Topic: General Xbox Series X|S Thread

@BAMozzy One thing I will almost completely disagree with is your definition of a premium game. It's not critical acclaim, or at least not fully. It should be just as much the budget/scope of a game as whether it's great or not. Just because an indie game with a small budget ends up being a great game doesn't mean it's a premium game that could be $60 or $70.

@KilloWertz If you read, I never once said Critical Acclaim should define a 'Premium' game - I asked if that's what constitutes Sony's justification for charging more for their AAA games over others. It surely can't come down to budget/scope because Sony's Exclusives are NOT in the same league as CoD, RDR or GTA on budget or scope. In fact, Horizon: Zero Dawn and Mass Effect: Andromeda had about the same 'budget' and Andromeda, despite its few 'technical' flaws is also 'much' bigger in scale - set across multiple different worlds with choices having 'impact' on the story and a much deeper RPG mechanic.

I know Indie games certainly don't have the 'budget' but often have scope/scale way beyond some AAA games. No Mans Sky scope/scale is far beyond ANY AAA game.

Anyway, the Point is Sony are charging £10 more for their PS5 versions -as if they are somehow 'superior' to any other AAA game - so is that because of Critical acclaim? Is that because Sony games over the past few years have contested, if not Won Game of the Year awards? New hardware/engines is supposed to make the process of developing games quicker and easier too - don't have to run RT passes over Geometry to work out where to bake in Shadows, don't have to make lower and lower quality versions of Assets etc. If other publishers who are building AAA games with similar (and greater) budgets/scale/scope etc are selling their games for £10 less with money going to the Platform holder out of their Profits on the PS5 (with Haptic Feedback, 3D Audio etc), what makes Sony's Exclusive worthy of that extra 'Premium' on PS5?

The reason I mentioned Critical Acclaim was purely because games like CoD rarely win Game of the Year anymore, yet in terms of budget, scope etc, easily surpass anything from Sony. Therefore the only difference is that in terms of 'Critical Acclaim', A number of Sony's Exclusives are right up there. Uncharted 1-4, Last of Us 1&2, Horizon, God of War, Ghost of Tsushima etc have all won many awards inc Game of the Year. In fact, Sony have won it 3yrs in a row with Death Stranding, God of War, Last of Us 2 (I know Hades won a number of GotY awards but LoU2 won many more awards overall) and even a number of the 'runners up' like Spider-Man, Horizon and Ghost of Tsushima won numerous Awards. Most years in recent memory, Sony has had the 'most' nominated games so are they using that to somehow 'justify' the extra 'Premium' on PS5?

It cannot be for reasons of Budget/scope/Scale as it perhaps should be because there are other Publishers who are building games with similar, if not larger budgets, scope, scale etc and not charging an extra 'premium' to play on PS5..

@FraserG FYI most Xbox services are down or partially down, not sure if you do PSAs on that still, but there it is.

It definitely feels now that Infinite's release date will be announced next week at Gamescom (either the Xbox stream or Opening Night Live).

Does anyone get the feeling Psychonauts 2 has been given pretty much no promotion by Microsoft in the lead up to launch. Sure there was some at E3 but that's been about it and it launches in 2 days.

https://twitter.com/Nibellion/status/1433436445449068547

(Alex) “Yes on a technical level from what i understand the playstation 5 has the equivalent of what the original Navi had which was primitive shaders and not the complete rdna 2 mesh shader implementation and on a technical level actually won't be such a big deal for a lot of projects because honestly you're going to have a lot of the same functionality mapping just slightly differently and with more limitations but from what i do understand is that primitive shaders do not have access to the same programmable amplification stage that mesh shaders have so there there could be technically very interesting tessellation schemes that happen to mesh shaders that do not happen with the primitive but in general i'm going to say it's going to take a while for devs to even use mesh shaders and primitive shaders anyway because they're doing some of these things through compute anyway right now…”

I still remember some fanboys telling Xbox Series X can’t do tessellation as good as PS5.

Also, GT7 has no in-game RT:

"Mr. Yamauchi: For the time being, you can choose ray tracing in the replay even during the game, and then you can see the stage demo and the picture with ray tracing applied in the garage."

I remember how they have made a big deal about this for FH5. PS false marketing and setting false expectations caught again.