Das_Regal

I love Death Stranding so much. Can't believe it's been two years since my first playthrough... Initial impressions of the Director's Cut:

- It's buttery smooth 60 FPS even 4k in quality mode nearly all the time.

- Ultra widescreen is super cinematic; I might play exclusively on that.

- QoL features remove the few pain points the original had for me.

- Game looks so good; I can't believe this was on PS4. One of the best games I've ever seen.

- Nails all of the PS5 features: controller/load times/3D audio are superb.

- Very hard mode! I'm playing through on this.

I'm only an hour in, so I can't weigh in on any new content. I can't believe how excited I am to do everything all over again. There's so many little details I didn't see the first time through... Reminds me of rewatching something like Twin Peaks.

First thing I did when I got my PS5 was play through most of the Souls games again after having finished them all many years ago. In Dec/Jan I played the 1 & 2 remasters and Demon remake. Then I tried to play 3 & Bloodborne and fell off on both of them fairly quickly. What I thought ultimately of each entry in the order I played them:

DeS remake is a beautiful game and worth buying a PS5 to experience if you like souls games. There's so many little gimmicks that make the levels feel unique, but towards the end when you return to the Boletarian Palace the game gets super repetitive and frustrating. It's only like, 2 hours or so before the last 2 boss fights I'm talking about, but they sucked.

DS2: SoTFS is still one of my favorites games in the series. It has such a dramatically different tone and feel to it in some ways, which makes it unpopular with the community, but I think it stands out as unique in the series for it. The music is some of the best in the series too.

DS Remastered aged much better than I expected. Sure, the textures and UI could use a little more work but ultimately it was still super enjoyable to play and after awhile I didn't even notice the difference in fidelity. Some of the regions are so visually impressive even now that I couldn't help but marvel at the grandeur of their construction.

I find DS3 unpleasant to play every time I try. Feels really lacking in charm compared to the old games and there are few gimmicks that make areas feel unique. Both the setting and the combat feel like they're trying to be Bloodborne in a way that makes the game feel like it was strung together from leftover BB combat and shoehorned into a Dark Souls experience.

I really wanted to play through Bloodborne, but its 30 FPS with frame-pacing issues stopped me dead in my tracks. Frankly all it needs is a resolution and frame rate bump from a slight engine tweak, which already exists in the wild as a proof of concept that can be applied on hacked PS4s. The fact that Sony has yet to do this makes me certain they're trying to sell us the game again soon. It's still a classic, but its age is starting to show a bit visually more than I expected (which probably wouldn't be an issue running at higher resolutions).

I only ever remember hearing most people complain about QTES and I know I hate them. Just in terms of how common they are, I think they're far from the norm too.

I didn't notice any recurring performance issues on my PS5, it ran beautifully on performance mode, but there are technical issues here in the form of crashes and bugs that crop up occasionally. But my complaints are more low-level than that. Scope-wise, Deathloop is a small game, closer to something like Death of the Outsider than Dishonored 2. Here are the chief things that disappointed me:

1) There are only 10ish guns. They're modifiable but there's no visual changes when you alter them with trinkets. Only one of them has an actual sight that I'm aware of. A lot of them are very redundant. I got one gun within the first 3 hours I used pretty much the whole game.

2) There are 4 stages, each of which has 3-4 time variants. And they aren't that different aside from enemy placement and blocked locations. They also aren't as huge as I expected given that there's only 4.

3) The analogy to Dishonored is way too easy. You have the same abilities and they use the same tropes to explain the story. This is disappointing, because the style is radically different. I wish they would've changed up the overall package more.

4) There are a lot of traits, trinkets, and powers to mess with compared to what you can actually slot in your loadout, so I just never used a bunch of the Arsenal.

5) The replay value of the game is terrible because you're already doing so much repetition as a part of just playing through once. This is made worse by the fact that you'll have to redo extremely mundane tasks that were only interesting the first time because you were learning new things, just so that they game can "record" that you learned it and allow you to progress.

6) There's no Newgame plus or anything.

I was really thinking a lot about Prey in my early expectations and that's really what I wanted, and not at all what I got.

I was pretty unimpressed by Deathloop while I was playing it... took me 15 hours to finish it and the story was very disappointing to me. But now after it's over it's wormed its way into my head. I've been thinking about how awesome the combat is.

I'd say wait on it, but it's definitely worth playing.

A Plague Tale: Innocence and Control Ultimate were pretty great this year.

This is a strange take. 

It's not strange so much as it is insulting.

I'm not interested in Superhero stuff either--but it's pretty crappy to project immaturity on people who are.

I was disappointed.

• Playstation sure is going hard on Marvel, huh?
• The KOTOR remake teaser was next to nothing and didn't feel like KOTOR.
• Forspoken's dialogue and story reminds me of a young adult novel.
• Gearbox actually make something new challenge 2021 failed.
• Deathloop again? I can't wait to play it, but why do they keep pushing its advertising so hard? We get it.
• First party Sony absence in the second half of the year continues.

I can't shake the feeling that Microsoft just has so much more of interest to me in its pipeline. I'm starting to lose faith in Sony. In a few years it's gonna be all Marvel/Disney properties. Just about everything that was interesting to me wasn't even a Sony property, but paid/timed exclusives I can probably play on the PC at launch.

Bloodborne on PS5 is exactly like it is on PS4, not anymore broken there. Desperately needs an update to fix the frame pacing issues...

I miss the daily deals. I miss them so badly.

No worries. It's confusing; that's part of Sony's problem. It's so hard to tell what has been updated, what works better on PS5, what doesn't and why. There are a lot of third party lists, but Sony can't be bothered to make an official one or give us a charm on the webstore for enhanced titles. But we can't have that because the PSN webstore still lacks BASIC features.

Days Gone has a PS5 upgrade already as well.

I think we're confusing PS5 upgrades with PS4 games that have patches that make them run better on the PS5; these are different things. Days Gone does not have a native PS5 app that you can upgrade to. You download the PS4 game and it runs better on PS5. Same thing with Horizon and God of War. There are other games that run better on PS5 that did not get a patch because their framerates on PS4 Pro were uncapped and/or they had dynamic resolution scaling, Dark Souls 3 for instance.

And some games have actually gotten PS5 upgrades after getting patches that make the PS4 version run better on PS5. Ghost of Tsushima for instance. I think Warzone is getting a native PS5 version but had a patch before. Genshin Impact... Destiny 2?

If there's truly no PS4 > PS5 upgrade path for H:FW that's $30 (with extra content) or less, that's inexcusably egregious. If you don't agree with that, there's no point in arguing about it. We aren't going to see eye to eye. The why doesn't matter to me.

Tsushima's situation was the most I'm willing to put up with and even that was a shitty deal given the middling-at-best graphical enhancements.

Thanks for the responses, I think I’ll stick with it a bit more and see how it goes.  By the way, do you suggest doing the avenge your previous death missions?  I did it like 4 times in a row and got wiped by that red sentinel thing.  I did finally beat it, but my health was wiped and it ruined my run.

 

Edit:  I figured it out, basically avenging to get 4 ether and if you go back after getting an upgraded weapon it is much easier.  I also got the sword now which opened up a lot too, game is getting better for sure.

I got through the entire game without doing any of the "avenge death" stuff because at launch it literally didn't work. I also didn't use Ether much other than to unlock items (not sure how worthwhile that was). I never once used the "save for ether" system other than after finishing the game to get the trophy associated with it. Not saying I played smart or particularly well--I didn't. The sword is great btw, particularly when you use it in combination with a dash.

If you never died to the giant squids that are massive bullet sponges in the last biome then you must have fast twitch like a teenaged asian kid. The first time I ran into one I had been absolutely wiping the floor with everything else in the level and got pummeled. 

 

The thing that made Returnal click for me was to focus more on dodging and less on trying to kill everything instantly. If you can maintain max adrenaline longer and longer you can hit proficiency much more quickly and all the weapons are fun once you have some of the better upgrades. The launcher especially, I hated it until I unlocked the auto fire mod and then it was amazing.

I got stuck on Biome 5, at the challenge room you have to clear... By the time I got past that, Biome 6 was always a joke. Nearly everything in that biome can be killed easily with a long-range weapon without ever touching you. The trick is just to be slow, methodical, and cautious. I literally beat Biome 6 on my first try, but in spite of that IIRC my playthrough was a bit longer than How Long to Beat's average. I think it's just a matter of my playstyle being good for Biome 6 and bad for other biomes. I'm slow.

I started and put a few hours into Returnal last night and I'm not feeling this game.  I even like rouguelikes, but this feels more repetitive than usual for this genre.  I also don't like the upgrades, half the time I don't even know what it does.  And I'm not sure it's worth spending ether at the start of a run when it seems kind of tough to come by.  So weird when I saw this game mentioned by many as their GOTY.  What's everyone else opinion of this game, and if you liked it, any tips?

I liked Returnal enough to platinum it, but it isn't a very good Roguelike. Skill is a little too emphasized for the first half, but by the end gear is insanely powerful and easy to come by. There are six distinct biomes and I've basically never died on the last. It decent was fun, but overhyped IMO. A solid B game and I thought the story was straight-up awful.

My advice if you're struggling? There are a few really great artifacts, but at the end of the day your ability to master the mechanics is more important. Consider changing your control layout; I swapped dodge onto one of the shoulder buttons and turned on always run in the options. After that it was just a matter of practice. This is like a souls game; you die a lot earlier on so that you can run through things easily later.

Returnal isn't for everyone; it requires patience and has very weak meta-progression early on. It isn't until the second half of the game that what you do in earlier runs really has much of an impact later, and it only matters there because you unlock weapon traits that make a huge difference, but even then the meta-progression is done in the most boring way possible. At no point in Returnal will you ever earn a currency you can allocate to make yourself stronger at a base level persisting in all runs.