The overall experience really has improved.

As it is incredibly easy to pick apart things that aren’t well implemented, it’s telling that I don’t really have any complaints about what has been implemented.

My only disappointment is with what has not/has yet to be implemented. I’m patient, yet I also worry some low hanging fruit might simply be passed over. Achievements have existed for more than 20 years now. Finally adding a Platinum equivalent is great, but there are easy wins just sitting there unrealized. Let us permanently delete games from off our achievement lists already. It fixes a myriad of issues (glitched achievements, broken achievements, closed servers, badly designed achievements etc), costs nothing, isn’t mandatory, and gives the end user more control. 20+ years and still waiting…

@Sindayl 4K@60fps is pretty much the gold standard for a game like this, but if I had to choose, framerate > resolution every single time.

Xbox users definitely get the better end of the stick with this one. As this is a live service title you need to be shackled to an internet connection to play (and thus this can’t ever really be owned), it’s something I would never buy. And yet for a racing game of its type, it’s fantastic. Gamepass has actually held out some value to me with this one, letting me play without wasting money on something I wouldn’t own.

Over on the Sony side, this will not be launching into PS+ like it did Gamepass, so they’ll either pay for what is nothing but a long term rental, or not pay and not play.

@Dalamar Don’t let Sony hear you. They’re foaming at the mouth to bolt roguelike modes on every game under the sun, whether it fits the core gameplay experience or not. And screw any gamers who don’t like the modes, because trophies are always attached to force the hardcore into playing them.

Idk about all that ‘return to growth’ stuff as that can easily be ofuscated by using misleading metrics (‘x many players’ vs. game unit sales, ‘monthly active users’ vs. consoles sold, etc), but I believe the “positive sentiment increased 30%” is absolutely correct. I’ve noticed the upward trend while reading news articles, reviews, browsing media posts and in real life conversations. It is quite a refreshing change of pace. Just keep capitalizing on Sony’s arrogant greedy mistakes, Asha. Give the players ownership and control over their purchases and watch that positive sentiment shoot through the roof.

As long as the high end premium main console isn’t adversely affected by any handhelds or lesser (Series S style) sibling consoles, it’s whatever. I’m only interested in that Halo device. I want the best experience possible, not a compromised one.

This one caught my eye awhile ago, glad to hear it’s attracting the right kind of attention. Always trust your instincts people…unless your tastes are bad to begin with.

@Fiendish-Beaver Nailed it. I suspect the only things that will be implemented are things that

A) take almost no effort, incur almost no expense, and can be easy PR wins

B) Turn a profit

After that, they might hold some things waiting in the wings to be deployed in case of emergency, but in terms of actually sculpting Xbox into what the fans want—I simply don’t think they’re interested. Look to Sony as a supporting example approaching this same topic from the complete opposite end of the spectrum. Sony is actively removing already established parts of the brand identity/experience that hardcore fans are vehemently against, and Sony does not care in the least. They’re in the ‘privileged’ position to be able to do so, but Xbox would be/is no different. Xbox simply has to be smarter and more strategic about how they accomplish the same thing.

Darn. Was hoping to get the complete combat overhaul the game so desperately needs but still hasn’t received.

Keeping HB2 exclusive was a mistake (or more specifically keeping it exclusive while other, bigger, more critically acclaimed titles were going multiplat was a mistake), and the mere existence of Gamepass as a thing were probably the two biggest contributing factors to it failing to meet expectations.

If HB2 either released multiplat—or part of a large roster of compelling exclusives designed to bolster the Xbox console—or into an ecosystem that had not trained its userbase to ‘wait for gamepass’ and instead to ‘buy day one’ like the other guys, one can’t help but wonder if Ninja Theory’s fate would be what it is today.

Edit—I know it’s on PS now, I meant ‘launch exclusive’

Mark Cerny yammered on about this from the podium during one of the early PS5 (or pre-PS5) technical reveal meetings, how the SSD was so fast it could theoretically be used as extra RAM. Funny that it wasn’t either Big Boy console that made use of the idea, but rather the anemic Jr. system in the iron lung that was the impetus.

Yikes, was not aware of the rougelike structure! Is it a mode that can be turned off or is the entire game designed around it? I prefer the ‘practice and conquer and feel a sense of accomplishment’ style of typical racing games to the ‘hope you get a good roll and don’t get screwed’ ethos of roguelikes.

It looks promising, but my enthusiasm has drastically waned over the past few months in light of recent events.

I own all the main consoles so I’m fairly platform agnostic in that sense, but I absolutely prefer to own and control what I spend my money on (and those games look oh-so-sweet up on the shelf). Preservation purposes, Ownership Rights etc. Hence, I was hoping to pick up the PS5 version on disc for the aforementioned reasons, but in light of Xbox’s…let’s face it, pathetic failure to ship a full game on disc on countless occasions, coupled with Sony’s recent ‘F you hardcore fanbase, you’re worthless aside from the money we can bleed you for and digital gets us more profit’ mentality, I highly doubt the game will ship feature complete on disc.

I may just end up waiting until it gets dumped on pc and then ‘creatively acquire’ it.

@badboidre I don’t quite follow. I’m guessing you didn’t like E-Day? I can understand not liking the PvP or horde modes; that’s a tough ask of anyone with more than two brain cells as it is. But not liking the campaign? Seriously?

@Arklelinuke lmao despite the fact it’s pretty crap, that was one of my earliest 100% games; I was big into Lost at the time. Now I wish I could erase it from my account. They really need to hand that level of control over to players. Let’s go Asha, get on the ball.

Something I’m not quite certain about—over on PS, not all games get a platinum. It typically applies to smaller games, though not always, as I believe I have 100% trophy completion in the original Resident Evil 4 port on PS3 and there’s no platinum for it. So my question is whether that and similar games on Xbox will get a Mythic or not?

@Balie3000 Had the exact opposite experience myself. Game felt great, tight control without any noticeable lag (happened to be on the PS5, downloaded it there—not sure if that makes a difference. It shouldn’t?) but that art style is atrocious. Looks like a low budget Saturday morning cartoon, like Fairly Oddparents or something. It’s quite ugly and doesn’t evoke the sense of gothic horror I want from Castlevania.

If Asha came out and announced ‘Not only will Xbox Helix come with an integrated disc drive with full backward compatibility through the original Xbox, and not only will we continue manufacturing disc versions of all future games wherein the game will ship completely on disc and be playable entirely offline, but starting today all games you buy on Xbox platform(s) are your legal property to own and control in perpetuity.’—that would be more than enough to justify any price. I would pay thousands for a machine catering to my demographic and guaranteeing that level of pro consumer protection.

It’ll never happen, but a man can dream 😔

@RiverGenie This PSSR-lite iteration, I’m doubtful. Actual PSSR2 on Pro, definitely noticeable. Sometimes night and day differences.

This is fascinating and puzzling at the same time. Greedy Sony is going to want to offload as many people into their new ‘You will own nothing and we DGAF if you’re happy about it or not, you’re nothing but sheep to be shorn for our financial gain’ discless PS6 generation as possible, so it’s puzzling why they would implement a feature that will help prolong this generation and mitigate the aging hardware’s weaknesses.

It’s fascinating that they were even able to get a version of PSSR-lite up and running at all (even if it’s a far cry from actual PSSR2 on Pro), given the hardware limitations.

Just watched the DF video. X looks great, S is a step down but passable. Unfortunately seeing how good the S version does look only makes me wonder why there are so many absolutely atrocious looking downgraded S versions of other games out there. Is Coalition just that many orders of magnitude better at making games than all the other devs out there with hideous, blurry S versions of games with entire feature sets stripped out? It seems to be the case 🤷‍♂️

Reverse ship of Theseus.

“Xbox is not for sale.”—How many individual studios can be sold off before Xbox ceases to be “Xbox”?

#3 is a death sentence, #2 sounds like an overwhelming risk to produce the greatest possible payoff (like they’ll either pull a Metroid Prime or Mario 64 or crash and burn while trying), and #1 is the safest bet.

Best thing Xbox has done since…I can’t even remember.

Now let’s work on the next logical step: Segregating single player content from multiplayer content and putting them in separate acheivement sku’s. Tons of people dgaf about running around in circles shooting at each other and are far more entertained by compelling story focused content. No reason to punish those achievement hunters by forcing them to play modes they have zero interest in. Separate lists mean one’s precious gamerscore and completion rating aren’t torpedoed.

Now that’s a color scheme that would trigger Indiana Jones.

@Markatron84 You must not be an achievement hunter. They’re forcing everyone to slog through that multiplayer garbage if you want the full 100% gamerscore, whether you enjoy mindlessly running around in circles or not. It’s been a problem with the series since the 360 days.

Never heard of Prince St. Pizza. This is one way to get the word out, I suppose.

Edit—is that “St.” an abbreviation for Street or Saint? Is this the patron saint of gaming tie-ins?

From everything I’m reading and watching, they have not fixed the clunky out of date combat ☹️

@BigRedPaper Hiroki Totoki/Hideaki Nishino would like a word with you

Praying the combat becomes tolerable now. It was the only thing holding me back from fully investing in this game and getting lost in the world&lore. “Chop, chop, jumping chop” was archaic back in original Xbox days and it’s nowhere near where it needs to be. Fingers crossed the update revolutionizes combat!

This is a strange one. I’m not really a GTA guy, but I get the whole ‘root for your favorite console and get excited when game [X] does better on it than on the competition’ mentality. Or should I say, I would understand it if there was something to own here. But there isn’t. It’s digital only. You can’t own it, you can’t control it, you can’t preserve it or display it nicely on your shelf.

Everyone’s arguing back and forth the degree to which Team Blue is—or is not—curb stomping Team Green in preorders for an ephemeral, transitory product. That’s the same as fighting over whether a movie performs better when streamed through Netflix or Amazon Prime. You aren’t acquiring it, merely paying to access it—at that point, who cares?

It could be cool, if it was different enough. And by different I mean “good”

@Fiendish-Beaver Sadly, we may never know. I’m envisioning Todd Howard giving the head of Obsidian a quest to meet him in the conference room, but poor Feargus falls through the floor or gets stuck in the stairs on the way there. Or maybe he asks a question and gets caught in an endless repeating loop where Todd just repeats the same thing over and over and the meeting never progresses and Feargus has to Quit Obsidian, lose all his life’s progress and restart his entire career.

Are we sure this isn’t a Sony patent? Seems like the same sort of thing corporate scum who attack customers’ ownership rights would do.

Moving in the right direction, still not in the ideal place.

Force developers to build in redundant methods of unlocking any achievements requiring a connection to online servers as a safeguard against inevitable/unexpected shutdowns, thereby guaranteeing all achievements will always be obtainable.

Allow users the option to permanently remove a game from our Achievement lists, no matter what percentage complete the gamerscore is. Not merely ‘hide’ it; permanently erase it. Xbox will still have tracked all relevant data up to that point (the real reason trophy and achievement systems exist, in case someone didn’t know) so they’re losing nothing by allowing this. It would be another safeguard in the event of bugged or glitched achievements, protection players’ hard earned, perfect 100% gamerscore accounts from being forced to have incomplete games sit there for all eternity due to developer laziness/oversight.

I wonder how Obsidian feels being under the Bethesda umbrella. It’s a logical choice as far as the types of games they usually produce, yet it can’t help but be said that Obsidian has churned out quality games (…kind of. Mostly. Sort of) on reaonsable budgets on a fairly consistent basis whereas Bethesda takes hundreds of millions of dollars and eons of time to release laughably broken games that are pure garbage on a technical level. It’s a shame the one can’t be guided and shepherded by the other.

Not sure how to feel about this.

On the one hand, CoD campaigns can be quite good. It isn’t always the case, but some of them were legitimately great single player experiences, and that could be promising for Halo.

On the other hand, the vast majority of people play CoD for that multiplayer slop, where low IQ, drooling individuals run around in circles shooting each other, dying, respawning and repeating—as if that’s some sort of an engaging, intellectually stimulating gameplay loop. That’s where Activision puts the majority of its focus, and that’s where it bleeds players with microstransactions. That’s where the profit machine churns the most. That same focus would drive an already beleaguered Halo even further into the ground.

Asha’s been pretty good at using/abusing the ‘lollipop after vaccine’ method, so I’ll be interested to see what good things she does after the layoffs to misdirect people’s attention. “You were a good gamer sitting through those nasty layoffs, here’s a treat for you: You now legally own in perpetuity all games purchased from the Xbox digital storefront!’ That would smooth things over pretty quickly, I imagine.

A Tale of (It Takes) Two Kitties

Cool name. Great concept.

Here’s a question Asha is either unaware of or doesn’t seem to care about: For the hardcore achievement hunter, the idea of a full 100% (including this new Mythic Achievement) being rendered unobtainable due to either bugs, server closures or some other reason is entirely unacceptable. What is she doing to ensure this unnecessary problem is being addressed?

A simple fix would be to file any online only, server dependent achievements into a different list separate from the core single player achievements, or force devs to construct achievements in such a way that there are backup redundancies for any online ones. ‘Kill X players with weapon X in multiplayer or campaign’, that type of thing.

Let’s carve out this tumor plaguing the achievement system since it debuted 30+ years ago, yeah?

“Hey guys, you know how everyone in existence hates Chadley and his tedious, purely superfluous side content? Let’s add another 60 Gigabytes of that crap.”

Paying extra to play a few days earlier than everyone else ranks pretty high up on the ‘idiot meter’. I’m wondering what the limit of that behavior is. Would these same suckers pay twice as much for 10 days early access? Would they pay an extra $180 for a full month shaved off the release date?

Easy. Permanent legal ownership of all games purchased in the ecosystem, carried forward in perpetuity.

This is all fascinating and extremely promising. True permanent physical ownership will always be the holy grail, but what’s described in the Verge quote is the next best thing. This does make the deficiencies with how Xbox has/is handling physical disc versions glaringly evident though, and this isn’t rocket science. Put the entire game on disc at launch and make it playable offline with the Ethernet cable ripped out. Really not a lot to misunderstand there.

That aside, if (and that’s a big ‘IF’) Xbox follows through and grants everyone full permanent digital ownership then that’s basically the best we can hope for. Everything comes down to retaining control and ownership over one’s purchased games. My favorite quote in recent memory is by Gene Park from a recent MLiD podcast, describing what true ownership entails: “I don’t just own the game, I have dominion over it like a f*****g god.”

Aside from the constant crashes, glitches, bugs and other BS caused by the laughably abysmal underlying tech I imagine is held together with duct tape and coconut rope, my biggest gripe with the game was how blurry and ugly it was (particularly those N64 era textures). This looks like a promising improvement in the resolution department, at least on X (and presumably PS5).

Seeing those pathetic Series S metrics only makes me all the happier I avoided that silicon turd like the plague. I believe it already runs at 1080p 60fps now on X/PS5, and that just took the Xbone/PS4 resolution target and doubled the framerate. I would never play this (or anything) on the S so I don’t know what the output res currently is, but it seems like the S is getting either a bump to last gen metrics or else no enhancement at all. Pathetic.

I’d prefer it. Subscriptions are a cancer, a tumor begging to be excised. Remember when games shipped complete on cartridge or disc, when you owned what you paid for, when you didn’t need to worry about it “leaving/rotating out” and when the purchases of people trained to buy games funded the next studio projects? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

I’ve never bought a game with a code like described in the article, so I find this whole thing confusing. If it’s an invalid code or an already-redeemed code, wouldn’t it just not go through at all? And if it’s a legit code it should just automatically work, no?

No matter how I’m misunderstanding things, it is indeed a positive that innocent bystanders caught in this nefarious digital crossfire had their accounts reinstated. I would expect no less, as that’s Microsoft/Xbox’s duty and responsibility lest they become digital thieves.

That last bullet point doesn’t make a lot of sense. $240 per year for a service with significantly less games than PS+ (which is currently around $160 per year for the top tier, no ads, and still includes cloud) ? Without Day 1 drops, it would fall into the ‘strictly inferior’ category in a head to head comparison. Does this imply a massive price hike for PS+ as well? I wouldn’t put it past those anti-consumer corporate filth over at Sony.