Community Chronicle: 31/01/16

I hope you’ve all been having a grand old weekend, whether you’re partaking in The Division’s beta test and deciding for yourself if it lives up to the hype, or if you made sure to roll out of bed to watch Andy Murray’s latest attempt at winning the Australian Open.

He might have fallen short once again, but at the pinnacle of this sport, it’s always very fine margins over the course of several gruelling hours.

The biggest news of the gaming week came during EA’s financial call, as CFO Blake Jorgensen accidentally revealed how many Xbox One consoles are out in the wild. With 17-18 million sold, according to EA’s numbers, there’s a rough 2:1 ratio to the fast selling PlayStation 4.

Looking at the total number of current gen consoles sold, Andrewww said, “That’s cool for the market in general, especially after wannabe clever analysts on Engadget and elsewhere declared consoles dead before the launch of this gen. However, Sony being that much in the lead is less cool for us consumers. A healthy competition would be better for us all, as we can see each month in lame Plus offerings.”

Starman wrote, “As it is the Xbox One is doing fine and probably better than Microsoft were expecting, It’s just overshadowed because the PlayStation 4 is doing so well; well beyond anyone’s expectations.” Kennykazey called it “the perfect storm” from Sony’s point of view.

While it is impressive, the successes of this generation haven’t necessarily translated into hugely compelling games. Devil2k said that in their opinion “it’s hard to find a game worth playing on PS4 instead of other platform (like PC). No really great exclusives came out in the past few months and the rest of the games are multiplatforms. It seems like PS4 is just riding the wave of future games.”

In some ways that’s a fair criticism – Sony’s only exclusive at the end of last year was the Uncharted trilogy remaster – but it also glosses over some of the great games like Bloodborne, Until Dawn and so on. They might not be to everyone’s tastes, but there’s plenty to enjoy on the console.

Sticking with EA, and they’re looking to shake things up in the middle of the year. They’ve backed out of having a presence at E3 this year, and will instead hold their own EA Play event in both LA and London.

Camdaz said, “I hope this isn’t the start of E3’s demise if other’s follow suit.” but hornet1990 asked,  “Is that such a bad thing? I can never keep up with all the announcements, new footage etc during E3. Each publisher doing their own thing would spread it out a bit, and hopefully de-incentivise them from releasing sexed up footage to compete with everyone elses that then gets downgraded and whinged about…”

However, Lyts1985 thinks that’s the beauty of E3. “It’ll be a shame if more devs/publishers follow suit,” he said. “I quite look forward to E3 and soaking up all the announcements and trailers – it’ll make console reveals a little dull too.”

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, though. EA aren’t on the show floor, but EA Play will kick off the E3 week regardless, meaning that they’re still adding to the inevitable crush of game announcements and news.

With that in mind, Starman asks the right questions: “So what’s the real reason for this behind the corporate speak? Do E3 charge too much? Or is it so they get a day with all the news dedicated to them?”

The Witness launched to rave reviews this past week – our own review is coming at the start of next week – and it’s already been well and truly beaten, as R1MJAW laid claim to the fastest platinum record for the game.

Crazy_Del has also been very busy with his trophy hunting this week, nabbing the Rocket League platinum before blazing a trail through Resident Evil Zero HD time and again on his way to the fastest platinum record there as well!

DividSmythe also got in on the record setting with the platinum for the “hilarious” The Deadly Tower of Monstrs, as well as polishing off the last few trophies for the Driveclub platinum. Dirtiestturnip got his first platinum with Lego Jurassic World this week, as well as taking on the simple task of replacing his PS4’s stock drive with a 1TB HDD.

However, life was not so simple for Pixel_nme who, having restarted Mad Max after finding a glitch, found his path to the platinum trophy blocked by another glitch!

Thankfully, Eldave0‘s playthrough of The Walking Dead was trouble free, allowing him to enjoy the game’s ending. Both Kennykazy and Freezebug had fun replaying the first Uncharted on PlayStation 4 – Freeze nabbed the platinum along the way – and both have moved on to Uncharted 2’s remaster, so I’m sure we’ll see more from this in the future!

A inferior race is back this week with the first update to the 2016 trophy leaderboard. Head over to page 2 to see what it was all about and who the winner was!

Aside from that, I leave you on this page with the usual submission form.