Anyone else picking this up on Friday?

Nope

I know you are out. You won't even play the game for the subforum you spend most of your time in.

Believe it or not, I was going to...

And then I learned that Sony is holding the online portion to ransom, so I grabbed Salt & Sanctuary instead for my Dark Souls fix.

I literally just ordered Blooborne off of ebay, though (with the 20% off dad code).

Multiplayer for both major consoles has been locked behind a subscription since 2013, and the Nintendo Switch is heading that way this year. It's almost 5 years too late to be upset at this one.



This is like saying you play HuniePop to get your Tetris "fix".

With the added irony that you got a (basically) single player game in order to get a fix, because you couldn't play the multiplayer in the preferred game.



Speaking of online purchases and PSN, Bloodborne's price on PSN is now equal to the price of its DLC, which has 4 of the best bosses in the game. And the two are bundled for 12.5% off on PSN. I would recommend (too late obviously) anyone planning to get the DLC just buy it from the online store tbh.

I mean, I would, but I think a better comparison would be a Bejeweled fix (which I have done, since I love match-3 games), since Salt & Sanctuary tries as hard as it damn well can to be "Dark Souls in 2D", even copying its messaging system. I've also been playing Hollow Knight, and it's come very close to filling my Dark Souls fix, but it's so much better of a metroidvania that it's giving me it's own kind of itch.



*opens mouth*
*facepalms*

You got me there. I hadn't even considered that angle. I just wasn't going to reward bad practices. I'd rather get an indie game that fully works as intended than a "triple-A" game that has part of its content sectioned off behind a paywall.

Calling PSN+ a paywall is like calling your ISP a paywall. You are paying a subscription fee to access the biggest part of the PlayStation Network, and the only major platform that doesn't do this is PC. Because all PC games aren't running on the "Steam network".

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On a different note, you aren't rewarding bad practices by buying Dark Souls Remastered on PS4. The publishers of Dark Souls Remastered have zero control over the PSN+ system, and as long as you buy a physical copy you aren't really rewarding Sony for anything.

You are basically refusing to buy a product from Bandai Namco because you don't like Sony. I guarantee you that if they could, Bandai Namco would provide the multiplayer to you for absolutely free, because it's in their best interest to do so in this situation. But they have zero control over that, because Sony has an obvious monopoly over their own network.

Again, that metaphor doesn't quite work, because you can't pay for PSN and get access to it without already paying an ISP. Other than that, you're fairly spot-on. Honestly, if I had a new computer and not one that was 7 or so years old, I'd just buy the remaster on PC and not have any of these problems.

A lot of this, I know, comes from the fact that I haven't had a console since the PS2, so a lot of these "normal" practices are just distasteful to me. Although I would like to note that I detest the idea that "it's been like this forever, you're too late to complain", because that kind of thinking got us Star Wars Battlefront 2.

It's been either 5 or 13 years depending on the point of reference you want to pick. When it's not a controversial issue, it's a wee bit of a stretch to compare something like this to something like Battlefront 2.

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The Remaster is HD Dark Souls with a lot of the bugs fixed and a few new bugs introduced. Unless you already know how to do some of the bugs or you google it, the only bad new thing introduced on consoles that affects the single player is that rolling has a minor animation bug I didn't notice until someone pointed it out to me (can't unsee that once you've seen it, so please don't google it if you don't want to know).

$40 to play HD Dark Souls on the PS4 was worth it to me. I would never pay for it on PC though.

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The three really controversial things about the game are:

1. They took Prepare to Die Edition off of Steam. This is slimeball-esque and should be the main reason you would boycott the game.

2. They introduced Dark Souls 3 weapon matchmaking into Dark Souls 1; without taking things like armor, spells, and early game tomfoolery into account. This basically made sure that co-op will die off in the long run, but serious twinks won't be affected at all while the game is still active.

^ This also means you should not buy the game for only the multiplayer unless you are going to play as much as you can before it inevitably dies off due to this mechanic.

3. They didn't put in good anti-cheat on PC, so it's very easy to Hack without getting punished/caught. It's not extremely common, but it's not unheard of either and is going to plague the multiplayer until they fix it. The most popular hack is where an invader spawns in and instantly curses you, egg-heads you, and breaks all your equipment. All things the game can't detect as not allowed.

Prepare to Die Edition will always be the best in my heart.