Happy birthday ice! Have a good one

The co-op story progression stuff doesn't bother me that much. It's a little annoying, but players still get experience and loot.

I hope Arkane drops the online requirement stuff before the game releases or shortly after. They haven't given us a reason why it's always online. I wouldn't be surprised if loot and experience is developed in a way to only work online. Maybe they don't want cheating but I don't see why it's matters for a single player and co-op experience. 

So apparently Xbox is requesting Sony documents dating back 11 years relating to timed/full 3rd party exclusivity agreements and timed exclusive content in 3rd marketing deal game agreements it seems. If Sony is actually forced by the judge to release those, will definitely be a bad look for Sony, across 11 years I'm sure there are over 30 timed/full 3rd party exclusive deals, I can think of quite alot off the top of my head from just the last few years:

• Deathloop
• Ghostwire Tokyo
• Final Fantasy 7 Remake and FF7R2 (presumably the deal included FF7R3 as well)
• Final Fantasy 16
• Forspoken
• Silent Hill 2 Remake
• Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic Remake
• Godfall
• Babylon's Fall
• Kena: Bridge of Spirits
• Stray
• Jett: The Far Shore
• FNAF: Security Breach
• Solar Ash
• Stellar Blade
• Genshin Impact

Go back even further and you can find quite alot more timed and full 3rd party PS exclusives.

Then you've got the timed or full exclusive content or timed exclusive beta deals on 3rd party marketing deal games, which are even more numerous. Some of those I can think of off the top of my head include:

• Hogwarts Legacy
• I believe every single Call of Duty since the marketing changes hands from Xbox to PS in 2015 had either timed exclusive modes or a timed exclusive beta
• Assassin's Creed Syndicate
• Control
• Marvel's The Avengers
• Lego Marvel Avengers
• Destiny and Destiny 2
• Batman Arkham Knight

If the judge forces Sony to release these, regulators will finally see exactly what tactics Sony uses to keep themselves at the top. 

To be fair Ms does the same with a ton of indies but also bigger titles like High on life/Stalker 2.  Sony is better in advertisement for some titles and making them big by doing so. Genshin impact is also a good example of MS fucking it up. They didn't wanted Genshin Impact and choose Naraka over it....Well we see now which one is bigger =p.

I honestly have a hard time understanding all the people that always start moaning when something has an always online requirement. It's 2023...which one of all these people, voicing their never ending frustration on some forum, twitter, reddit, or wherever else online ISN'T actually online 24/7 on pretty much any device they own? It's such a non-issue for the overwhelming majority of gamers.

bruh, thank you. I feel like a crazy person because i'm like... 2023. Like I do understand the possibility of it "flopping" and being unplayable (however pretty unlikely with gamepass) but that's with every MP, granted this game does have a SP and it is odd they would require it but idk, I legit haven't played offline in the past 13 years except like one time my wifi was out for like 3 days. But if people want to boycott it off principle, to each their own.  

To me personally, the far biggest issue is co-op progression being tied to the host.

It isn't an issue for me and hasn't been for about a decade now when I got better internet. But I do have a friend who is still on about 1.5 mbit/s DSL, which isn't really fast enough for any online only game to work. So I do understand the plight of these people who live in rural areas where there is no option for cable or fiber optic internet. It's more people than you might think, a Microsoft study in 2019 showed that 162m Americans still lacked broadband internet at that time, while a FCC report in 2020 said that 21m Americans live in areas where there is no option for high speed internet at all. And that is just America, rural areas in many other top 20 internet speed countries still suffer from poor internet options, while gamers in emerging gaming markets in South America and Africa in particular are also often without high speed internet.

There is some hope for these people now that Elon Musk's Starlink low orbit satellite internet is a thing, but it is still a very pricey option with a $600 initial setup fee and a $110 a month charge, too much for poorer folks, and it has yet to roll out to some parts of the world including half of the US and most of Africa and Asia. 

There was also some talk about finding a way to increase DSL speeds over copper phone lines to make DSL capable of meeting the broadband definition, but I haven't heard if they have made any progress on that front.

As far as the whole moneyhat thing goes, they both do it but my stance is still that it should be mostly indies, independent A/AAs, aka the people that could use financial support without a big publisher. Xbox hasn't had a AAA moneyhat since the infamous Tomb Raider one which they received a ton of backlash for. Even the "bigger" titles like The Medium and Stalker (assuming its the same) have very small windows of exclusivity. Meanwhile AAAs like FF7R and FF16 is up in the air if they will ever come to xbox.

Yeah, I really don't mind these AA and smaller hat deals on games like Kena, The Medium, Stray, and such, though I do wish that the timed windows on the Sony ones were as short as the Xbox ones often are (we are still waiting after more than a year for Kena on Xbox for instance). Regulators definitely should put a stop to allowing these AAA timed hat deals though, they are very anti-consumer. And they should put a stop to allowing Sony to hat exclusive content for their marketing deal games, they are effectively paying to make other platforms get less content despite the same price tag for the game, very anti-consumer.

I mean … MS could easily money hat anything they want but choose not because Phil wants to keep up his nice guy facade, no point in them whining that Sony is money hatting shit when they choose not to go after the bigger games.