother with that. I can barely put up with that in real life. And I'm not even talking about my dog.

Well, The Last Guardian — more than all the games Jonathan Blow and Hello Games will make until they're all dead — was a game. That chimera doggy bled production value with every step he took. So, while I'm not sure whether I'm going to replay that game after I finish it, I feel like it was well worth full retail price so far. I'm actually having fun with it, too. It's one of the few games released this year without such a ridiculously steep difficulty curve and with intuitive learning.

It's always a good idea to manage one's expectations. Reality is imperfect and very rarely lives up the lofty standards we impose upon it. I'm at the point where I approach everything with either withering skepticism or, at best, a guarded optimism.

Although, I have to admit, my "guarded optimism" for Persona 5 is dangerously close to being hype, but I keep reeling it back before it crosses that line.

Regarding the Edge magazine GOTY list on the previous page, I like to read/post them because it creates discussion (which it did) and you will always find a new game that you haven't heard of before, and buy it.

It is also interesting to see what games people seem to like.

I thoroughly dislike logic and puzzle games, mostly because I don't have a particularly puzzley or logical mind however, The Witness was my favourite game of the year until The Last Guardian came along.

Some see it as a game with a boring one-note mechanic - and give up within an hour - whereas those like myself, who got past the admittedly slow and occasionally uninteresting courtyard puzzle, managed to spend over 60 hours to reach the end, which felt more rewarding than, well... anything I have ever played!

It just empathise how different everybody is; what's joyless for one person is a joy for another.

Time for another GOTY list, courtesy of the readers at Eurogamer:

20. Civilisation VI
19. Pokémon Sun and Moon
18. Ratchet and Clank
17. The Witness
16. Hitman
15. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
14. Firewatch
13. XCOM 2
12. The Last Guardian
11. INSIDE
10. Final Fantasy XV
09. Dishonored 2
08. Forza Horizon 3
07. Battlefield 1
06. The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine
05. Titanfall 2
04. Dark Souls III
03. DOOM
02. Overwatch
01. Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

I love the analogy for the readers number one choice:

"It's a steak with fries." says DonNorris - and hold onto something because this analogy is going places. "Naughty Dog has made some before, others made theirs too. Classic yes, but made with the best meat and potatoes around by a chef in his own tier. They've added a whip of the sauce they used for The Last of Us, and there might have been a little bit too much. A steak with fries then, still the best one I've had in quite some time."

Baring in mind that the votes begun on the first day of November and were unable to be edited once submitted, hence the likes of Final Fantasy XV and The Last Guardian being low(er) than usual, given that they came out in late November and early December respectively.

I think it's a pretty agreeable list myself!