I given up Splatoon 3 so I'm considering getting Soul Hackers

Question is I love Persona with passion, but had mixed reactions to SMT 5. Press turn combat is great and imo better than Persona and MP management is much more lenient in SMT too. The game has a much more open spaces, meaning it focus on exploring instead of tight gaming design, which is fine as I appreciate both dungeons and exploration. The setting is also very atmospheric, which is nice and the OST (although nowhere near Persona level) is decent.

The problems are SMT 5 has a very boring and dull story, repetitive gameplay dynamics and maps. It's basically wasteland after wasteland with only combats and eventual side quests that aren't fun to being with. So you spend 60 hours in a desert capturing Pokedemons and fusing them and that's it. A JRPG without a good story, characters and is soulless for me, but really the dull wastelands were the worst for me, must be the least visually appealing game I've played in a while and made me completely uninterested in exploration because... what's there to explore in first place?

I want to know how Soul Hackers plays compared to the other two.

Hogwarts Legacy has officially been delayed, but, there is a release date! February 10th, 2023

Hmm, so far Spider-Man on Steam has leveled off at 60,000 players and has hovered around that number for the past 30 minutes. Slightly going up and slightly going down. I was expecting a much higher number, but still respectable.

I wonder how much of an impact the game releasing in the middle of the night in Asia and Oceania, and the morning of a business day in the Americas had on player counts? Europe primarily had the best timing to play the game since it launched in the late afternoon. We'll have to see over the next 6 hours if numbers start to go up dramatically.

I understand the frustration of why PC versions get all different kinds of features and customization but that’s due to the nature of PC gaming. Console hardware is static and doesn’t change till a revision or next-gen upgrade. PC’s have years worth different hardware customizations and there’s like 10 different sku’s of components ever single year going from affordable to super powerful. So a proper PC game has all the features you see advertised because the game has to be able to scale to run on an absolute potato to the beefiest of gaming rigs.

So it’s not so much that PS5 can’t handle a lot of those type of features and customizable settings, it’s more that there’s not really a reason to. Plus after watching Digital Foundry’s tech review, Ray tracing on console still doesn’t hold a candle to a capable PC.

But, with features like FSR, 120fps support, and VRR, that type of capabilities is growing on console. Still another generation or two from really bridging the gap.

Totally agree with you that it isn't the same situation, but it is the closest we can draw from, for me when we analyze Bungie MP, Sony making more ports for PC the cost of the purchases it would make sense to go hybrid.

I could see a potential Square or Capcom acquisition going completely exclusive with PC ports down the line since they have an immense legacy with the PlayStation brand. However, I wouldn't be surprised to see exclusivity for certain games/franchises, with the rest staying multiplatform. 

In a way, the PC versions of these games should come out with more bells and whistles, especially if Sony wants to sell older ports of PS4 exclusives at full price, when the PS4 versions have been heavily discounted for a few years now.

Spider-Man on Steam has gone up to 65,000 players today, so numbers are going up!

I would say PS5 have a lot of features that I wasn't expecting and that are mostly PC centric (and probably Xbox, but I don't follow to really know, from what I hear they have more than PS5 anyway), so the level of choice is bigger than ever for consoles.

By a mile for sure! This generation of consoles is the closest to PC level gaming consoles have ever been. And the gap between the two will continue to close as the years go on. Hell, the custom SSD in the PS5 is so fast that Spider-Man actually loads faster on PS5 than a top of the line commercial SSD on PC right now lol. By a solid couple of seconds too. 

Idk if they’ll ever become 1:1 in performance comparison as there’s new processors, graphics cards, hard drives, etc ever other year whereas consoles take several years at least before a hardware upgrade happen, but that’s also why it’s such a big deal that PC features such as AMD’s FSR 2.0 upscaling AI technology can be fully utilized on console to where hardware limitations become less and less of an issue. The future of console gaming is as bright as ever for sure!