Sony Warned 2024 Would Be Light But PS5 Still Has The Best Games
This is the latest guest column from Push Square, the voice of the PlayStation community, offering passionate, in-depth coverage and insight into the world of Sony. Its goal is simple: to keep you informed, engaged, and part of the conversation surrounding all things PlayStation.
Sony sparked discontent among the PlayStation fandom in February this year when it said during an earnings call there’ll be no sequels or updates to “major existing franchise titles” on the PS5 before March 2025. With the platform holder keeping its content roadmaps close to its chest, the comments were largely taken out of context and many assumed this would be a lean year for the company’s new-gen console.
While it’s true this has been a fairly quiet year for PS Studios, it’s been anything but light on the games front. At the time of writing, my three Game of the Year frontrunners are Astro Bot, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, and Metaphor: ReFantazio and the PS5 is the only platform where you can play all three. Other possible contenders for awards include Silent Hill 2, Helldivers 2, and Black Myth: Wukong – all console exclusives.
There seems to be a sentiment on social media that a game doesn’t count unless it comes from a wholly owned first-party studio, but PlayStation has done a particularly good job of working with partners to keep its portfolio packed this year.
Stellar Blade is a great example. It collaborated with Korean developer Shift Up to help bring the NIKKE: Goddess of Victory creator’s console debut to market and in my opinion is another game in contention for an end of year gong. Rise of the Ronin, a similar partnership with legendary studio Team Ninja, may have received a cooler critical reception but it’s currently ranked 17th in IGN’s ongoing Game of the Year user poll, proving it was a hit with fans.
The nauseating number of remakes and remasters may not be to everyone’s taste, but it’s easy to forget The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered launched this year and tagged a 90 critical average on aggregators Metacritic and Open Critic. And while many rolled their eyes at the rumours around Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, a $10 upgrade fee and re-recorded dialogue and motion capture mean it’ll almost certainly attract positive reviews as well.
Not everything PlayStation has touched has turned to gold. Its complete misreading of the market with first-person shooter Concord will go down in history
Of course, not everything PlayStation has touched this year has turned to gold. Its complete misreading of the market with first-person shooter Concord – a competent albeit uninspiring affair – will go down in history after getting axed after two weeks. And yet for all the talk of its live service initiative stumbling, it launched the fastest-selling game in PS Studios history with Helldivers 2, an online co-op smash that, despite benefitting from a simultaneous PC launch, has outpaced juggernauts like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and God of War Ragnarok.
It’s been a quietly colossal year for PS5 then, and you get the sense the best is yet to come. The company’s largely kept its blockbusters close to its chest but 2025 should see the release of Ghost of Yotei and Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, with Marvel’s Wolverine waiting in the wings. These are the “major existing franchise titles” the Japanese giant was referring to in that aforementioned investor call.
Many may still argue this has been a light year for PS5 but the catalogue of content Sony has amassed paints a very different picture. The most exciting thing is that it’s successfully filled the time while its first-party teams continue to cook. A huge second-half to the generation now awaits.
Sammy Barker is the Editor of Push Square. He’s been living and breathing the wonderful world of PlayStation for decades now – and has the tattoos to prove it. You can find him on @_get2sammyb.
This is the latest guest column from Push Square, the voice of the PlayStation community, offering passionate, in-depth coverage and insight into the world of Sony. Its goal is simple: to keep you informed, engaged, and part of the conversation surrounding all things PlayStation.
Sony sparked discontent among the PlayStation fandom in February this year when it said during an earnings call there’ll be no sequels or updates to “major existing franchise titles” on the PS5 before March 2025. With the platform holder keeping its content roadmaps close to its chest, the comments were largely taken out of context and many assumed this would be a lean year for the company’s new-gen console.
While it’s true this has been a fairly quiet year for PS Studios, it’s been anything but light on the games front. At the time of writing, my three Game of the Year frontrunners are Astro Bot, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, and Metaphor: ReFantazio and the PS5 is the only platform where you can play all three. Other possible contenders for awards include Silent Hill 2, Helldivers 2, and Black Myth: Wukong – all console exclusives.
There seems to be a sentiment on social media that a game doesn’t count unless it comes from a wholly owned first-party studio, but PlayStation has done a particularly good job of working with partners to keep its portfolio packed this year.
Stellar Blade is a great example. It collaborated with Korean developer Shift Up to help bring the NIKKE: Goddess of Victory creator’s console debut to market and in my opinion is another game in contention for an end of year gong. Rise of the Ronin, a similar partnership with legendary studio Team Ninja, may have received a cooler critical reception but it’s currently ranked 17th in IGN’s ongoing Game of the Year user poll, proving it was a hit with fans.
The nauseating number of remakes and remasters may not be to everyone’s taste, but it’s easy to forget The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered launched this year and tagged a 90 critical average on aggregators Metacritic and Open Critic. And while many rolled their eyes at the rumours around Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, a $10 upgrade fee and re-recorded dialogue and motion capture mean it’ll almost certainly attract positive reviews as well.
Not everything PlayStation has touched has turned to gold. Its complete misreading of the market with first-person shooter Concord will go down in history
Of course, not everything PlayStation has touched this year has turned to gold. Its complete misreading of the market with first-person shooter Concord – a competent albeit uninspiring affair – will go down in history after getting axed after two weeks. And yet for all the talk of its live service initiative stumbling, it launched the fastest-selling game in PS Studios history with Helldivers 2, an online co-op smash that, despite benefitting from a simultaneous PC launch, has outpaced juggernauts like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and God of War Ragnarok.
It’s been a quietly colossal year for PS5 then, and you get the sense the best is yet to come. The company’s largely kept its blockbusters close to its chest but 2025 should see the release of Ghost of Yotei and Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, with Marvel’s Wolverine waiting in the wings. These are the “major existing franchise titles” the Japanese giant was referring to in that aforementioned investor call.
Many may still argue this has been a light year for PS5 but the catalogue of content Sony has amassed paints a very different picture. The most exciting thing is that it’s successfully filled the time while its first-party teams continue to cook. A huge second-half to the generation now awaits.
Sammy Barker is the Editor of Push Square. He’s been living and breathing the wonderful world of PlayStation for decades now – and has the tattoos to prove it. You can find him on @_get2sammyb.
IGN
Sony Warned 2024 Would Be Light But PS5 Still Has The Best Games - IGN
Pokémon developer Game Freak has reportedly suffered a significant hack resulting in the leak of stolen data that includes codenames for 10th generation Pokémon games and even the Nintendo Switch 2.
Forgotten Gems is a regular column about notable games that have moved out of the public eye and may not be easily accessible anymore. To see all the other games I've covered so far, check out the previous issues of Forgotten Gems in our Columns section.
Metroid-like games and their roguelike off-shoots are everywhere today. Not a week goes by without an indie game announcement promising “metroidvania” gameplay elements – and even Nintendo returned to making new Metroid titles after a near six year hiatus following Metroid: Other M in 2010. And that’s me being generous and counting Metroid Prime: Federation Force as a Metroid game…
But it wasn’t always so. After a Metroid renaissance in the early 2000s with Fusion, Prime, and Zero Mission (what a run!) exploring the series in both 2D and 3D, there was a clear shift away from these classic side-view explorative shooters. Konami stuck it out longer with the “vania” part of the equation and cranked out several quality 2D Castlevanias. But despite the critical success of many of these games, I think it’s fair to say that the genre was diminishing.
So it was with much excitement that I read on IGN back then that designer Donald Mustard and the ChAIR Entertainment team were planning to make a game based on Orson Scott Card’s dystopian novel, Empire. The two had previously collaborated on the underrated Advent Rising, and early coverage on IGN in 2006 – including whispers that it was going to be a bit of a love letter to Metroid – sounded promising.
When Metroidvanias Roamed the Earth
“The 2D Metroid and Zelda games were some of my favorite games of all time and to me represented the pinnacle of 2D game design, specifically when it comes to making a non-linear ‘onion layer’ world where exploration and discovery is the core design pillar,” Donald Mustard, former CCO, Epic Games and Co-Founder of ChAIR told me last week.
"…mostly, we had some awesome and innovative ideas and I just wanted to make it and play it." - Donald Mustard
“Our team felt like the genre had been largely abandoned for over a decade, since the advent of 3D gaming, and we really missed playing them. We thought maybe other people missed them as well, or that even a whole new generation of gamers could discover them. I know it’s weird to consider now, but it was also a time when non-physical – aka digital – distribution was ‘just’ becoming viable and games were no longer limited to being put in a box on a store shelf at a cost of $60 or more. It felt like the possibility of what a game ‘had’ to be was ripe for disruption, and it was the perfect moment to try and do something unique. But mostly, we had some awesome and innovative ideas and I just wanted to make it and play it.”
Selecting a genre other than first-person shooter or RPG already meant swimming against the current, but releasing Shadow Complex as a digital exclusive in 2009 made it an even bigger wager. At the time, console gamers vocally defended their preference to buy physical media over digital downloads.
Living in a Material World
Selling a game like Shadow Complex as a digital exclusive was a big deal back then. While Steam, Google Play, Apple App Store, and console digital stores game sales now dwarf the amount of physical games sold in the US, Statista estimates that in 2009, 80-90% of all game purchases were physical.
I’ve pulled this slide from our 2012 Gamer Segmentation Study (from the dusty corners of my hard drive) for another look at console gamers’ buying habits back in the Xbox 360/PS3 era. Even in 2012, the majority of console gamers didn't just prefer to buy physical games, they relied on retail purchases for most of them, too.
While it cut down on the publisher’s gamble with a non-franchise, niche game potentially gathering dust on store shelves, a digital-only release also risked alienating its potential core fanbase. Luckily, Shadow Complex made a great first showing. The polygonal, 2.5D presentation avoided the game looking like a relic of a bygone era. For ChAIR, going with polygons over sprites was all part of wanting to push the classic 2D Metroidvania formula as far as they could – and that included advanced lighting and effects.
Shadow Complex is at its core a side-scrolling action-adventure that’s heavy on exploration and platforming, but there are moments where it swings the camera around for third-person action sequences and lets players fire into the background. In a bit of serendipity, perhaps, that approach found its way into the very series that inspired Shadow Complex. The Team Ninja-developed Metroid: Other M similarly mixed 2D sequences with third-person perspective interaction – to its detriment, I’d argue in that case, as it was also tied to a clumsy control scheme.
Colonel Mustard, in the Lab, With the Foam Gun
One my favorite things about every new Zelda, Mario, or Metroid game is to discover what new powers the designers came up with. Being able to unlock, say, a magical vacuum cleaner, and then figuring out how to use it to solve puzzles is the sort of hook that has me coming back for more time and time again. I just 100-percented Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom this week – and while it didn’t quite live up to the peak combat and dungeon design of the best Zelda games past, it takes and runs with the "multi-use tool" concept in impressive ways. Whether it’s grabbing a water-based enemy to put out flames or building stairways out of beds, getting creative with objects that unlock exploration is half the fun in action-adventure games. Which brings me back to one example of why Shadow Complex stuck with me for so long: the Foam Gun.
Turns out, Mustard is also on Team Foam Gun: “I love the Foam Gun too! One of the things that most Metroid games have is a freeze mechanic you can use to freeze enemies in place. You can then use the frozen enemy as a platform to land on or jump off. We loved that mechanic and wanted to extend on the idea – what if you could use a ‘quick hardening Foam’ to ‘freeze’ an enemy or an object but then could stack Foam to build structures or walls or platforms, and then go further and add combinatorial effects like ‘what happens if I shoot foam onto something and then throw a grenade into it?’ We wanted to allow for more emergent and unexpected forms of gameplay. The more we prototyped and played with it, the more exciting it became, and the more we leaned into it as a core mechanic. That kind of philosophy and design heavily influences everything I’ve made since then.”
The Foam Gun wasn’t just fun to use. It also became an integral way to sequence-break Shadow Complex. At a runtime between five and 13 hours, according to HowLongtoBeat, the ability to create yourself your own platforms provided those who knew where to look a way to blaze through the game even faster. There is a moment in Metroid Fusion where the game sort of breaks the fourth wall to acknowledge when a player creatively “breaks” the game and gets to an area in record time. It’s a fascinating bit of meta commentary because it reminds players that for as smart and crafty as they think they are, the designers were actually one step ahead after all. They didn’t just figure out the same trick, they may have designed it in the first place.
“I love emergent gameplay, and rewarding players for trying to push the edges of what the game world or a game system can be. As we discovered crazy sequence-breaking opportunities, we decided to lean into them as opposed to ‘fixing them’ as much as possible,” Mustard told me when asked about the Foam Gun shortcuts. “We were very lucky to have Ken Lobb at Microsoft Games give us some incredible advice. It was great working with him. He was part of Nintendo when the original Metroid games were being made and shared some techniques they used to deliberately allow people to find ways to sequence break very very early into the game. It’s a design lesson I’ll never forget. Cough. Fortnite Rocket Riding. Cough. Cough.”
When Shadow Complex released in August of 2009, the reception was unanimously favorable. Not only did players love the game, it brought back fond memories of an increasingly underserved genre.
Naturally, ChAIR started work on a sequel. Mustard: “Finishing the game almost felt like ‘okay now we actually know how to make a game like this’ so now we can be much more ambitious with the next one. Our goal can be to really move the genre forward!”
Mobile Blade Killed the Console Star
While not much is known about the actual project, designers at ChAIR and its parent company, Epic Games, acknowledge that they were working on a Shadow Complex sequel. As late as September 2011, Cliff Bleszinski (then Epic Games design director) commented that Shadow Complex 2 was “largely designed” and that Epic needed to find a partner to help finish the game and publish it. But sometimes, better – or perhaps, bigger – is the enemy of the good – and a pioneering mobile game hit led ChAIR into a new direction.
“We immediately began working on a sequel. Like with Shadow Complex, we designed the entire game map on paper first, then quickly stood it up in a very rough but completely playable form. We got pretty far into preproduction, and in my opinion, it probably would have been the best game I’ve ever made,” Mustard shared. “But… in late July of 2010 we had a very unique opportunity to partner with Apple to make the very first game ever using Unreal Engine on mobile devices. We decided to pause development on SC2 to investigate that opportunity and 4 1/2 months later released Infinity Blade on iOS.”
"Shadow Complex 2 probably would have been the best game I’ve ever made" - Donald Mustard
Infinity Blade blew up – in part because it showed core gamers that mobile games could be for them – and was quickly followed by a sequel. The two games grossed over $30 million at a time when established publishers and developers alike were still trying to figure out a “there” for them on Apple’s expanding mobile gaming marketplace. Infinity Blade III was unveiled in late 2013 and launched at the same time, complete with an Imagine Dragons song tie-in. It rocketed to #1 in the App Store within hours. But there was an even bigger distraction on the horizon that made a return to the world of Shadow Complex very unlikely.
Mustard says that creating Shadow Complex was one of the great joys of his life. The team’s goal was to see if they could make something that would live up to the games that inspired it – and then expand upon them and help bring something new to the genre.
“The right timing to return to Shadow Complex just never presented itself as we soon became very busy with what became Fortnite,” said Mustard.
I've Seen the Future and it Will Be
As for the future, Mustard left Epic in 2023 to join the Russo Brothers, the directors of Winter Soldier, Civil War, and Avengers Infinity War and Endgame, at multimedia studio AGBO. “I am very satisfied with the work I’ve done in games over the past 20+ years and for now I feel like I have done everything I wanted to do -- with one possible exception,” he told me.
The good news for fans of metroidvanias – including Mustard who calls out this year’s Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown and Animal Well as new favorites (I agree!) – is that the genre is now clearly here to stay. Gone are the days of having to pick between the two flavors “sci-fi” and “gothic” bounty hunter or having to wonder if Metroid: Dread would ever see the light of day. We now have granddaddy Castlevania crossing back into the very roguelike spin-off it inspired in the first place, Dead Cells. We have forgotten Atari 2600 shooter Yars’ Revenge serving as the inspiration for a 2D metroidvania reboot in Yars Rising. And we even have the absolutely delightful shmuptroidvania Minishoot’ Adventures that basically crosses The Legend of Zelda with Galaga. If you want to play a metroidvania, you no longer have to dig in the past. I know, ironic – because that’s what this very column is about.
But I’m greedy, so I asked Donald Mustard if he would come back to work on a game like Shadow Complex – or if he was ready to deputize someone else out there who could carry on the legacy and continue the series.
“The opportunity to become a partner at AGBO with Joe and Anthony Russo and the absolutely incredible team that has assembled there is a dream come true for me. We are creating some truly incredible stories that will allow us to push storytelling further across different mediums. I can’t wait for people to experience some of these things,” he said.
“But that ‘possible exception’ I mentioned? If I was to ever direct another video game someday, it would absolutely be a game like Shadow Complex.”
"If I was to ever direct another video game someday, it would absolutely be a game like Shadow Complex.” - Donald Mustard
Where Can You Play it Now
Shadow Complex wasn’t entirely forgotten after ChAIR turned to Infinity Blade. The developer brought back a Remaster of Shadow Complex for an encore outing in 2015 for PC, with a console release on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One the following year.
If there is a silver lining in the story of a potential game series cut short, it’s that Shadow Complex is easy to track down – and it still holds up well in both editions. The Remaster is available for $15 on the Epic Games Store and Steam and the PlayStation and Xbox Stores. Annoyingly, the original Xbox 360 game sells for the same price. If you want to splurge, there’s even a small physical release of 7,500 PS4 copies of the Remastered version, courtesy of Limited Run, which unfortunuately now commands upwards of $100 on eBay. The remaster is definitely the version to play – and I highly recommend going back to it if you’re a fan of metroidvanias in general.
Peer Schneider heads up Game Help & Tools across IGN, Map Genie, Eurogamer, RockPaperShotgun, and VG247 and would love to fill a pool with metroidvanias and go swimming in it.
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Earlier this week, Intel announced what would be its 15th-generation processors: the Core Ultra 200S lineup. These new processors mark the beginning of a completely new design philosophy for Intel’s desktop processors, with AI at the forefront. Intel, in its infinite wisdom, added last year’s neural processing unit (NPU) to its desktop processors in an attempt to boost AI performance when the graphics card is otherwise occupied.
The problem is, Intel did this while also dialing back power consumption, which leads to “parity” performance with the 14th-generation chips that came out last year. Intel is hoping that by lowering power consumption and temperatures while more or less staying at the same level of performance, it can convince desktop and PC gaming enthusiasts to buy in on AI in a way that doesn’t really help us. Intel isn’t alone.
While AMD didn’t go so far as to add an NPU to its latest desktop processors, AMD Ryzen 9000 also dialed back power consumption and temperatures, which led to some processors falling behind their last-generation counterparts in some tests. Couple that with the longest time we’ve ever had to wait between graphics card generations, with Nvidia and AMD’s latest GPUs still nowhere to be seen, and it’s a weird time to be a PC gamer.
Processors Got Too Hot, Now They’re Backing Off
Dialing back power consumption and operating temperatures was the right move from both CPU manufacturers, as Intel and AMD have faced intense issues over the last year. More recently, an Intel microcode – essentially the instructions that facilitate communication between your motherboard and processor – was cooking 14th- and 13th-gen processors in their sockets, dramatically lowering life expectancy. A fix has been released, and anyone with a 14th- or 13th-gen Intel CPU can update their microcode and BIOS to remedy the issue.
Likewise, AMD ran into some issues, particularly around the popular (and still amazing) Ryzen 7 7800X3D. Multiple motherboards were found to have pumped too much power into the processor, causing it to literally explode, as demonstrated by Gamers Nexus last year. Luckily, this issue has also been fixed through BIOS updates, via The Verge.
In a lot of ways, configuring desktop processors to take the foot off the gas pedal just a bit has been needed for a long time. I remember when I was reviewing the Intel Core i9-12900K for TechRadar, I had to do multiple double-takes to make sure my cooler was working right when I kept seeing 90°C temperatures at stock settings – and that was with a 360mm AIO. Ultimately, once I had a reliable test system and I knew everything was dialed in, I ended up finding the 12900K peaked at around 86°C. Not bad, but still a huge increase from the 76°C reached by the 11900K in the same test suite.
Temperatures kept going up in subsequent generations, though. I found the Intel Core i9-14900K would hit up to 102°C during my review, a result Intel assured me was working by design. To be clear, I’ve been using a 14900K in my testing since it came out and I haven’t had any problems with stability, so clearly it is working. But when temperatures go that high, problems can happen.
Power consumption has also been a major pain point lately, which is true whether you’re talking about CPUs or graphics cards. That Intel Core i9-14900K I mentioned earlier consumes up to 329W of power by itself. That’s an astronomical amount of power for a desktop processor that’s not running on an HEDT (high-end desktop) platform.
The upcoming Intel Core Ultra 9 285K has a Turbo Power Limit of 250W, which is about the same as last gen’s Intel Core i9-14900K. However, the 14900K’s PL1, the actual power limit, was upwards of 350W. Intel hasn’t released unlocked power limits for the Core 9 285K, but it will certainly be interesting when I get it in the lab.
If Intel is able to match the performance of the Core i9-14900K, but without the stability issues that have plagued its processors from the last couple of years, I’ll consider that a win. But given that AMD also went through a similar process with the Ryzen 9 9700X earlier this year, I think it’s fair to say that gaming CPUs are going through something of a reset.
AI is Ruining My Life
What makes less sense is Intel’s need to shove an NPU into its desktop processors. I totally get why NPUs are being shoehorned into every laptop processor – gaming laptops are going to get the AI treatment at CES 2025, prove me wrong – but it’s simply unnecessary for a desktop processor.
Half of the reason graphics cards are so expensive is because they’re so good at powering AI at every stage of development. This likely has a lot to do with the recent leaks suggesting the RTX 5090 could cost up to $2,499. Anyone that’s going to fork over the $589 for the Core Ultra 9 285K is going to be pairing it with a high-end graphics card – that’s just kind of how enthusiasts work. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super, which isn’t even the fastest GPU out there, can deliver 836 TOPS of AI performance. The NPU in the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K can do 13 TOPS. A drop in the bucket.
Intel claims that this NPU is there to assist when the GPU is already occupied with other tasks, like gaming. While I wholeheartedly believe non-upscaling AI is going to make its way to gaming at some point, we simply aren’t there yet.
It makes even less sense when you consider Intel has already implemented a better NPU into its Lunar Lake lineup. The NPU in the Intel Core Ultra 9 288V, a laptop chip, is capable of AI performance up to 120 TOPS. That means Intel’s enthusiast chip has an NPU more than ten times slower than what’s found in a laptop right now. Why even include it?
Will This End?
AI is inescapable when it comes to PCs lately. AMD, Intel, and Nvidia have all told me over and over again that AI is the future. That’s probably why every component lately has been designed with AI in mind, or at least in part. I don’t know about you, but I still haven’t found a single AI application that actually makes anything I do easier. Instead, these tech giants seem to be creating solutions to problems that don’t really exist in order to sell new hardware.
I’m sure some AI applications are going to become part of our daily lives, but is it worth making everything we buy cost exponentially more? I don’t think it is, and my heart genuinely goes out to you if you’re trying to build or buy a gaming PC right now. It’s hard out there.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
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