May 2023 Sony State of Play

Hey Folks! Yesterday was a big Sony State of Play event revealing a good number of games to be released largely in the remainder of this year. It has been a while since I have done a post where I talk about a game presentation so I thought I would do so this morning and cover my personal highlights. There are some big-name games that I am not going to spend much time on. For example, a remake of Metal Gear Solid 3 was announced… and given that I hate stealth gameplay that series is very much “not for me”. Similarly, a new Assassin’s Creed game was announced that is supposedly a return to the stealthy gameplay form of the original games… but again… not my jam, and I preferred the more Witcher-3-inspired Open World gameplay.
You can watch the full presentation in the above link, without anyone annoyingly talking over it. Maybe this is just Old Man Bel talking here… but I detest the modern tradition of streamers milking these things for content and giving their moment-to-moment commentary. I’m largely frustrated by this because the Streamer SEO is way better than the official companies and it is much harder to find a “clean” stream link than any number of “talking head” ones. Right now Sony is winning the console power struggle… but that might change rapidly as folks shift to more and more cloud gaming options like Gamepass. At the moment… Sony is well behind the curve in their cloud gaming options and needs to rapidly catch up. However, the majority of the show really plays towards their strength of console domination.

Teardown

The show started off with a rather bland heist game called Fairgame$, but what caught my attention was a voxel destruction-based heist game that appeared not that far after it. I know nothing about Teardown but it looks outrageously fun. The idea of rampant voxel destruction combined with smash-and-grab gameplay looks like it would be a heck of a lot of fun to play. One of the games that I remember the most fondly was Midtown Madness 2, and the “capture the gold” gameplay mode where you had to pick up the loot and make it back to your base before someone crashes into you and steals it back. Teardown looks like it might be a similar style of multiplayer gameplay. I’m on board with this particular brand of nonsense.

Tower of Fantasy

I am calling this one out only because I think it is probably good for the longevity of Tower of Fantasy as a whole. I’ve written at length on this blog about how much I enjoyed my time spent playing TOF. It is my hope that I will be able to link my existing PC account to my PS5… which is not a thing I can do with Genshin Impact given that I played it exactly ONCE on the console and as a result cannot undo the fact I have a different account on the console. I personally liked TOF much better than Genshin Impact, and the pull rates and freebie currency were much more beneficial to the players than a Hoyoverse game. If you’ve never played TOF then you might check it out when it launches here.

Granblue Fantasy Relink

I know next to nothing about the Granblue Fantasy universe because while I have downloaded it a few times… I’ve never really gotten into the mobile game. I am just not much of a mobile gamer at the end of the day. That said I think this game looks awesome and I am looking forward to its release. I greatly enjoy the Genshin-Impact-style action combat gameplay, and based on how many people are gaga for this setting… it would be an interesting way to learn about the world of Granblue Fantasy. That said… this game has been teased for years at this point so I have no real confidence that we will actually see it this year.

Dragon’s Dogma II

I feel like I largely missed the boat with Dragon’s Dogma as a franchise. I’ve attempted to play it a few times and largely enjoyed what I played of it. That said the general clunky nature of the original game… made it hard for me to attach. It is my hope that maybe Capcom has learned a thing or two about system design in the intervening years. However… I also played Monster Hunter World and we loved that game in spite of its completely scuffed UI and multiplayer settings. I am somewhat taking a wait-and-see approach for this one. I will have to see what else I am playing at the time to determine if I am going to give it much attention when it ultimately releases.

Spider-Man 2

Okay, this trailer looks really freaking cool, and I am excited to see Symbiote Peter Parker in action. That said I should probably actually play Spider-Man and Spider-Man Miles Morales before getting too excited about this one. I am not sure why but it has never really been the right time for me to dive into these games, and I should fix that. Essentially it feels like I have homework to do before I can look forward to this game. We will see if that actually happens before it launches. Still looks freaking cool and I dig the setup for Kraven. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out given they are blending a bunch of existing storylines.

Marathon

So this is the fastest I have gone from excited to uninterested in a long while. I am not and have never been an “Apple Guy” and as a result, Marathon is just a piece of gaming history that I have no real context for. I was absolutely a rabid ID Software fan and Bungie devouts have told me that Marathon was effectively “better than Doom in every way”. So when I saw that this funky trailer I was watching was for a reboot of that franchise… I was admittedly pretty pumped. Then those hopes were immediately dashed when I read some more information about the game and saw that it was a: “sci-fi PvP extraction shooter”. I am just completely uninterested in a PVP-only game full stop, no matter how cool the universe looks. After the recent Overwatch 2 debacle… I won’t hold out hope for a PVE version of the game either. I guess I will follow this one from afar.

Alan Wake II

This was one of my highlights of the show, seeing more footage of the continuation of the Alan Wake story. I’ve become a zealot of the “Remedyverse” and I am so on board with more of this game and more of the funky shared universe they have created across multiple titles. I did not love the flashlight gameplay of the first Alan Wake game, and I am happy to see folks roaming around with more “traditional” weapons in this game. I have so much hope for this title and I am ready to geek out about the deep lore of this series once again. I want even more entangling with Control which is my favorite of the games in this series. I would LOVE it if the agent we see in the trailer crosses paths with the Federal Bureau of Control or even Director Faden herself. So pumped folks!

Revenant Hill

This was the highlight of the show for me. I love beyond love A Night in the Woods, and this is from a studio created by the two remaining creators of that game. The cat that you see in the trailer has deep Mae vibes and there is absolutely a statue from NitW about 10 seconds in. I have no clue if this will actually connect up to that game, or if those are just easter eggs for the faithful… but whatever the case I am here for it. If you have not played A Night in the Woods, please stop whatever you are doing and proceed directly to whatever platform you probably already own it for thanks to copious giveaways. It was a relatively short game and honestly… I kinda hope this one is as well. In reading there are books that I consider a “comfy read” or a “light read” and NitW was sort of the gaming equivalent of that. I really need to mix in more games like that as palette cleansers between my bigger titles.

The Not-Vita-2

On an investor call on Tuesday, CEO Jim Ryan indicated that Sony was about to announce some aggressive plans for cloud gaming. When you combine this with the fact that in the show they announced Project Q a game streaming handheld… my guess is that Sony is about to make a bigger play for the Gamepass/XCloud market share. The biggest problem with that is that right now… their product offering is pretty lousy. I have access to the rebranded PlayStation Now which is now confusingly called PlayStation Plus… and it isn’t that great. The gameplay hitches constantly and there is zero support for auto-resuming your last progress like you can with XCloud. Fundamentally if Sony wants to make a play for this market they need to update their infrastructure and improve their overall product offering. That is not to say that they can’t do precisely this… and honestly, I HOPE they do. What I want from Sony is the ability to stream every single game that I own on my account over a PC or Mobile device with full access to the latest save state for all of them. That said I likely won’t be buying this device that looks like Earl from R&D sawed a PS5 controller in half and J-B Welded it to an Android Tablet. A device like this needs to come in around $100 for it to really be successful, and knowing Sony we are probably looking at another $300 appendage to an already $500 console. Until then it will just be better to keep buying cheap Android devices for this purpose.

What were your favorites?

I am sure I missed some that were crowd favorites. Like I did not talk about the Destiny 2 expansion trailer that shows the return of Cayde-6. I am not entirely certain how I feel about that one. If they can bring back a character that they spent so much time killing off… maybe they can bring back all of that content that I paid for that is now cut from the game. I’m largely checked out of Destiny 2 so I didn’t spend much time on this one. What were some of the games that I did not talk about that excited you? Drop me a line below. I think for the most part it was a very strong showing for Sony, and with the news coming out that it is likely going to be three or more years before exclusives release on PC… I guess I will have to suck it up and learn to enjoy playing on a console with a controller so I can experience some of these games. The post May 2023 Sony State of Play appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

First Week on PC

First Week on PC

This is one of those mornings when I am not even sure where to start the post.  It is like I have all of these disconnected thoughts in my head and am having a very hard time wrangling them together into something that follows any manner of logical progression.  Destiny 2 released on the PC last Tuesday and since then I have played a significant amount of it, only really taking a single night off to go do something else.  According to WastedOnDestiny.com I’ve played 32 hours of the game since release…  which is officially more than I played Destiny 1 on the Xbox One.  On the PS4 I managed to make it to 267 in that very first week, and on PC I managed to break the 265 cap and push on to 271 which makes me happy.  I am nowhere near as lucky as my friend Raz was…  who is sitting at something crazy like 282.  There are ways to do this…  but they involve madness and way more grinding than I was able to get in this week or really wanted to do.  Additionally I started working on secondary characters and managed to push the Hunter to 18 while recording the podcast… and finished leveling it to 20 and making it through all but the final quest last night.  I also started up my Warlock and got her to level 8, which was mostly about getting my 5000 clan xp to help level Greysky Armada.  We managed to hit rank 3 which is extremely awesome and is largely made possible by the fact that myself and Wolfy started leveling the clan a bit on PS4 before the release of PC.

First Week on PC

On Friday night we decided to give the Nightfall a go, which in truth I was uncertain about given that I only actually completed the Nightfall once on the PS4 side… and even then it was a bit of a pain in the ass.  I also remembered us being significantly higher than the 250ish we were when we tried it.  Together Tamrielo, RustySpork and I managed to get the boss down with about 3 minutes left on the clock, which is not good enough for the rat king…  but makes me happy nonetheless.  Yesterday afternoon I gave it another attempt with Mor and Grace and once again finished…  but just barely with me taking down the boss via a couple of pulse grenades and auto rifle fire at about the 1 second left on the clock mark.  Mor was just barely at the 240ish requirement for zoning in, so I feel like in the future so long as we are bringing in 260s we should be fine for this.  This week also was a bit of an aberration in that it was extremely easy to cheese the objectives because of the modifier giving us insane grenade and melee regeneration.  Striker Titan with double grenades meant I could clean out a bunch of adds almost as fast as I could throw them.  They still hit insanely hard though and I just don’t have the recovery yet that I really should for doing harder content.  This largely comes from just wearing a bunch of scraps instead of something resembling a full set of gear.  I am really hoping in a few weeks I can get the full set of Titan Iron Banner gear again because it makes for a really excellent base for shenanigans.

First Week on PC

I would have finished the Hunter but instead I took a lengthy break Sunday afternoon and worked on doing the weekly milestones on the PS4 side of the pond.  I have to say after playing so much PC…  the console version just feels sluggish and odd.  Everything seems to move more slowly, which makes the crucible much easier…  but everything else feel really odd.  Not only was the visual fidelity much lower than even my laptop running at greatly downgraded settings…  but just the movement speed of my character felt slower.  I noticed this when doing some of the intro missions where you are limping through the city…  on the console there was a specific point I could make it to before my character was forced to pause for a moment.  On the PC I could make it considerably past that point before I was forcibly halted, so my running theory is that the PC version just has faster movement speeds.  Weirdness aside I did manage to get used to the controller again and finish up Clan XP, Call to Arms and Flashpoint milestones which were enough to finish pushing me to 305.  I feel much better hibernating the character now that it is sitting at the level cap rather than being just slightly under it.  I will probably keep logging in at least once a week to finish off these easy milestones however because I feel like I need to keep contributing some Clan XP to TQMB in addition to all the work I am doing PC side with GREY.  Eventually once I have gotten my PC characters to a more manageable state I am sure I will start doing those three main milestones on six characters…  3 on PC and 3 on PS4.  It takes me roughly an hour to do all of the things needed to earn those three luminous engrams, and after a point that becomes my routine of logging in a new character each night and getting their progress.

First Week on PC

I am absolutely loving playing the game on PC because it fits my play style considerably better.  With the console it forced me to be in the room I have my PS4 set up in, but with PC  I can either be playing it on my gaming desktop or downstairs on my laptop.  The laptop doesn’t run it perfectly and I am having to throttle it down to 720 p and a few other considerations…  but it runs well enough for me to be able to do almost anything I might need to do.  For something like a Nightfall where there is a timer on the line I wouldn’t want to push it…  but It is more than fine for some strikes or crucible.  My activity of choice however is still doing public events and random token farming through chests and patrols.  My goal for tonight is to attempt to push the hunter through the various things needed to unlock her three easy luminous engrams, and then to maybe get her through the Nightfall.  From there my goal by next weeks reset is to have my Warlock finished off so I can start triple dipping on the powerful rewards front.  While it has been a pure joy starting over on the PC…  I do still want to arrive back at where I left off…  and hopefully in a much faster time frame than the seven weeks it took to get me there on console.  I am booned by the fact that the game seems to have traction among the AggroChat crew and with that means that there is likely going to be raiding before too much longer.  I am assuming the raid will open up tomorrow much like it did on the console side, and then I am assuming next week we will have faction rally once more.  Destiny 2 on PC is pretty much everything I had hoped it would be.