Balaam_

Halo releasing in November to coincide with the anniversary would be ideal from a nostalgia perspective, but I don’t think they’ll wait until then. I say we see it early spring for no other reason than execs salivating over all the money PS will generate. I’m sure they’ve done the math and the revenue loss from dropping it in gamepass is a drop in the bucket compared to what will be generated over there. Greedy execs like fast easy money, so Halo first, then Forza, then Fable last.

I’m hoping Fable doesn’t get the axe as that’s the one I’m most curious to see how it turns out. It would be a real shame to see it canceled before we get anything close to what resembles a proper gameplay deep dive.

Physical edition with the whole game on disc without any ‘internet download required’ BS? For this, I am a man of infinite patience. Take all the time you need.

Easily my personal GotY thus far. For what it is, it’s practically perfect. If Xbox somehow made their own take on it, even if it was only half as good, it would still be a fantastic game. Hope they go for it

Kind of irritating they sent this game out to die with little to no fanfare or advertising. It deserves so much better.

Concordtraband

Whoever decided No Multiplayer needs to get a giant raise. In fact, take it out of the salary of whoever decides their physical disc prints don’t get the full game on-disc. The latter deserves less money, the former deserves more money.

It’s a much better remake effort than I expected. Played it free on PS+ recently and liked it so much I bought the physical copy for permanent ownership. Anyone still on the fence as to whether Bloober Team ‘gets it’ or not can rest easy and expect a solid game. Only hope the performance is improved for the Xbox release.

It seems like hardware drops by around ~30% each and every year on a consistent basis. I can see why Xbox is anxious to get new hardware to market sooner rather than later; it’s like tearing off a third of a piece of paper each year until you’re left holding a sliver of paper so small that one more tear threatens to split the atom😆

Lots of mitigating reasonings in this comment thread. Maybe this vision will succeed and play out as hoped. I’m more interested in what will happen if Microsoft’s next gamble here doesn’t pan out. If this fails too, will it be more goalpost moving and mitigation in the comments, or will that finally be enough for the apologists to start pointing fingers and laying blame?

@Briarback I agree with you on this one, but according to corpo speak Mr Stark is actually ‘correct’ in that Ninja Gaiden 4 is considered a 1st party game by virtue of it being published by Xbox. Even PlayStation holds this same interpretation. I hate that interpretation and do not agree with it at all, but in the interests of fairness Mr Stark is technically correct…the best kind of correct.

Free online play sounds great, but parts of the overall strategy here don’t add up.

This device will undoubtedly be significantly more expensive than a traditional console. Spec wise, it’ll be barely in mid-range pc territory by the time it launches. That means they’re pricing themselves out of the mainstream console market, while PC bros will just build rigs with far better hardware rather than invest in this machine. It just seems like Xbox is trading one small userbase for another.

I lived through the ‘Sega exiting the hardware business’ era of gaming. Sega was never my preferred platform, but I owned them all and have may fond memories of th systems and games.

When news broke they were exiting the console business and transitioning to becoming just another publisher, it was quite a sad announcement. It may not have been my preferred place to play, but I would have infinitely preferred Sega continue to make hardware and keep their stuff exclusive.

Homogenization killed a lot of their unique spontaneity, the spark of life that differentiated their stuff from other publishers’ games. During the PS360 era I barely played a single Sega game. It was mostly watered down content indistinguishable from every other 3rd party game.

It’s the burden of necessity that drives innovation, the burning need to craft unique experiences for your own platform to set it apart from the competition and create an allure, a desire to buy into your ecosystem. That doesn’t exist to the same extent for a third party publisher.

Looks promising! Seems they ditched the multiplayer, which I couldn’t be happier over. The mp achievements with their absurdly anti-achievement hunter criteria should never have existed, and this looks to correct that mistake. Put the full game on a physical disc version and make it a trifecta 👍

I couldn’t get over how astonishingly awful the foliage and vegetation looks. That animation cascade is a joke. Is there something wrong with the engine that it can’t animate a meager amount of generic looking grass more than 6 inches ahead of the player? I don’t recall other UE5 games having this glaring problem.

@eduscxbox that’s spurious reasoning. PS5 and PS3 are two different generations of device. You’re trying to say that rog ally x is a different generation of device compared to the series machines? Seems more like you’re arguing one ‘Xbox’ can’t play another concurrent ‘Xbox’s’ games and yet somehow both are xboxes.

I imagine the subsequent conversation between Phil and various studio leads went something like the beginning of Return of the Jedi.

“Mr. Spencer, this is an unexpected pleasure, we’re honored by your presence—“

“You may dispense with the pleasantries, I’m here to put you back on schedule.”

“I assure you Phil, my developers are coding as fast as they can. I tell you, we will reach 30% profit margin as planned.”

“CFO Amy Hood does not share your optimistic appraisal of the situation.”

“She asks the impossible. I need more developers.”

“Then perhaps you can tell her when she arrives.”

“The CFO is coming here?”

“That is correct, and she is most displeased with your apparent lack of profits.”

“We shall double our efforts…”

“I hope so, for your sake. The CFO is not as… forgiving as I am.”

That’s the ghost of lower prices forever trapped inside, unable to escape

@dskatter This. I couldn’t even be bothered to waste my time finishing that broken janky mess, and I have no intention of wasting any money on the PS5 version.

Was previously somewhat interested, and planned on picking up a physical copy on whichever system was offering it. Instead news broke earlier that they screwed over the hardcore fanbase yet again by producing an essentially blank disc when th game could have fit. There’s 1.3GB on disc, the rest is held hostage via an internet download. Maybe I’ll pick this up when it’s in the bargain bin for $1.30.

No shame lifting something that’s genuinely useful for people when they’re trying to get the most from their money these days. I hope this or something similar gets implemented in the storefront 👍

I was really hoping Code Veronica would be next, but maybe it’ll be after 0.

Game looks awesome, eagerly awaiting some free time to play it. That said, the site is usually so good at puns—I was surprised no one grabbed the low hanging fruit of ’It’s a Keeper!’ . Then again, if you’re experiencing it through a rental service instead of actually buying it…I suppose it isn’t.

So if everyone spent more time on gamepass it would be a more ‘successful’ service and the price would logically drop back down to reflect that. Hmm…

I wondered if perhaps Carl Ledbetter was related to Richard Ledbetter of DigitalFoundry, but upon further investigation Richard’s name is actually spelled Leadbetter with an ‘a’. Thought perhaps this was how DF was granted special preview access to the Series consoles way back when, but nope. Nepotistic conspiratorial crisis averted!

Certain titles, absolutely. I have a yearly ritual of dusting off the old ps4 and basking in the glory of a fresh Bloodborne playthrough, along with a plethora of nostalgic games from my childhood on various ancient consoles—NES, Saturn, etc.

In an unusual turn of events, it seems I’m in complete agreement with the comment section so far. I love the Keeper one too 😅

[console] war…[console] war never changes.

Wanted to double check and make sure Time wasn’t owned by Microsoft or something (it isn’t). So this praise seems legit! Although, Time is owned by Salesforce, a cloud computing company heavily invested in ai. Like minds think alike, I suppose.

Every prospective console launch plays out exactly the same. Right now we’re in phase 1, which is the ‘Wow, just imagine what developers will be able to deliver utilizing all that power.’ Speculation will run rampant.

Phase 2 will be shortly after launch. That’s when history will repeat itself yet again and all devs will code for whatever the ‘de facto’ console is. If that target console isn’t the most powerful, than most of the potential spec and tech within that most powerful device simply won’t ever get taken advantage of and alot of people will end up frustrated and disappointed.

Slammed that refund button as fast as anyone after the gamepass price increase. Not paying money for a digital key deceptively disguised as an actual physical released. Fingers crossed whoever made that call gets canned during the inevitable next wave of layoffs.

I’m not big into these military shooters, but I must admit the destruction physics look really cool. I’d probably spend the whole match shooting buildings with the bazooka just watch them crumble.

Fond memories of Stacking, but can’t go wrong with Day of the Tentacle either

No, but not because of the whole gamepass thing debacle (don’t really use the service myself) or any of the other rakes they’ve stepped on in recent memory. If I needed a new controller I would 100% prefer this, a first party pad, over essentially 99.9% of any third party offerings. My issue is simply the price. It’s waaaaaaaaaay too high for what tech is here. A base controller is already overpriced, but I’d just pick up one of those instead over this.

Separate installs for single player, multiplayer and so forth was a really good idea that I’m glad to see many publishers take advantage of. I only wish the same principle applied to how achievements and trophies are handled.

As an avid trophy/achievement hunter completionist, it can be a colossal pain to be forced to slog though a game’s multiplayer content or add on modes just to claim the full 100% when all I really want is the single player. If the lists were subdivided into separate SKU’s for single player, mp and any tacked on wave survival/horde etc type modes the end user could simply not bother installing those portions to one’s achievement list and thus not be penalized. Case in point—I would absolutely have bought Gears Remastered, but since they force that awful multiplayer with its completionist-unfriendly ‘Get 10,000 kills’ achievement, I passed. I’m not staining my account with a game with incomplete achievements, but I’m also not wasting time and effort that I’d more enjoy spending elsewhere just to fulfill poorly thought out criteria. Giving the end user the option to bypass modes/game types they aren’t interested in empowers the player.

Virtuous is involved? Halo: The Master Stutter Collection confirmed.

Most of these nominations are well thought out and I could easily see Xbox winning a whole bunch—but how on earth is the janky, straight up broken Oblivion Remastered up for ‘Best Remake/Remaster’?? It’s a shoe-in for ‘Worst Performance’.

I’m firmly in the buy-to-own rather than the pay-to-rent camp, but I like the idea here. If I was inclined to go the gamepass route, this is a much more appealing offering than what Microsoft is currently bending people over with. That said, I suspect that at the end of the day the suits probably thought of something similar but decided against it, concluding there’s more money to be made the way things actually are. Because that’s literally the only thing they care about. The only ‘feedback’ they ever consider is that of the greedy shareholders.

Wasn’t the price increase to $30 per month already enough of a fatality?

$30 per month to own nothing lmao. They should switch the letters around for the highest tier and call it GamePass Mutilate

There’s so much spin here attempting to paint this massive price hike in a good light that I’m getting nauseous 🤢

Article title misleading. Bond’s quote only says “…ROG Xbox Ally can also play PlayStation Studios titles that are available on PC”. There is nothing here about “fans will soon be able to play PlayStation Studios games on an Xbox device”, only that a handheld pc with an Xbox sticker can play the PlayStation games currently on Steam.

So one less reason to use Bing then. Back to Google it is, with udm_14 extension to block all their ai trash.

I forget how this remaster handles the dlc Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles. I know both regular and deluxe versions come with both, but are they separate downloads or is it one big file? I ask because I’d be ok with the full base game on disc, with a download required for the DLC’s and bonus content. That’s pretty much best case scenario if we’re talking 120GB+. But for the disc to be a worthless coaster with no data? Sorry, but I have a custom spell ready for the person who made that call. $3 trillion~ and they can’t even spring for two discs…

@Jenkinss I was just watching some old Majuular videos detailing that whole sordid affair. What a shame

Now’s the time to tell them to leave that copilot ai slop at the door when the next machines come out. Had to install an extension to block all browser related ai (Google doesn’t seem to understand I decide what’s relevant info…), but we won’t get that opportunity with these closed operating systems.

You guys are 100% correct, but here’s a positive spin on it—if it turns out that we get even 1 uniquely great game from an Asian studio owing to this push that we otherwise wouldn’t, then that’s a definite win.

Aren’t all Microsoft first party releases “Day One on Xbox Gamepass”?

Microsoft supporting PSVR2 more than Sony now 😅

I think this will probably be twisted out of proportion. Playing for less time isn’t ideal, but trying out more games is arguably more important. It leads to discovery, potential repeat business and free advertising by way of word of mouth. In a perfect world people would be playing more games for more time, but that really isn’t feasible.

Annapurna is like the A24 of the games industry. Not everything they put out hits, but when something does it’s pretty special.