Entertainment
Games Inbox: Battlefield 2042 story and setting, God Of War: Ragnarök price, and The Witcher 4
The Tuesday Inbox argues that £70 for a new game isn’t as unfair as it sounds, as one reader calls for a proper Tom Clancy crossover game.
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Battlefield future
So the new game is called Battlefield 2042, eh? That’s further in the future than I expected so I wonder what we can assume from that? Robots will obviously be a big part of the game I imagine, since they’re already starting to become a thing now (remember when people thought they were too sci-fi in Call Of Duty?) but who will be the bad guys? I think the time skip will be for more than tech reasons and it means instead of terrorists we’re probably looking at some sort of environmental disaster/refugee crisis.
That’s a common prediction for the future and it avoids having the bad guys be generic Middle Eastern terrorists and instead something the story can actually get its teeth into. Who exactly you’d be fighting I don’t know, but it’ll be interesting to see whether EA do the opposite to Ubisoft and actually get political – or at least show a realistic depiction of what the future could be.
I know we haven’t seen anything official yet, and even the leaks are pretty vague, but I’m cautiously optimistic about Battlefield. Just because, as people have pointed out, this is basically the last chance for EA to get it right and I think they’re going all in.
Caspian
PS: Since Battlefield 2142 (the one everyone always forgets about) has giant mechs and such I would be totally up for an expansion based on that, since they’ll probably not doing a full sequel given they have Battlefield now.
Extra Pro
I must say I share everyone’s disappointment that God Of War is cross-gen. Sure, it’s going to look amazing but one of the main selling points of the PlayStation 5 was the SSD and how it opens up game design to new possibilities. At the moment we’ve basically got a PS4 Pro Pro.
Has it been confirmed that it will still cost £70 on PlayStation 5? If it’s £15 cheaper on PlayStation 4 it’s really going to rub salt in the wound. Technically the game development cost has actually been increased by the inclusion of a PlayStation 4 version, so logically that should be the more expensive one (I must clarify though that I don’t want that!).
Nick
GC: Nothing has been confirmed about the new God Of War, not even its name. Sackboy and Miles Morales are the same price on both consoles but they’re not £70. Horizon Forbidden West will probably be the first chance to see if a PlayStation 4 game will be priced at £70.
Missing the joke
Disgusting to see that Cyberpunk 2077 ‘gag reel’ and then to have a producer actually tweet about it, as if he saw nothing wrong with it! Personally, I think CD Projekt’s reputation is unrecoverable at this point. Before Cyberpunk they were everyone’s favourite, not only because they made The Witcher 3 but because they seemed very consumer friendly, with the free DLC and anything.
Now we see the truth that you’re only as good as your last game, which in this case was industry-shatteringly awful. At least in terms of what it stands for.
I agree that CD Projekt should cut their loses and just move on to The Witcher 4. Nobody’s going to play Cyberpunk multiplayer, especially if it’s a standalone game, so that’s just drawing out the pain unnecessarily. I’m not surprised to hear about so many staff leaving, I would too if I worked there.
Freddy
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Gametic universe
I’m sure this Ubisoft leak about a new Tom Clancy PvP game is true but it already sounds boring. What I don’t understand is why they’ve never tried to have a proper crossover game for all these difference series that are supposed to be set in the same universe. The only one I can think of is EndWar and that was basically a real-time strategy game (and quite good, I wouldn’t mind a sequel).
I guess the problem is that none of them really have any memorable characters except Sam Fisher, but that in itself is a clue as to how things have bene going wrong with the whole franchise. I do find it strange that no publisher has tried to create a Marvel style ‘cinematic universe’ but with games. Weirdly the closest anyone has come is Nintendo with Smash Bros. and that barely has any kind of story.
A Tom Clancy universe could help to even out the creepy right wing agenda though by having characters that were a bit more diverse and liberal but Ubisoft doesn’t seem to care. Activision kind of did it when World At War and Black Ops had a surprising connection and I’d like to see more of that kind of stuff.
Focus
Fair dues
Last year I got my hands on an original PlayStation and a Nintendo 64 to relive my youth. It’s been 21 years since I owned a N64 and had a few games up in the loft, still in their boxes and still with the price tags on them.
Some AAA titles were £50 for a game 21 years ago, made with a smaller team of developers, shorter play times, 64-bit graphics. and minimal audio dialogue.
Is £70 for a shiny new next gen game really out of order? It’s an increase of about 95p a year. What’s more if it had risen in line with inflation then games would now be at around £125.50.
I think that’s pretty fair for the 60fps, short loading times, HDR, 4k resolution, 30+ hours of gameplay, and complex storylines, voice acted out by numerous professional actors.
Seems to me the only thing that is inflated is some people’s expectations and their underestimation of the true cost of the future.
Liquinathium
Pedantically two-dimensional
RE: Chris and GC’s discussion of old games that still look good. I’d say that Majora’s Mask looks much better than Ocarina Of Time. They used the same engine (I think) but the models in Majora’s Mask held up much better in my opinion.
I felt this way when trying to play Master Quest on the Wii, that Ocarina had actually aged really badly. Soul Reaver still looks mostly good, though the edges are sharp. Also, Ōkami (though not as old as any of those) still looks amazing.
Also, being pedantic, Doom was 2D, not 3D (all of the maps are 2D with some tricks to make them seem 3D, you can’t look up or down, if you look towards something ahead of you but is above and shoot your bullets would bend upwards to hit them because they are actually on the same plane as you). Basically, If Doom counts as 3D, so should Shining In The Darkness and other old maze games (or, heck, Zelda: A Link To The Past).
Joseph Dowland
GC: Being pedantic is an understatement.
Premonitory pre-orders
GC, you said there isn’t any reviews, for Horizon Forbidden West and Deathloop, yet I don’t follow reviews, I never have. Days Gone got bad reviews, I loved it. I know what I like, all because one person hates it doesn’t mean everyone will hate it. The only way you will know if you like a game is if you play, that’s why reviews don’t mean anything to me.
I’ve done it like that four 20+ years and I’ve only regretted buying one game.
David
Blame the scalpers
Seems odd for readers to suggest the PlayStation 5 shortages are due to scalpers and not genuine customers. Why would scalpers continue to hijack stock and push it at a high price if they weren’t able to shift them at that price? Or do we think scalpers are sitting with hundreds of unsold units each, while they continue to keep buying new ones under the assumption that they’ll sell them all at a profit?
The PlayStation 4/5 cross-gen decisions are certainly connected to the fact that there aren’t 100+ million PlayStation 5s in homes but the reason for stock issues is a lot simpler. And the understanding right now is more PlayStation 5s PlayStation 4s have sold at this stage in their lives.
I’ve also seen the common argument that there weren’t any first party cross-gen games before the PlayStation 5 era, even when there were PlayStation 4 supply issues, etc. But there also weren’t any first party games worth getting wound up about. In particular, the PlayStation 3 didn’t have supply issue because it didn’t launch with any good games and it was obscenely expensive compared to the better value and more established competition.
I can’t accept the preference would be to go back to that and have fewer good-looking games come out, as long as they’re exclusive to the new generation.
In terms of how this makes the PlayStation 5 look overall, lack of clarity notwithstanding, I think Sony has managed a good balance between incentive to upgrade and software sales prospects. I can relate more to complaints that specific games mean a lot to people, so the preference is that they’re not (potentially) compromised in any way. But then we might as well say ‘I wish Zelda: Breath Of The Wild 2 wasn’t on its way soon as I’d rather it was held back three or four more years for the Switch 2’.
Maybe this will end up as a common complaint with that game, but you’d think the existence of its predecessor, and the Switch overall, underlines pretty decisively that technical parameters aren’t always the main reason for a game’s design successes or failures.
I’d bet if the Switch ports of The Witcher 3, Doom, Doom Eternal, XCOM 2, etc. had all been announced at the same time as the PlayStation 4 versions, there would be complaints that the games have been designed exclusively with inferior tech in mind rather than simply scaled down once it was determined that would be possible.
The way things developed generated no complaints about the technically superior versions specifically, because those came out long before the compromised ports. That’s why I’m willing to wait and see what these Sony games have to offer before drawing definitive conclusions from nothing but speculation and my own ideas of how game development works.
Funnily enough, another bet I’d have placed is if the recent Horizon Forbidden West footage had been shared on the pretence that the game was a PlayStation 5 exclusive, people would be regarding that exact footage as confirmation that games do need to break away from last gen tech as early as possible or the best version would never look like that.
Panda
GC: Scalpers have absolutely been hoarding consoles, although that is less evident recently. Although we think the argument you’re referring to is more that the high number of scalpers explains the low attach rate, since obviously they wouldn’t be buying any games for them.
Inbox also-rans
If I had £1 for each time I saw a comment claiming ‘I sold my PS5 because…’ I’d actually be able to afford one myself!
Russell
GC: You can find a PlayStation 5 for £3?
Tesco currently have PlayStation 5 games Spider-Man: Miles Morales for £35 and Demon’s Souls for £50.
Rolph
PLEASE NOTE: There will be no Hot Topic this week due to E3 at the weekend.
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The small print
New Inbox updates appear every weekday morning, with special Hot Topic Inboxes at the weekend. Readers’ letters are used on merit and may be edited for length and content.
You can also submit your own 500 to 600-word Reader’s Feature at any time, which if used will be shown in the next available weekend slot.
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MORE : Weekend Hot Topic, part 1: E3 2021 hopes and expectations
MORE : Weekend Hot Topic, part 2: E3 2021 hopes and expectations
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