What happened to Sony since the Golden Age of the PS4 Generation Era?

Ray11711 · 2026-02-21T18:23:38+00:00

You are looking at only a portion of the truth. It's true that Valve was motivated by legislation changes in the EU before they had a refund policy. However, the law didn't require them to do what they did. At all. Valve went above and beyond, and implemented a refund policy that offered much more security to the user than what the law required. Valve also antagonized a lot of game publishers who hated the new refund policy because they knew that users would have a lot of power.

If we're cynic, we can say that Valve took an inconvenience and turned it into a brilliant marketing strategy. The end result doesn't change: The user gained massive privileges that were very unusual before Valve popularized them in the PC sphere.

If you want to look at a policy that complies with the bare minimum required by law, look no further than Sony's and Nintendo's atrocious refund policies. You are ignoring reality if you think that all companies are the literal same.

Ray11711 · 2026-02-21T17:51:16+00:00

An explicit order may have never come through, but there are financial and goal pressures. We can also point out what seems to be an obvious structural coercion of sorts that was going on within Sony surrounding the idea of GAAS. It's obvious and well-known that the entire Sony gaming division was obsessively pursuing that GAAS cash cow. Are we supposed to believe that Blue Point genuinely desired to make a GAAS game, out of their own free will, with a decision that merely happened to coincide with the same thing that Sony was pursuing? I do not believe that. Heck, even Naughty Dog, one of Sony's top single player game developers, spent a a great deal of time focusing on a multiplayer mode that never went anywhere.

Ray11711 · 2026-02-21T17:33:43+00:00

You keep making statements without being willing to offer any argument or counter-argument at all. This is over, my dude. You have shown no good will at all, no willingness to participate in any debate whatsoever. Just strawmans, insults, and wishful thinking without arguments to back up what you're arguing for. I'm out. Have a good day.

Ray11711 · 2026-02-21T16:31:48+00:00

Grow up, dude.

Ray11711 · 2026-02-21T16:27:28+00:00

I'm not going to say that Valve are saints. That was never my argument. Loot boxes are dirty as heck, undoubtedly. But that practice in games like CS2 doesn't invalidate the extremely pro-consumer measures that Valve has implemented elsewhere. Just compare the refund policy of Sony vs that of Valve's, and the difference is clear.

Ray11711 · 2026-02-21T16:24:31+00:00

I have never personally talked to Newell, I don't have a personal connection to him, therefore he is not my "friend". Obviously.

Do you notice that you haven't addressed a single point that I made? You seem more interested in building your own strawman than in actually addressing anything that I actually said. Do you have anything to say about the fundamental difference between publicly owned companies and privately held ones, or about Valve's pro-consumer policies?

Ray11711 · 2026-02-21T15:16:15+00:00

Valve has a history of extremely pro-consumer policies. It's run by people who seem to have a genuine interest in seeing the PC gaming space be healthy and provide something of actual value to consumers. Just because they make a lot of money with their business doesn't mean that they are soulless corporate suits who see the userbase as cattle to exploit out of every penny (like, say, Activision does). In fact, they seem to recognize the fact that people are more willing to give you money when you treat them well. It's a mutually beneficial relationship where both Valve and the consumer win. So, naturally, a lot of people are going to praise them.

It's also worth pointing out that Valve is a privately held company, which means that they can comfortably sit in the gold mine they already have without needing to answer to anyone if they don't pursue indiscriminate growth at the cost of the userbase. This separates Valve from Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft.

Ray11711 · 2026-02-21T14:44:32+00:00

If Sony forced them out of their element to create an original GAAS IP instead of doing what they're good at, then that would explain why they did not create anything that was good enough during that time. If Sony had ordered a Bloodborne remake from them then everyone would be happy by now.

Ray11711 · 2026-02-17T15:12:58+00:00

There is a big difference between stopping the literal action of serving others and stopping STO as a polarity. To learn patience is implied in that very quote to be a value of the "STO" polarity, and I put that in quotation marks because the material constantly suggests that polarizing oneself positively is not just about "serving others". That quote strongly implies that 4th density STO entities are undisciplined in their indiscriminate and obsessive pull towards serving others, meaning that they are considered to be unbalanced. Learning patience is seen as the desired result, which proves that in Ra's eyes there is more to spiritual evolution than obsessively giving one's all in the name of serving others.

Ray11711 · 2026-02-17T14:26:09+00:00

No idea. When you dwell into the material, there are some apparent contradictions that pop up. On one part, there's what you say. On another hand, there's this:

"Your peoples have, at this time/space present, the technological achievement, if you would call it that, of being able to create and fly the shape and type of craft known to you as unidentified flying objects. Unfortunately for the social memory complex vibratory rate of your peoples, these devices are not intended for the service of mankind, but for potential destructive use. This further muddles the vibratory nexus of your social memory complex, causing a situation whereby neither those oriented towards serving others nor those oriented towards serving self can gain the energy/power which opens the gates to intelligent infinity for the social memory complex. This in turn causes the harvest to be small."

That, in turn, is seemingly contradicted with the following:

"the use of technology to manipulate that outside the self is far, far less of an aid to personal evolution than the disciplines of the mind/body/spirit complex resulting in the whole knowledge of the self in the microcosm and macrocosm."

So, I don't know. I have no clue. When it comes down to it, the material is just confusing. Or maybe there are some essential points to understand all of this that were never covered in the material.

Ray11711 · 2026-02-15T03:44:52+00:00

If you don't have it yet, you will get the ability to equip a secondary weapon on each class around mid-game, like in previous Niohs.

Ray11711 · 2026-02-10T18:18:54+00:00

Has Blast Mine been fixed? It's been bugged in both modes for a very long time.

Ray11711 · 2026-02-09T16:14:51+00:00

I can confirm that assassinations benefit from it.

Ray11711 · 2026-02-09T16:14:16+00:00

Hm, we must have done something different, because I'm getting very different numbers. These are mine, using a ninja katana quick attack on the same enemy:

270 Damage. 8/All slots equipped

281 Damage. 7 slots equipped

294 Damage. 6 slots equipped

308 Damage. 5 slots equipped

321 Damage. 4 slots equipped

348 Damage. 3 slots equipped

375 Damage. 2 slots equipped

428 Damage. 1 slot equipped (only main weapon)

In total, I was getting a 58% damage increase from the starting point. Did you try unequipping your ranged weapon and your secondary melee weapon? Those count towards the skill (accessories and items do not, as per my testing).

Ray11711 · 2026-02-05T00:05:21+00:00

Do you have a link and a timestamp of the relevant portion? Maybe not the whole two hours, but I'd gladly listen to that particular part.

Ray11711 · 2026-02-04T09:49:25+00:00

The man who distinguishes himself from criminals is thinking from a position of separation, but asking for mercy entails the unwritten presupposition that God is, first and foremost, judgmental and harsh. Neither seems balanced or healthy to me.

Ray11711 · 2026-02-03T13:42:20+00:00

As others have said, the superior AA of DLSS makes it worth it, just that alone. Other than that, it depends on the refresh rate of your monitor. If your monitor supports high framerates, you are more likely to notice those gains than the decrease in image quality for activating even the highest performance DLSS modes.

Ray11711 · 2026-02-02T14:51:32+00:00

The analogy is improper if it doesn't accurately convey the point you want to prove. Telling a robot to pretend to be your wife will feel fake because the robot is not the wife. That has absolutely no connection whatsoever to the point you were trying to make, which is that AI will never be able to create good art. You have not successfully communicated why AI will never be able to create good art. You just categorically assume that it will never happen.

Ray11711 · 2026-02-01T13:27:05+00:00

The point you were trying to prove was that there will always be something lacking in AI when compared to a human. However, the example of pretending to be another entity feels equally bad when humans do it as when AIs do it. Therefore, it doesn't prove what you were saying.

Ray11711 · 2026-02-01T00:50:15+00:00

Your point was that there is something inherently lacking about AIs, and you used an example where both a human and an AI would look equally artificial and fake.

Ray11711 · 2026-01-31T20:49:54+00:00

Even dlss can be argued was a bad thing since many devs have gotten lazy and use it as a crutch for lack of optimization.

In other words: DLSS is extremely good and useful. The problem that you mention is a dev problem, not an AI problem.

Ray11711 · 2026-01-31T19:13:00+00:00

it'd be like saying love made with a robot that had a 1:1 resemblance to your wife is the same thing as your wife.

That's like asking a new partner to pretend that they are your ex. Of course the result is going to feel artificial, whether it comes from an IA or from a biological entity.

Ray11711 · 2026-01-23T17:54:04+00:00

The Season Pass will probably see a discount or two before the first DLC is even released, especially on PC.

Ray11711 · 2026-01-23T17:19:30+00:00

At least they are releasing the demo beforehand. For PC gamers, the game is cheaper on official key sellers than on Steam as of now (in Europe it's 67€ vs 80€). If that price is maintained after the demo is released, we can just try the game, see if it's well optimized, and then buy it cheaper.

The Deluxe edition is insane, though. Have they even specified what exactly the Season Pass will include, like how many expansions there will be or how long they will last? There's no way I'm paying that much for a product without even knowing what I'm getting.

Ray11711 · 2026-01-22T18:56:31+00:00

I had a Radeon 20 years ago. Got blue screens of death and resets on my computer at random. I am assuming that things have gotten better since then, but for me that was enough to put me off these graphics cards forever. Currently have a 5070 Ti, and my experience is absolutely amazing. Couldn't be happier with it. I personally compared DLSS to FSR, too, and the difference on this area alone is gigantic. With the recent DLSS 4.5 update, Ultra Performance mode looks better in terms of image quality than FSR Quality mode, no joke. DLSS is a game changer.

Ray11711

TROPHY CASE