The Monday letters page is more than happy for the Switch 2 to become a port machine, as one reader recommends indie game Aero GPX.
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Only one
Interesting to read about how the PlayStation 5 is doing in the UK and worldwide, the short story being well, but not as well as the PlayStation 4. To us ordinary mortals that doesn’t sound like such a bad thing but for a corporation it’s got to be growth all the way or execs don’t get their bonuses. It also reinforces the idea that the console market is not growing in general.
As GC points out, the traditional reaction to slowing sales is to release a new console, which Microsoft is already doing with the next gen Xbox, whatever it is. But I think it’s pretty obvious from chatter online that nobody has much appetite for the PlayStation 6 right now.
What seems even more unwanted is the PS5 Pro. I know, obviously, you don’t have to buy it but we all have to sit through the marketing for it, as Sony try to convince us to spend £500 on a new console and then a few months later try and convince us to do the same for the PlayStation 6.
The PS4 Pro was largely pointless in terms of what it did, but Sony needed it to combat the Xbox One X. They don’t need a PS5 Pro though. They’re well ahead of Xbox and there’s no sign of an equivalent, whatever dumb name they’d give it, from Microsoft. If a PlayStation 6 needs to come out in two years then so be it, but please let’s not have another one before that.
Cranston
Lee side
So, GTA 6 is pretty much confirmed to be coming out next autumn. Nothing else really makes sense given what we know at the moment, and the fact that there’s no sign of a second trailer yet. I think that’s what everyone expected though, so no problems there.
It’s funny thinking we’re in the calm before the storm though, because next year is going to be absolutely insane in terms of hype. By this time next year fans are going to be absolutely drooling for the game, and I hate to think how many leaks and crazy stories we’ll have about it.
But here’s a question: how long will it take the hype to go back down? We know it probably won’t get any story DLC so the only thing keeping it alive will be GTA Online, which doesn’t tend to make many headlines. I’m not saying the game will stop selling – ever – but at what point will it stop being the only thing people are talking about? Whenever it is, I don’t think it’ll be till at least 2026.
Gifford
Borderline failure
Pretty hilarious how bad the Borderlands movie is doing; it’s one of the biggest flops of all time already! I think the main problem is that it’s so badly cast. None of the actors look right for the role and they’ve even managed to get things like Claptrap wrong. Why not just use the original voiceover actor, instead of just having Jack Black being Jack Black?
That said, I’m not sure why it’s flopped quite this hard. Borderlands is full of dumb dad jokes and obnoxious characters and so is this, so it’s not like it’s that different.
I think the truth is most people don’t actually like the humour in the games, and they just put up with it because it’s a fun co-op game. Mind you, releasing the film now, when it’s been five years since the last sequel, probably wasn’t a good idea. Announcing Borderlands 4 is going to be super awkward after all this though. Maybe they’ll make it a serious drama instead?
Korey
Final disappointment
I’ve come to realise two things this weekend: bigger is never better and Housemarque should make the next Earth Defense Force.
Slight spoilers here, but the final level for the recent EDF was utter rubbish. Having spent so many missions building up an arsenal of weapons, battling a vast horde of enemies coming at me in different sizes/formations/frequencies, I thought my skills and choice of weapons would be put to the test for the finale.
Instead, I shoot a massive phallus-shaped space dragon from afar who does very little damage, a few minor enemies turn up, much dialogue later and I win. Talk about a letdown, I was hoping to blow up a million bugs instead!
But sadly this is not new. I always remember the Mortal Kombat final bosses, from the PlayStation 2 era onwards, being large skilless entities that require you just to spam the same move over and over.
The final for any game involving action should be a test of the players skills, not rubbish like this.
Liam
Give it time
RE: Darkest Dungeon 2. The first one is one of my favourite games of this generation and I put about 250 hours into it, so have been looking forward to the sequel.
First impressions were: ‘What is this awful stagecoach?’ And the game is baffling, with so much going on. But your review is spot on, that once you start to get a hang of the mechanics then it all clicks and I’m now doing hours long play sessions on it and loving it.
I would have been happy with 1 with a lick of paint, to be honest, so fair play for them mixing it up a bit.
Simon
Port machine
Agree with the letter on Friday, about potential Switch 2 ports, that there may be many third party publishers bringing PlayStation 4 titles over is quite obvious and not that interesting. On the Switch, publishers did bring over a lot of what you might call equivalent titles from the Xbox360 era: Bioshock, Borderlands, Burnout Paradise, Bayonetta… and those are just the games starting with ‘B’.
With Switch 2, I’m entirely confident Japanese developers and publishers, in particular, will flood the system in the early days. ‘Game of the Year’ editions of Elden Ring, Persona 3 Reload, Final Fantasy 7 Remake/Rebirth, etc. are shoe-ins for the launch window. I’d be more surprised if they didn’t turn up.
I guess the interesting aspect is how difficult it will be to port these titles. One problem with the Switch is that despite huge console sales, if you look at the top-selling titles most gamers only buy Nintendo titles and back that up with some cheap indies like Stardew Valley or Hollow Knight.
If it’s expensive to bring over PlayStation 4 level games to the Switch 2 (it requires years of development from specialist port houses) then it might not be good business for, say, EA to bring over Star Wars Jedi five years later to sell at full price and only shift half a million copies. I’d imagine most people interested in those games already have a PlayStation or Xbox and have played it, and paid significantly less to do so being older titles frequently on sale.
The Switch 2 will have very different architecture to the home consoles, so it would be smart for Nintendo and Nvidia to do a lot of work themselves with APIs, to make it as easy and cheap as possible to port titles over to it, allowing publishers and developers to make profits on lower unit sales and/or asking prices.
Nvidia have a motivation to do this, given it’ll be a good selling point for other platform holders keen to have more competition for AMD’s chipsets in future consoles. They could even offer a service to port titles over themselves, to give more incentive to publishers to jump on board.
Marc
GC: A port generally only takes months, not years. But you’re right that, currently, AAA third party games don’t tend to sell particularly well on Switch. However, EA just announced announce last gen versions of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, more than a year after the original release, so they clearly thought that was worth the trouble.
Back in time
RE: Titanfall 2. I picked it up in one of the sales on the PlayStation Store and forgot how good it was. The time travel level must be up there with one of the best levels in gaming – it reminds me of Singularity, which must be the most underrated game of all time. Love that game.
Simon
PS: Most underrated games of all time? Resistance 3 is another one – that game is basically Half Life 2 in HD and probably better.
Infinite possibilities
I’ve been playing games since those Grandstand handheld devices that played a single game back in the 80s, and I think right now gaming has never been better.
The range of devices we have now were unthinkable even 25 years ago. It wasn’t that long ago that handheld meant a Game Boy with wildly less power than a home console, but now you can get a Switch Lite for £150 that plays everything (well, almost) that the most expensive Switch does. Or if you really want to spend money you can drop £1,000 on a handheld PC. Alternatively, you can go the other way with a range of handheld Android-based devices.
At the start of this gen, I thought home consoles also had every price point covered, between the Xbox Series X/S and the two PlayStation 5s, but now we’ve gone one step further with streaming sticks, meaning if your fine with HD you don’t even need the console. Or even stream to handhelds with devices like the Logitech G Cloud or just your phone. Controls aren’t even an issue, as devices like Backbone are as good as those on a dedicated device. Or maybe you have a PlayStation 5 but want it handheld in which case there’s the PlayStation Portal.
PC isn’t my thing but with super-wide monitors and everything else going on, on that side, I’m sure there’s people building set-ups that put F1 simulators from 20 years ago to shame.
Hardware is nothing without the games though, and there’s now so much of it.
We’ve got regular cinematic story driven games, strategy games so detailed you could play nothing else for a year, online role-playing games to play forever alongside single payer role-players for those that prefer it that way. Flight sims using real weather data, management sims, building games, games that aren’t even games. Phone games, phone games that were console games, free games, paid games, games that never end; a never-ending supply of indie games, games that last three hours or games that can take a whole year. There’s so much of it now, it doesn’t matter what you like people are making it, and most of it is really really good. Even games that go direct to £20 are decent.
Then there’s the access to them. Buy them new at anywhere between £5-£70, or wait for an offer, or get them on a subscription service. Then there’s free-to-play games for those wanting to spending nothing. Every option is there and it has every type of game, meaning there’s something for everyone.
We’ve gone from all having to do and play largely the same thing because it was the only thing, to a world where we can play what we want, the way we want, at the price we want, at a quality level that’s now really hard to improve upon.
I for one am now playing more than I ever had, covering more type of games than I ever had, and to be honest I don’t think it’s even costing that much more.
Tim
Inbox also-rans
I just heard about Aero GPX, which released early access on Steam this week. The trailer looks great. It was apparently made by just one man and funded through Kickstarter. I’m hoping it ends up on Switch eventually, to satisfy the F-Zero GX fans.
Barry
All these little details about the Switch 2 leaking out, like the new cartridge… I know it’s not much but it all makes it feel like it’s getting really close. Here’s hoping for an official reveal this year.
Jonesy
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