u/Effective-Priority62

I feel like with all the two main franchises at Bethesda (TES and Fallout), then Rockstar (GTA and RDR), then over at PlayStation studios with series like The Last of Us and Horizon, both of those which got screwd over not only by massive dev times but also poor planning and live-service projects that went nowhere, we are increasingly moving towards a system where certain AAA franchises releasing games is turning into this huge, once in a decade event.

Sure, the reasons for how massively long they're taking for each game are all varied and depend on the studio or publisher. When it comes down to it, most of these huge flagship AAA games, even when they're something as relatively short and linear as Uncharted or TLOU, take like 4 or 5 years to make (and that's at the very average, as it can go up to 8 years like GTA 6 or Cyberpunk 2077), and that's not accounting for all unforeseen events at management that may delay them further.

And the studios's franchises themselves have to compete between each other for dedicated years of dev time and their slot in a decade, like we're seeing with Bethesda (this decade was for Starfield apparently, we may be lucky to get TES6 before 2030, while at least Obsidian might make new Fallouts concurrently), CDPR (Cyberpunk and The Witcher), and so many others. Hell, even smaller games in the AAA area might get affected. You'd think a game as relatively mid-sized as Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart would've gotten a sequel by now almost 6 years later, but Insomniac has gotten their hands ever too full with Marvel IPs to spare the money and manpower.

My point being, the release cycles and dev times are already huge enough, ranging from anywhere between roughly half a decade to a whole one, and a lot of those are influenced by poor judgement from corporate management. That doesn't mean franchises like COD or Assassin's Creed won't keep up with their yearly or almost yearly releases. Their publishers are huge and can afford multiple studios for the same franchise so they work on simultaneous projects all the time.

But the really high-polished AAA beasts, (even when they're not that high polished or well received at launch) the ones that take many years to make from a studio overwhelmed by too many IPs and so little time to take care of them all, those might be heading for a bleak future where they only ever come around once a decade. For some of those studios, gone are the days they could pump out a whole trilogy or even five games of the same franchise over the course of a decade, like in this century's first 15 years or so.

And unfortunately, unless there's some severe shakeup in the industry, this is just something we'll have to get used to. Drip-feed on your favorite franchise one drop per decade, a couple of times before you die, or a couple more if both you and the franchise are lucky to live that long

I know the writing's on the wall for the end of physical media games in our near future and of course Sony and Microsoft had to be assholes about it years in advance by adopting these awful practices of making Deluxe or Collector's editions available only for digital versions of the games (as far back as 2022 if I recall with Spider-Man 2), even tho said games still get physical releases with the full base game in the disc.

But why does EVERYONE ELSE have to follow suit? Why couldn't Remedy make the Deluxe Edition for Control 2 and all its bonus goodies also in a physical edition box instead of only in digital game stores? Why even Bandai Namco had to release a collector's edition for Elden Ring that doesn't even include the game? What is making them all follow this trend that devalues or discourages acquiring these games physically? I know this mostly started this decade, tho please feel free to tell me if this happened sometime also in the late 2010s.

I know making physical editions with some collectibles and some booklets is expensive due to manufacturing and packaging, but the point of Deluxe and Collectors editions IS to be expensive. Is every publisher really that motivated and excited by an all digital future or are the big players like Sony and Microsoft somehow mandating that games for their consoles don't have their Deluxe or Collection editions bundled with the physical games anymore? The ONLY recent exception I can recall against that trend is 007: First Light. Which has a physical Collector's Edition, with both the collectibles and the physical game. But that's it, if you want the cheaper deluxe edition instead, you still have to buy it from a digital storefront on console or PC.

It just hit me that, with all the security issues Rockstar has faced in the last years as well as how many people they've fired and how many disgruntled employees they still have, that they've prepared for a possible leak of a playable build of their game.

And by intentionally stalling completion and optimization of the PC version by a couple of years, not to mention how this allows them to focus on finishing the initial console version, they can both double dip by making people buy the game again on Next-Gen consoles and PC, AND make sure that even in a worst case scenario where a good portion or full early build of the PC version leaks, it turns out so buggy, horribly optimized and incredibly taxing to run on average to higher end gaming PCs of the last couple of years, that most people will just not go through the trouble of finding a link to torrent the game that hasn't been taken down yet, or risk the malware it might come with.

They'll just take in the spoilers (if it hypothetically leaked before console release) and patiently wait a couple more years until the finished PC version is ready for release.

And of course, some of that extra time might not even be dedicated only to making sure they maximize the double dipping. With the ever worsening hardware crisis, they'll want to take as much time as they can to optimize the hell out of it so it can decently run in as many modern PCs as possible, not just top-of-the-line hardware, which would result in less Steam sales

I wanna preface this by saying I'm not out to excuse or redeem Konami, PlayStation or Xbox in anyone's eyes. They're corporations, first and foremost. They're in it to make money, and that's it. And so, they'll sometimes make logical shitty decisions, other times completely illogical shitty ones. But the common thread between them in this topic, is the visionary game autheur, god-designer, celebrity director. Hideo Kojima.

Looking at a quick recap of his history climbing the ladder of the game's industry, you could say MG1 and MG1 from the late 80s to early 90s were modest successes for their time, while the classic 3D MGS trilogy and its accompanying material, tie-ins and expansions from the late 90s to mid 2000s were widely successful. But only for the standards of their time. The scope creep in the gaming industry has grown massively since then, and Kojima's ambitions, well, have only kept up as well.

We know now that he was always trying to boot David Hayter out the door with every new title, making him addition for the main role of every new Metal Gear so Konami would hire him to play a Snake character again, until he was eventually replaced with Kiefer Sutherland. Kojima himself wanted a distinguished Hollywood talent to play Snake in MGSV, a decision he justified a lot and still divides the fandom to this day, based on how much it really paid off in the final product. Then his status as a celebrity game director and designer only grew with time, his split from Konami, joining PlayStation and creating Death Stranding making him kind of legendary, as more and more celebrities who are fans of his work spent time with him, visited his studio's HQ and even joined the cast of his games (DS1, DS2, OD), leading to some brilliant mo-cap work. And also some crazy budgets for batshit projects no one else could get approved.

Which brings me to my main point: Ever since MGS4, Kojima's games have been on an uphill battle of inflated budget and massive dev times. It was Konami's most expensive game to date, barely got out on its summer 2008 deadline, had tons of cut content and features from its original very ambitious vision and scope, and still only had 5 solid hours of gameplay on your average campaign, compared to all the work and money that went into the cutscenes, radio calls and voice/mo-cap acting, the true bulk of the game's content, reaching an almost staggering 10 hours. It still was a massive success, of course, as it was the PS3's killer app and a groundbreaking game in terms of technology and boundaries-pushing. But it only managed to break even against it's massive development costs because of perfect storm it released in. Were it not to come out as one of PS3's premier titles and the grand finale to the MGS saga, its financial success might not have been nearly enough.

Then you have the 2010s, with MGS Peace Walker, an unthinkable follow up from a corporate perspective, on a system like the PSP, which was a critical darling but made little to no meaningful commercial return. The cancelled MGS Rising game. And finally, MGSV. A behemoth of a two-part game, more ambitious than ever, again pushing the envelope in graphical and mo-cap tech, headlining a Hollywood celebrity as the leading man. Also even more expensive and time-consuming than MGS4's dev cycle. Konami were fed up with him way before development was complete. They wouldn't greenlight any other of his other projects until it was done and they've got results. Which of course, doesn't stop him from diverting dev funds from MGSV to create his P.T. demo for Silent Hills starring Norman Reedus. The rest is history, you could say. Tragic, disastrous history for how MGS ended as a franchise, as well how Kojima Productions ended their time on Konami.

Fortunately he got picked up by PlayStation to make Death Stranding, a huge win and comeback story at the time. They were willing to shell out money for whatever he needed and give him carte blanche for his new project. Twice over, with Death Stranding 2, and they've even let him keep the IP, something unheard of. But once again, these games were massive risks, and although DS1 ended up a sleeper hit and DS2 might go the same route, they were far from the blockbusters Sony was hoping for. And once again, the dev costs of Kojima's vision seems to have only ballooned, as these games are more Hollywood-stacked than ever, with Kojima's friends and groupies. Who knows how that's going for OD? Since it's a more self-contained horror game, even tho there are famous actors, the cost might just be enough for the game to pay for itself once it's released.

But that's everything Kojima was able to do before this industry imploded on itself. We've reached the ceiling. Big companies like Sony have no more growth to achieve, and despite all that, they won't scale down. They still prefer to go all in on live service ventures, blowing hundreds of millions at a time hoping something sticks and becomes their forever cash cow, instead of funding single player passion projects like Kojima's, who can cost just as much but with minimal chances of making the spectacular financial return they need. And so they've reevaluated their partnership for Psynth and realized cancelling it or booting the Kojima partnership saves them a lot more money. And that's just the unfortunate reality of it. These companies are shitty, yes. But Kojima also needs to learn to rein himself in and try to make smaller-scope games that at least try to be equivalent to the scope his games had between 1998 and 2004. He has to balance art and financials again after 20 years, or else the last big publisher willing to fund him, Xbox, won't maintain their partnership for long if Psynth is another huge risk that barely breaks even.

Everyone seems to think this will just be MGS6 with a different name, but there's nothing guaranteeing that will be the case and Kojima won't try something crazy and out of the box like Death Stranding again. Trying to reinvent the wheel on stealth games in a way most casual audiences don't care for enough for a substantial financial return. Those are all possible risks. And big Hollywood names attached to the cast are almost guaranteed. So that's my main worry for Kojima and Kojima Productions, going forward. It seems Psynth is still in its early development stages. They need to have their ambition reined in. Have someone to keep him grounded and help him make a game under a reasonable budget, and minimal celebrity cameos, or at least balance it out with some features and gameplay that might help sell it better for general audiences instead of just recreating a new gameplay niche like Death Stranding.

If he and his team can't manage that, then Psynth might be his last carte blanche premium project ever, and no one between Xbox or PlayStation or any big publisher might be willing to fund his next AAA thing. At which point they'll have no choice but to scale back down by necessity. As a long time fan/admirer since I've first played MGS3 in 2010 at the ripe age of 12 I hope it doesn't come to that. Their legacy is too great. They just need more authority figures in the room to make their leading man and visionare responsibly compromise from time to time.

They had managed to include some sort of Vol+ and Vol- buttons on either or both sides of the USB-c port that's right above the Sony logo. The system's volume when wearing wired headphones connected to Dualsense via headset jack is pretty damn good, but often, depending on the game or video, you'll have to keep adjusting as things get too quiet or too loud.

Wasn't much of a problem with PS4 as I always found the maximum volume a bit weak, so it was always set to maximum. But in PS5 while using Dualsense's headset audio, oh my god. Don't get me wrong, I love the PS Button's quick menu from which we can quickly access the volume. But it always has to pause the game/cutscene/YouTube video or whatever else we're watching, while it fills up the screen. I wish they had included a way for it to be seamless, which a lot of portable consoles already have.

Simple volume buttons, where you can change it with ease while watching a video or doing some low effort/passive gameplay stuff that doesn't require pausing. And a visual volume slider on screen that's minimalist, on a corner of the screen and mostly doesn't get in the way. That would've been my dream for the PS5 UI and Dualsense to be truly perfect. I guess it's just very uncommon for non-PC desktop consoles to have this

"I don't have time for your politics, superstitions or bureaucratics. Let me through or I'll fucking kill whoever's in my way." She didn't outright say it like that, of course. But I love how her "diplomatic" attitude developed and matured over these two games lol. It was a breath of fresh air to have a flashpoint before entering Eleuthia-9 where you could just choose aggression and tell the High Matriarchs to fuck off cause she just fought past an army to save their sorry asses and they can't stop her if they tried.

There was also that side-quest where you had to find the source of the Glinthawk attacks in a nearby settlement, and turns out there was a scrapping operation downstream where they were recklessly leaving machine carcasses to accumulate and attract scavengers, when Aloy confronts them about it they just say they're neck deep in farming debts and need to pay it out any way they can, and they don't care about the attacks that have been happening. Then they show off their hired mercenaries to show Aloy she can't force their hand. For which you can choose to try and compromise and help them finish their machine parts scavenging quicker, or just outright fight and kill them all. I gladly chose the fight option, they were selfish, remorseless and all deserved to die

Then there's once again her no-no sense attitude during the entire Embassy ordeal in Forbidden West's first hours, where she seemed about to give up at any point and just slip west anyway without anyone's permission. Specially satisfying when she threatened Nozar's men who wouldn't open the gate to her. "I'd like to see you try!" And I believe her she was ready to at least beat the shit out of those guards, and escalate into full on bloodshed if Erend didn't intervene to get Nozar to let her through. She didn't have time or care for the Carja politics, and rightfully so, as she was running out of time and Earth just had a few months left while the Zenith's were secretly trying to steal all of GAIA. Tho it was for the best that she went through without causing a massacre cause that would've ruined the Embassy even before Regalla showed up. Avad would've probably handwaved it and placed the blame of the entire incident on Nozar, but without the conversation with Fashav, the Rite of Passage and her defeating Grudda, she'd probably be hunted by the Tenakth as well and seen as an invader for as long as she was in their lands.

Which brings me to Hekarro. Aloy was too reckless when she approaching him, tho I can understand how tired and desperate she was. AETHER was just within her reach, but this guy she thought was just another warlord wanted her to be his hired muscle. Seeing her ask what's stopping her from just killing him then and there was cold as fuck. Tho I'm glad she chose reason and opted for the path that saved the Tenakth from Regalla, and this reflects later in the game when she prefers to defeat Regalla altogether instead of letting Sylens user her to sacrifice the whole Tenakth tribe against the Zeniths. And then there's THEBES, where she had to dress up as Sobeck and entertain the CEO. Holy SHIT, was that torture. I was dying for her to just snap at any fucking moment and kill all of them besides Alva right there, before they even reached Faro. Unfortunately that didn't happen, and I didn't get to get my hands on the CEO, only watching him die out of his own incompetence. I don't quite recall if we had another moment like that in Burning Shores, lol probably in that mission where you have to audition for an audience with Londra, she came pretty close and only didn't break character for Seyka's sake.

I wonder if with NEMESIS and everything, will there be any more tribal bullshit she has to deal with in Horizon 3, or have they all mostly fallen in line to fight their common existential threat, meaning there won't be more of these moments. Maybe if we get some new lands and tribes a little to the east of the Nora Lands. Maybe Aloy doesn't really need to convince them to fight, but she does have to convince them to let her and her allies pass so they can search for whatever will help her and GAIA in their fights, which leads to another bullshit situation where she must complete a ritual or untangle political stuff but this time she's just like "The world is ending, I don't have time for this, and frankly neither do any of you. Let me pass or get ready to die."

Anything I missed from the side-quests or DLC in the two games?

(Apologies in advance. Once again, I always end up with huge paragraphs. I'll cover most of them in spoiler tags, and just leave the ending and beginning uncovered if you wanna skip my deep dive into my game of choice. I also had to completely rephrase my title as it was too long, so most of its premise is gonna start in the next paragraph.)

Ever heard about how nowadays games and their dev cycles/sequels take too long, while older games usually took just a couple of years to release? What's an old game that you wish actually had [more] dev time and came out more content or feature-complete? What would be the consequences of that?

For starters my example is not *that* great as far as old games go cause it actually took 4 years. For 2000s standards, it was not good but also not terrible compared to nowadays where 5 years is the average. My wish was for the delay of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, which came out in June 2008 and took 4 years to make. 3 and a half years, to be more precise, or about almost 3 years and 5 months after Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater came out in November 2004. Sure, between those two games there came out MGS3's upgraded Subsistence version which came with the much needed QoL improvement of a free 3D camera which became the basis for every subsequent MGS3 re-release, and also Metal Gear Acid 1, 2 and MGS: Portable Ops for the PSP. But at the time, none of them were really that mainline or notable, even tho you could argue Portable Ops was canon and an intended main chapter back then, and people still argue about its canon status to this day. But as far as important releases go, the main team and Kojima were focused mostly on MGS4 after 3 initially dropped.

And boy, what a fucking game MGS4 was. >!Only those who've played it on the PS3 will know how wild that journey was. And how bitter a taste it left, if you loved all the extra content in the Integral or VR Missions versions of MGS1, or the Substance version of MGS2, even the Subsistence version of MGS3, whose significant bonus gameplay content was just its long-dead online mode, still offered great value even single player cause the new camera encouraged even more runs of the already great story campaign, which at the time, at around 10 to 15 hours with cutscenes, was pretty long. It had its ton of mandatory and optional cutscenes and radio calls, sure, but the balance with gameplay ratio was still fantastic, you could argue it's still the best in the series to this day, as you can spend a good chunk in-between heavy story sessions, just lying low and causing mayhem in the remote Soviet wilderness. Tho of course it got surpassed by MGSV, but in the classic MGS story formula of short but long enough campaigns, MGS3 was the winner.!<

>!But then you get to MGS4, and you know. It's just so cutscene + radio/codec dense. 9 hours of it alone, while the actual gameplay campaign barely amounts to half of it. To make matters worse, a lot of the game's ambitions and promises were watered down, like the dynamic battlefield where you could join either side and manipulate the war to your advantage. It's mostly a very linear and narrow corridor full of scripted sequences were the villain-alligned private military soldiers just keep mowing down the underdog local militia NPCs, and a lot of the times you can't influence or change the tide of it at all, specially not without going Rambo or guns blazing. Then there are sections, like just before you reach the building with Meryl, when the enemy soldiers spawning into the map are just endless and you can't just clear the level before moving in, you're supposed to just blast or crawl your way past them. The game's stealth itself is very prohibitive, even compared to MGS3, it's older brother from which movements and mechanics it borrows and expands many of its ideas from. There's barely ANY great ways to hide around the warfare maps without being spotted, unless you're constantly crawling around and making use of the octocamo suit that blends into any texture when you're lying down. The game's constantly throwing at you new weapons, bonus items and opportunities all of which almost never work in the stealth context you're trying to enjoy. Like it wants you to go Rambo and guns blazing all the time. Hell, we have a massive in-game store for buying, customizing and/or unlocking enemy weapons. A wide variety, from all the points we accumulate during gameplay, 90% of them barely help in a stealth-focused run. And it is such a miserable and short affair if you just go against the game's ludonarrative and just blast your entire way through in alert mode. It's not fun, and it'll even punish you for it with in-game stress levels and PTSD mechanics. Like those are too many mixed signals, Kojima. What were you intending here?!<

>!Anyway, those are only the first two of five gameplay Acts, surely the other 3 will have good classic MGS stealth, right? Well... Not quite. Act 3 is just a half hour trailing mission that can become two hours if you mess it up. No optional side-missions to do in that great open map that's a recreation of part of real life Prague. Just mess around some semi-empty streets that are under military curfew and have some soldiers in every other corner. After that, it's just a ton of cutscenes, a bike chase on-rails shootout, a boss, and then another ton of cutscenes. Act 4 is a glorious return to Shadow Moses, MGS1's island that's been abandoned for over a decade. But it is also quite short and if you take your time there it's only because you're going down memory lane. It could have been a great return to classic MGS stealth and more complex intertwining levels full of soldiers that actually make your life hell, but it's just a narrow corridor full of stupid robots you can fight or sneak past. The only soldiers there, are the stupid FROGS. A type of superhuman combat unit. Getting in the way of your actually interesting sniper boss-fight. And then more robots as you make your way past areas that weren't in MGS1. The final act? A joke. 10 minutes stealth section where you absolutely can't mess up a centimeter, or you'll end up triggering an alert, which turns into a short, 5 minutes or less alert section. And then a boss, several cutscenes, rinse and repeat until the game ends and there's more two hours of cutscenes. See what I mean? The thing is, it wasn't necessarily supposed to be like this.!<

>!The game had a TON of cut content that couldn't make it into the single Blu-ray disc that Konami or Kojima intended to ship it with (there's even a joke about not needing to swap the disc in the same spot you would in MGS1, so they were at least adamand on keeping that joke relevant and not bloating the game files enough to need two installation/play discs). They also stated some of it couldn't make it into the final campaign because of the release game deadline. There's cut content that have been found that could have expanded the Act 3 gameplay at the very least. A lot of it was repurposed for MG Online 2, which lasted only 5 years before servers shutdown even though it was very much still active in player count and it's MGSV successor - MG Online 3 - is still online to this day despite barely any active players remaining most of the time. And ALL of the DLCs for MGS4 went into MG Online, again, a doomed mode that was only revived due to PC emulation. For owners of the PS3 game, specially after MGO shut down, all that DLC was just doomed content. Specially me, cause despite having playing the game before on a cyber cafe a couple years earlier when I didn't have my own PS3, I think I only got my own MGS4 copy in 2013 just after these servers shut, and never got to play the online mode, only the single player.!<

>!All that content and and effort, down the drain cause they couldn't keep the servers active and had to prepare the terrain for MGSV's online mode, which would come out in 2015. And couldn't be bothered to come up with a true single player DLC for MGS4 or at least a Subsistence-like edition where the game gets a couple dozen VR Missions and uses some of the online maps for short single player stealth missions, like MGS1 and MGS2 had. They were too busy with Peace Walker, of course. And then the cancelled MGS: Rising, before they handed ir over to Platinum Games and it became MGR: Revengeance. And then straight to MGSV, which had gameplay content galore.!<

>!Bottom line, I think MGS4, while a great finale for the mainline saga (at least back then, they've made MGR later, tho that's not mainline, and MGSV, which is chronologically a prequel), was so unjustly rushed over. Of course, Kojima's ambitions and vision for the game were already sky-high over this 4 year dev cycle, it was the most expensive thing Konami had done yet (before MGSV), and they would NOT budge and make the game's development costs even more expensive while delaying it a year or two so its 5 Acts could have more traditional MGS gameplay or at least have their levels expanded, or package the game with a bunch of extra & VR missions like the expansions of MGS1 & 2. I wish they could've planned it better somehow. Not announced it for 2008 cause they wanted it to be PS3's first Killer App so bad (probably also had an agreement with Sony, as they badly wanted a game like MGS4 in those first two years). If they had released it in 2009 or 2010 while holding people over with another PS2 entry in like 2007, I think it could have been a good compromise. Instead of wasting the story & concept of Portable Ops in PSP, rename it and repurpose it for the PS2 as a true MGS3 direct sequel/interquel, that improves upon all the things people love from the 2004 game, such as the jungle survival aspect, aesthetics and whatnot. Instead of the concrete buildings that permeate most of the PSP game. Just change the subtitle, adapt the story a little for actual 3D cutscenes worthy of a MGS3 sequel instead of a spinoff, and promote the game heavily so it's another PS2 Swan Song title alongside God of War II. The success of things like GTA Vice City and San Andreas in-between GTA III & IV is a good example of how it could have worked for Portable Ops turning into a PS2 game instead that would actually sell well and justify Konami in allowing a 2009 or 2010 deadline so MGS4's true scope could be realized, in a way that we get a much healthier gameplay/cutscenes ratio and bonus content/missions.!<

>!The alternative, could be to just launch MGS4 as it was and maybe still make those online DLCs, but not go immediately work on Peace Walker or Metal Gear Solid Rising. Just put these off, take a couple of years and released a Integral/Substance version of MGS4 (which nowadays we'd call a Directors Cut) that's filled with extra missions using the online maps, as well as VR environments, maybe even some new levels in the campaign itself. Could be a good compromise. And with that delay, Kojima could allow himself to be even more ambitious when making Peace Walker if they chose the upcoming PS Vita as the target hardware instead. The game was already fantastic, albeit heavily limited by the PSP hardware and controls, and you can feel those limitations even when playing the HD Edition in PS3. Just imagine what it could have looked and played like if it came out for the Vita, which had two analog sticks, a touchscreen and a rear touchpad, which replaced buttons like L2 and L2 as well as L3 and R3. And how good it could have looked, if Uncharted: Golden Abyss, Killzone: Mercenary and Gravity Rush 1 are anything to go by. Oh, what could have been.!<

>!In either case, development on Peace Walker, MGS Rising and consequentially MGSV would be all delayed by the extra dev time on a 2010 MGS4 or its 2010 expansion re-release. Then we'd get a 2012 or 2013 Peace Walker made natively for PS Vita, with probably a PS3/PS4 port down the line. MGS Rising being delayed could potentially buy enough time for Kojima to not even cancel it, instead developing it alongside Peace Walker and maybe releasing in 2015 exclusively for next-gen on PS4 and Xbox One. Now imagine that. I don't even want to know how long until we'd have MGSV. 2018 and the very earliest, provided it started development before MGS Rising finished but most realistically, 2019 for Ground Zeroes alone, then 2020 for The Phantom Pain. In that world, we'd unfortunately lose Death Stranding and Kojima getting his independence and creative freedom. But damn would I love it for the series.!<

>!Alternatively, the domino effect of all that is that somehow, Peace Walker comes out in 2012 while MGS Rising is still quietly cancelled and given to Platinum Games. MGR: Revengeance still comes out in 2013. Ground Zeroes comes out in 2016 and The Phantom Pain in 2017. Somewhere along all that, the P.T. fiasco and Kojima Productions's deteriorating relationship with Konami still happens and they all leave, with MGSV releasing without his name on the cover, tho still stamped all over the game at the start of every story mission/episode. That would delay Death Stranding by at least 2 or 3 years, provided Kojima managed to still establish his new studio with PlayStation sponsorship in 2017 right after finishing work on MGSV. Which would make Death Stranding 1 basically an early PS5 exclusive at launch, coming out 2022 at the earliest. At this rate, we'd still be a year or two away from Death Stranding 2. If it wouldn't launch at the very end of 2027 after a 5.5 year dev cycle, then it release just outside the physical media window. Making it Kojima's first entirely digital game, wether he liked it or not. Still probably a PS5 game. It would be at best, a cross-gen release if PS6 indeed releases by the end of next year and isn't delayed.!<

Anyways, that was what I wanted. Not the delay of everything else, of course, which would ultimately negatively impact Death Stranding or even prevent the perfect storm that made it possible. But just the delay of MGS4, or its continued development until 2010. Is it selfish of me? Definitely, specially cause 6 years for an important sequel like that back then was basically unheard of outside of GTA IV, and even that had big, culturally impactful non-numbered titles like VC and SA released in-between. But god, I would just love to have seen Kojima or his team give that game the time it deserved. Almost every other big Metal Gear since MGS1 got that, even if MGS3 had mostly the online expansion. MGS1 Integral, MGS2 Substance, Peace Walker, which is already a huge game without any expansions, and of course, MGSV and then later Death Stranding 1 and DS2. MGS4 is the black sheep of the family in that regard. Widely controversial for being more of a 15 hour playable movie than a game, it had so many cool concepts and ideas that couldn't have been explored properly because there was just not enough time. If I could turn back time and make a wish on a game's development, that would've been the one whose course in history I'd change.

Now, I realize that this is far from the only rushed game in the past 30 or 40 years, that a lot of fans would wish wasn't impacted by either insufficient deadlines or fast dev cycles (definitely not MGS4's case, as it already took too long by 2000s standards). What are your examples? And how would they impact the studio, publisher or franchise's timetables if they were delayed or kept getting new expansions or re-releases?

The way she always twists everything Abby does or says into a negative, from that tall fucking moral pedestal of hers. Rising in the ranks of the WLF, going after revenge for the SLC massacre, saving the Seraphite kids. Being jealous of her deadbeat baby daddy getting back together with Abby can only excuse her so far. They were good friends, as you can discover in the lore bites/notes. Abby even vouched for Mel to become one of her father's medical students, for which Mel was extremely grateful. Then Mel just couldn't wait for Abby and Owen to split so she'd swoop in and take her (ex?) friend's ex. Shitty behavior if you ask me. Despicable when you take into account Mel's emotional blackmail to Abby saying she'll only go with them to Santa Barbara if Abby stays in Seattle, I don't care if she knew Abby & Owen have slept together again or not, if you can't let Abby come along with the kids she saved in the name of their old friendship, do it in the memory of her father who mentored you and made you into the doctor you are today, for fuck's sake. Who even needs enemies, with friends like that. For a backstabber who probably always wanted Owen, she deserved the bum husband/boyfriend she got.

They both deserved each other, honestly, as Owen wasn't a saint and could barely bring himself to care about Mel and his unborn child's safety and well-being throughout the game. How he would always take new assignments to get away from her, letting her go into the field, actually trying to leave her in the Aquarium to go with Abby & Yara to the island. Their end is still terribly sad and violent of course, and that's what makes this game so good, all the ifs and unrealized possibilities that arise from the butterfly effect of each characters's choices. I like to think, if Mel and Abby hadn't had that fight, Abby and Yara could have found Lev in time, and they all could have left for Santa Barbara in that boat, everyone could have been alive (well, some of them could still walk right into a Rattler trap anyway), except for Manny, who'd still be finished off by Tommy, and the rest of their friends who stayed.

That said, I like Mel as a character, I think everyone in this game is really well written even with their limited screen times. (I also love her performance, Ashly Burch is so good you can totally forget she's also Aloy) I understand how Mel reacted, specially as a pregnant woman with a boyfriend like that. But her projection and vilifying of Abby to the point of banning her from escaping with them only tells me she always hated her due to jealousy of Owen and whatever else. She lost her friend over a weak-willed man who didn't know what he wanted and only used her as a long-term rebound. She brought that on herself.

TL;DR Mel got done dirty by Owen, but people got to stop painting her as one of Abby's victims. She was anything but. Even her and Owen's deaths are Owen's fault, if you wanna get technical. It wasn't Abby who pushed to let Ellie & Tommy live. That decision doomed their whole group. But of course, she'll never take it out on Owen, it all has to be Abby and her "evil" need for revenge's fault, somehow.

I started to write this just as a response to someone in another thread. Then ofc, it became too big and rambly. Still, I feel like I finally vented out most of how I feel about Forbidden West's human villains, have felt for a long time. How they're good but underutilized. Starting next paragraph:

I have a certain issue with how Forbidden West's plot is structured. It's hard to justify why there's not more Zenith exposure like cutscenes and lore bites. Outside of Tilda, and Verbena's comedic death, we literally see most of them only three times, Proving Lab, Gemini and the island. Granted, this is normal for the villains of most games like this. Like Helis & HADES in the previous game. But the Zeniths were a monumental reveal for the Horizon world, and they were being planned even back then in 2017. Just 3 major appearences is a joke, they deserved much more of a spotlight. Of course, they don't immediately start hunting Aloy or Beta and their friends because they're busy capturing the other subordinate functions, and you can chalk the rest of their inaction to just being flat out lazy and arrogant. It's still not an excuse for us not having more confrontations or close calls with them. Or at least cutscenes from their POV, without Aloy involved, even tho the whole series so far is pretty much told from her POV in every moment.

But then you run into another problem, if you indeed want Aloy & the GAIA team to have some other confrontations with them. They're too fucking OP. Their invulnerability, shields, telekinesis, everything is a bit much even for Horizon, which often tried to explain most of its sci-fi workings, meanwhile the Zenith's infinite energy manipulation bullshit was just too much, specially when you find out they were mostly scratching their balls in VR and doing nothing these past 1000 years other than Frankensteining their minds into a cosmic horror ChatGTP. If they were at least like a couple levels stronger than the Specters, that would have been so much more interesting narratively. They'd still be near invulnerable and ultimately need Sylens's EMP to be ultimately defeated and hardly caught off-guard, but would provide Aloy and other natives a lot more opportunities to push them back and escape.

The alternative, to have them run into Aloy a couple more times, would be hard to write in a believable way. Their shields invulnerability, limitless flying/floating, etc. They could have easily tracked down Aloy or Beta in the couple of weeks between the Proving Lab and Gemini, or the Ninmah Research Lab and Gemini. By simply starting to capture and interrogate native tribes or outright attacking and overwhelming their settlements and demanding leads on them by showing them holos of their appearences. Start an actual massacre or war that forces Aloy's hand. Or just start tracking her area of operations in general for any sign of someone riding machines on land. That could have been interesting, but would've made the game plot too complicated or contradicting to the free roam gameplay.

So it's back to the drawing board. Make their shields way less invulnerable against the ZD humans's arsenals, and limit their energy supply so they don't have infinite ammo or infinite flying. Let us know more about Erik, Gerard and the other unnamed Zeniths before killing them. And for the love of god, that final battle should've showed way more lol. We should've been able to kill some of them, not just see two people get taken out in a cartoonish, goreless fashion while being told everyone else died as well. Also, Walter Londra in Burning Shores. The whole thing was too weird. Sylens just tells Aloy to go kill him. Then he doesn't even give her a new prototype of his anti-shield tech, nor does she asks for it. She just wings it, hoping to somehow catch him off-guard and kill him with her arrows & sling bombs and whatnot, like they would cut through his shield. Or like she'd prophetically known she would catch him connected to the Horus CPU orb and just fry the CPU with her spear in order to kill him.

Then there's Regalla. An amazing villain and amazing performance we should've seen more of. Unfortunately limited to only a couple cutscenes and confrontations, most of them at the Grove, while the man who bested her just a couple years earlier is now somehow completely helpless. I understand, Angela Bassett is expensive. But damn do I wish we've known more of her before choosing to spare her and take her to our base. More scenes from her POV, or from her terrorizing and wrecking shit up would've been nice. More of the actual war we barely see. The Rebel faction outside of her is too one-dimensional and barely has any interesting characters as well, mostly just Ubisoft-style outposts to be liberated. Could've been fleshed out with more nuances to the Teknath tribe beyond just their three clans. But that would've been a lot more voice acting, actors, mo-cap and game data, I guess. As well as money and dev time. I'm also so gutted we don't actually get to fight the rebels and their Tremortusks in the Isle of Spires like Aloy does in the 2021 gameplay demo lol. And barely any rebel Tremortusks in gameplay outside of that one mission with Kotallo. The war being a dynamic series of battles or battalions you could run into across the map would've been an interesting concept, but probably too complicated in an already highly ambitious and expensive game, I guess.

And finally, Hephaestus. I think they've showed him just enough. His presence is more supposed to be felt over the course of the journey and the world, rather than constantly being confronted directly. I'm very curious to how they'll be handling him in H3 without making him lose his spotlight to Nemesis, and vice-versa. We've waited 2 games so far trying to finally get back at Hephaestus, it'd be sad if he's just a footnote in H3 and Nemesis takes all the plot's real estate. The opposite would also be bad. Dealing with Hephaestus for like two thirds of the game and Nemesis only becoming the endgame threat near the finale. Some sort of balance would be nice.

[Just realized I made a huge wall of text with way too long paragraphs. Edited it to smaller paragraphs to make it as readable as I could. Sorry about the ramblings, hopefully you can get along with my train of thought, or at least skim through to the end and add some of your examples.]

I'm replaying Horizon Forbidden West now, finally on NG+, UltraHard so I can get the last remaining trophies which are related to both of those modes. I started playing it last November. Waited basically 6 or 5 years to play it on a PS5 with a 4K TV, after Zero Dawn on PS4. My expectations were always on the roof, since Zero Dawn was already such a dear game to me. I've heard a lot of divisive and contrasting opinions about Forbidden West, which is fine, cause a lot of people also look down on the first game. What was worrying me is that even among the fans, there were noticable differences in wether they thought FW was a worthy sequel or a disappointment. And boy during those first couple hours playing it did I think the latter.

In Zero Dawn, the prologue was quite effective, short and simple, doesn't matter your playstyle, getting through the tutorials as kid aloy shouldn't take more than one hour. After that, there was the limited semi-open world, which was still closed off from the rest of the map for another couple hours or just 30 minutes if you rush it, but that's fine because it was all so fascinating. The environment, vibes and the people you meet as you get to know Aloy's world. Can't say the same about the prologue in Forbidden West (yes, you can choose to skip it in NG+ but I chose to replay it because I want to relive the story to the fullest and I want to check if my views have changed after almost a year).

The tutorial mission can be quite fast, like only 30 minutes but only if you rush through it/speedrun it, barely engaging in any exploration, stealth, combat or dialogue, skipping all cutscenes. If you really take it all in, specially on a first playthrough, it could be up to two hours. And it's such a uneventful/anticlimactic introduction to such a grandiose game full of spectacle. Just exploring some ancient ruins carved up by rivers and rocky formations. All at a leisurely pace that feels like the mission belonged as a breather in the middle of the game campaign and not before all of that, which honestly I think could've fitted, if you changed most of the tutorial stuff into an actual challenge instead.

Without getting too much into spoilers, the mission already practically gives away and hits you over the head with the incoming plot twist that's only gonna be revealed by the end of the game's first act, that the owners of this space launch facility are gonna be the true villains of the game and might have caused the events of most of the franchise. Something that was so carefully hidden and subtly foreshadowed in the first game's lore and documents. Just gratuitously bashed over our heads with a hammer in the second game's intro in order to remind us and the casual players so no one complains about the later plot twist coming out of nowhere. I feel that there were more elegant ways to slow-cook info about them during the story until the big reveal in a way that most audiences wouldn't complain about.

Hell, this intro tutorial mission itself adds nothing to Aloy's journey other than stating she spent 6 months chasing dead ends and only finds a lead when her friend tracks her down and brings her back to Meridian, to check out something she missed. Meridian is another heavy detour from the overall pacing, just character dialogues, mostly optional, but a lot of them unfortunately don't feel like they serve a purpose to the story, like checking how things have changed since Aloy left or how the world is progressing, more like one big recap in case players missed any of the stuff in the first game or didn't play it outright. They even undo the great little character building they've done with King Avad in the first game by having him unlearn his lesson and completely openly thirst after Aloy again when she already turned down his advances and made him realize he can't use her to replace his dead lover and right-hand general.

After Meridian is finally done and you get a beautiful music & opening credits sequence of Aloy travelling west that ends in the title card finally dropping, you'd think the game will finally start. Well... No. It depends on how your expectations were. If your wish was to finally get dropped blind into the Forbidden West without too much handholding and figuring things out for yourself like you did in the first game after you left the Embrace, you'll be disappointed. Instead, you get a narrow mountain valley full of busywork and more of the insufferable Carja/Oseram bickering and politics from the first game, like you didn't have enough of them already. And it's not pretty like the first game's initial open world area, at least not for me.

Just another giant tutorial whose setting I feel could have been a lot better and taken place inside the Forbidden West per se, not right before its borders, where you need to deal with a bunch of other bureaucracy and there's a ton of other side stuff you could get caught up in while hoping the game finally clicks. That's when I was starting to think the sequel would suck for me. Specially cause the combat difficulty curve in this game increased so steeply and I was getting owned even by the smaller machines without having even any good skills or gear to fight them in an enjoyable manner. Thank god, it eventually ended, and the game finally truly began with the Embassy, which itself turned into an ambush/massacre that set off most of the events of the game.

I ended up loving Forbidden West a lot. Platinum and 100% trophies on both base game and DLC, as I bought the complete edition. My pace is very slow, patient and focused on exploration and experimentation, as well as a bit of roleplay, as I often didn't use fast travel. So I had almost 400 hours from that first run alone. Now it's time to get those last NG+ & UltraHard trophies. With all the gear and skills from the first run, as well as less need to slowly explore what I already know, I think this will take like only a hundred hours or less to beat the main game, maybe even 50 or 20 if I rush instead of trying to experience all of the story and side content again. Depends on how I'll feel like tackling this campaign.

But yeah, I almost hated it. One year didn't change how sour that intro feels, both before and after the title card drops. There's a couple other games that felt this way to me. To a lesser extent, TLOU2. Intro was a SLOG, gameplay wise. Beautiful storytelling, which I appreciated much better in later playthroughs, but as a tutorial it was just so slow and not fun in the slightest, specially the Ellie parts. It was mostly the Abby ones that kept the intro actually thrilling and exciting, probably cause she was fighting for her life in a zombie snowstorm while Ellie was literally horsing and flirting around in the snow before the storm caught up to her. Things only really started clicking for me and the game turned genuinely captivating after getting to Seattle, midway through Day 1. That's when the game hooked me and never let go.

Another Naughty Dog example to me is Uncharted 4. Tho that's not a case of only the intro being extremely slow. The whole first third of the game feels like one big intro where I'm waiting for things to finally pickup and for the chaotic nonstop sequences of gunfights broken up by dialogue and exploration to start, like they were in the first 3 games. Instead, it's the opposite. This game is just A LOT of climbing & talking set-pieces broken up by a couple short action sequences or two that can be also cheesed stealthly. Which is why I much prefer the first 3, specially 2 and 3. Gorgeous game, great mechanics, but I feel like they focused too much on multiplayer and online co-op.

Any more examples you have of games you loved but was almost put-off because of the intro or first act?

My firmware is 26.04-13.42.00. July 1st update. My PS5 Slim is currently stored away and I've hadn't had much chance to play it anymore and I've been heavily debating just plugging off my home's WiFi router, turning on PS5 again then deleting every wifi setting and backing up my user data via recovery settings to an external hard drive so I can maybe install them on a newer PS5 if I ever want to use something online again. Then wipe my old one's memory/settings so there's no trace of any account PSN left. And keep it stored for like 2 to 5 years until jailbreak has fully caught up with version 26.04-13.42.00.

I'm heavily debating doing this because I refuse to be made to buy any digital licenses for base games unless they're actually indie and have limited or no disc availability. Then there's the announcement that they're killing PS5 disc production in January 2028. Sucks for me cause I ONLY buy major distributor games if they have at least the full base game on disc. I skipped on Doom The Dark Ages because of that, as it's disc only has an installer that downloads the rest of the game.

This means any Sony 1st party/exclusive, especially those released after 2027, I won't get to play any time soon. And that's fine. I can wait, as I take years or almost a decade to get around to playing a game anyway. With jailbreak, or PC emulation in 10 years, something will always come up as an opportunity to play them. But I really want to evaluate this opportunity, now that I'm already one firmware behind. There's a couple future PlayStation originals I'd really like to play eventually in like 7 or 10 years without needing PC emulation, and that's only if I start saving this PS5 for jailbreak now.

Which brings me to my actual topic. Cross-gens with PS5 during PS6. How long do you think it'll last? If PS4 to PS5 is anything to go by, ir will last a long while. At least 3 or 4 years of PS exclusives/1st parties that comes for old and new gens. But with this new gen, ir could be an even longer cross-gen period for their big games. Maybe 5 or 6? Depends on how unwilling people are to buy the new +1000 dollar consoles, and how Sony folds under the pressure, or if they ever manage to bring the prices down. So there's this timeline. After PS6 is out in late 2027, cross gen will hopefully last until maybe 2031. But I don't know if that'll be enough for the games I want to come out for it and eventually get back-ported to my firmware.

Horizon 3 & The Last of Us 3 specially. Then Ratchet & Clank's sequel to Rift Apart. Astro Bot's sequel, if it takes too long to make. Whatever Insomniac, Santa Monica, Media Molecule, Sucker Punch and Bend Studios cook up next. Those are all games I would really like to play on PS5 jailbreak eventually, even if they take like 8 years to be available on my firmware, but there's the possibility they'll take too long to come out and not be cross-gen at all. PS6 exclusives.

That's what I wanted to ask about. What's your opinion on Sony and the industry trends in relation to how long will their cross-gen last from PS5 to PS6? Do you think we're at a point now that it might last the whole PS6 gen? Specially with the rumored portable PS6 that will make every game so optimized they could run on PS5 anyway?

Alternatively yeah, I could just buy a used PS6 early and wait for its firmware to get a jailbreak. But in the event I don't manage to, what do you think about these games coming out in the late 2020s to early 2030s? PS5 cross-gen release likely? I know I'd then have to wait like a couple more years for them to be playable on my firmware, I don't mind waiting