8thDoctor

I get he's specifically talking about sequels to recent games, but I hope this doesn't mean Pillars of Eternity 3 isn't getting worked on as well. After all, a medium sized studio like them only has so much room to develop games at once.

MS is a multi-trillion $ company, they could easily subsidize pretty much all of their hardware if they wanted and it would barely register for them. They choose not too, which is fine, Surface and Xbox are not huge sellers and they'd rather make a nice profit off of the units they do manage to sell rather than boosting sales by subsidizing.

"the deal [to make this game] has been in the works since last year" if they only just started working on it, I don't expect we'll see it before the end of the decade on next gen. No point in announcing it this soon imo

$50 higher than the equivalent storage Steam Deck is not too bad on the base model and if you want better performance, you can pay an extra $50 for a last gen Z1E Rog Ally. I question the CPU choices made for it, but it is a close equivalent to the Steam Deck chip so I can see some sense to it (tech & price wise).

$1K for the top model is just too much, at that point you can get a decent laptop with a proper GPU attached that will run circles around it in gaming, & come with the keyboard & trackpad needed to use it as a proper computer. That's a problem with all the top-end handhelds so far this gen.

Given it's meant to be played through at least twice to get to the true endings I think the 10 hour runtime is pretty good for the genre. Assuming it keeps things fresh for round 2 that should be a solid 20 hour commitment for get the true ending.

the base model hitting somewhere close to Steam Deck OLED price seems like the logical conclusion given the SoC. The higher model X is the one whose price can be scary.

The camera shake toggle might be the best thing I've read about this remaster. I'm not joking, heavy camera shake tends to make me dizzy and the X360 GoWs were very heavy handed with it.

FSR4 should be backported to RDNA3 next year & that's going to be the big performance bump for this machine. Hopefully RDNA3 won't be left behind as newer and better versions release later on, that should keep it rolling for a while longer.

@deck2461 the Z2A on the base model is basically the Steam Deck chip specs wise, and I would expect the performance to be closer to that rather than any previous Rog Ally. Give or take the Windows performance tax and how well MS has optimized.

A price increase to coincide with their 1st-party games going $80 is to be expected. I hate that Xbox players get the worst side of the deal though. Standard should provide every bonus, minus access to Cloud and PC, specially if prices are just going to keep increasing every year until it's just not worth it anymore.

at native 420p even DLSS would start struggling trying to upscale that, it's so painfully low. My biggest hope is that they let you pick the og color grading in a patch, I don't care too much for the new realistic color palette (not a deal breaker, but it's my preference).

@Kaloudz IMO the word for it is "remake", there's not much difference here to what Bluepoint did with the SotC and Demon's Souls remakes. The word for what FF7Remake and Resident Evil 2-4 do is "reimagening" (which you used), with broad changes to the gameplay, the core systems and the story.

great addition! I don't get yearly CoDs so I jumped from MW1 ('19) to BO6 when that released on GP. It will be nice to do the whole reboot story now.

$500 for fairly equivalent to Switch 2 specs could be killer deal if Microsoft puts it weight behind it in promotions.

If GTA6 fails the whole damn gaming market would crash along with it. lol Everyone is banking on it being the 2nd coming of Christ, meaning anything less than record breaking money is effectively a failure. Ej. Square Enix thinking Tomb Raider 2013 was a failure for failing to meet targets even though it sold millions of copies & made profit, but on a truly MASSIVE scale.
I don't believe it will actually happen, but man it's scary when the whole industry (particularly the speculative market) effectively puts all its eggs on 1 basket.

If Sony could manage it, I'm certain PC gamers would make a functional workaround in less than a week. It's just a money sink waiting to happen, they would have to block around their contract with Valve and in a way that doesn't also block the non-Xbox portables that can already play those games.

It's a lot of fun, randoms eventually realize that sticking together in small groups is the way to go. One of the biggest issues this early on is that too many people just rush through the torture chambers, you got to level up your damage and health 3 or 4 times so you're doing proper damage as enemies scale up. Getting to Ascension & Lucifer with a +3 damage is a death sentence.

Did the finally fix the godawful character select screen with the dozen separate John Cena's that all play the same?

COD is always there to fill the major Fall release date now, & in the face of GTA6 (supposedly) also releasing in that October-November time frame there may genuinely be no point in having anything else from the 1st party studios around that time.

Sony did the same releasing Puppeteer two months before the PS4 hit store shelves. Suits are always down to make some completely stupid choices & then not take responsibility when the product fails.

Assuming the XsS version is as well made as can be expected, a Series S GTA6 bundle for $350 would sell like crazy.

IMO in a few years the Series S will be reflected on very positively for helping pave the way for the Steam Deck, Switch 2 and all the other disparate handhelds to have very playable games.

Kinda funny that the NG2b UE5 remaster shadow dropping today looks graphically better than NG4 running on Platinum's engine that comes out late in the year, which is par for the course for PG. Of course, Nier Automata looks like a 360 game while still being one of the crowning jewels of last gen so as long as it plays great & tells a good story it does not matter.

If this is real I'm really worried about how UE5 is going to handle the physic systems and object persistence Bethesda games are known for. What the engine allows is a big reason why Bethesda hasn't moved on and just keeps building on top of the rickety Gamebryo bones. That's even without getting into the stuttery mess UE has been for a while now.

I wonder how the math works, do they take 30% of the 30% MS takes or 30% on top of what MS takes? The later one would be untenable for game devs.

I think the games where we will see big games are the ones that run at godawful lower native resolutions. where you'll get a X1/1S to X1X case, so FF7 and the Ubisoft pirate game, maybe even in frame-gen games if PSSR can couple with FSR frame-gen to get better results. Thing is that there are very few games this gen that are like that, no doubt in part because we're still getting cross-gen games to this day, but also because the main consoles are just very solid all around, RT not withstanding.