State of Play Megathread | June 2 SoP Announced

[Moonface]

Sons of Sparta reminded me of how a lot of Sony-owned IP games on PSP and PS Vita were when compared to their home console entries, in that they were usually lesser. If Sony still had a handheld I could totally see that game having come out on there rather than a home console. It's a shame really because I always thought God of War was the best IP Sony had to do a metroidvania style game with, especially as it would have been a way to go back to the older hack and slash style of gameplay that the series naturally moved away from due to the story it told after GoW 3. It can't make sense for the current version of Kratos to mimic the way he fought in the OG trilogy so that was what I think should've been a slam dunk solution.

[Dragon Lord]

It probably could have been good if there was any competence from Western AAA devs in 2026. Sadly there isn't, 90% of the games they push out now are pure slop. Sons of Sparta is another example of a half-assed, low effort game that they hoped would sell purely off of it's story connection to God of War, but they forgot that you actually need to make a good game still.

Especially in the Metroidvania genre in current year. There's so many amazing Metroidvanias that have come out the last several years, especially from the indie scene, that you can't just make one half-assed and expect it to do big numbers. You have to put a lot of effort into them. Especially when you're releasing just four months after one of the most anticipated Metroidvanias ever in Hollow Knight: Silk Song. When Sons of Sparta came out, people were still coming off the high of Silk Song. or still in the middle of their play through of it, and if your Metroidvania is mediocre as hell like SoS was, then you're just doomed from the start with no chance.

Some day PlayStation will learn that they need to get back to actually making good games again. It's probably going to take several more years and possibly a nightmare of a PS6 launch, but maybe they'll wake up and get back to it. The decline has been happening for a long time, so it's not something that's going to go away instantly either. We've seen it with a lot of recent games. A good example of this is Ghost of Tsushima vs Ghost of Yotei. Tsushima was a literal master piece. Yotei, from everything I've heard about it, is significantly worse in every possible way outside of combat. I've heard that God of War: Ragnarok is noticeably worse than the 2018 God of War, though not nearly to the same degree as Yotei was compared to Tsushima. But I've seen a lot of people say that the story in Ragnarok took a huge hit in quality compared to the previous game.

PlayStation had set a good foundation for themselves with a lot of good games in the mid to late 2010s, but then decided to set those foundations on fire and let it all burn to the ground. They've just gotten extremely lucky that Xbox decided to literally self-destruct or else they'd be in a lot worse position. But with Xbox trying to revive itself and turn itself around (I have huge doubts it'll work though, too little too late), PlayStation needs to make the fuck up and realize it's time to cut the slop and get back to making some good games. Unfortunately they apparently need to learn one more painful live service lesson with that upcoming HZD liveslop.

[Moonface]

It probably could have been good if there was any competence from Western AAA devs in 2026. Sadly there isn't, 90% of the games they push out now are pure slop. Sons of Sparta is another example of a half-assed, low effort game that they hoped would sell purely off of it's story connection to God of War, but they forgot that you actually need to make a good game still.

Eh, I wouldn't say the main developer (Mega Cat Studios) for Sons of Sparta is a AAA developer. They only have 24 employees and most of their games were for retro consoles and none seem to be anything large in scale nor cost. Not that their small size/scale is an excuse since plenty of other small studios can put out bangers, but it seems that they were given the game because they pitched something Sony liked yet they don't seem to have much experience in making the type of game Sons of Sparta was. Furthermore, their bread and butter seems to be making games that feel and look like they came from the retro era, and maybe if Sons of Sparta is compared to games from the 5th Gen maybe it holds up better but the problem is it has to hold its own in 2026 and it's attached to a AAA IP. I fault Sony more for once again giving a developer a game that is outside their scope of capability and/or experience for the sake of chasing money, as has been the case multiple times with Sony trying to attach their IP's to multiple live service games except none of the developers behind those IP's have any experience in live service games and some of those IP's don't even make sense to do a live service game with (God of War being one such appropriate example here).

Some day PlayStation will learn that they need to get back to actually making good games again. It's probably going to take several more years and possibly a nightmare of a PS6 launch, but maybe they'll wake up and get back to it. The decline has been happening for a long time, so it's not something that's going to go away instantly either. We've seen it with a lot of recent games. A good example of this is Ghost of Tsushima vs Ghost of Yotei. Tsushima was a literal master piece. Yotei, from everything I've heard about it, is significantly worse in every possible way outside of combat. I've heard that God of War: Ragnarok is noticeably worse than the 2018 God of War, though not nearly to the same degree as Yotei was compared to Tsushima. But I've seen a lot of people say that the story in Ragnarok took a huge hit in quality compared to the previous game.

Ragnarok has better gameplay than GoW 2018, but the story is just bad by itself without even comparing it to anything. Apparently it was originally meant to be a trilogy of games that got cut down to two and it just meant there was too much in Ragnarok to cover properly and pace appropriately. I didn't play Yotei but did watch a playthrough of it and yeah, it's just really kinda whatever in most aspects. It also tells yet another tired revenge story that was done significantly better in TLoU 2.