Ghosts of Tsushima may be the best Playstation game I have played EVER. It's a testament to how late in the console release cycle, developers are just now mastering internals. It's the ideal video game: open world, 13-century feudal Japan, Age of the Samurai. High contrast "Kurosawa" mode, 4K HDR is cinematically photoreal. I really hope it remains a Major IP for many years to come ;)
I just finished playing through Horizon Zero Dawn which had been untouched, collecting dust on the shelf for a couple years. Found more time in the pandemic and I'm wondering what else I've missed out on! The only other titles I've played with great acclaim are God of War and Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
From a brief wiki search, it seems outside of Nintendo, studios only tend to have one-hit wonders. I never played the Infamous games, but will take you on your word on Ghosts of Tsushima.
- Witcher 3 brought me back to gaming after a 10+ year hiatus. While not perfect, it's the best/most immersive game I have ever played. Thanks to truly incredible writing, an interesting, engaging world where small side quests are some of the best content, good graphics that still hold up very well (especially with mods on PC, but just fine on console). All built on a foundation of very solid combat and gameplay.
- "Nier Automata" is an unusual experience that smoothly blends very different combat styles and has a mind-boggling, thought-provoking story.
Nier Automata is just something else. Not every part of the game is that well executed, but the music alone is worth the price of entry and the emotional payoff in the story makes me forgive the many clunky elements.
I'm so glad I gave it a chance, because battle androids in maid costumes was not something that got my attention for the right reasons. Skill Up's review on YouTube is what tipped me over the edge - he expressed he had many of the same concerns going in.
I'd say Witcher 2 is at least close, just smaller and less refined. The potion system is significantly more interesting in my opinion. That said, 3 is a masterpiece.
Even the original Witcher game is solid and has some interesting systems for its time. I wouldn't recommend it though to anyone who doesn't have an absurd amount of free time, or a real passion for the characters. It's been really neat watching CD Projekt step up their game, as it were, over the years.
Witcher 1 had some serious pacing issues, but I personally enjoyed it more than 2. 2 got too flash for me, whereas 1 was more about the characters and the story.
But it most DEFINITELY had pacing issues around the swamp area.
Witcher 2 is a good introduction to the state of the world in 3. You can read the books (or watch the whole series after it concludes), play 2 and understand the geopolitics of 3. It is also short, has a good but nearly-linear story (there are choices that significantly change your playthrough and outcomes, but when you play a second time taking the other road at every fork you've seen it all) and can be had for cheap. Oh, and it has a really touching story arc with the best love scene I've ever seen in any game.
Witcher 1 was a good game for its time, but unless you consider yourself a serious fan of the universe, I would recommend skipping. It's the only one in which Sapkowski was involved, it has some very good dialogues in random places and it's the only one which gives you a very good feel for what a "normal" Witcher's life is. But the voice acting is only good in Polish, up to the point it's recommended everyone use Polish audio with subtitles if they don't speak the language. And the plot is quite disconnected from the books -> Witcher 2 -> 3 line (I'm really bummed we never got closure on the plot of 1).
No, but you'd very possibly do yourself a disservice by skipping them.
Personally I prefer the first two games over the third in most respects, with notable exceptions for graphical polish and inventory management.
I watched the TV series first, and Witcher 3 has a much better and coherent story than the TV show even though the game picks up after the events of Witcher 1/2. I finished the game mostly for the stories.
Even having read all the material and played all the games, the show was pretty convoluted and confused me until near the end. The time jumps give little to no notice.
They could've very easily had text on the screen saying what time period the current scene was in. It seems like they left it out deliberately for artistic reasons and many people have been confused as a result.
It does stray quite far from the books though. Especially the angle on infertility is hilarious. In books the infertility was a side effect of hormonal imbalance caused by the use of magic. Impossible to recover from for males, nearly impossible for females. With how they changed it in the series, I wonder how are they going to explain all those important characters, Geralt included, being sons of sorceresses.
They could have very easily made the series a collection of short stories too, but they trued to tie them tigether in an incoherent way instead. Very poor attempt, in my opinion, and I often enjoy cheap TV shows.
I second the HZD recommendation – it's one of the best video games I've ever played. Funny thing is if I hadn't bought an HDR tv I'd probably never pick up the game, mechanized dinosaurs didn't really float my boat and I never saw a trailer or read the synopsis for the game. I bought it dirt cheap on sale only because it said it had HDR support and I wanted to see what difference it'd make in a game. Turns out it was stunningly gorgeous, great gameplay and a compelling story to boot!
I'm getting a PS5 this winter or next year, chiefly because of the Horizon Zero Dawn sequel – I desperately want to see where they take the story.
Metal Gear Solid 5 remains one of the most fun games I played this generation. The storyline is dumb even by MGS standards, but the gameplay is absolutely phenomenal. Every feature just clicks together.
It also manages to avoid, for the most part, the pitfalls open world games fall in to (huge spans to cross with nothing happening, fetch missions, collect missions etc).
Infiltrating and exfiltrating a compound, whichever way you can think of, in the Afghan desert with none of the fancy SONAR or gadgetry of other MGS titles is what the series has clearly wished it was since day one.
> Infiltrating and exfiltrating a compound, whichever way you can think of, in the Afghan desert with none of the fancy SONAR or gadgetry of other MGS titles is what the series has clearly wished it was since day one
That sounds exactly like “The Wild Geese”, the movie Kojima got the idea for stealth gameplay from: https://youtu.be/G0xy-XdMqS4
The games I enjoyed most over the past few years, in no particular order, are Red Dead Redemption 2, Spiderman, The Last of Us Remastered, Detroit Become Human, Bloodborne, Days Gone, Shadow of the Collossus remake. And in 2D, I loooooved Hollow Knight,
And of the ones already mentioned: God of War, The Witcher 3, Horizon Zero Dawn, Ghost of Tsushima.
The Infamous games were ok. Not great, but not bad. Ghist of Tsushima is vastly better than their previous titles, IMHO.
If you're at all into 'platformers', I highly recommend Celeste, Hollow Knight, and Ori and the Blind Forest. These are some of the best in the genre and pretty cheap to boot.
The GoW games on a PS2(console, not emulated) are amazing, especially considering it's a 20 year old system. I still prefer them to the newer GoW on PS4.
Wow - I'm really sorry you've only been exposed to bad video games until now. It's a decent game but it doesn't even come close to the best game I've ever played.
I agree with the sentiment that video games back in the day were more elaborate in other ways that matter more than what is done today. Several good or promising franchises have also been totally ruined by becoming big.
As soon as it's making large amounts of money, it garners attention from the kind of people who don't really care about anything but making money. DLCs and all the other bad shit is because the people in power aren't the ones that are passionate about making great things.
As every other mainstream game for the last ten to fifteen years, give or take, it's just a forced course of action narratively illustrated by an interrupted sequence of dull cinematic scenes; the player just follows along with very limited space--if any--for exploration, decision-making, flexibility or creativity. The open world experience is ridiculously limited, as well. Does it look good? Sure! (Although every game uses the same game engines now, making them almost identical visually). But that's not the only thing that I expect from the format.
Let's be honest here: videogames aren't nearly as elaborate as many of them were just one or two decades ago, when many developers were having fun making them and putting in tons of effort without as many market constrictions and demands. Then you have, on the other hand, indie games, which tend to be just a glorified demo which uses technical limitations to its advantage, mainly aesthetically.
If somebody showed me how videogames would look when I was a kid, in 2000, twenty years in the future, I would have been incredibly disappointed. Besides them looking more immersive and VR being far more advanced, I'd have expected that the player had become an active participant, the effective subject of the game, instead of a passive spectator that just consooms whatever's put in front of them without any critical thought.
> very limited space--if any--for exploration, decision-making, flexibility or creativity
If that's your criteria, then I really think the last 10-15 years of gaming has seen more of that than the earlier decades. Minecraft, Kerball Space Program, Factorio, Subnautica, Stardew Valley and many more have become mega-hits even if they didn't originate in the mainstream. Their influence on the mainstream games (Fortnite) is undeniable and has forced gaming in better directions, particular towards exploration and creativity. I was a kid in 2000 as well and if you had shown me Minecraft then, I would have been head-over-heels. Sure, there's still on-rails shooters if you want them and a lot of games are "open world" ala Far Cry 3's map-of-checkboxes-to-tick and not "open world" ala Minecraft. But gaming as a whole gives way more options (even just among best-sellers) for creativity, expression, and exploration than ever before. We're in a golden age for the medium right now and if I could experience that through the same eyes I had growing up, I'd be awed.
> Let's be honest here: videogames aren't nearly as elaborate as many of them were just one or two decades ago, when many developers were having fun making them and putting in tons of effort without as many market constrictions and demands. Then you have, on the other hand, indie games, which tend to be just a glorified demo which uses technical limitations to its advantage, mainly aesthetically.
I'll agree with other commenters pointing out the wealth of amazing games that fit neither category you describe. Hollow Knight, for example, feels like a small team just went bananas offering a ridiculous amount of high quality content for a low price. I could name a whole bunch more that others haven't already. They're far from 'glorified demos that use technical limitations to their advantage'. Hollow Knight has been considered perhaps the best 'Metroidvania' by critics and fans alike.
Even a game like Celeste, which perhaps gets closer to being 'technically limited' and literally came from a demo game jam, is one of the best platformers I've played in my life.
The way I see it, your argument has some degree of merit insofar that the 'mainstream' of gaming got a ton bigger, more global, and more lucrative. This also happened to film and music.
But it's needlessly pessimistic to conclude that as a result there's less quality.
I'm a very picky gamer and since I don't make some artificial distinction between triple-A games and 'indie games', I could spend a hefty chunk of money on a monthly basis buying only the games I consider truly amazing. This has not been the case historically, at least in my experience.
> If somebody showed me how videogames would look when I was a kid, in 2000, twenty years in the future, I would have been incredibly disappointed.
I highly doubt it.
the witcher 2, GTA5, factorio, DOTA2, Rust. I would have dreamed to play anoy of those. You can even watch DOTA2 like its a football game with pro commentators and incredible money on the line.
Your critique of some of these bigger titles and studios is not wrong, but you are generalizing it into a farce of the modern gaming world.
Did you consider perhaps you changed, and don't have the same wonder and ability to immerse yourself in games as you did 20 years ago.
Exactly. Popular video games today are purposefully engineered products made to maximize addiction and play time with decisions being made based almost entirely on how to maximizing profit for shareholders. It's sad.
Incidentally I've been finding much more enjoyment in indie games the past few years, because these tend to be made by people who aren't doing so to become rich(though I suppose they wouldn't mind that happening along the way).
Same, but it's because Indie developers have to make trade-offs and those trade-offs result in more interesting games even if they're not as polished.
One of the reasons I was excited for VR is because I was hoping it would turn into the wild west again like it was back in the NES/SNES days where people where experimenting. You'd play a game where some stuff worked and some stuff didn't, but you appreciated the entertainment regardless.
Nowadays it's all so engineered and samey that I often find it more difficult to finish AAA games than indie games.
I liken AAA games to porn.They put a little bit of everything in there to try and appeal to as wide an audience as they can.
Back in the day, exploring the game itself and its systems used to be part of the appeal. Nowadays developers are scared to death that a player might make a decision that locks them out of content.
I think your judgement is clouded by fond memories you acquired in your youth. A child can get utterly fascinated by the most mundane things.
My subjectively positive experience of video games already declined, right around when yours peaked, even though by pretty much any standard, these newer games were better than the ones that came before them.
What? That's a wrong assumption on your part. No, you are characterizing my experiences with video games as a kid arbitrarily to support your own argument, which is--I think--just a fallacy: "the world's always been the same, it's you what's changed and you are just referencing fond but ultimately biased memories". I expected more from video games when I was a little kid, that's the whole point of my comment, so I didn't glorify them, even as a kid, to the point of having my judgement significantly clouded.
Same thing when people criticise heavy smartphone usage, for instance: "well, people watched more TV then; it's always been the same. You miss being young". You couldn't take your TV virtually everywhere, so the extent to which people distracted themselves and neglected their lives was less.
>by pretty much any standard, these newer games were better than the ones that came before them.
Watch this (or almost any other video from crowbcat): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWVtZJo-HqI. This is the tendency in video games: less resources, less elaboration; higher prices for the whole game (DLCs, Season Pass, etc.). As with anything, it's "reduce the costs, increase the benefits", as well as "make it more addictive", even at the expense of the product's quality.
I think this video largely supports the point. As someone who's played very little GTA, I don't understand what the video's trying to communicate - the only big difference I'm seeing is the higher resolution in GTA V clips.
> I don't understand what the video's trying to communicate - the only big difference I'm seeing is the higher resolution in GTA V clips.
I'm afraid it's as clear as day, but anyhow, you have it on the video's description: "Physics, gunfight, AI, melee combat, controls, interiors, multiplayer freedom". In GTA IV, almost everything looks more elaborate and polished, and it came out five years before the franchise's next instance.
I'm similarly unable to understand how this video shows Gears 5 isn't "brutal, grounded and satisfying".
It really seems like the same phenomenon I experienced with the latest first generation Pokemon remake. It has more resources, immersion, and engagement than the original releases in 1996 by any objective standard - but it feels less engaging, in some nonspecific way I've never been able to communicate to anyone didn't play the originals.
I played it after Last of Us 2 and it just doesn't compare, especially in terms of mechanics and visuals. If there's one last game to play on PS4 it's Last of Us 2.
I didn't find either of them super compelling. I never really bought into the characters so to me they were both mostly mediocre action games that tried way too hard. They weren't terrible, but I didn't agree with the hype.
I got excited when I saw this - I don't game much but my son is obsessed with samurai and would love this. However, I think it's a bit violent for him - anything similar you could recommend for a 13y/o?
You're deluding yourself if you think your 13 year old isn't consuming much worse than video game violence on a daily basis. Just let him play the game.
Yep, and then enjoy all the other amazing exclusives: the last of us one/two, drakes uncharted, god of war, horizon zero (pc did just release but is buggy), ratchet and clank,
I wouldn't be surprised if console revisions/upgrades begin coming out with even more frequency. There was only a 3.5 year gap between the PS4 and PS4 Pro. Only a 2 year gap between the Nintendo Switch and the revision with vastly improved battery life (not as big a deal as PS4 to PS4 Pro, but still a big deal for anyone who uses their switch on the go).
Personally I think I'm going to wait until the PS5 releases and then see if I can find a secondhand PS4 pro at a good price.
Gameplay, creative backstory, unique multiplayer + PVP, and countless other aspects place Dark Souls at the top of the list for me, and that’s not limited to Ps4 but all platforms.
https://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2020-shading-cours...