AtheistPreacher

I prefer Sony's controllers, but that's the least surprising thing in the world considering Playstation has pretty much been my primary gaming console since the PS1 one came out. It's hard to be objective about it when those controllers are just the ones I'm used to.

It does say something that the DualSense resembles an Xbox controller more than any of Sony's controllers ever have before. In that sense I suppose MS ultimately won the battle for most ergonomic shape, they all basically look like that now. However, I will say that I've always hated both the feel of the Xbox d-pad and the placement of it further away from the outer edge. I will die on that hill, so to speak. I much prefer the mirrored analog sticks of the Playstation controllers.

Nintendo easily wins for most creative controllers over the years, they've never been afraid to try new things, but I can't say I've ever really been in love with any of them.

I'm curious if others have continued to play and have more thoughts. Per my last post, I thought that maybe I'd take a break and wait for more content, but actually I only paused for a day and then got drawn back in.

Game's real good. At this point I believe I've maxed out all NPCs on gifts for now, and also maxed out the levels of all the arcana cards I'm actually using (still plenty of others to upgrade). Did manage to beat a few runs on Fear 16 to unlock the second statue, but have not gone higher and after that have mostly been slumming on Fear 0, where it's now pretty hard to lose with the rogue-lite upgrades to Melinoe's kit and my own greater experience with the game. But I'm still finding it amusing.

What weapons have people gravitated to? I've played mostly Axe, as its ridiculous damage more than makes up for its slow swing speed... the slowdown for omega attacks mostly makes the slow speed a non-issue TBH. But I'm also not sure if the Axe really is as overpowered as it seems or it's just the kind of weapon I personally tend to gravitate to. Still, wouldn't be surprised to see a nerf in the first balance patch.

Eventually I went back to the Staff just to do something different, and fairly quickly discovered that it's actually pretty easy to turn it into a really powerful mana-less ranged weapon. Its "normal" (non-omega) special attack normally only does 10 damage, so %-based boons suck on it, but take Poseidon's flat damage boost (40 at Epic level) and suddenly your weak little pew-pew gun begins to hit like a truck. If you then manage to find the Hammer that changes your special so that it fires 2 tracking projectiles instead of just 1, you can pretty much just steamroll over everything for the rest of the run.

The other three weapons have not grabbed me. I dislike the extremely short range of the Sister Blades, the ammo retrieval on the Skulls is annoying, and the Torches feel underpowered. But maybe they're just not my style.

That first patch came out and fixed the gold display problem I mentioned earlier. It also made it so that the tool you pick is a "focus"--resources for the tool you pick just appear more often than other resources, but you are able to collect them all. So the game will no longer taunt you with resources you can't pick up. Probably a good change?

Besides the Axe in general, the other thing in the game that feels kinda OP to me is Zeus's Storm Ring, which blasts a single foe in your omega cast for insane damage, and pretty much always feels like the best option. In fact, if you get that and a boon that changes the cast to a projectile, you can almost ignore your primary weapon and just keep spamming your cast.

Anyway, I'll be interested to see how the game evolves. I came to the first Hades late, so I don't have a good sense of how things changed from the early days, but it seems likely that this one will change less now that SuperGiant has a formula to work from.

@gtxforza: I guess Sony just doesn't see the relatively small amount of additional sales as worthwhile for the hassle of breaking out the online components into a separate thing?

FWIW I did a bit of Google searching and found this video about Xenoblade Chronicles X, I think that's the one I was remembering. It does seem like it was a very horny game and has the kind of "armor" I was talking about. But it also apparently had various things censored outside of Japan. I guess they assume other countries are more prudish in general?

I was pretty interested in all this, so I decided to see if I could go and find some numbers that would help me understand it better.

Unfortunately sales data per country is just not a thing that's publicly available. The best I could do was locate this list of Steam users by country. Number of users isn't a perfect metric to understand revenue percentages, but it's the best we've got.

I stuck all of this in a spreadsheet and then went about highlighting the PSN countries to separate them out using this list (the same site has a corresponding list of non-PSN countries). Note that the numbers don't fully jive here. This site lists 70 PSN countries and 121 non-PSN countries, for a total of 191 Steam countries overall, whereas the site where I got the user numbers shows 226 countries. And all the articles are saying it was 170 countries in which one can no longer buy Helldivers 2 or Ghost of Tsushima, and yet when I separated out the PSN countries I was left with only 156 non-PSN. I'm too lazy to compare it against the SteamDB change list, but suffice it to say that the data I found isn't all complete.

With that being understood, here's the top-line summary I came up with:

• There are a total of 97.25 million Steam users worldwide.
• 86.39 million users are in the 70 countries with PSN, or 88.8% of all Steam users. The average number of Steam users for PSN countries is 1.23 million.
• 10.85 million users are in the 156 countries without PSN, or 11.2% of all Steam users. The average number of Steam users for non-PSN countries is 70,000.
• This means that, on average, countries with PSN have about 17.5x the number of Steam users as non-PSN countries.
• The country with the most Steam users that does not have PSN (by far) is the Philippines with 2.1 million. Runners-up are Vietnam, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, each with between 550k and 600k Steam users.
• The four countries with the least Steam users that do have PSN are Nicaragua, Malta, Bahrain, and Oman, each with between 20k and 27k Steam users.

So there's the data, imperfect as it may be. Make of it what you will. As I noted at the outset, number of users is hardly a perfect metric for revenue, as I'd expect that on average the PSN countries are wealthier and hence spend more money per user on games, so the 11.2% number is probably still high compared to actual revenue share.

With this being two high-profile releases in quick succession, it certainly does seem to be the future. At least the PSN requirement for Ghosts is only for the online functionality. I haven't played the game myself, so I'm not sure how significant that is, but I've never been much for multiplayers in those types of games.

I guess it makes sense for Sony to try to get more people into their ecosystem. Still, can't say I'm in love with this development, and it especially sucks for people in all those countries that now can't buy this game. As you say, it seems they could still offer the single-player parts to non-PSN countries, yet they're not doing that. One wonders what the rough percentage of prospective sales would be for the delisted countries; maybe it's so small that Sony doesn't see it as worth the hassle.

Welp, I just had my first successful run on Chronos. Felt kinda flukey though, honestly. I got a Daedalus Hammer upgrade early on that shortened my special charge speed by a lot, but I didn't really build around that for most of the run. Then right at the end I ran across a Charon well that offered a couple of temp boons: something like +40% damage to all omega attacks, and +30% damage to all special attacks, for X number of encounters. On the strength of that I was able to just range Chronos down with fast charging omega specials that were hitting for like 900 damage a pop. I just kept my distance and tried to stay safe.

I'll probably do a few more runs for giggles, but I think soon I might stop and give it a little more time to cook, give them time to write the actual endings, etc., not to mention add the remaining surface world areas.

@efesell: TBH the weapon aspects also feel that way. I unlocked them recently and they're less distinct than I want them to be.

@junkerman: It's been a while since I played the first one, but it's pretty much just more Hades IMO.

@shindig: You're not wrong. Also Humble Bundles etc. It ain't all bad.