Games Inbox: Sony doing a good job with PS5, Assassin’s Creed Shadows faults, and eight years of Concord-GameCentral-Entertainment – Metro

How are things going for Sony? (Sony Interactive Entertainment)

The Wednesday letters page has an idea for what Nintendo’s secret new device might be, as one reader celebrates 20 years of Kuon.

To join in with the discussions yourself email gamecentral@metro.co.uk

The absolute state of play
Since it doesn’t start till 11pm I obviously haven’t seen the State of Play yet, but I can’t say I hold out much hope that it will be good. Although who knows, because at some point Sony has got to start talking about something.

They’ve kind of poisoned the conversation because they keep having boring preview events, and announcing important things via blogs, that to suddenly go back to how things used to be is an admission that they’ve been messing things up. That shouldn’t be a problem really, all would be forgiven if they just made an effort, but I don’t think there’s any question that Sony are now stuck in arrogant mode.

I’d imagine the central problem is that it’s taken this long for the effects of the pandemic to really be felt but since Sony won’t explain anything, or admit any fault, they just seem distant and uncaring. All they have to do is announce a couple of new games and people would instantly forget the recent powers, but I don’t know if that’s what’s going to happen this week.

If you look at the sales, and the early game releases, I’d say Sony has been doing a good job with the PlayStation 5. What they’ve been bad at is communication and keeping the hype going.

If the problems have been caused by things largely out of their control they should just say, but either way the solution is simple: just annouce more games.
Gadfly

Fitness spy
Really don’t know what this mysterious new Nintendo wireless device could be, but my guess would be some kind of fitness thing. Most of Nintendo’s weirder peripherals have been that and they’re definitely going to want to have some kind of equivalent of Wii Fit and Ring Fit Adventure on the Switch 2.

I’ve no idea what, but maybe this thing, whatever it is, could be a camera that watches you and makes sure you’re doing the exercise properly? The problem with these things before has always been that the game clearly don’t know what you’re doing with your legs or body, so that would actually be a big fit. It could work with Just Dance too.
Lemonoid

A bad year
Ubisoft really has made an absolute disaster of Assassin’s Creed Shadows. For years people have been asking for one of the games to be set in Japan and while I don’t necessarily have a problem with Yasuke being in the game, the fact that it’s a Western made game refusing to let a Japanese person have one of the lead roles is not a good look.

Yasuke appears in lots of anime and films but those are made by Japanese creators, I think there’s a big difference. It doesn’t help that the game overall does not look very historically accuracy, but even worse is the weird apology and half backtracking.

They’ve made the worst of a bad situation and now they’re having to deal with the end result, which I assume is going to be much lower sales than they expected. On top of Star Wars Outlaws it’s clear they’re not having a good year.
Doscus

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Get what you pay for
I’ve just been reading the article regarding the OG PlayStation anniversary colour option, and I was floored by the price of the DualSense Edge controllers. Even the base model going for upwards of two tons is prohibitive. Can GC shed some light on whether this is worth it? I’ve not bothered with an internet search but I’m sure that you lot will have reviewed the tech.

Gone are the days of hormonal teenage rage practice of smashing up controllers. I think third party SNES ones cost around £16, so it was reasonably disposable tech back then. This iteration of control would mean an elasticated 24 carat chain attachment is essential to insure this kind of investment.
D Dubya

GC: We did review it and it’s a very good controller, possibly the best ever made. However, similar to the Xbox Elite controller, it’s something that very few people will actually need.

Forgotten treasure
20 years ago, in 2004, a title released to virtually no fanfare. Most allowed it to slide under the radar, very few saw it worthy of purchase and it became something of an urban legend. Today, it is a sought after collector’s item and one of the very rarest PlayStation 2 games on the market.

I consider it one half of the holy trinity, along with Rule Of Rose and Haunting Ground. Today, I hold it in my hands: Kuon.
Shahzaib Sadiq

GC: For those that haven’t heard of it, it’s a survival horror game by FromSoftware. In Japanese, the name can be read as Eternity or Nine Evils.

Time flies when you’re being scared (Shahzaib Sadiq)

At least they’ve got Blade
I see there are rumours Rocksteady is working on a new Batman game and Sony are trying to money hat it. They already have Spider-Man, so adding Batman as an exclusive would be catastrophic for Xbox. I kind of hope it happens. Something has to wake up Xbox, because only their rivals are competing.

It’s gone beyond frustration, for me. I envisage Xbox sales tanking even further. Whether Phil Spencer makes any correlation with their stupid multiformat strategy remains to be seen. I highly doubt it.

They finally had a promising line-up, but didn’t even give it a chance. Maybe Indiana Jones doesn’t shift many consoles? Doom: The Dark Ages certainly would!

I feel day-and-date on Game Pass has ultimately been their undoing. Smart leadership would have decided on 6 months to a year later from the outset. It still would have been a value proposition. The same strategy for PC ports also. I can’t quite fathom the level of incompetence. The entirety of Xbox leadership should be fired.
Si

GC: Doom is not that big, not in 2025.

To be this good takes ages
Quick question: what ever happened to the Sega/Microsoft Super Game aka live service game possibly featuring Sega characters from past, present, and possibly future? Or possibly not…

It’s all such a secrecy shrouded mystery that I think everyone has forgotten about it – including me – until now!

Given Google doesn’t really seem to know I guess I will have to wait until Apple AI releases to find out.
Geoff

GC: We don’t understand the AI comment, but Sega has said the project won’t be ready until sometime after March 2026. It’s still unclear what the game is or if it’s connected to its various franchise revivals, which also haven’t been heard about in public for a long while.

Unsexy excuse
Although most people have been concentrating on the price, for obvious reasons, the thing I still can’t get my head around is that Concord took eight years to make. That’s not even a guess, that’s according to the developer themselves. That’s the lion’s share of an entire decade and almost twice the average length of time someone stays in a job.

This is so crazy I can’t even really believe it. Especially as it means they were copying a game that was popular then and still expecting it to be the big new thing eight years later. Presumably they weren’t intending to spend eight years making it but why does it have so many characters in it?

It might seem wrong to complain about too much content but cut the roster by a third and presumably the game could’ve come out a lot earlier and since it’s not full price wouldn’t have seemed much of a rip-off.

I can just imagine Sony being told it only needs one more year for two or three years in a row and at that point what are you going to do? But this whole thing is ridiculous. It may not be very sexy to blame project management for a game’s failure but that seems to be the reason from what I can see.

That and it just being a really boring and unimaginative idea for a new game. Like all those devs that copy Dark Souls and try to make it as similar as possible, instead of something a bit different.
Focus

Inbox also-rans
What on earth was the point of that Sonic Central livestream? They could’ve at least hinted at Sonic Frontiers 2. Instead we got more mobile junk, Lego, and a movie trailer.
Austin

EA Sports FC 25 gives you erectile disfunction? What does eFootball do then? Infect you with the black death?
Rory

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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 via email or our Submit Stuff page, which if used will be shown in the next available weekend slot.

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