Balaam_

This hurts. Now that Indy is out, this is one of the few remaining titles in the known pipeline I’m looking forward to. Now we have to wait even longer ☹️

There are two types of people in this world; those who can put two and two together and knew from the beginning this was why it wasn’t on Xbox, and die hard angst ridden fanboys seething that once again they miss out, and therefore adorn their misshapen heads with tinfoil hats and start cranking out conspiratorial propaganda and posting it on social media in an attempt to whip up the already frenzied masses. Good to see those incompetent fools like Jez on their knees.

6 games. 4 I will definitely play through in their entirety, 1 I’m on the fence about and need to see more, and 1 that I expect I’ll start and probably end up not caring for and abandoning. That’s still better than all of 2020-2023

Definitely Fable. I’ll be looking for an RPG of superlative quality, and Avowed just isn’t it. I’ll be curious to see if Fable goes down in history as another Killzone debacle where the trailer isn’t even close to what the actual gameplay looks like, or if they actually pull it off.

Stellar Blade hands down. Game is phenomenal. There is no way on earth BMW beat it out for Best Action Game at the Geoff’s; I’ve played both and BMW is decent but nothing remarkable. Stellar Blade is elevated.

Lol no. Just no.

I wonder how many of these will still be exclusives by the end of 2025. Indy’s out, Stalker 2 will likely be out, probably Hellblade 2 too. Those are the obvious/known ones, let alone whatever else may be lost if the brilliant geniuses at the helm decide to turbo charge Project Destroy Xbox. Oh sorry, I meant Project Latitude.

There’s a typo in the article title. You misspelled ‘Microsoft Gaming’ as “Xbox”.

As long as there’s a physical copy where most if not all content is on disc , count me in. I don’t care if I have to go over to PlayStation to get it, this game is worth the effort and I have every reason the great guys at Machine Games can do it again.

Finally. The rumble in the Xbox controller is leagues behind the Dualsense haptics. All I want is for them to keep the stick placement and basically scrap everything else. The ergos are off, the face buttons do not feel good to press, the dpad is an unforgivable sin, and the triggers/bumpers need a redesign. Cmon Xbox, if Nintendo can successfully reinvent the wheel and if Sony can keep iterating on perfection, there’s no reason I can’t get a decent controller for my Xbox. I’m sick of buying third party adapters so I can use other controllers as replacements.

Not sure why the steam player count for Indy was so low. WTF does the pc so-called ‘master race’ want? I think Indy looks phenomenal (waiting to play until bugs and patches are sorted out), and it reviewed quite well. Is it because it’s not a twitch shooter they just turn their noses up at it?

Not sure if the key art here is indicative of what the actual game will look like, but if it is…I’m not a fan. Looks like it was thrown together in Microsoft Paint with some magic marker touch ups. Actually, what it reminds me of is the downslide in card art quality in Magic: the Gathering for about the last 8-10 years or so.

Oh well. I suppose for every Okami and Pentiment and Animal Well out there, there’s a law saying we have to get an Everwild, Fortnite and Avowed too. I guess we can’t wear out all the good visual aesthetics.

Mr. Rogers once said “There is a direct correlation between a person’s competence and overall worth and the number of physical games they buy. The lesser the one, the lesser the other.”

Everything seems decently placed in the 1-10 with the exception of CoD. I suppose this is to pacify all the low level “gamers” who spend countless hours running around in circles killing, dying and repeating. How that could compare to a technical showpiece or masterfully crafted narrative like what’s on show in Indy or Hellblade2 or Metaphor is nonsensical.

Hey I think there’s some room to squeeze an ad between the words “Merry” and “Christmas” in the title. Make it one of those flashing, jittering, scrolling ads to really detract from the experience of trying to read it.

This is fantastic news. Now I can throw more money away in new and exciting ways, to not own anything. I think Sega should subdivide their subscription into multiple breakaway subscriptions (subsubscriptions?) to even further clog distribution channels.

Let Atlus and RGG splinter off and form their own subscription services offering all Persona/Metaphor games and all Yakuza games in separate services. Sega proper can follow suit with a strictly old school IP subscription filled with Sonic games, Virtua Fighter games, crazy taxi games etc.

Yes, this is great news. I wish the movie/tv industry would take notice and divvy up Netflix and Disney+ into sub divisions, each with an additional subscription fee. Locking away content behind as many ventures as possible is exactly what’s best for consumers. Now we can own nothing while having to pay even more to get access to what we once had all in one place.

It never ceases to amaze me how Nintendo (and to a lesser extent, Sony) is sitting on a mountain of gold in the form of old IP’s and yet their BC is trash (NSO and PlayStation classics aren’t what I’m looking for—I want to pop an old disc/cartridge in and play), while Xbox has so very little worth replaying in the back catalogue and their BC is second to none. It’s so utterly backward. Should be called Backwards backward compatibility.

@Coletrain I would disagree.

There are only a few things coming up that I’m interested in, and that’s not a slight against the studios. They’re mostly very talented teams that have delivered many solid titles in the past. It’s simply that for whatever reason, a lot of these upcoming games don’t look very appealing.

Clockwork looks like a poor man’s Bioshock, Raven’s talents are being squandered on CoD, Everwild looks bland (and when I say ‘looks’ I’m speaking metaphorically since they basically haven’t shown anything at all), Avowed looks like trash (sorry but that hideous visual aesthetic murders any desire I would have had to even boot it up), and I’m genuinely concerned for Elder Scrolls 6 after how badly Bethesda butchered Starfield and that lame dlc.

Other stuff I never had any interest in marches ever onward; stuff like CoD, Minecraft, Blizzard mmo’s and King’s mobile slop.

On the positive side, Fable holds extreme promise if the footage we’ve seen is even remotely accurate, and plenty of other studios are known safe bets like ID, Machine games, Turn 10 and Playground games. So it’s a mixed bag for the future, whatever ‘games aren’t important, services and welding totalitarian control over what we let you play and how we choose to distribute it’ future that turns out to be thanks to Darth Satya’s vision for his Empire.

I used the money I’d have thrown away renting a metric ton of crap I’d never touch to instead buy outright the select über high quality titles I knew I would enjoy (and did, immensely). Now I own them in perpetuity, on physical discs that cannot be taken from me or altered against my will. If indeed there was something I was on the fence about even after doing due diligence, there’s always the ‘get gamepass on steep discount for a month to try it, then smash the cancel button like there’s no tomorrow’ route.

Pretty sure the Crash Team Nitro racing game on Gamepass is the same game that fans of the series should have bought on disc when it came out years and years ago. Idk why anyone would have a different opinion now that you can spend money to rent it instead of own it outright.

Ronald is one of the few faces I have respect for over at Team Green. Phil is a marionette, Bond is easily flustered when put on the spot and doesn’t seem to know what her left hand is doing at any given moment, and Satya is all numbers/money and wouldn’t know a good game if a truckfull fell out of the sky and landed on him. At least Jason Ronald is good at what he does.

Edit—realized I forgot to even mention Matt Booty. Probably because he’s entirely forgettable and utterly useless.

Pro enhancements?

Looks like they learned their lesson after the Bungie catastrophe. Why buy the cow when you can pay a much smaller fee to guarantee the milk?

Sony has historically made smart business moves in regard to the PlayStation division and partnerships/acquisitions (again, Bungie aside…) and this looks like a return to form. Pay what’s necessary to ensure they get what they’re after, along with a hand on the wheel to help guide the ship. I wouldn’t be surprised if they further increased share ownership again in the coming years, until one day there aren’t any left to acquire.

Hold on, back up. You mean whatever profit is being raked in off gamepass subscriptions isn’t enough to offset the expense of producing a title like Hellblade 2? No way that can be true. People on social media have been claiming for years the gamepass model just plain works. Those people can’t be wrong.

I refuse to believe that prioritizing establishing your home console base and focusing on game sales over ignoring that in favor of pay-to-rent and releasing on competitor’s hardware is a viable business model in this day and age!

Darth Satya: ”I am altering what it means to be an Xbox fan. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”

Don’t skip out on Alan Wake’s American Nightmare. It isn’t just some low effort, tacked on wave survival trash like so many devs like to shoehorn into their games to create the illusion of ‘more content’, it’s legit. If you like Remedy’s stuff, you’ll love it.

@themightyant Thank you so much for posting this PSA, and also for the spoiler tag! I’ve been dying to play Indy but want to hold off until I can give it the attention it deserves, and for some patches to smooth it out. I’ll have to keep an eye on the status of bugged achievements, as that would turn me off entirely if it isn’t resolved. No game should launch with achievements that aren’t functioning 100% perfectly, that should be a mandate from Microsoft.

Well done Indy! Nice to see an actual Xbox exclusive crack the list, even if it’s only temporary.

My original Xbox is in good company, sitting there on my shelf next to my Saturn and Dreamcast. All remind me of glory days and better times, before poor decisions drove these platforms into the ground and they now barely resemble what they used to be (and why I ever bothered with them in the first place).

And this is why I buy my physical games elsewhere. Thank you, stupid younger pro-digital generation. Thank you, greedy ‘we can make more money if we rent games to our userbase as a service instead of focusing on sales’ Xbox management.

@jesse_dylan my thoughts exactly. I’m extremely grateful it’s standalone and they didn’t try to shoehorn whatever achievements this will have into the main game’s list. Now I can try it on my alt and if the achievements are rubbish I can bypass it without any issues.

All developers should be forced to follow this procedure; why should achievement hunters have to pay the price for developers’ bad decisions? Some people have less than no interest in multiplayer or low-effort, tacked on modes like wave survival trash.

Since Microsoft won’t allow us to delete games with partially completed achievements from our lists, it falls on the developer to make gamer-friendly choices. Sadly, most make selfish choices that needlessly screw over achievement hunters.

Now that I think about it, this might well be one of Xbox’s few permanent exclusives. There’s no way they’ll relicense cars/music even if the series does drop on PlayStation. They’ll never get this one, boys.

I’m just happy to see there are more people who have taken this poll that appreciate a quality, narrative driven experience (namely Indiana Jones) than the D-tier, low intellect experience of running around in circles shooting, killing, dying and repeating ad infinitum (cough cod cough)

Anyone else’s hopes get raised and then crushed when Pope Geoffrey started talking about something Final Fantasy ‘coming to another platform’ and then showed Clive, only for it to be a Tekken crossover?

Idk if the first ever came to Xbox (I played the og on PS2, and the remaster on PS3) but oh man was the original fantastic. If it’s available and you haven’t played it yet, do so immediately. I can’t wait for th sequel!

Astrobot for the win 😊

I thought Resident Evil 4 got 120hz support? No?

Always unfortunate news, layoffs. Especially when they turn out to be because of bad decisions made by a few key higher ups. I wish we lived in a world where those people were the only ones whose paid for their mistakes, and not everyone else but them.

Yet another reason I prefer physical media, where possible, and on devices where the data is actually on-disc and not just an online key. The classic Charleton Heston line doesn’t pack the same punch in today’s cyber age; “I’ll give you this digital data when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.”

The only thing that matters is quality. I would rather wait a number of years for another game of Indiana Jones level production values than another Redfall or Starfield in 6 months.

Glad to see Indy getting recognition. I have problems with this list in general though; there are some glaring omissions and also some fodder whose presence I can’t explain.

This is unbelievable. A game as trash as this gets achievement/trophy protection, while countless other (infinitely better) games say ‘F*** You’ to dedicated achievement hunters and shut the servers down and permanently screw everyone out of any online related achievements? What Rocksteady did here is not only the simple solution to the problem, it’s the only acceptable one. This practice needs to be mandated across the entire industry by all platform holders. We should not tolerate any more lazy, shady behavior by scummy developers.

I’ll be picking this up physically on disc when it becomes available. I have fond memories of playing these way back on PS1; it’ll be nice to revisit them with some modern niceties sprinkled on top.

If the jaws of Tencent have to close on something, I’d infinitely prefer they devour these moldy, putrescent scraps rather than get their grimy claws one share closer to owning FromSoftware.

Not unless the entirety of the game is minted on disc (no digital key BS).

It’s the same old story. I’ve been at this hobby of ours for decades now, long enough that I know what games I’ll like with a nearly 100% margin of error. It just isn’t worth subscribing and paying a nominal fee every month to own nothing; I would infinitely rather invest my money wisely and buy-to-own what I know I’ll enjoy. In the rare instance I was on the fence about something and there was no demo, gamepass has proved an invaluable resource to be dipped into and quickly back out of once I make a decision. I don’t foresee any of this changing in the future, regardless of what’s added or however they choose to restructure it next.

Aside from the Kojima joint I’m not sure there’s anything they could have that would get me all that excited. Indy is out, and that was the big thing on the horizon for such a long time, now it’s pretty much just OD and…tumbleweeds.

That’s a win for Right to Repair. Now we just need a push for Right to Own Physical Media and ensure there’s a pipeline for discs and drives to continue being manufactured by someone down the road.