AverageGamer

@Balaam_ I doubt it was actually called Infinite 2. It probably had an actual different internal product name. Probably just easier to call infinite 2 for simplicity. Plus Infinite 2 doesn’t make sense given that their plan was to use Halo Infinite as a platform similar to Fortnite that they just regularly update with new story content and DLC.

@Fiendish-Beaver “ causing delays because contractors that came in to help with the making of the game had to learn a completely new engine before they could actually get to the point of helping”

You would think that maybe the cause of all their problems is Microsoft being cheap… and the best thing to do is stop relying on so much contractors. Nope. It completely the engine fault. Left move to UE5 and still rely heavily on contractors.

@Titntin Most of 343i leadership left, and the studio was affected by massive layoffs… At this point, it basically is a fresh new team, and that we it think they did a name change. To show that this a new team, and not just 343 rebranded.

@NEStalgia Nope. They have been 100% consistent with that.

EDIT: I know this cause that where I've been buying my Ubisoft game for the last couple of years outside of the ones I bought on Stadia and iOS.

@NEStalgia "or even an unpopular one, opting only for their own which absolutely nobody voluntarily uses."

I mean... their games are on the Epic store. They moved away from Steam in favor of Epic.

@Fiendish-Beaver The rumor is that the next Xbox is planned to be released 2026-2027. So it will definitely be a launch period title for the NeXtBox just like OG Gears was for the 360… Microsoft like to tread old ground it seems.

Microsoft is on a role with the strategy games, and I feel they don't get enough credit.

@OldGamer999 "Yeah I get their intentions, but due to producing for all devices they never produce a TOTK or GOWR for the series x. A must have game of outstanding quality in all areas."

Wasn't GOWR also on PS4? A system weaker than a Series S? So that a terrible example....

@OldGamer999 "Wish it was being made for the series x only.
Total focus on one console and no other devices."

We don't even know when this coming out... So, it may not even be a Series X game for all we know

I wish we could get an exact break down of the number because it definitely not the games that made that 10 billion, much less 2 billion. 95% is most likely from all the merchandise.

This is probably simply just down to how the back compat works on PS5 requiring a native version of the game to bring up to par with the Xbox Series X/S version... We have seen this countless of times with other games that required devs to basically go in and create a native version of the games. Whereas on Xbox, devs didn't need to do that.

@LX_FENIX Since when did Phil say that? Phil has green light multiple single player projects…

@Cikajovazmaj TBH... when dealing with these massive 1 trillion-dollar companies. The only thing that will get their attention is call them out publicly. We've seen it countless of time, not just with Microsoft, but other companies as well. These companies have completely separated themselves from the rest of society. To the point that it near impossible to get ahold of anyone unless you're also a billion-to-trillion-dollar company and have direct contacts.

@Trmn8r @PsBoxSwitchOwner Apple don’t get none of Netflix money anyway. As you can’t subscribe to Netflix through the App Store. You have to sign up for a subscription on a web browser or different device, so Netflix is avoiding the 30%

Microsoft could probably do the same thing that Patreon is doing by charge a higher fee for any Apple user who do does any App purchases through the App Store…

I know that game can probably stand on it own. But have they said about recommending playing Pillars of Eternity first to fully understand the universe?

@OldGamer999 I bring up Gears cause 5 released at a time where they was developing for One X/S and PC. So it no different than what they are currently doing when it comes to developing games for Series X/S and PC.

@OldGamer999 “ If the Avowed developers were just developing for the series x alone and given the time, the game would just look the same and be at 60fps.”

TBH… I don’t think Avowed being solely made for just Series X would have changed anything. Obsidian has alway been an extremely average C tier developer who were lucky enough to have a few break out hits like New Vegas… They’ve been living on borrowed time, and probably why they agreed to be purchased by Microsoft.

Their studios focus have never really been on the technical aspects of games like frame rate or the graphical fidelity. Vs Guerrilla who entire exist since their purchase by Sony has been nothing but the technical aspects of their games, and how pretty they look… But is a snooze fest 😴 to play.

“ Microsoft business model is different and prioritise developing games on lots of devices, but it comes at quality cost.”

This hasn’t affected the quality of Forza Horizon nor the recent Gears games… so moot point.

@PsBoxSwitchOwner Returnal did run at 60FPS… but it also ran at 1080P internally

Man, 15 years... That sounds like such a long time ago. I still have the Game informer magazine (RIP) back from when it was the cover game and was known as Halo 3: Recon.

@NEStalgia Cause native ports are better for smaller and lighter games. It makes no sense to stream something like among us. When that'll run just fine on native mobile hardware. Cloud stream should be a last-ditch effort to play game that literally can't be run on the hardware.

@Markatron84 Capcom and Ubisoft ports was $30($40 in the case of RE7) for games that barely ran and was limited to the highest end devices. People will buy games if they make sense for the platform, cheap, and run well. Older games are perfect for this as they are lighter on the hardware and can be price between $5-10.

"if you can't get Assassin's Creed to sell, what can you?"

The funny parts it that the SpongeBob remake ports on mobile have sold better than Assassin's Creed...

@NEStalgia I mean... Yeah. But Microsoft has a ton of stuff that isn't King or Minecraft that could benefit from a native port. There is always that strange possibility of them just having us stream games. With us just download a separate client app for each game.

I'm still very much excited to see how this turns out. I really hope they plan on native games, and not cloud games for this mobile store. A native port of the old halo games would be great as well as a more mobile friendly port of the Forza games.

@Savage_Joe Given how close these studios are to each... A ton of these ex-Bungie devs are probably already ex-343i devs and vice versa... So, it probably not going to really help 343i.

@Pigrotto idk… Do any body think the Samsung Galaxy phone are superior to iPhone cause it the S24 instead of the S14? or that the the red magic 8 pro is inferior to the iPhone 15?

Xbox would have been fine going with a number.

They’ve need a cloud tier since like forever. I would gladly subbed to that to play games on my iPhone and iPad. Buying ultimate has always been a waste of money for me since I don’t have an Xbox and I don’t use the Xbox app on PC (Steam forever!!!!)

@NEStalgia They also aren't just pushing Cloud gaming through Amazon. They've been pushing it through Samsung, and Meta with the Quest 3 getting support last year in December.

The issue is that MS themselves can't directly support their own game stream service. The EU and Uk regulators won't let them. So, Microsoft are stuck having to find ways around that... MS technically don't even own the right to stream their own games. Ubisoft own the cloud streaming right to CoD.

@NEStalgia I just want to point out that Series X hardware blades launched it 2021, with the upgrade being completed by Oct of that year.

This is also when they were splitting up the Series X blades into running 2-3 Series S instances instead... This was around the time of Forza Horizon 5 and Halo Infinite launch as everyone (myself included) was complaining that games weren't the Series X version. So that had nothing to do with the ABK purchase and was something they was doing years before.

@Xbox_Dashboard "Cloud gaming will never hit the desired levels of latency that on board gaming can."

Cloud streaming could never beat the latency offered by a Native PC game with keyboard and mouse, but cloud streaming services like GeForce Now has already come close to and have beaten latency offered by consoles 2 years ago. I don't know the modern number now, but with stuff like Reflex and the new gen of GPU it probably better than anything we have on Xbox Series X and PS5.

@OldGamer999 They keep pushing cause it a viable solution when everything works well.

The big issue is that companies are all failing on one or more aspect that could make streaming great.

Stadia = Great hardware, terrible game library. xCloud = Great library, terrible hardware. GeForce = Fantastic hardware, an okay library but too heavily depended on you already owning the games which make it a big ask for people who don't already have a massive steam library.

It also doesn't help that these low-cost streaming devices like Firestick aren't all great for game streaming. Game stream still require decent hardware with a very good NIC/Wifi Card and an SoC cable of good decoding. Most devices don't have this.

Not surprising considering the recent everything must go sale, and the fact FH5 is still Xbox best racer. Due to FM being a massive disappointment considering the development time.

@Banjo- My dream car is a manual Mustang GT in Ben 10 green (lol) with black stripes. I know, pretty basic, but I enjoy mustangs. But car in game was the PP1 with the 2018 refresh they did for S550 generation. I added sport spring in game, so it was slightly lowered.

But in 2019, the speciality color for that year was a green that basically matched the green that I picked in game and came stock from factory with black stripes. I ordered one brand new from Ford it the same PP1 configuration, active exhaust, with the upgraded interior, and of course in manual.

@Banjo- Damn. Six year!?!?!? It feels like this game just came out yesterday. I remember picking the game up, creating my dream car, then purchasing the exact same dream car a couple months later in the same car, and configuration

@Kezelpaso @GuyinPA75 BF3 was so bad on consoles that it used to make me physically ill from playing it.

Even Anno is coming to consoles day and date. That crazy.

@teknium_ They could definitely filled another hour. I’m guessing they don’t want to avoid fake cinematic trailer from their in house studios this year

@northernmonkey75 “ No mention of Activision additions to Game Pass, no shadow drop, no Xbox portable and no Banjo”

Doesn’t Xbox usually hope after showcase events where they do deep dives on game, and announced further thing? Pointless to waste time announcing that stuff doing the main showcase

@Banjo- Why waste time during the showcase for that? Xbox always have an after event show where more announcements can be made.

@themightyant This is most likely the case...

We saw the same thing last gen. Xbox is just not a priority.

@smoreon "Will it be more of a reimagining, then, with actual gameplay changes and new content? Anything else would just be redundant."

A reimagining would be cool... Pull stuff from the book, explain that John-117 wasn't the only spartan aboard the the pillar of autumn, show how John-117 and got off Avery Johnson got off Installation 04... etc

@Medic_alert “ Why wouldn't Rare be on the chopping block if this becomes the next big failure?”

Sea of Thieves… As long as a studio has something successful to fall back to. I don’t think we’ll see Microsoft closing down that studio.

@NEStalgia "I think most of the selling point of the X Elite is the transition layer though. Most of these games, especially BC will be through that layer."

Microsoft and Qualcomm have improved the emulation, but we'll see if it as good as Rosetta. They have tried multiple time and have failed... But there will still be a performance hit vs native ARM apps.

I don't see them making the ARM jump simply because they would be too lazy to recode their bloatware and other pointless junk just yet for ARM. Better to stay with x86 for compatibly reason until the market increases.

We already see where at least Asus is going. They plan to repackage basically the same hardware in a slight nicer package for $800

"I mean I would hope your $1000 ipad pro could beat a $250 Series S..... Though with Apple I wouldn't doubt if it didn't. "

We're not talking about price... We're talking about the massive technical improvement that we've seen in mobile chip. Where a tablet can now beat out a system with active cooling. It doesn't matter what my iPad cost since it has a screen, camera, speakers... etc. It also isn't being subsidized like Series S.

@NEStalgia 30FPS in BG3 is super impressive. That a very heavy CPU game, not necessarily GPU bond. They ran AI upscaling mostly due to the fact a lot these snapdragons chip is going to be put into laptops with ridiculously high near 4k panels. Games won’t look good on these panels without the AI upscaling. Even on Ally with a 1080P screen you need to run BG3 with FSR to get “higher” than 30FPS.

Also, I would like to note that their performance test is most likely using an x86 to ARM translation layer, not a native ARM version of BG3 that can port from Mac. So, there is definitely going to be some performance loss there.

“"800p at 60fps medium settings" would far exceed a Series S, so I'm dubious of that.”

I wouldn’t doubt that. The Series S wasn’t that impressive of kit when it released, and we are easily reaching the point that it can be surpassed by these mobile chips… People say the Series S GPU is the equivalent of 5500xt. At this point, the M4 in my iPad Pro is faster than the Series S.

If Microsoft stop subsidizing hardware. We can really say goodbye to Xbox hardware. No one is going to bother buying overpriced Xbox hardware. Even Valve realized the importance of subsidizing hardware which is why they did that with Steam Deck.

@NEStalgia “ Only thing right now I can think of is something to do with their Qualcomm partnership and some sort of Snapdragon X Elite handheld, which could probably get 15 hours of battery vs 60-90 minutes on the Z1E at full tilt. But graphics are not the strong suit of those things, leaning hard into the NPU based AI upscaling, and those are quite pricy, appearing, for now, only on $1k laptops”

While graphic performance aren’t a big part of those chips. They are very potent chips performance wise. They should have no issues running most games at 800P with medium settings and hit 60FPS. But we have to wait for independent reviewers to get the full picture.

As for appearing only in $1k laptop… That cause laptop/hardware manufacturers aren’t subsidizing the cost of components. Those are designed strictly to make money off the hardware.

Xbox can and will subsidize the hardware cost… That is something Asus and Lenovo also aren’t doing with their handhelds. So Xbox could easily release a stronger handheld at a cheaper price point.

With all the news about the new ARM chip from Qualcomm. I would love to see an ARM based Xbox portable announced.

@InterceptorAlpha Yeah. The Xbox leadership at that time was great. They wanted to deliver a great console, and they did. It crazy to think what they accomplished with less than what current Xbox has.

@oopsiezz I never saw hype for this game. The only people who was pushing this game was twitter and YouTube Xbox fanboys who wasn’t playing on buying the game anyway…

The game had barely no marketing, was only barely shown to the public, and the release date was announced less than 3 months before the actual release. Add in the fact it only $50, this was never made to be a top list seller.

@Banjo- Exactly! People don’t seem to realize that studio like The coalition have been running around and basically been assisting everyone with UE development. At this point, they’re basically the go to studio for UE right behind Epic themselves.

@InterceptorAlpha @Fenbops You think with how many people have lost their job. As a community, we shouldn’t be here joking about that. What is wrong with y’all.

The game was great. Every once in a while, I boot it up back and replay it. Sad that it will never get a sequel