Alan Wake 2 on PS5 takes advantage of the Dualsense controller’s haptics, similar to all games. It gets the haptic triggers for shooting and the usual even rumble for effects. However, the game also includes an extra setting I have never encountered before that all players should use.
This setting can be found in the Audio section called Dialogue Vibration Intensity, and it is set to off by default. What it does is that character dialogue, whether in cutscenes or just surrounding chatter while in towns, will cause the Dualsense to vibrate.
Image Source: Remedy Entertainment via Twinfinite
What’s neat is that this makes it like you are feeling the base of a character’s voice. While it allows you to change this on a scale from 0-100, I completely recommend cranking it up to the max; you won’t regret it.
The serious edge to any voice in the game is heightened to an extra degree, making watching the live-action scenes much more engaging. It’s truly a shame this is only available on PS5, but players should be taking advantage of it. Though I can be love-hate with the adaptive triggers, this is one setting I would never turn off on any game.
The best way to pair this setting is with a nice headset so you hear the audio right in your ears as it tingles against your fingertips, pulling you into the narrative.
As things ramp up in the story, there’s nothing better than feeling the (almost) literal weight of the words in your hands. I’m shocked Remedy Entertainment hasn’t been making more noise about this awesome feature. With any luck, it will catch on. Though, I would just as easily settle for enjoying Control 2, or the Max Payne remake with it as an option.
Considering it’s been a 13-year break between games in the Alan Wake series, it is very nice to see Remedy doing all they can to make this entry feel like a perfect evolution.
About the author
Cameron Waldrop
Cameron is a freelance writer for Twinfinite and regularly covers battle royales like Fortnite and Apex Legends. He started writing for Twinfinite in late 2019 and has reviewed many great games. While he loves a good shooter, his heart will always belong to JRPGs.
Whether in seriousness or jest, best to just leave all vaguely unorthodox Halo opinions at the door. Halo: Combat Evolved’s campaign is an all-time classic. We shall never gaze upon the likes of Halo 3’smultiplayer community again. Do not say you loved being able to sprint in Halo 5, let alone that you thought the first Halo without Bungie was the GOAT. Master Chief himself, space hockey pads and all, would not survive the psychic damage.
With the wind at their back, Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan and head of PlayStation Studios Hermen Hulst recently presented the state of the PlayStation 5 ecosystem to investors and hinted at what’s coming in the near future. Among other things, the company promised new IPs, more live-service games, and a big push behind cloud gaming.
Type S: Chiaki’s Journey II Volume 4
While Sony’s big gaming showcase will offer specific details on new game announcements, release dates, and potential hardware refreshes, the investor presentation was a broader look at the current state of the PlayStation business and where it’s headed next. We got a pretty granular breakdown of some interesting sales data as well as cryptic teases of upcoming initiatives, like Sony’s rumored cloud gaming handheld, Q Lite [Update 5/25/2023 11:07 a.m. ET: the devices was revealed in the showcase and it’s wild looking]. Here are some of the biggest takeaways from the company’s latest business meeting.
PS VR2 is already outselling the first virtual reality headset
Sony’s new virtual reality headset is a comfortable but pricey bundle that requires users to already own a PS5, but initial sales numbers show it’s actually tracking ahead of the first PS VR headset. PS VR2 sold 600,000 units in its first six weeks, while the PS VR1 sold closer to 550,000. Whether that momentum will build the platform into something more than an expensive accessory for enthusiasts remains to be seen.
Image: Sony / Kotaku
Analysts previously called for a price cut to fuel sales, and it’s unclear if big new games will arrive without a larger install base, especially as companies like Meta lay off VR developers amid cutbacks.
Sony plans to invest a ton in new franchises
Since the PS5 launched, fans have been waiting to see what new IPs would grow out of the latest console generation. So far it’s been mostly sequels to series that already existed or got their start on the PS4 like God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Spider-Man. But Sony revealed that new franchises are planned. PlayStation Studios’ investment in new IP will hit 50 percent in 2025, compared to only 20 percent in 2019. However the lag in production means we might not end up seeing the results of that spending until late in the PS5’s life cycle.
Live-service games will be over half of that spending
Sony’s first-party single-player games have been setting the bar for story-driven blockbusters for years now, from The Last of Us to Ghost of Tsushima. It’s clear the company now wants to do the same for live-service multiplayer games as well, and will be leveraging its recent acquisition of Destiny 2 maker Bungie to achieve that.
Image: Sony / Kotaku
The breakdown of total spending on content this year will be 55 percent on live-service business models vs 45 percent on “traditional” ones. The difference will be even more stark by 2025, when live-service spending will reach 60 percent of seemingly all production costs. It’s possible some of those games will still have a traditional single-player emphasis and just include cosmetic shops, like Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Others are sure to be multiplayer-focused affairs more like Destiny 2.
PS5 owners spend a ton on microtransactions
Prestigious exclusives might help sell consoles, but it’s not what makes the most money once players are locked in. Sony revealed that PS5 players are spending over $100 more than PS4 players were at a similar point in the console cycle. That extra money isn’t coming from more games sold, however. It’s coming from spending on add-on content, meaning paid DLC and microtransactions.
Full game sales actually dropped by 10 percent on the PS5, while add-on content grew by 210 percent. Although Sony collects a 30 percent commission on all in-game purchases in Fortnite, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, and Apex Legends on the platform, it would stand to make a ton more if those purchases were made inside its own first-party exclusives.
Spider-Man sold great on PC while The Last of Us Part I is off to a slower start
2018’s Spider-Man didn’t arrive on PC until last year. In the eight months since it hit PC, the game sold an additional 1.5 million copies on the platform. The Last of Us Part I, meanwhile, has sold 368,000 copies since it arrived on Steam in March. That’s not bad considering it’s a remaster of a decade-old game many people have already played on PS3, PS4, and PS5. But it’s not exactly God of War numbers, which sold nearly a million copies in its first two and a half months on PC.
Image: Sony / Kotaku
It’s not clear how much The Last of Us Part I’s rough performance and poor optimization at launch hurt its initial momentum, compared to the overall increase in sales of the game across all platforms following the success of the hit HBO adaptation. It seems like the port was in part a learning exercise for Naughty Dog, potentially as Sony eyes bringing the rest of its games to PC.
Half of all game releases won’t just be on PS5 by 2025
In the past Sony seemed afraid to cannibalize console sales by releasing its games on PC. Now it’s clear the company is ready to do just the opposite, porting its exclusives and investing in potential mobile spin-offs. The company plans for 50 percent of its releases in 2025 to be either PC or mobile games.
A lot of players are paying for the more expensive PlayStation Plus subscriptions
When Sony unveiled its overhauled PS Plus program, creating three separate tiers and folding its PlayStation Now streaming service into the priciest one, it seemed needlessly complicated. The highest tier, Premium, also didn’t seem worth the extra price in exchange for a slim selection of PlayStation Classics and cloud gaming features that are still a work-in-progress.
Image: Sony / Kotaku
It turns out a lot of people were willing to upgrade, however. Sony says 14.1 million subscribers joined the higher tiers in the first 10 months, which now represent 30 percent of all PS Plus users. And Premium actually accounts for the majority of those with 17 percent of total subscribers, while the middle-tier, Extra, only has 13 percent.
The first PlayStation mobile game will arrive as early as 2023
Sony said it’s currently “partnered with established teams on games,” and “bringing some of our most celebrated IP to mobile,” with the first set to release in fiscal year 2023. The company acquired mobile maker Savage Game Studios last August and Bungie has also long been rumored to be working on a mobile version of Destiny 2. According to Sony’s charts, the mobile gaming market is already bigger than console and PC gaming combined, and it only projects that gap to widen in the coming years.
Sony’s doubling-down on cloud gaming
In the most cryptic part of the presentation, CEO Jim Ryan said the company has “some fairly interesting and quite aggressive plans to accelerate our initiatives in the space of the cloud.” He didn’t elaborate on what those are, but made the comment in the context of mobile gaming and portability. It certainly raises eyebrows since Sony has also now revealed a cloud gaming handheld codenamed Project Q that would be a remote play accessory for the PS5.
PS Plus also doesn’t currently support cloud gaming on smartphones either, requiring you to use a PS4, PS5, or PC. We do know that Sony has been developing a number of patents to decrease latency while streaming games, and The Verge previously reported that the company is hiring for a number of roles to build out its cloud gaming infrastructure. Cloud gaming has been at the center of the regulatory fight over Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard, and it seems like whatever the outcome of that proposed merger, Sony wants to take back some of the video game streaming market share it previously ceded to Game Pass and xCloud.
If you thought that gamers could be normal about two queers sharing a passionate kiss in 2023, then you would be very wrong. Horizon Forbidden West’s new story DLC, Burning Shores, contains a scene in which Aloy can choose to kiss a woman named Seyka, and it seems some PlayStation fans were not happy. Indeed, some players were so offended at being given this choice that they mass review-bombed the DLC on Metacritic. While the Metascore, which is based on critic’s reviews, currently sits at an 82, the user score is at just 3.2.
The Week In Games: Galactic Refugees And Stone-Age Life Sims
Burning Shores is a DLC that, for technical reasons, is only available on PlayStation 5s. It brings significant quality of life improvements such as easier looting, though it’s apparently details like the better-looking clouds that rendered it a PS5 exclusive. The update also provides players with the opportunity to have Aloy pursue a romantic relationship with someone nice, which has been a fan request for years. And I’m happy for her. Seyka seems like a nice lady, and Aloy deserves to open up to someone after running around and saving the world for two consecutive games. The main people who are mad right now are the homophobes, who seemingly can’t stand the thought of any gay content in the Horizon series at all—even if whether or not Aloy acts on her feelings is fully optional.
The bar is on the floor, y’all. But it doesn’t stop bigots from running face-first into it. Recent players complained on Metacritic that “homosexuals” were putting forward a “dirty agenda” that “sabotaged” what could have been a beautiful story. Nearly all of the reviews with a “0” score complained that they shouldn’t be forced to see gay women exist in the world of Horizon. One player called the game “woke propaganda” for allowing Aloy to fall in love with someone she just met—as if that isn’t how human romantic attraction so often works. “[Guerilla Games] retconned the main character for LGBTQ nonsense,” bemoaned another so-called fan who seems to have completely missed that there were sparks between Aloy and Petra in Horizon Zero Dawn. “Aloy never showed signs of being a lesbian,” complained one player who seems to have played a completely different game.
This is not the first time that a PlayStation first-party franchise was attacked for featuring openly queer characters. This February, homophobes review bombed The Last of Us on HBO because they were forced to endure the unbearable sight of queer tenderness on television. Hopefully with enough repeated exposure, gamers will come to realize that queer video game characters are here to stay. Because culture is moving on, either with or without them.
I spend a lot of time putzing around my PlayStation 5: deleting games here, downloading them there, looking for old saves, and trying to talk to friends. It’s made me appreciate every new firmware update, no matter how small or niche the improvements it makes are. And earlier this month, Sony delivered a bunch of satisfying tweaks.
Players got a preview of March’s big 7.0 firmware upgrade back in February, revealing Discord integration, new save data transfer options, and more. It recently went live, and it’s a far cry from the usual opaque “improves system performance” updates. It’s not as big a deal as the PS5 finally getting folders, and there are still plenty of other new features I’d love to see, but it’s another milestone in the platform’s continued improvement.
Use Discord to voice chat with Xbox friends
Screenshot: Discord
Cross-play has been great for bringing people across PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC together, but actually trying to communicate with them was still a drag. Discord integration fixes that, and lets you easily start up conversations with anyone and feed the audio through your console.
Plus, it doesn’t even have to be game-specific. Someone playing Rocket League? Another person watching Mandalorian? No problem! Discord is actually great for just chilling together while everyone does their own thing.
Capture gameplay using your voice
It sounds silly, but you can now use the microphone on the DualSense controller to ask the PS5 to record gameplay. Perfect for capturing gameplay in the thick of battle or a tense competition when you don’t want to lose control while toggling over manually. Now if only there was text-to-speech to type out the social media posts sharing my highlights.
Update your DualSense wirelessly
There’s nothing worse than trying to play a game and seeing that your controller needs to get a firmware update. Previously, this required plugging it into the PS5. Now, you can download and install it wirelessly. It was the smallest of inconveniences, and thankfully it’s now gone.
Get variable refresh rates on 1440p monitors
Variable Refresh Rate support came to PS5 last year. It helps the framerate flow more smoothly and makes the graphics look crisper. With the lastest patch, it’ll also work with 1440p monitors, a niche but practical halfway point between 1080p and 4K. I don’t play my PS5 on one of these displays, but I’d be pleasantly surprised if I did.
Receive notifications for save data in the cloud
Image: Sony
Like a lot of PS5 owners, I have a huge library of PS4 games, and save data from all of them backed up in the cloud. Unlike Xbox Series X/S, however, the PS5 doesn’t automatically pull that save data over. But now, it does something almost as good: send a notification prompt when you install a game that supports your existing PS4 data (like a PS5 game where you can transfer saves). Clicking on the prompt will automatically start the transfer, rather than having to go rummaging through a bunch menus.
Join games directly from the party chat
Another button-prompt shortcut, it’s now possible to meet up with friends in-game directly from the party chat menu. It’s a nice time saver considering how often you migh group up to play the same thing, and your friends or clan mates probably already got started before you.
See what your friends are playing more easily
This feature is still somewhat incomplete, but it’s still a step in the right direction. Like with Steam, it’s now easier to see which friends own a game you have or are actively playing it. A small section with that info sits under each game tile on the PS5 home screen. My only quibble is that you have to click through to see which friends own it, and it only tells you someone plays that game if they are online in the middle of an active session. Baby steps.
Request to watch a friend’s game directly from their profile
I rarely use the share screen feature, usually because if I’m online with friends we’re probably already playing something together. Still, it’s another nice shortcut to be able to quickly watch what someone’s playing directly from their profile, skipping another bit of the PS5’s tedious and often esoteric menu scrolling.
Filter games when adding them to a folder
Image: Sony
Alright, game folders are my favorite new feature the PS5 has gotten since launch, and they just got easier to make. When they first went live, you had to scroll through your entire library adding stuff as you went. Now you can filter it by various categories, making the whole organizational process much, much faster. Will I ever play 99 percent of games I stick in the PS5’s folders? Not a chance. But I like doing it all the same. It helps me relax and feel less guilty about my backlog.
It’s possible we’ll get another batch of PS5 tweaks later in the year. “We are always thinking about the features that our fans might want to see and ways to make their gaming experiences on PS5 more fun, social, and connected,” Sony Product Management VP Hiromi Wakai said in a recent interview. “We keep a very long list of features and think carefully about how we prioritize our time and resources to deliver the ones that will make the most meaningful impact on our players’ experience.”
Hopefully PS5 background themes aren’t too far away.
Yesterday, Larian Studios announced Baldur’s Gate III will come to PS5 the same day the PC version leaves Early Access. It sounded like an exclusivity agreement might be keeping it off Xbox, but the devs say that’s not the case. So what’s the hold-up? Getting the co-op RPG’s splitscreen action to work on the weaker Xbox Series S.
Larian revealed the August 31 launch date for the PS5 console port in a new trailer during Sony’s latest State of Play that, among other things, showcased actor J.K. Simmons voicing newly revealed villain General Ketheric Thorm. It’s normal for Sony-promoted teases to leave out competitors’ platforms, but when fans didn’t see an Xbox release date on Larian’s website either, they began to wonder.
Today, the studio clarified what’s going on, stating that an Xbox version will arrive if and when Larian can get splitscreen gameplay working across both Series S and Series X:
We’re seeing a lot of varied interpretations of what that means, so we wanted to clarify further. We’ve had an Xbox version of Baldur’s Gate III in development for some time now. We’ve run into some technical issues in developing the Xbox port that have stopped us feeling 100% confident in announcing it until we’re certain we’ve found the right solutions—specifically, we’ve been unable to get splitscreen co-op to work to the same standard on both Xbox Series X and S, which is a requirement for us to ship.
There’s no platform exclusivity preventing us from releasing BG3 on Xbox day and date, should that be a technical possibility. If and when we do announce further platforms, we want to make sure each version lives up to our standards and expectations.
It’s an especially interesting wrinkle considering players have long speculated about the trade-offs and challenges involved in developing games for the similarly-specced PS5 and Xbox Series X that must also accommodate the less powerful Series S. Splitscreen can be an especially taxing feature, and was notably dropped from Halo Infinite last year as 343 Industries tried to salvage the online shooter’s live-service ambitions.
Baldur’s Gate III’s minimum PC specs already require an Nvidia GTX 970 graphics card at minimum, with a GeForce RTX 2060 recommended. While not likely to push PC players’ hardware the way recent blockbusters such as the Dead Space remake or The Callisto Protocol have, it’s still more than what your average isometric RPG fan probably has on hand. The console port could potentially be a big boon then to those who don’t already have a higher-end gaming PC, or the funds to upgrade. That said, for now it seems like the $250 Series S might be getting in the way.
Square Enix’s Forspoken is asking for a LOT of RAMImage: Square Enix
Over the past few years, the minimum amount of RAM you’d need to play the latest games on PC has been somewhere around the 8-16GB ballpark. Unless, that is, you’re talking about some very weird outliers, both of which are also games from, or appearing on, the PlayStation 5.
Last month we learned that Returnal, a game released in April 2021 on the PS5, would be coming out on the PC in 2023 with recommended specs “asking for an eye-watering 32 gigabytes of ram”. 32GB! What the fuck! While that was just the recommended amount—the minimum is a still-hefty 16GB—it certainly stood out not just for the sheer amount needed, but the fact that it didn’t really seem like the kind of game that, let’s be real, would need that much compared to its peers. But having come from the PS5, most people simply wrote it off as a consequence of the game’s development having been a weird, console-first quirk and got on with their lives.
Image: Square Enix
Now, though, the Square Enix-published Forspoken—a game also coming to the PlayStation 5 but with a PC version hitting alongside it at launch—is doing much the same thing. It has 16GB of RAM as a minimum (just to run at 720p! On a PC!), with 24GB recommended and 32GB required if you want to run the game at Ultra settings. Returnal being a port of a PS5 game was one thing, but Forspoken has been developed with a PC version launching alongside the console edition, so it doesn’t have that excuse.
This is too much RAM! I bought a brand new gaming PC in 2020 and it came with 16GB of RAM, which at the time was fine, maybe even slightly excessive, because games were only ever asking for 8GB (2022’s Modern Warfare II, just for comparison’s sake, asks for 16GB to run at Ultra 4K). To have leapt to the point where certain PlayStation-related games (and almost no others!) are asking for 16GB as a minimum is wild, and I’m sorry Returnal and Forspoken, but neither of you are going to make me go out and buy new hardware just to play.
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Sony has done a pretty good job lately of bringing its games to PC, with everything from Horizon to God of War doing well enough to make ports a fundamental part of PlayStation’s release business going forwards (The Last Of Us, for example, is coming in March). Those have all been games released on the PS4, though, and so came with relatively reasonable specs; if this is the amount of RAM needed to bring PS5 games to the PC (and I’m not saying it definitively is, just that this is now a pattern), then Sony’s future ports might not enjoy such smooth sailing.
While we’re on the subject of Forspoken, a demo was recently released, and fan feedback has resulted in some changes being made to the game:
Neon White was one of 2022’s most pleasant surprised when it landed earlier this year, somehow managing to combine old-school shooters with speed-running, a card game, and Persona’s social links. Now, having been out since June on other platforms, PlayStation owners will finally be able to play the game.
Having originally released on PC and Switch, Neon White is out on both PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 on December 13. And while the PS4 version is going to be a fairly straight port, the PS5 edition will be taking advantage of the superior hardware to run at a constant 120hz, and use the SSD drives to speed up load times (which will make a big difference when you need to restart a level for the 97th time).
Most interestingly, though, and in a move that will set the PS5 version apart from all the others, is that it’ll be using the console’s adaptive triggers. As director Ben Esposito says on the PlayStation Blog:
Neon White also makes use of PS5’s adaptive triggers to make each Soul Card feel unique when you fire them as well as when you discard. Controller Haptics provide an extra level of feedback on top of that. You’ll feel it when you’re moving faster on water and you’ll get a subtle confirmation when you successfully snipe a distant demon. Our goal wasn’t just to make you feel cool, but for you to develop a sixth sense. To turn you into a speedrunning freak.
I’ve spent the past few days trying to figure out why this bizarre concoction of elements clicks, and I think I have it. Last summer, during Neon White’s initial marketing push, Esposito told me, “The energy that powers this game is teen energy. This is what I would have thought was the coolest thing ever when I was a teenager inspired by, like, Y2K era-anime and The Matrix and all this stuff.” Now that the game’s actually in my hands, this ethos is plainly evident—right down to the anime-inspired intro.
