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

Ok I don't think I need to see any more by this guy, but that was great

Also - drop kicking the skull! I didn't know you could do that.

if i got a PS4 it would just be for Bloodborne. then again that game rules so hard it would be worth it.

I don't want to get any more ahead of myself than I already am, but how would you differentiate the three Dark Souls and Bloodborne? From what I've read, everyone loves (in some sense of the word) the first Dark Souls, many don't like the second (I don't know why), people are mixed but generally like the gameplay of III and it seems people ... like Bloodborne best of all, to the extent that playing it first might ruin Dark Souls for you?

xxxp oh lord the chicken-moblin war

i dont think playing Bloodborne first would ruin anyone's experience playing Dark Souls. not sure if this is the right analogy but perhaps it would be like ruining Super Mario Bros. 3 by playing Super Mario World first.

the big draw for Dark Souls is the world design, the way everything is connected, the way it all feels like a real place. your first time through DS will be special because no other game has that tight interconnected design. DS3 comes close but DS2 is a sprawling mess that doesn't make any sense w too many levels.

xxp Souls games have more build and weapon variety and tend to encourage a more cautious playstyle than Bloodborne. pvp is also more prominent in the former.
I don't think playing one first will ruin the others beyond the inevitable burn out aspect of several hours long games

So nothing on good ps4 jrpgs? Please help!

persona5 if smt is your thing

ni no kuni ii is out now right? i have only played the first but it made me feel very warm and fuzzy so i imagine 2 is great!

also: if you missed valkyria chronicles the first time around, there is a remaster on the ps4. also the 4th game in the series is coming out in september, by the time you get through all of the other stuff on this list you'll wanna play that one. (don't worry about 2 and 3: i played the... second one i think, it's on PSP, and as far as i can tell they are all more or less discrete stories)

final fantasy xv is... something. i didn't get that far tbh before other games distracted me, but i hope to go back at some point! there are some awesome weird little moments of "hanging out with the boys" that i love, and the SUPER WEIRD detail of the food they make when they camp (on coleman camping equipment) was so weird i think about it more often than i probably should. if you want a more, uh, traditional final fantasy experience?, FFX and FFX-2 also got remasters if you wanna play those and haven't before (i can say FFX was great and probably the last great "normal" numbered FF (FFXII was also great but by no means 'normal')).

i've heard good things about I Am Setsuna.

some people call the yakuza games RPGs which is a little weird to me but they're so far wonderful. apparently zero is a good place to start, but I am starting with Kiwami, a remake of the first game, and enjoying it thoroughly. Kiwami 2 comes out later this year, 0 and 6 are out there, and 3/4/5 are supposed to get barely-remastered re-releases on PS4 at some point (fingers crossed for stateside).

i never got into the ys series, but there are some of those on ps4 and some folks say they rule.

ditto for trails of cold steel, also on ps4 now.

monster hunter world is extremely not my shit, but you might like it. everyone else seems to!

don't think trails of cold steel has an english ps4 version unfortunately, it was on ps3. if you're looking for turn based jrpg then persona 5 is the big one and there's not much else unless you want to play like an atelier game or something low-rent like that. valkyria chronicles is turn based but it's closer to an XCOM type game than a jrpg. dragon quest 11 is out in September.

lots of good options for action jrpg though:
nier automata
ys viii
tales of berseria
the dark souls/bloodborne games obviously if you count those as jrpgs (they totally are)
ni no kuni 2 is alright

jRPGs are tricky to recommend in general because you have the people who just want to battle and skip through the cutscenes and you have the people who just want to hang out with some fun characters and be told a story and mash through battles and the entire spectrum in between, then you have the people who loved chrono trigger but think all modern ones are anime trash and the weebs who like the trashy anime and get bored by the underwritten old/retro style ones and in the end you can have 100 people play the same jrpg and come away sounding like they played 100 different games.

dang. I've never played a Final Fantasy since NES days when I played the first one & maybe the second. I understand these are good but I don't even know where to start

I do have persona 5 already which I wanna start but summer's starting & I'll be on the road a bunch so I don't wanna start it now

my personal understanding of final fantasy is that 6 thru 9 are classics, everything before that is too primitive and everything after that is too messy. 12 has a bit of a following though I think & I haven't tried it.

dunno how many of them have PS4 ports though

jRPGs are tricky to recommend in general because you have the people who just want to battle and skip through the cutscenes and you have the people who just want to hang out with some fun characters and be told a story and mash through battles and the entire spectrum in between, then you have the people who loved chrono trigger but think all modern ones are anime trash and the weebs who like the trashy anime and get bored by the underwritten old/retro style ones and in the end you can have 100 people play the same jrpg and come away sounding like they played 100 different games.

so true

i often wonder why i play rpgs. sometimes i do really enjoy the story (the first 3/4 of xenogears, the witcher 3), but often they seem oddly underdeveloped, given that they're supposed to be a highlight of the genre. it's tough to put up with terrible voice acting for 50+ hours. even just zelda's meh voice acting in breath of the wild is driving me nuts, and i barely encounter her. i'm willing to put up with anime-leaning games, but i'd rather not play a game where most of the adult female characters speak like 6-year-olds and/or showcase their underboobs, and that's most of them ime.

xp
FFVII has a PS4 port already but also has a PS4 remaster due at some unknown near future point. So maybe worth waiting for that rather than picking it up now, if remasters are your cup of tea.

the ff7 project is a full on remake not just a remaster and it's probably a long ways off still

some people call the yakuza games RPGs which is a little weird to me but they're so far wonderful. apparently zero is a good place to start

yes, forgot about yakuza! i've played a few of these, halfway through 6 now, and 0 is my favourite so far, and it's like $20 nowadays

kiwami and zero at $20 on june 28!

polygon story on greatest hits releases next week

oh nice, i'll pick up yakuza zero for $20 for sure

i can say FFX was great and probably the last great "normal" numbered FF

yeah i liked X a lot. i would agree with this. it has the turn based combat of the older games but there are some really nice mechanics added in that make it a lot of fun to do battle. it also has the most absurd mini game ever where you have to anticipate lightning strikes.

So I've seen some talk about the merits of going with the Pro for "future-proofing" reasons, which I don't get. It's not like games made to take advantage of the Pro's hardware won't play or will break the gaming experience on Slims, right?

Yeah, I don't get it. I thought about it, but if you're worried about "future proofing" anything you shouldn't be getting a new system toward the end of its cycle. PS5 or whatever is being talked about for 2020, maybe, but even if the PS4 lasts longer, the only real significant thing the Pro has to offer over the slim is, I think, 4K support (plus faster processor, maybe?), and "future proofing" with TV evolution in mind is a fruitless task.

But man, the dude at Costco was really pushing the Pro over the Slim, even though even to a know-nothing like me I knew more than he did and knew he was talking out of his ass. "Oh, the difference is this one has HDR+, but that one has 4K, which is what you really want" - wrong - and (he points to pictures of games on the box) I think it comes with these games" - wrong.

A bunch of games that have already been released not only run better on my Pro than they did on my PS4, but they have added features. The most significant is visual textures etc. that are only displayed if 4K/HDR is enabled, but also I think some games have extra Pro-only features. (Don't quote me on that.)

Future proofing probably only matters if you have a lot of PS4 games and want to keep using your library. I'm probably more likely to play PS4 games through my PS5 on PS Now or whatever than I would be to dust off my PS4 and use it, but if you can see yourself doing it, the new system is definitely very nice. Even the menus seem nicer ... I haven't A/B'ed that yet though.

Warning: Some redundancy up there :(

But is it $100 (or whatever) better?

normal PS4 does HDR too btw, if that wasn’t clear

Huh I didn't realize that.

Well, it was an easy sell for me because my PS4 was getting pretty wheezy. I think the better tech specs are worth it but ymmv.

So what kind of game sales should I be on the lookout for? For example, there is a playstation flash sale right now. Do those happen all the time? Some games I'm interested in are 50-60% off. Is that common? Unusual? How about at brick and mortar stores, anything (or any specific places) I should be keeping an eye on?

gamefly sells off copies of the games they rent, i've found good deals there occasionally

josh, just get the witcher 3, you don't need any other games

josh you seem to be extremely interested in the relative prices and values of videogames, in general! it's fine, i'm just saying you're off the bell curve in terms of how much you think about this.

the best way to play good games at low prices is

a) play older games for current system. there are tons of really good game that are a few years old and are now down to $20 or so. this is more true for systems like PS4 that have a larger catalog and have been around for a while.
b) buy an older system (xbox 360, ps2, many good options here) - the games are cheap, there are tons of good ones and you can work your way through lists of the best games released for the system, you can buy lots on ebay for cheap, etc
b) play free games. either for a console or on your computer. there is a lot of good free shit. if every game is a ratio of fun / cost, your fun ratio will be beyond time and space and/or destroy the universe if you divide by 0

or like NA said, buy the witcher 3. you can play it every day for the next several months without completing it. and by the time you do, cyberpunk 2077 will be out, and you can spend all of 2019-2025 playing it. it's worth $60, it's worth $150. it is arguably worth $15000

i am way in the minority here but i thought Witcher 3 was not much fun at all. gave it a good 25 hours or so and dropped it.

maybe it was because i had come to it after a Souls/Bloodborne game and the combat just felt clunky as hell. and story driven games just aren't my bag i've come to find.

ha we are opposites. i put the difficulty down to easy to get past a hard part and ended up leaving it there because i just wanted to explore and have fun and enjoy the story and side missions, not master combat techniques.

xpost Ha, it's just that I have been burned before when it comes to things that can be accumulated. I will think, wow, this is supposed to be awesome and the price is great! And then I find out the price I paid was average or overpriced, and I start seeing it for less money everywhere,and I feel like a sucker. In the end, $20, $15, neither is terribly expensive, but given the choice I would rather pay $5 less.

for me though it is less the relative value of games in the case of the PlayStation and more specific games I want, then trying to figure out the price they're worth, when I have encountered a wide range of prices for the same item.

another related thought experience: would you rather pay a small bit more for something with twice as much content, which is a good value, even you are unlikely ever to play all the contact? my heart says yes even though my brain knows better.

content not contact

I actually pay attention to the sale prices a lot. In terms of what's on sale, I don't see anything that hasn't been on sale a couple times already this year. There are some games that only go on sale maybe once or twice a year ... some Japanese companies have sales much more infrequently ... I waited a pretty long time for Persona 5 to go on sale even a little bit.

I think the usual timeline is that games are slightly on sale before they're released, then they're regular price for a long time. Then maybe there's a Christmas sale, and then they don't go on sale for quite some time.

EA games are constantly on sale. Ubisoft games go on sale a lot.

Another thing to note is that when you look at New Releases, you'll sometimes see older games at the top. I think that means that they're establishing a new price point. So what was a 59.99 game is now a 39.99 game. For me that's as good as it going on sale ... they're not going to reduce the price again after setting the new price point.

I hope everyone grabbed Xcom 2 for free this month. :)

Josh: i'm with you on obsessively maximizing dollar value out of video game purchases, but (I'm guessing) you're probably at the point where you straight up don't have the time to play that many games. i have an insane backlog (seriously, hundreds of games, not even counting Steam) going back years because I've spent so much time buying cheap games, because you can get so much playtime for relatively speaking, very very little money. (especially compared to pretty much every other hobby including comic books, music, movies, TV...)

in short dun worry about it. the sales come, the sales go. if you don't need to play every brand new game, you never need to worry about value. (um less we're talking about Nintendo, sales are less common. but they still happen!)

and PSN has sales literally every week, you'll get a slightly better discount with PS+ (which you should get for the free games and multiplayer access anyway)
the flash sales are roughly once a month but no special discount for PS+ members

p.s. cheapassgamer.com and slickdeals.net

i'm with you on obsessively maximizing dollar value out of video game purchases, but (I'm guessing) you're probably at the point where you straight up don't have the time to play that many games.

Lol, totally. In my defense, I bought the PS4 specially to play a small handful of time consuming games. The compulsive part of me just wants to buy that handful of games and have them, well, handy.

Here's a FPS question for you all. I'd never played a FPS before I bought Doom for Switch. Gyro aim has been super helpful, to the extent that I can't imagine being able to aim and shoot without it. My question is: am I able to accurately aim and shoot without it? Sometimes I forget that people are playing these games on PC, or with mouse/keyboard support, but are FPS games playable just aiming with dual analog sticks? Seems super hard, and Fortnite on Switch has underscored that, but is it just another thing to get used to that will eventually become second nature? I specifically skipped Wolfenstein on the Switch since I presumed the presentation, price and play would be better on the PS4, but i just occurred to me that means/meant sacrificing gyro controls.

Yeah it's fine, just needs a bit of getting used to. Console games also tend to have a little bit of aim assist to make up for not being quite as accurate as a mouse.

I'm absolutely awful at FPS games.

The only ones I can play are slower paced ones like Fallout and Skyrim.

That's sort of what I was wondering. Doom is as aggressive and fast paced as it gets, so I can't really imagine getting good at aiming with the sticks after being spoiled by the gyro on Switch. (Then again, sometimes even the gyro throws me off.) I suppose it's possible, I'll see. But other shooters are apparently a tad slower and more methodical (like, I guess, Fallout). And then you get to Fortnite, which, on the Switch, I find hard to play, because I am playing against homebound semi-pros with mouse and keyboard rigs who can pick me off with ease while I struggle to aim, and am seemingly unable to hit anything even when I have the upper hand. It's hard for me to tell if that is because 1) I am not good 2) aiming with analog sticks is hard and, afaict, there is no aim assist or 3) I am simply playing against people much, much better than me. (This last is a given, regardless.) And this is all in a pretty janky environment, anyway.

I'd probably go with #3.

If you're just a casual player, unless the FPS has some pretty good matching system, you're going to be up against people who probably play the game 8+ hours every day.

apart from Rocket League i have never been good at online games. the deck is stacked - you are playing against people that can commit full time to playing these games. when i was a teenager i played hella videogames daily, i was a DOOM (og game) monster, and if there was global multiplayer i would have probably wrecked.

if it makes you feel any better after playing (and losing) Fortnight on Switch i ended up downloading for Steam and playing with M+K. in around a dozen matches i still have not made a single kill or survived a match.

this is where the crafting mechanic really shines, i can be a complete loser and still have fun for most of the match running around and, for instance, coming across a pack of teammates all destroying a cop car.