In my fumbling around this morning for something to talk about, I remembered a tweet that I responded to yesterday from Charlotte McGrath of the larger FunHaus gaming ecosystem. Returnal is a game from Housemarque that seems to be blending a bunch of genres… namely the rogue-lite, bullet hell shooter and maybe a little dark souls mixed in for good measure since everything wants to be the dark souls of something. Generally speaking this is not the sort of game that would garner a ton of attention, other than the fact that it is one of a scant number of PlayStation 5 exclusive titles. This is sorta like the people who were all about Snipperclips when they had five games to play on their shiny new Switch.
I am going to admit there are times I regret the purchase of my PlayStation 5. While I did not get mine on launch day, I did manage to get a preorder that arrived five days later than expected. I have been able to count myself lucky among the folks who physically have a unit in hand… but unfortunately said console mostly sits there unused. There isn’t really a game that has made me want to play it over something I already have on my PC. I think that is the key difference for me as compared to a lot of folks that end up buying a console… it is the system of last choice. I got my PlayStation 5 because my PlayStation 4 was barely holding in there. I never went through the process of upgrading to a pro model and as such I had sorta been plotting the upgrade to PS5 since it was first announced.
I think the key difference between my experience with the PS5 and my experience when I first got my hands on the PS4 is we are in this weird moment that there really aren’t that many games on the platform that I don’t already have access to in other forms. Sony is known for being the console of exclusives but right now there is just nothing pushing me to really be playing the console. I got my PS4 with the Alpha for Destiny was announced and I managed to acquire a console and get into that alpha program with those being my very first experiences on the platform. Past that there were a number of games that were sitting there waiting on me like Infamous Second Son and Resogun that I just couldn’t experience somewhere else.
The truth is, most of the games that I am playing on my PlayStation 5 are all titles that I could be playing on my PlayStation 4. However given how much better those games play… said PS4 has mostly just been mothballed since November 17th. I did add an external hard drive so that I could play more PS4 games, but given that I went with an SSD based model I still get better performance out of those games than I did on the original console. I guess for that and that alone the upgrade was worth it for me personally, but if I had a PlayStation 4 Pro… I am not sure it would have been. I have not really done much with my console since getting it that I could not have continued doing on the older hardware.
I guess lets run down the exclusives that I am aware of on the platform so far.
Astro’s Playroom – Pack in title, really great. Deserves more attention than it probably gets because it is Mario quality.
Demon’s Souls – I actually played quite a bit of this game when the console was new, because it was essentially my justification for owning the big white tower.
Destruction AllStars – was a free game through PlayStation Plus and I have it installed but have never even booted it up. eSports nonsense is not my jam.
Then you have some upcoming releases
Returnal – Comes out today, and I already talked about it above. As per the original tweet I think this is a game a lot of folks will pick up only because they have nothing exclusive to play.
Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart – this launches on June 11th and honestly is probably the reason why I bought my console if we are being completely honest. I wanted to own a PS5 by the time this game came out. I expected it to launch sooner… but it is what it is.
The challenge however is that if ANY of those games came out on the PC, I would buy them on that platform in a heartbeat. That is my platform of choice and unfortunately it is also the platform that is going through the most painful growing pains as it is nigh impossible to get a graphics card. Of the hotly sought out preorders of November, I feel like maybe I bet on the wrong horse. Had I put the same amount of effort into trying to lock down a RTX 3080 that I did into attempting to lock a PlayStation 5, I feel like I would ultimately be happier today. If there is any buyers remorse it is largely over that issue rather than the console itself. I know in June I will be thankful I have a PlayStation 5 because I love Ratchet and Clank, and will ultimately want to play Horizon Forbidden West on day one as well rather than waiting for the eventual PC launch.
I realize if we are being completely honest, we went through the same sluggish release schedule with the Nintendo Switch. As I stated earlier this console came out on March 3rd of 2017 and by March 31st I had managed to get my hands on one. The key difference however is that the Nintendo Switch had the massive juggernaut of Breath of the Wild to carry it forward. Sure that game was not exclusive to the platform… but no one actually owned a WiiU so it might as well have been exclusive? The same is not true with the PlayStation 4, which has sold around 116 million units to the roughly 13 million Wii U. It has been a little over 5 months since the launch of the PS5 and we have far less to show for it.
Nintendo had two things on their side, the first that they spaced out the big exclusive titles with Splatoon landing in July (roughly 3 months), and Super Mario Odyssey landing in October (roughly 6 months). The other thing is because of the relative lack of play of those Wii U titles, they could re-release a number of them for the new console and they would still feel fresh like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe landing around a month after the console release. The other big difference between these platforms is that the Nintendo Switch gave you new ways to play on the go, so it made sense to maybe rebuy some of your favorite third party games because the convertible nature of the platform.
The PlayStation 5 however is just a bigger and better version of the same thing you already had on your shelf. Reposting this picture as a reminder of just how damned massive it actually is. It doesn’t really allow anything to do something new that they were not already doing before. With the Nintendo Switch it became an interesting console that I often took to bed with me to play until I was falling asleep. The PS5 however is still operating in the same parameters that a dedicated console always has. Seeing as my preference will always lean towards mouse and keyboard on a PC, it serves the same role that consoles always do for me… allowing me to play games that I can’t get in any other way.
The other major change for me that happened this year is that I have been entirely remote. Seeing as I use consoles differently, that means they are all hooked up in my office so that I can easily capture video footage from them. I am finding it harder and harder to be upstairs at night seeing as it is my office all throughout the day. You might think… but Bel isn’t your gaming machine in your office? Sure it absolutely is, but I also have a laptop downstairs and am regularly playing remotely through Parsec streaming everything to that small screen in 1080p 60fps. Sure PlayStation technically has remote play, but they also have not really put the R&D work required to really make that optimized. There used to be a third party remote play client that was awesome… but Sony set out to crush its existence and kept making attempts to permanently break its ability to do interesting things. Essentially as it stands… the remote play experience is so much worse than the on box experience that it doesn’t really feel right to be streaming it.
So to answer the question posed in the topic of this post. Do I regret my PlayStation 5? Yeah a little bit, but not really for the reasons you might think. I regret that I took one of the market that could have gone into the hands of someone who would use it better. I regret not putting the same effort into trying to snag a 3080 and putting the money that I would have spent towards that goal instead. I don’t regret having the console however because eventually I will encounter a game that I really want to play that I can’t play through some other means. They are still hard to get so it isn’t like there is that reliable “I could have waited until X released” option. We had really bad ice storms in February… and it was only last week that I realized I had left my PS5 unplugged since then in an attempt to reduce power drain. That is a good illustration for how infrequently it gets used.
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Featuring: Ammo, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we are down an Ashgar but work our way through a series of topics from the list. First up Bel can in fact confirm that the PlayStation 5 exists and talks about his early experiences. From we talk a bit about Bugsnax and how it is this weird Muppet Pokemon game that also has deeply disturbing Bioshock style undertones going on. Tam talks a bit about puzzle shooter Superliminal and Kodra talks about What Remains of Edith Finch. We talk a bit about parkour ninja game Ghostrunner and Bel shares some of the recent changes to Destiny 2. Finally we wrap up with some extemporaneous viewing suggestions… Duck Tales, Animaniacs, Mandalorian and the Ashens series of movies.
Topics Discussed:
Yesterday was a bit of a cluster, as is the days that most console pre-orders go live. I was expecting something calm and orderly as it seemed to be with Sony’s system of signing up to pre-order, but that was not the case. Above is a link to the PlayStation 5 show that started at 3 pm my time and finally dropped the official price and release dates of the console. The all digital version I had been wanting would be going for $399 and the disc version for $499 and both consoles would be available starting November 12th. The consoles were to go up for pre-order on the 17th… aka today as I am writing this. That however is not at all what happened.
GameStop stores started doing in person pre-orders as the show as going on, and Walmart started their pre-order machine around 5:30 pm my time and was sold out before I had even managed to put one in my cart. Target dropped their pre-orders around 6:30 my time, and I had one in the cart but it sold out before I managed to successfully check out. Best Buy followed suit around 7 pm and once again I had one in the cart but they sold out while I was attempting to check out. Game Stop started online pre-orders around that time and by the time I even got the link they were sold out for both units. My last and only chance was Amazon and seemingly they started pre-orders at 10:30 last night… whereas I went to bed around 10:20 and once again missed the boat.
The logical part of my brain is telling me that there won’t be a single title that HAS to be played on the console until at least summer of 2021. However I am more than a little disappointed because I skipped upgrading to the PlayStation Pro thinking that the PS5 was just around the corner. As a result there is a huge backlog of PlayStation 4 era games that I have been waiting on diving into because I wanted to be able to play them in 4k. Once you get used to 4k there really is no going back, and I have been playing my PC Titles at that resolution for quite some time. Going back to the base PlayStation 4 just feels bad. Maybe I can snag a restock at some point along the line, but it seems like it is just not in the cards for me to get a PlayStation 5 this year.
So you remember that nonsense of signing up for the chance to pre-order through Sony? Well it turns out those emails also went out yesterday around 9 pm, with a second wave going out around 10 pm. I did not get an email in either case so that seemingly turned out to be nothing. This lottery is also not a guarantee, but instead you are given a unique URL that you then have to click on and try and order along with everyone else doing the same thing on Friday at 10 am Pacific Time. This too will sell out, so even if you did manage to be among the chosen by Sony, it is likely going to be another cast of fastest fingers first.
In the proud tradition of assholes flipping pre-orders, at the time of writing this there are 1919 sold listings for a PlayStation 5 on Ebay. I knew that more or less based on past experience that it would be secure a pre-order or just not have access to a PlayStation 5 this calendar year. In the past I was always one of those folks trying to get them after they were already long sold out. The first console I remember having extreme shortages for was the Nintendo Entertainment System, but the first I actively sought out was the Nintendo 64. It was the summer of the next calendar year before I was able to find one that was in store and available for purchase. With the PlayStation 2 I completely missed the boat and lucked into someone who had effectively bankrupted themselves buying it in the first place and picked it up second hand. Nintendo Wii and Nintendo Switch… I want to say I managed to pick them both up a good 4 or 5 months after the release as the major restock waves hit.
The frustrating part is that I probably could have easily scored a disc model if I wanted that. However I have been focused on trying to get one of the elusive unicorn all digital models. I say they are illusive because in all of the cases I talked about above, the Digital was the first to completely sell out. This seems to be because Sony maybe underestimated the demand for those who are like me and have zero use for a physical drive. So far I have been seeing reports that retailers are getting roughly 20% of the number of Digital units that they are physical units. In the case of GameStop this was reported to be an allocation of 10 physical units and 2 digital units per store.
Yesterday Microsoft threw a not insignificant amount of shade at the fiasco going on with the PlayStation 5 pre-orders. They begin taking pre-orders next Tuesday and are promising that they will all go live at the same time and folks will know exactly when that times is. I guess time will tell if they can somehow manage to wrangle all of the third party vendors into following the company line. I expect that it will be just as chaotic as the PlayStation mess turned out to be. Fortunately or unfortunately depending on the point of view, I will not be participating because the new Microsoft console doesn’t really do much for me personally. I think it is a phenomenal deal if you are a console only gamer, but I have a PC and I have access to pretty much all of the same games. The PlayStation has always been about exclusive titles and I have a backlog of those that I had been wanting to wait and play in a higher resolution.
The Ninth Generation of consoles has begun like so many before it as a chaotic train wreck. I expect that I will be able to get a PlayStation 5 next March once the supply loosens up a bit. Maybe by then there will be some exclusive titles to play on it. March seems to be when I get new consoles, I remember getting my PlayStation 4 right after Infamous Second Son released in 2014. If you were hunting a pre-order I hope you got one, but I have a feeling that most of us will not have. As we try and snipe any restocks… may the odds be ever in your favor.
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Last night was a rough night. I got unceremoniously startled awake by our youngest cat at two in the morning and struggled to get back to sleep. While I have never been diagnosed with having a panic attack, I had what I can only deem as one. It felt like my heart was beating out of my chest even though both my blood pressure and heart rate were in the normal ranges. On top of that I could not get my mind to shut off.
This morning I have to go into work, which in the time of largely unchecked COVID-19 spread is always stressful given that there is no legitimate reason why I should need to do this thing other than for “face” with my management. On the way into work I have to drop our eldest cat at the vet for a glucose check, and if she so much as gets a hint of the cat carrier being around she freaks out and often pisses all over whoever is carrying her. Basically my brain went into overdrive running through the worst possible scenarios of how my morning was going to go… all the while ensuring that my day was going to be shit due to sleep deprivation.
A few weeks back I shared my concerns about how successful this console generation launch would ultimately be, and last night it seems some of those concerns were at least warranted. The reluctance of both Microsoft and Sony to reveal pricing and start pre-orders made me think that in both cases supplies for 2020 would be exceptionally limited if for no reason other than the constraints of ramping up production during a pandemic. Last night emails went out to Sony account holders, but I am not exactly sure what determined getting one versus the many folks who did not. I am wondering in my case if it was tied to PlayStation Plus access, because I have long considered that just part of the cost of owning a PlayStation console.
The email is not a preorder notice… but instead a notice that you can now register for the opportunity to preorder a console. The verbiage contained within the email and on the registration page goes a little something like this.
There will be a limited quantity of PS5 consoles available for pre-order, so we will be inviting some of our existing consumers to be one of the first to pre-order one from PlayStation.Sony Playstation 5 Pre-Order Registration Email
If you did not get one of the emails you can register through the page on PlayStation.com. I signed up because I had avoided purchasing a PlayStation 4 Pro in part because I was planning on upgrading to the 5 this year. I’ve squirreled away some cash for this purpose and have already prepared the spouse for this expense. In theory once the pre-orders open I will pop in and try and reserve a unit, but I do feel like I will be racing the bots.
When you submit your registration you are asked to provide your PlayStation ID, which is likely there to try and stop bots from scooping these all up to scalp for a premium. That said I would not be surprised if those same craigslist/ebay flippers are now instead creating a number of bogus PlayStation accounts, since you can do that without owning a console. It does however make me wonder if they are going to prioritize this system somehow, so that the first wave is to folks who have verified ownership of a PlayStation 4 and an active PlayStation Plus account or something along those lines. It will be interesting to see how this system plays out.
The majority of my game time last night was spent snuggling with cats on the sofa and playing some more New World. This time I started the game in a vastly different location than I did during my first test, and as a result getting to other territories seems considerably easier. As such I have popped over to the next settlement that the quest chain sent me to. However the quests I am being given are still sending me back across the border for various objectives.
I’ve leveled to 17 so far, and I believe the highest I had gotten in the previous test was somewhere in the vicinity of 25. My first time in the game I was picking abilities from all over the place and as a result I created something that felt very uneven to play. Now that I have focused largely on the defensive tree for sword and equipped a full set of heavy armor I feel considerably more sturdy than I was previously. As a result I seem to be able to take encounters that are significantly higher than my level, and have successfully defeated packs of 23ish mobs that aggro’d onto me while exploring.
Last night I found myself however switching things up and starting to level healing staff a bit. I found out that it seems weapon experience is gained by whatever weapon you last damaged the mob with. So I can whittle something down with Sword and Shield, and then swap quickly to Healing Staff and get that last hit in allowing that weapon to soak the benefit of the full experience. As a result I have poured on some very quick levels and at the very least now have that AOE pulse heal which comes in handy for recovering from a rough encounter.
One of the biggest frustrations that I have had so far in combat is really a two fold problem. Firstly I really hate how hard it can be to get a tag in on a mob when there are multiple people fighting it, as instead you end up registering hits on the players (and since I am not flagged it is effectively damage that just poofs). The second frustration is how seemingly random the aggro table seems to be on mobs. I would be interested to see how the formula actually works because the game seems to be fairly unacceptable to trains, aka where a large number of disengaging mobs chain onto a new target. I noticed this happen a few times in the previous test and I have seen it happen to me a few times here to a lesser extent.
All in all though, I am still really enjoying myself. As Bhagpuss said in his comment yesterday, if it released tomorrow I would likely happily play it in production while they stomp any residual bugs over time. I did not at all expect myself to enjoy the game in the way I have, and I am interested to see how it shapes as it nears release.
The post The Next Town Over appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
consoles available for pre-order, so we will be inviting some of our existing consumers to be one of the first to pre-order one from PlayStation.Sony Playstation 5 Pre-Order Registration Email
