Only when it comes to Sony games do people complain about sequels sharing too many element from the first game. People expect Playstation studios to reinvent the wheel for every franchise they make after one game. They cant even get to a sequel without people complaing, but they will ignore other franchises that are at 4 or 9. This is a recently new phenomenon as well, because you never heard people say this about 3rd party games like Dark Souls 2, Zelda Tears of the Kingdon, Doom Eternal, Yakuza: like a Dragon, etc. I dont hear anyone complaining about Death Stranding 2.; a game where you deliver packages as well.
If you diverge too far away from the first game, then you arent making a sequel, you're making a whole new game and run the risk of alienating your fan base. If Fromsoft was to make an Elden Ring 2, you wouldnt hear any of these same complaints, despite the fact that all of their souls games look and play the same. They practically share the same assets. When Insomniac or Santa Monica makes a sequel to game that shares assets because its based on a specific location and character design, then people want to say "its too samey", lol. I know Im not the only one that sees through this.
Its disingenuous criticism as well because there are plenty of new features that make this game different from the sequel; like being able to go after bounties, having different weapons, a camp system that allows you to meet NPCS and cook, a different map, a different protagonist and story, being able to interrogate enemies for clues, or go back into the past as a child.
Its almost like we're living in the twilight zone when it comes to Playstation games. If cheese pizza was invented today, these same people would complain about peperoni pizza and say its dissapointing, because it shares the same cheese and bread as the original. Like they expect the chef that created it to abandon the receipe and find lightening in a bottle again.
FWIW there have been people saying similar things with the Yakuza games of late, that they feel too iterative and in that IP's case it's in part because they do clearly reuse assets & have been pumping them out every couple of years now. So it's not a complaint levied at this SIE games. There were some complaining that TOTK felt like more of the original instead of a "true" sequel.
There are definitely some people being disingenuous in their criticisms over GOY, but that's not the case for everyone.
I read this thread before watching it, so had low expectations.
Seems like a quintessential Playstation experience. Great audiovisual experience so play on good quality screen and audio system.
With sprinkles of fun - ish combat systems to keep it entertaining.
If this is what you are looking for, not sure why are you disappointed.
Examining rock textures close ups are not the good way to go about in this hobby IMO.
Yeah because GT7 is all about being on-foot and looking at rocks the whole time for pictures
That wasn't a problem at that time, and I wouldn't say it's the problem now. Open worlds can only be designed in so many ways, and no one had too much an issue with SM, Horizon, or even Ghost or Days Gone on the level of being "Ubisoft" games. Whatever you want to say about them, each, barring Ghost, was a major design departure for those studios. For Insomniac to bang out Spider-Man in less than 4 years after Sunset Overdrive was impressive, and the game fired on almost all cylinders. Gameplay, story, tech. Could the open world design be more immersive? Sure. But given the time and technology at hand, it would've ballooned the resources required for that game. The same goes for Horizon, which actually did get a little design boost between installments.
I definitely do not see how Ubisoft anything applies to GoW or TLOU.
The problem now is that we're five years into the gen, and not a single one of these studios has advanced in the gameplay or tech front, while having degraded on the creative/story front. And they're taking even longer and spending more money to put out these games that are reusing so many assets as to look indistinguishable at first glance.
Yotei is looking like the worst offender. And it's just so creatively uninspired. Feels like the primary aim is to just radiate samurai media medley Vibes. "Customize your experience to resemble one of these influences we've done nothing interesting with because we don't want to make a focused game".
Like, the section about the music comes off as if Sucker Punch was more interested in pulling obscure names from anime and media a few guys at the studio are nerds for than making this game distinct in any major way.
I don't think Yotei is creatively uninspired, at least in areas like the art direction, which is great. And some aspects of game mechanics given so far seem like notable improvements, such as the card clue system (how deep that gets, we don't know yet). However, other choices seem odd, like getting rid of stances altogether in favor of weapon choice swaps; this would've been a great time to implement both to open up some crazy combat potential.
IMO, SIE studios have built themselves into being considered industry leaders in this cinematic gaming space, so it shouldn't be surprising that people have expectations of progress in that template they want to see met. Combined with games taking longer to make these days, I think with SIE's 1P AAA that leaves less room for "simply" safe & iterative sequels, when that could be the only release from a studio that gen. These are consequences of design choices in the creative process, not hardware bottlenecks, so people using that excuse don't have ground to stand on.
There was a time during the PS3 and even most of PS4 gen where SIE's single-player cinematic games felt heads & shoulders above other studios when it came to the immersion & storytelling factors alongside tight core gameplay. I'd say only Rockstar managed to first start closing the gap, because they were the closest competitor to SIE's studios in that area even in 7th gen between GTA4 and LA Noire. But over time, the gap between SIE's studios in that space and 3P has shrunken considerably, and if you ask some people they might say certain 3P have surpassed SIE's 1P studios in terms of narrative story-driven AAA, even among the cinematic variety. Death Stranding 2 is one example I see come up, and I'm sure GTA6 will be another next year.
And like I was saying elsewhere, I think the PC strategy is having some negative impact in terms of appreciating visual jumps for these sequels. GOT vs GOY on base PS hardware (PS4, PS5) should be the point of comparison, but I'm sure a lot of people are picturing GOT on high-end PCs running at 60 FPS and maybe even with graphics mod packs for textures & other features so, to them, GOY doesn't seem as impressive a visual jump. That type of sentiment is only going to grow over time, IMO.
I half-agree with this, and it's not this game/studio's fault that we ended up here.
Disregarding all other complaints (like amount of dev years, delays, culture wars, etc.), this is what things currently look like at Sony:
Horizon - Third person Action/Adventure
Intergalactic - Third person Action/Adventure
Ghosts of Yotei - Third person Action/Adventure
God of War - Third person Action/Adventure
Spiderman - Third person Action/Adventure
Wolverine - Third person Action/Adventure
And then there's:
Astro Bot - Third person Platformer
Helldivers 2 - Third person Shooter
Returnal - Third person Shooter
Gran Turismo 7 - Racing game
If you count a couple of third party exclusives (like Death Stranding 2), their portfolio is simply too stacked on one genre, so I can understand the Sony fatigue. I don't have the fatigue myself, but I can see why others here do.
They have lost First Person Shooter, JRPG, and Choice-based Narrative as 1st party genres since last gen (letting 3rd party exclusives take JRPG), and the studio who was making them exclusive Soulslike games has also moved on.
We will see what happens this upcoming generation, but one would hope that they give either Guerilla, SSM, or Sucker Punch a different genre to work on next. It would be a good mixup and dev challenge for them.
Staying in the third-person action/adventure niche in itself isn't necessarily an issue. It's an inability to innovate in that niche in ways meaningful to the intent of the subgenre in a way that feels significant. The main innovations have been in going open-world and adding (at times convoluted) RPG mechanics & crafting systems, but if you think about the stories themselves and how they are being told, in most cases it hasn't evolved since 7th gen.
Now, Yotei could be a big evolution point of that. Maybe the story develops in completely different ways depending on the order you take on going after the six main bad guys. Maybe you'll have a choice in actually not killing a few of them which could influence the story even further. So you could potentially have at least six major storylines that develop while playing based on what order you go about the targets.
However, I have big doubts that's what Yotei is going to do, because AFAIK no AAA open-world game has taken that approach, likely both out of fear players won't replay the game that much, and because the amount of content these open-world games have
tricked themselves been pushed into providing runs antithetical to that style as people aren't going to put 300+ hours in a game to unlock six storylines.
I was surprised by how similar ds2 felt but this is on another level of familiar. I think i was too harsh calling ragnorak and ds2 dlc, nah this is dlc.
I think the problem is that they take too long to make these games nowadays. They still think they are in the mid 2000s and are churning out games every 2 years but they are taking 5 years and somehow can't figure out how to add meaningful changes to the formula to keep things fresh. So they settle for what worked the last time.
I think we put our faith in the wrong company. They will not set the bar like they did the last two gens. They are effectively making b tier Ubisoft games but with above average storytelling and the same core gameplay loop that won awards the last time around. Its the very definition of playing safe.
Okay, so who's the other company we were supposed to put our faith into? I hope you aren't gonna say the one that's firing 9K people, closed down several studios, and are banking on nothing but super-safe IP themselves going forward....
And outside of them, among AAA there aren't that many making these types of cinematic story-driven games. You have Rockstar, you have Kojima Productions, you have EA once in a blue moon, you've got CDPR, you've got Square-Enix, you've got Capcom and you've got Ubisoft. What are they doing in this space that's fundamentally different from what SIE's studios are doing, especially when comparing sequels to previous installments?
IMO the problem with evolution of the cinematic game template (or lack thereof) the past 5-10 years is kind of an industry-wide problem in the AAA space, and directly tied to issues regarding dev bloat, budgets, required manpower & time of development. We might have better luck in the next game design breakthroughs in the AA space, or indie devs who scale up to AA, looking to take a stab in that genre space.
Hug? The only real enhancements the PC version has over the PS5 version is DLSS and a bit further draw distance on grass with some slightly sharper shadows. In screenshots most people won't even be able to tell the difference between PS5 and the PC version at 4K, unless it's a scene with the grass draw distance highlighted. DF specifically mentioned the PC has very little upgrades over the PS5.
Well for one, DF are usually wrong these days so I wouldn't take much stock in their word on analysis. As for comparison, I was speaking about Tsushima on base PS4 or PS4 Pro, as that's how most people played the game, compared to Yotei on base PS5 or PS5 Pro.
The PC port did offer higher resolution, ultrawide, some better lighting in area and other things. You also have mods for PC like this one:
which give even further visual boosts. This type of stuff doesn't go unnoticed and I feel some people do keep it in mind when comparing Yotei to Tsushima, fairly or unfairly.
I think the biggest issue is that it took too long.
S0ULZB0URNE
was arguing over Helldivers not being a Sony IP due to some AI fuckery. AI is fucking garbage.
