A PS4 Thread: Because You Had to Play "Knack"

I've become a big fan of Outer Wilds. One of these games that etches it's way into my mind. I have started dreaming about it. I think about it while I'm away. But I love how low stakes it is (especially for a game about the END OF THE GALAXY). Very little violence. Lots of exploration. And I can play it for as long as I like thanks to the 22 minute time loop.

Mad Max is a fun game as it uses the Batman Arkham fight mechanics which are always good and some of the vehicle weapons are very satisfying. It does include a lot of collecting stuff missions that fill up a whole load of open world games where 20 hour campaign modes turn out to be 15 hours of finding scrap metal - though I suppose that makes more sense in a Mad Max universe than in other games.

"Ratchet & Clank" may be the literal opposite of "The Last of Us," which is perfect, but ironically more challenging than it should be at first as I adjust to something so low-stakes and goofy.

lots of people banging on about ghost of tsushima. any good? or is it just fetch quest central?

it looks like an offbrand assassins creed game. the standard ubisoft open world formula, despite being by sony and not ubi

it _looks_ super cool. but yeah, it appears to be another map checkbox game with a stealth combat engine pasted on top

i typically play about one of those a year, so i may get to it once it gets down to $15

ghosts of tsushima is good, reviews are wrong, and i typically find open world checklist games unbearable. infamous x babby mode bushido blade.

whoa really? that's good to hear! what makes this one different for you?

i guess the bushido blade ref is a good one - i used to fucking LOVE bushido blade, although i sucked at it

it is tempting and getting good fan reviews, but I still have Witcher, Death Stranding, RDR2 and Horizon all in various states of completion so maybe i'll wait

everyone sucked at it, that's what made it great

xpost

my wife described it as "elegant" which is not a word i'd use to describe like assassin's creed.

the bushido blade thing comes from the standoff mechanic which is basically a little minigame where you hold triangle and wait for a dude to commit to an attack. release triangle at the right time and it's a samurai movie instakill. you can upgrade it and chain them together and it's pretty cool, if simple.

there's a big map with lots of dumb shit to do, mostly "talk to dude/kill other dudes/return to first dude." but the HUD is minimal, the vibe is chill and pretty, the combat is stupid fun. lots of toys and easily-pulled-off moves. bombs and shit.

it feels kind of ps2/3-ish, in a good way, in that you can break the systems pretty easily. set of an alarm and train all the dudes in a fort in a big line around and around until you can grab whatever the goal is, then run away and pick them off one by one. the stealth is basic but funny. like just stabbing dude after dude making a huge pile of bodies that the remaining mooks don't seem to notice.

for context i thought ass creed odyssey, RDR2, and spiderman were brutally unfun and tedious but i love jak 2, beyond good and evil, and ass creed liberation.

ass creed

I think you need a pair of these
https://images.halloweencostumes.com/products/29521/1-1/adult-apollo-creed-boxing-trunks.jpg

whoa thanks for the impressions. might give it a try when it gets to the $20 part of its lifecycle

the black and white 'kurosawa mode' getting advertised as a draw despite being blatantly poorly conceived was enough of a red flag that i wrongly assumed the whole thing would be off

has 'buy for 12£ in PSN summer sale 2021' written all over it

remasted GOTY edition for PS5 too

last three post otm

oh yeah it'll be $20 by thanksgiving for sure.

there's a haiku writing activity (not even really a minigame)

oh the story is completely boring and the main character dude is also completely boring if you care about that kind of stuff

checkbox game stories are generally there to give you a moment to check your phone and eat some snacks, although there are exceptions (witcher 3)

witcher 3's central story isn't very good either ime, its the sidequest writing thats fun

Main story of Breath of the Wild was pretty pro forma, it was the side stuff that made that game, too.

breath of the wild actually has the right approach to make open world storytelling work - fragmented and environmental rather than a linear central narrative

Ratchet and Clank isn't stupid-fun, but it is stupid and fun.

https://blog.playstation.com/2020/07/28/a-great-slam-and-then-some-cuphead-is-out-today-on-ps4/

alright, who is playing Fall Guys

it's fun! and free!

There’s a thread!

A lot of people like "Prey," right? It's going straight to my virtual backlog, but on sale with its well-regarded iirc DLC for $12? No brainer.

you should play through your backlog first, any sale price you see is going to come around again a couple times a year and maybe even go lower once the PS5 is out

Oh, I'm playing! I'm just slow. Ratchet and Clank is moving along (and is so far just kind of dumb). I think Bloodborne might be after that, which will slow me down even more. Then I've got a bunch of the AAA action games, too, like Tomb Raiders, Uncharteds and Wolfensteins. I just kind of pick them up compulsively when the price drops below a certain point.

West of Dead looks very cool.

I won a $50 PlayStation gift card at work, and even though I don't generally play multiplayer, I do want to try Fall Guys, so is it worth putting that into a year subscription to PS+ (which will end up costing me $10 out of pocket)? I guess the free monthly games will save me some money down the road too.

i thought fall guys sucked tbh

Weird, West of Dead was announced for Switch, with an August 5 release date, but I don't see it on the Switch store ...

Ah dammit I didn't realize PS Now and PS Plus are different!

ps plus is the online multiplayer gaming service (plus monthly free games/store discounts)

ps now is a streaming service of some sort, don't know anyone who uses this

it's a catalog where you can download, delete and redownload anything from their catalog as long as you are subscribing to the service or until they cycle it out of their catalog... and you can keep it even once it's out of the catalog if it's on your hard drive. Obviously the speed of your internet provides a potential bottleneck but Sony's constant updates mean that's a problem with the system generally. It's actually fairly well curated, especially if you are only now starting on PS4; games for play include Dead Cells, Hitman 2, Dishonored 2, Just Cause 4, Control, Metal Gear V, Last of Us, Bloodborne, Uncharted 3, Rocket League, Lego Batman, Doom... I would say if you want to play two of those, do the 7 day trial and then use your $50 for a five month subscription.

To clarify, I'm not interested in PS Now. I'm only considering PS Plus just to get in on the Fall Guys nonsense.

i guess if it gets popular enough they might give it the fortnite exception where you dont need a subscription to play online

Control Ultimate Edition announced. If you buy it for a current gen system, free upgrade to PS5/XSX. A little burned that existing owners don't get it, but hey whatever. I can wait a year or so for it to get cheap if I still want to play it. Of course, I just bought the season pass on a few weeks ago...

At first your post made me regret getting it on sale a few weeks back, but given there is no way I'm getting a PS5 any time in the next 2 years I think that regret would have been more FOMO than anything else. BTW, I assume all my current PS4 games will play on the PS5, or has that still not been made clear?

They haven't given guarantees on anything (they said probably the "100 most popular games") but most games should be. Of course, it's unclear if Control will work; will be a bit of a bummer if my PS4 copy doesn't work on PS5.

I remembering reading that Sony wanted to guarantee that their top 100 selling PS4 titles had to be playable on PS5, but that was several months ago and don't know if anything's changed since then.

that's a misunderstanding of the claim, the goal is to have all ps4 games be ps5 compatible but it's impossible to guarantee that without extensively testing and maybe patching each title. cerny's quote re: the top 100 meant only that they sampled those and the majority were fine out of the box, there's no reason to expect that everything else will be different

put differently, there's no reason to expect ps4 -> ps5 compatiblity to be any worse than xbone -> sexbox, it's jaguar cpu + custom gcn gpu -> zen2 cpu + custom navi gpu in both cases

I'm not so sure - PS5 supposedly has some extra weird stuff in it. But hopefully, yes.

it has dedicated audio and custom storage hardware but that shouldn't interfere with anything since the ps4 had neither of those.
the ps5 cpu has custom logic specifically to help with back-compat.

the biggest reason for expecting the xbox to have better compatibility is their bigger experience with it, they've been doing it since the 2006. og xbox -> 360 and 360 -> xbone are both much harder than xbone -> sexbox.

ps5 should run any ps4 game in the same way that a new pc graphics card should run any game your old card could run but can occasionally run into bizarre edge cases so they can't give a guarantee. they're both basically PCs architecturally unlike previous generations