crispy4000

I spent $45 on that Amazon Prime 25% off Nintendo gift card promotion. Thinking of it as a BotW2 pre-purchase. Beyond that, I might spend another $60 or so between Humble, Steam Winter Sale, Black Friday and PSN (have a little gift credit still stored there). Could be a little more, could be less, depends on the deals. I’m already quite frugal with gaming, plus 2020 has given me a new appreciation for the backlog. Nothing for the holidays screams day-one purchase to me, especially when I’ll be holding off on next-gen / new PC. Most of my budget right now is weighted towards a house down payment and investing, so it can wait.

It would have sold consoles, but not nearly as many. The Switch wouldn’t have blown up so quickly. It was able to ride that initial wave. Nintendo did the same thing with Twlight Princess on the Wii. It was the fire starter. They absolutely made the right call. It’s why no one should ever discount the influence of a killer app at launch. Even if it’s a timed exclusive for a marginal window. Sony will probably sell more copies of Ghosts this way, but it’s not going to be the game pushing PS5’s. If it was held back, sure. But TLOU2 would have been the real heavy hitter to position like Zelda. Cyperpunk is more like RDR2. It’ll generate a ton of hype no matter what it’s on. Or how long that next-gen patch gets delayed on consoles.

Holding back BoTW meant everything to the Switch. Just saying.

I guessed right then. I think there should be plenty of room for a full priced multiplayer game of its sort. (See: Splatoon 2, fighting games, etc) Even at a next-gen $70. The problem is Sony is feeding us nothing but breadcrumbs. I don’t know if I should care, and I enjoy Twisted Metal and the like. It’s a total failure in the marketing. Or maybe just a bad game they’re hiding behind to pad. Who knows. Sony and Microsoft focus too much on each other to think that way, IMO. Just look at how long we had to wait for the price.

On the PC side, they need reasonable upscaling results to compete. Because just running that Port Royale demo ballpark to where AMD could compete on price doesn’t account for the humongous FPS boost from DLSS in games themselves. Yes, the terms of engagement have changed. Native performance metrics don’t matter nearly as much as practical use, with next-gen upscaling factored in. That's something we should want for the consoles as well, for the doors it can open.

But that’s a huge caveat given the direction the industry is going. It doesn’t have an equivalency with Ryzen vs Intel CPUs. Without the full story on their upscaling plans (which they NEED to compete in the PC space) it’s a total shot in the dark how far behind they actually are with RT. The two go hand in hand. I want to see them compete in the PC market. But they can’t do it just by brute forcing here.

This would be a reasonably good year end line-up for them in a normal year. Notice I’m using the same language. I think there’s a good number of games there that people won’t stop recommending. But I don’t think you can totally divorce the console launch from the lineup either. In some ways, we should be expecting more from them. They have something more direct to prove to us about what the next gen consoles can do than normal year-end releases. That is only my opinion though. Not everyone in this thread has those standards. We’ve been through this before. You think retail releases today are too chopped up these days because of expansion DLC and mtx. And that every extra (inflated) dollar you spend demands more value. I say we should expect $70 games to be at least the same value as they were the last price hike two generations ago. And I have few doubts, considering how stuffed retail releases are today. I don’t expect that to change with a price increase. I’d more expect that if there wasn’t. The idea of the single-player only / multi-player focused full priced game was once very controversial. Reasonable people now realize there’s a nuanced answer there. Tell me, with your snap impressions of Destruction All-Stars (and the lack of footage), would you assume it’s worth $60? I doubt it. I don’t think an extra $10 is the real issue you have with it.

Seems like a more demanding game in general before RT is considered. It’s also open world, whereas Control is not. They’ll both be good case studies for different implementations. This is also Ubisoft’s first pass at it. Wonder if they’re having optimization trouble like EA did initially.

We’ll need like-for-like comparisons to see exactly where the Series X stacks up in regard to RT. (As for VRS, we’ve already seen on PC that it’s nowhere close enough to ‘free’ RT) Seeing how the next-gen release of Control performs on Series X relative to a 2080 with DLSS should suffice, since it’s the heaviest game we know of with it.

Still sticking to these?

Out on all consoles now. Gamespass too, I think?

Not too surprised they pulled ahead on traditional rasterization. But it's most encouraging that they caught up to the 2080 TI in RT. They'll still really need that DLSS alternative though.

I bet most of the launch titles you can remember were "fully next gen" games. It does matter if the goal is to illustrate why the hardware is so desirable. Devs by and large haven't shown us they're ready. Halo Infinite. UE5's timeline. REVIII's rumored production issues. Cyperpunk's next-gen patch coming so far post-release. The almost total lack of Japanese games at launch. Etc. There are a few exceptions, of course. But by and large, I don't think the industry was ready to sell us on next-gen because of what we're seeing now. They're trying to sell us on cross-gen as the main course. And that is a departure from the past.

I think its already true for most Americans, even outside of a pandemic. Huge wake up call for everyone to get their financial house in order and spend less. Anyways, it's veering a little off topic.

The whole business model of those upper end cards are people with heaps of disposable income (or little financial inhibition). It's quite literally the 'nice things' audience. PC gamers should want developers to hurry up and drop the current gen consoles regardless. Killer apps that make me feel like I couldn't want any longer. It's not simply a matter of being tapped into an ecosystem. It's a question if whether you can afford, or are willing to buy a new console at launch price. During a pandemic, of all times. There will be plenty of people who look at the consoles this year and say it can wait. If I had a surplus this year, I'd probably end up investing it instead. That's just me though.

@JPDunks4 I don't agree that a next-gen console doesn't need to launch with a next-gen library. This idea that current-gen+ feels substantial enough came to head with the Pro and X1X. It was acceptable at the time, because they were supposed to be the stop-gap platforms, before a generational shift that would rock the boat. So now we're at the generational shift, and by and large boats aren't being rocked, because developers aren't ready. In that respect, the launches feel 6-12 months premature. It begs the question: Why not wait to buy one until there's more next-gen exclusives that genuinely illustrate the hardware's potential? If you think a early half-step forward is worth a full console price once again, the more power to you. But I don't think that its a strong sell to an average gamer. Even that gets diminished by patches that haven't or may never materialize. Again, it's feeling like Pro and X1X deja vu. There was another generational transition that was slowed by the early perception of a 'nice things' jump before: the 360/PS3. I'm not saying it will happen again, but it can't be ruled out, especially with COVID. At the very least, I think we can count on the cross-gen period being especially long. There's nothing exciting about that. Next-gen will be held back, current gen will be hit even harder with performance woes. I don't expect every launch game to make a case for either console's potential. That's an impossibility, and unreasonable. But I applaud any decision that leaves the current-gen behind, and that tries to sell us on a next-gen vision. Because that's what makes the tech in these consoles truly exciting. It should be the draw.

We already know it's launching as a retail game.

Some new footage. 1080p sadly.

I enjoy both games equally. WR:BS issue is that it plays almost nothing like the first game. It tries to make good use of the analog triggers to lean into turns. But the best way to play it is to lightly tap them, in the same way you would tap the brake in other racers. You keep control much better. Also, never boost unless you can quickly regain your charge. Once I figured those things out, I ended up enjoying it a ton and beat every difficulty level. It's still a beautiful game, holds up better than most games that generation. The weather effects too. Stormy days dramatically change how races play out.

Gamecube comes close. Rogue Squadron II, Luigi's Mansion, Super Monkey Ball, THPS3 and Wave Race: Blue Storm were all great games, IMO. Smash Bros Melee also came out only 3 days later. The original Xbox had a good launch too. Halo is obviously the star, but there was decent stuff around it too like Project Gotham and DoA3. PSP had a solid line-up too. It was Sony's best effort until now.

Nah.

Hopefully you're just joking here. I just want to see if it looks fun to play. That shouldn't be that much of an ask 3 weeks before launch.

Press has them.