PlayStation Plus
Credit: SonyIt’s time for some more PlayStation Plus free games: October approaches, and with it all manner of spookiness throughout the video game industry. This month touches on that a little bit with a Vampire game, as well as a driving game that isn’t particularly spooky but is perfectly fun nonetheless. Here’s what’s coming down the pike:
Need For Speed: Payback: Described by PlayStation as a “four-wheeled action blockbuster”, this is not exactly the a faithful driving simulation. It...did not score all that well on metacritic, coming in at a 61%, but it should fit the bill for some mindless driving action.
Vampyr: A third-person action RPG from DontNod, Vampyr puts you in the shoes of a doctor-turned Vampire in London during the time of the Spanish Flu. It combines some third-person combat with supernatural abilities and the branching dialog that asks you whether to save or feed upon the denizens of London.
And that’s it: you’ve still got until October 6, when these go live, to pick up Street Fighter V and PUBG: PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.
I’m somewhat curious about the future of PlayStation Plus’ free games in the near term, because things are changing after November. From one perspective, they’re getting much more generous with the addition of the PlayStation Plus collection, which adds an impressive suite of PlayStation’s first-party exclusives from last collection. What happens after that, however, is a little less clear. Will Sony keep releasing monthly free games, or will it pare that back a little bit?
Microsoft, for example, basically let Xbox Games with Gold go to seed once Game Pass debuted. It’s not quite the same because Game Pass both has new games and is much more extensive than the PlayStation Plus collection, but it feels instructive nonetheless. Games with Gold still exists, after all, but it’s clearly not Microsoft’s focus.
We’ll see what happens when we learn about next month’s games, which could either be big titles in order to juice up excitement for the PS5, or they could be smaller ones if this just isn’t Sony’s focus anymore. We’ll see soon, even if this month promises to be a long one.