In an interview with Game File, Maguire spoke about high engagement rates for PlayStation Plus, revealing that the more expensive tears of the service – Premium and Extra – have been seeing more and more players sign up. “Engagement in Plus has never been higher than it is right now,” said Maguire.

While PlayStation Plus as a service had originally existed even in the PS3 days, it only started becoming necessary for online multiplayer with the release of the PS4. At the time, the subscription service also rewarded players with free games that they could add to their libraries. The current form of the service with its different tiers was introduced back in 2022, and Maguire has noted that this rework “surpassed our expectations”.

“It’s really given us a new way to reach the audiences with these games, and it’s given new value to partners to find new people to play their titles,” he said. “And just the engagement we see from it is really positive, in terms of the number of people choosing that Catalog and coming back month after month.”

Maguire also noted that, while Sony is continuing to reinvest into the service to attract new subscribers by adding in additional features – like game streaming on PlayStation Portal – he also notes that the company still isn’t keen on releasing its first-party titles on to the service on release. Rather, Sony wants to stick to its current strategy of bringing in three or four third-party (often indie) titles to PS Plus, and bolstering the catalogue with an older PS5 title.

“Our strategy of finding four or five independent day-and-date titles—and using that to complement our strategy of bringing games in when they’re 12, 18 months old or older—that balance for us is working really well across the platform,” Maguire said.

When it comes to the availability of classic PlayStation games from previous console generations through PS Plus, Maguire also spoke about the difficulty in bringing in PS3 games, since the unique hardware of the console means that its games can’t natively run on PS5 hardware. Rather, PS3 titles are often available through cloud streaming.

“Through streaming, we’ll still continue to look at those ones,” noted Maguire about PS3 games. “We haven’t ruled them out. The opportunities are there. But there are a lot of PS3 games already streaming.”

Ultimately, Maguire notes that, despite some negativity in the comments for PlayStation Plus game announcements, the company plans to continue investing in the service.

“I think we’ll continue to listen and learn about what gamers want and try to bring more value in for them,” he said. “We’re very proud of what we’ve delivered in the last few year. And excited to sort of see the response and the engagement we get from players coming in.”

DOOM Eternal is looking to take everything that made DOOM (2016) so bleeding good and crank it all up to eleven. In all that we’ve seen of the game so far, it’s looked like a hellishly good time- characteristically brutal, devilishly fast, and beautifully gory.

Now, newly emerged footage (via ResetEra) – footage itself that’s not too recent – shows more of the game in action, and continues to exhibit those same strengths. It’s only a few minutes, but it’s enough to get you excited. There’s impactful shooting and explosions of bloody guts, the game’s expanded movement and mobility, and Mick Gordon’s blaring, pumping soundtrack punctuating it all. Take a look below- the video’s timestamped, so just hit play.

We’ll be seeing a lot more of DOOM Eternal not long from now. It’s supposed to be the centrepiece of Bethesda’s E3 presentation, which is scheduled for June 9th. Following that, the game will also be playable at QuakeCon Europe in July. The game itself launches some time this year for the PS4, Xbox One, PC, Nintendo Switch, and Stadia.

https://youtu.be/qdz4b5psrhE?t=2433

The story is as low stakes as the previous titles in the series: Lydie and Suelle are twin sisters who live with their father in the capital city of their kingdom, running an atelier. However, the girls are inexperienced, and their father, who seems to be the eccentric artist type, isn’t much better, and their atelier isn’t doing all that well. The girls mostly have to fend for themselves (including making and managing money and feeding themselves), but they harbor a hope to have the best atelier in the kingdom- a hope founded in a promise they made to their mother, whose whereabouts are unknown.

The story unfolds from there along two convergent paths- one is when their kingdom institutes an atelier ranking system to invite more alchemists to it, which causes the girls to start making efforts to get better at what they do; the other is when they discover they can escape into paintings. Inside these paintings, they conveniently find more materials that they can use for their alchemy to achieve great results that otherwise seem to be out of their reach.

"The Atelier games have settled into an easygoing routine and formula by now, and they’re comfortable in just staying in their niche. As such, if the previous games were up your alley, so will this new one be. If the older games failed to win you over, Lydie & Suelle won’t convert you."

The story here, as I am sure you have realized, is quite different from other JRPGs, other RPGs, or really, any other story in games- rather than focusing on a central conflict where you have to come of age and save the world, or overcome some obstacle, this is a breezy and relaxed tale that keeps things mostly stress free. It’s a cheerful world with likeable characters, and it even acts as a stress buster after, say, a particularly intense bout of Fortnite or Monster Hunter.

As for those characters, they are, very largely, tropes- Lydie is the “older twin”, who’s meek, submissive, and doesn’t like confrontation, while Sue is the “younger” one, who’s vivacious, tomboyish, and mischievous. Apart from that, you have the absent minded father who can’t get his life together, the young prodigy, the childhood rival, and so on and on and on. The characters never truly grow beyond these archetypes, which can get grating, but at the very least, I can say that the tropes are done well- as long as you don’t hate stereotypes by definition, you might even like what is here for what it is.

The gameplay for the title here is similarly breezy and casual- you have turn based battles where you can use you standard attacks or your skills, with wrinkles thrown in thanks to a “positioning system”, where characters in battle pair up, with the front character acting as a wall, and the back character acting as support. It never actually gets too complicated, and the enemies never pose much of a challenge- really, the game’s battles are in keeping with the easygoing nature of the rest of it all- but battles make for a nice change of pace from the rest of it all, with slightly more engagement required than most of the rest of the game.

Other gameplay elements include alchemy (which involves gathering materials in the world and then throwing them together in a minigame to craft items), completing quests, and managing your time- because, as a slice of life game, Atelier Lydie and Suelle has a constant clock going on, and everything you do costs you time. Again, managing time never gets as stressful as it can in something like Persona, but it is an element to be mindful of.

"All these elements come together to create a rather open ended experience, giving players the option to decide how their story unfolds. In fact, there are are even multiple ending paths in the story, based on what you emphasize the most in your playthrough, which can potentially lead to more replayability."

All these elements come together to create a rather open ended experience, giving players the option to decide how their story unfolds. In fact, there are are even multiple ending paths in the story, based on what you emphasize the most in your playthrough, which can potentially lead to more replayability.

This apart, the game looks fine (although it’s a fair bit blurry, and graphics never go beyond looking merely acceptable), with voice acting that I honestly did not find too good. Now, it’s in Japanese (no option for English voices), so I might not be the best judge, but I’ve played a fair few games with Japanese voices previously, and none of them have ever grated on me like Atelier Lydie & Suelle, which sounds stereotypically anime, did. The actual localization isn’t the best, either, and I spotted some sentences that were oddly constructed- but, again, in a game like this, that’s splitting hairs.

On the other hand, the music here was probably the best of the “presentation elements”- again, it’s not spectacular, it’s not even very good. Most of it is fairly generic, but what it is is catchy, and for some tunes that you will be listening to for hours on end, that’s probably the best we can hope for (outside of demanding actually great music).

Atelier Lydie & Suelle is not a great game. I would hesitate to even necessarily call it a good one by conventional definitions, to be honest. What it is the most like is comfort food- there’s nothing it does particularly well, and you know there are loads of alternatives to it that are better in most regards. But there’s something soothing an comforting about booting this up and just engaging in a low stakes, stress-free story for some hours on end every day. Given how many incredible JRPGs the PS4 already has, this wouldn’t even be near the top of my recommendations for the genre on the platform- but if you’re looking for a nice, sweet game to relax with, you could do far worse than Atelier Lydie & Suelle: The Alchemists and the Mysterious Paintings.

This game was reviewed on PS4.

Fallout 4 is a game that is supposed to lead you to some moral choices and then force you to make a decision that isn’t all that moral. The world of the game is one that is harsh and is very much kill or be killed. The game’s developers have even pointed out they built it in a way that would force you to kill someone eventually.

The game is also about as open world as you can get and that means there are a ton of different ways to play. One particular player even managed to find a way to beat the game without killing a single person. Kyle Hinckley knows it’s hard to believe he finished the game without murdering a single person so he posted video evidence of his win (which you can watch below.) What’s even more impressive is that he did so on the game’s hardest level.

Hinckley told Kotaku that he completed this task by loading up his character with charisma so that he was able to calm down even the most deadliest and angriest of enemies. This Charisma also allowed him to actually talk quite a few characters into taking each other out. That means this isn’t exactly a bloodless run through, merely that the player didn’t have to do any bloodletting on his own. By playing the game like this, the player, who calls himself the Weirdist on YouTube showed that there really are a ton of different ways to beat Fallout 4.

I really thought that the PS+ lineup for this month would be good- we are entering the holiday season, the PS4 has an uncharacteristically weak lineup for the remainder of the year, and Xbox One’s monthly offerings with Games with Gold continue to get better. Imagine, then, my disappointment at just how underwhelming the lineup this month really is.

The month’s lineup is the following. I guess the Vita gets four games and the PS4 three, thanks to Cross Buy shenanigans:

• Broken Age (PS4/PS Vita)
• Super Meat Boy (PS4/PS Vita)
• Unmechanical Extended (PS4/PS3)
• Kickbeat (PS Vita/PS3)
• Kung Fu Rabbit (PS Vita/PS3)
• Chariot (PS3)

To add insult to injury, DriveClub PS+ Edition will be leaving PS+ on October 6. Which is rich, considering that it is a gutted version of the game, promised toPS4 purchasers for free at launch, delayed alongside the game for a year, and then delayed for another year as Evolution Studios tried to get their act together.

Yeah, all in all, a pretty terrible month for PS+.

It almost feels as though Square Enix are going out of their way to undermine the long awaited Final Fantasy VII remake that they announced last E3 as much as possible. After announcing a version of the game for PC, and then also confirming that that same version would be coming to PS4 last December, they have released yet another version of the game that will make it widely available to fans and newcomers- Final Fantasy VII is, you see, now available for iOS platforms.

It’s a pretty demanding game, too- you need over 4GB of free space to even download it, you need an iPhone 5s or above, an iPad 3 or iPad Mini 2 or above, or a sixth generation iPod Touch- anything lower, and Square Enix warns that the game could run at extremely slow speeds.

The game is mostly a straight port of the PC version, though several mobile friendly changes have been made- a virtual controller designed not to obscure the action has been added, and you can choose between virtual analogue or fixed four-way digital control pad options. You can also adjust the opacity of the on-screen controls. Finally, you can choose to turn off overworld turn based battles (for when you are playing in a hurry) entirely, though story battles are still mandatory.

It sounds like a good deal, then- and for $20, it’s not half bad at all.

The August selection of games for Sony’s PS+ Instant Game Selection service have been announced, and it’s a rather middling selection all around this month- unlike Xbox Live’s Games With Gold, which has an actual impressive showing this time around, PS+ is largely an underwhelming showing.

The big headliner this time around is the excellent former Wii U exclusive Stealth Inc. 2 is up for grabs, as is the outstanding platformer Limbo.

The full selection is as follows:

Limbo (PS4)
Stealth Inc 2: A Game of Clones (PS4, PS3, PS Vita)
Sound Shapes (PS4, PS3, PS Vita)
CastleStorm Complete Edition (PS3, PS Vita)

What do you think? How does this stack up to the Xbox Live Games with Gold selection? Let us know in the comments!

Even though at its core, DriveClub is actually a fairly great racing game, with an amazing driving model and gorgeous visuals, it became a bit of a running joke because of its messed up launch, which saw server issues and the game not functioning properly for months afterwards, and developer Evolution forced into damage control mode, offering apologies left, right, and center, conciliatory free DLC, and even going so far as to suspend the PS+ version of DriveClub indefinitely– which was the very first thing that was ever promised to us about the PS4, way back in February 2013.

Well, Sony Worldwide Studios Shuehei Yoshida recently took the time to outline where exactly the game went wrong, and what the cause of all the issues was, in an interview with Kotaku.

“We are very embarrassed,” said Yoshida, “and we are sorry for that.”

“It’s just the number of people the server couldn’t handle,” he said. “The stress-testing was not designed correctly. So it was the oversight. So the team had to go back to the drawing board in terms of server code. And they have been re-factoring and re-engineering server-side to be able to have more people play the game at the same time.”

Essentially, then, this wasn’t just a coding error or a glitch- the very server architecture of the game, and of PSN at large, was revealed to be inadequate, and had to be redone. Yoshida claims that that has now been redone, and points to the successful launch of Bloodborne as proof.

Of course, this is punctuated by the fact that yesterday, DriveClub’s PS+ edition did go up on PSN for a while, before it was taken down again within a couple of hours (it now launches tomorrow, June 25). Evolution’s reason for pulling the game from the store yesterday? “The servers aren’t ready yet, so it’s been removed while we get them ready.”

… yeah.

If PlayStation Plus was not enough of a rewards program for you, then Sony Computer Entertainment Europe has gone one step ahead and announced the PlayStation Plus Bonus program for Italy, which will offer addition deals and discounts to members.

PlayStation Plus Bonus is a service for PlayStation Plus subscribers; it stacks with their existing PSN PS+ subscriptions, and it lets them take advantage of several discounts in three different areas: vouchers, discounts, and benefits. To avail of these additional discounts, all you have to do is log into this site with your PSN credentials, and redeem the discount you are interested in.

As of right now, this program is exclusive to Italy, and the press release does say that it is planned to stay that way. That said, something similar might crop up in other parts of the world, and, even if it does not, it does not seem like we are missing on much anyway.

Most of DriveClub’s bad launch can be put behind us as a bad memory now, but one haunting specter remains to this day- the failure of Evolution Studios to launch the free PS+ edition of the game, which was promised to us as far back as two years ago, at the debut of the PlayStation 4.

If you have been holding out in the hope that it will launch sometime soon, don’t- it seems like a lot of work on the PS+ version is still left, by Evolution’s own admission. ‘There’s still a lot of server development needed to support the PS+ Edition,” they said.

That said, it’s not all doom and gloom- while DriveClub is a great game now, I think everyone will agree that it does have a dearth of cars. Evolution confirmed that they are working with more car manufacturers to remedy just that. “We’re working with new manufacturers to bring new cars to the game, so keep following :)” they said.

Which sounds good. Fine. But no, I won’t stop whining about the PS+ version, it’s about the principle now.