Balaam_

I’d wager not, unless there’s some secret project close to release that we aren’t aware of yet. Fable has the most potential, but also the highest likelihood of failing to meet expectations. Forza will be awesome as always, but it’s ‘just a racing game’ and historically won’t be in contention for GotY. Clockwork Revolution looks so bad I’m plugging it for the golden raspberry, and Gears will probably be great but sadly the series hasn’t been relevant for quite some time. The changes they’re making to the Halo remake are far too incendiary and controversial for it to be in the running as well.

I’m not really a fighting game person (aside from old school Tekken 3), so I haven’t played this. But with the way the title is worded—is MK only available through gamepass? As in you can’t buy it à la carte? I wasn’t aware that was a thing, and that makes me even less apt to ever support the service. The day my ability to even buy a game digitally (let alone physically, which they seem determined to take away from gamers…) is the day I jump ship entirely.

Why does he look so chunky in that first picture? Maybe this is why they added sprint to Campaign Evolved, so he can lose some weight.

Between major 3rd party games skipping Xbox for what feels like generations now and the whole ‘Xbox is 3rd party now with no exclusives’, I’ve found my Xbox console playtime shrinking with each passing year.

People can try to scrape the bottom of the barrel of excuses as much as they want, but at the end of the day why would I play Xbox games on Xbox where I can’t play Sony first- and third-party exclusives when I could just do all my gaming on PlayStation and get both? PC oriented players might have a different outlook, but a PlayStation and a Switch(2) as a compliment is the obvious path for the console first gamer.

Sounds like the same generic public facing corpo speak we always hear from game studios, except it’s the Coalition and we all know they’re enormously capable and highly skilled. In this case their quote does indeed get me excited!

I bet whenever the wrap up does arrive, no one will outdo Jez Corden in the ‘Goalposts Moved’ stat

@Shinato2024

Quantity ≠ Quality.

‘[Insert game] is now available on more devices for more players in more places!’
≠ an inherently better game.

As a fan of facts, figures and statistics in general, it makes me sad to not get an Xbox year end wrap up. But I get it. Looking at things from their perspective, if there’s no money to be made from it and no way to use it to shove ai down people’s throats, why would they bother with a wrap up?

I scrolled slowly down the first portion of this article, then scrolled through the second half at blistering speed. That pretty much speaks for my gaming tastes and sensibilities right there.

@GamerScore200K it’s a lot of the same old, same old yeah but there are some absurdly great games on this list. If you think Alan Wake 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, DoomDA, Death Stranding or FF16 are “crap”, I can’t imagine what you’re playing. You either have access to true god tier games the rest of us don’t even know about, or you’re a ‘gamer’ who actually just plays stuff like Fortnite and Roblox.

Mine would have been oblivion if it weren’t a flat out broken pile of stuttery, janky, bug filled glitch riddled rubbish. So my vote went to THPS 3+4, which somewhat surprisingly came out nearly flawless (once the awful Xbox controller was swapped for the one the series was built around). I doff my cap to those guys, they even went the extra mile and cleaned up the achievement list compared to Vicarious Visions’ tedious, grueling list for 1+2. There are some combo challenges that pose a significant difficulty spike for new players, but for veterans from the PS1/PS2 days it’s smooth sailing. Fantastic collection of games all around!

So very tired of them beating that old ‘more games for more players’ drum, as if that somehow equates to a higher quality of game.

I’d rather a game be phenomenal and in less places than simply mediocre and widely available to everyone. Ideally it would be both quality+availability, but that perfect combo seldom materializes. For many devs it’s either pick a side and get more funding and tech assistance from the platform holder, or go wide and be everywhere but without that extra support. I’d rather play a better game even if it means I must do so elsewhere than an inferior game that meets me where I already am.

@ILuvGames not sure if you’re trolling or not, but if you’re for real then that’s awesome news. Bioshock is a ridiculously good game, and I very much liked 2 and infinite (to a lesser degree). As for Arkane, I’m once again not among the popular opinion; I think the systems and player agency in their games was always top tier, but I hated literally everything else about them. Setting, characters, plot, and especially the hideously unappealing visual aesthetic. But having this pedigree folded into the Bioshock formula would be a dream come true nonetheless.

Single player > Co-op > PvP

This perfectly encapsulates why the original Xbox is my all time favorite Xbox. Even if many of these were only prototypes or glorified tech demos never intended to be released, there’s more ‘magic’ in this list of unreleased games than in the entirety of the 360’s actual catalog.

I wish other similar GaaS games would adopt the mantra expressed in the quote about non-expiratory bits’n’bobs.

I booted up Fallout76 the other day and saw a neat looking store item in someone’s base. A quick search revealed it’s either no longer sold in the atom shop or else it rotated out and who knows if/when it’ll return. This is utterly incompetent design. Do they not want my money? I was intending to buy the item, but I can’t buy something that isn’t for sale. All games with a relevant in-game storefront should always have all items available perpetually until the day the servers shut down.

Just another perk of permanent ownership, I love it.

Alan Wake was the entire reason I got a 360 and is far and away my favorite game on the system (perhaps even that entire generation). As long as Remedy doubles down on what it does best—compelling, single player narrative driven gameplay without any multiplayer garbage—I don’t really care what they do and I’m convinced it’ll be fantastic whatever they come up with.

I tell ya h’what, that’s a handsome controller.

Can’t wait for this one. Been on my radar since the debut trailer, looks unbelievably good.

There’s something to be said about the overall presentation of DoomDA, but the fine grain detail is rather lacking. You don’t have to look too closely to find some shockingly low resolution textures and low poly models, and I’m talking about the X version here not the S. Personally I’d give the award to Death Stranding 2, Alex’s ‘holier than thou’ PC raytracing supremacy attitude be darned.

THPS 3+4 dominated a lot of my time, but playing on pc with a Dualsense was a necessity. The Xbox controller is a joke for a game like this, the awkward triggers and awful dpad rendering it nearly unplayable. It’s blatantly obvious the series was originally built around Sony’s controller from the very beginning. But once that problem was solved, the game itself is fantastic and endlessly replayable.

Still voted for Keeper in the top spot though. It’s a crime a game this uniquely good was sent out to die by management with little to no advertising or marketing 😠

Well that’s a letdown. I didn’t have my glasses on and thought the article title said CEO. I got super excited for an immediately brighter future for Xbox, but my hopes were dashed when I realized it’s just about the CFO 😞

“Our whole focus is on delivering player satisfaction and delivering player value. And we’re always going to be listening to what people want there.”

Corporate BS. If the sentiment were true, they’d be catering to the millions of us who derive satisfaction and value from permanent physical ownership. Full game, on-disc, no online check-in or internet downloads required, commitment to future consoles with integrated dedicated disc drives. Why not meet us there? Because there’s less money and less control for them, that’s why. Which makes the quote a lie. It was never about ‘meeting players where they are’, it’s about meeting wherever most of the money is.

This is one of a few more deserving games that should have taken the GotY crown instead of the ‘good, just good but nothing more’ E33. Reminiscent of 2011 when the lesser game inexplicably took the crown that year as well.

That 60fps makes all the difference in the world.

@rhyno_888 you can’t be serious

Played FO76 for about 5hrs yesterday. Game crashed to dashboard 8 times, inexplicably reset some option settings (stick sensitivity, Y-axis inversion etc) to default, the final boss of the daily op got stuck in a wall and became unkillable which forced a restart, and the game is still a choppy stuttery mess. Instead of hocking new merch maybe they could have used that money to pay Bethesda’s (rumored) tech support devs to fix some of the glaring issues with the actual game(s)?

These are corporations so it’s not as though they’d communicate in any other fashion, but the corpo speak is tiresome.

“…for some of you, the Franchise has not met your expectations…” —by some, you mean the overwhelming majority?

“To be very clear, we know what you expect…” —then why didn’t you deliver what we expect the first time? Why push out what you evidently know people don’t want only to backpedal now?

Not really sure who to root for here. I’ve had Netflix for ages. Their UI went from being perfectly user friendly to a massive downgrade making browsing nearly impossible because of GIGANTIC TILES TAKING UP THE ENTIRE SCREEN. That, and the fact Netflix has less and less ‘real movies’ and more and more of their own stuff (which I feel is of significantly lesser quality) makes me want to unsubscribe.

I’ve never had Paramount so idk if that service is user friendly or a clunky, janky, nearly broken app like Hulu/disney+. This seems like a loss for everyone no matter who buys WB, since if the ABK acquisition has taught us anything it’s that these tens of billions of dollar splurges mean inevitable price hikes for the end user.

@neillaw I was thinking about that earlier. Pro is significantly more capable than the X, in fact the power delta between them is greater than that between base PS5 and the stronger X. Yet somehow Blubber team coded the game so poorly it runs worse on Pro. In pure technical terms this shouldn’t be the case. It’s straight up lack of skill at optimization.

And of course they passed the blame onto Konami who is too lazy to address it, so nothing gets done about it. All we have are 4 mediocre console versions, all flawed, where the X is the least stinky poop of the bunch. That’s no win; we all lost.

Both versions look rather poor without the RTGI the game was clearly arted around. The fallback lighting is flat and dull and ruins the presentation. That said, the framerate on the S is surprisingly smooth and makes a world of difference—those stutters and frame time spikes on Switch 2 are really noticeable. Between the two, I’d prefer to play on the S for that reason alone.

I still find it irritating Publishers/Platform holders decide to count games that they published but otherwise had little or nothing to do with as ‘first party’. I don’t consider Death Stranding or Ninja Gaiden 4 or Bayonetta 3 as first party by any stretch of the imagination. Doesn’t diminish the quality of a game by any means, but calling it ‘first party’ is a misnomer these platform holders should avoid.

Is there a current gen port/native app being worked on for FO76, or am I mistaken about that? I thought I remembered hearing something about that, but it seems this isn’t the update for it if it’s happening.

Just played through Thank Goodness You’re Here over on PS. Absolutely fantastic. Best indie I’ve played in a long time. Perfect trophy/achievement list too; I can’t heap enough praise on that. All other devs should be forced to take classes on how to design such an impeccable trophy/achievement list!

I pressed “None of these” so hard my thumb nearly punched through my phone screen and came out the other side

There was a news item drifting through most videogame news sites recently about how, in a nutshell, many Xbox devs were extremely happy to be able to finally sell their stuff on PlayStation and make big bucks off that platform. For that story to be even remotely accurate and still somehow align with what the executive is saying in this article, there would need to be a scenario where the dev is making most of its money off actual sales on PS, PC and/or Switch while being offered a decent sized Gamepass bag to boot. At that point everything aligns—they’re making actual fiscally relevant revenue off individual unit sales on other platforms while also benefiting from the ‘hey cool, we got a Gamepass bag along with it!’ Xbox approach.

Otherwise there’s conflicting info at play here. ‘Gamepass is great, yet oh thank god we also get to sell on PS because we desperately need to recoup investment’—it doesn’t mix.

7/10 Good. The game itself is excellent, and I’d have given this an 8 or 9 if not for the garbage optimization (or lack thereof). The fact that the Series X version is the best of the worst ports isn’t so much a ‘win’ for Xbox players as it is an indictment against Bloober Team’s technical inadequacies. Pro should easily be the best version even with a crappy PSSR implementation (power delta between X and Pro is significantly bigger than between base PS5 and the X), but here we see poor optimization all around. Stutters, frame time spikes galore, traversal hitches, muddy resolutions…it’s not a good showing on any console. Pity, the game deserves much better!

The shoe business is rapidly evolving and selling these only on the crocs website is antiquated business. These should be available on PlayStation Direct! More shoes for more people benefits everyone!

@Shinato2024 how is that impressive? Microsoft simply bought them. Would it be as impressive if another super rich entity had acquired them, like Tencent or Elon or the Nvidia?

Let’s not kid ourselves here. While ‘Every developer would love to have their hard work enjoyed by as many people as possible’ is certainly true, the driving force will always be money

While one platform’s userbase has been conditioned to not buy games and to just ‘wait until it’s on gamepass’, the rest of the industry doesn’t adhere to that model anywhere near as closely. Those Nintendo and PlayStation people predominantly buy games à la carte. That’s a big stack of cash sitting there for the taking, the same stack of cash many of these developers/studios/publishers used to be able to count on when projecting profits, but now that they’ve been sent to toil in the gamepass mines they view it only from a distance—until very recently. So now that they’re tasting that sweet, sweet ‘customer actually buys game’ pie again, of course they’re overjoyed.

Play Anywhere is absolutely irrelevant to me. I invested in a top of the line television and each console, along with the plushest and comfiest of furniture. My minifridge is within arm’s reach and a plethora of USB connections are at hand to charge all my devices. I am ensconced. Think Mojo from the X-Men and you’re not far off.

In other words, I have less than no desire to play anywhere else, so ‘Play Anywhere’ is nothing but an afterthought, an unutilized addendum to the core experience of gaming.

Didn’t know this wasn’t on Xbox already. Just finished it an hour ago on PS5, it’s fantastic. One of the best indies I’ve played yet this generation. Highly recommended. Brilliant trophy list, and I imagine the achievements are identical.

Resolution tops out a bit higher on PS consoles, but the series X holds to that 60fps line more consistently which is the better win. It’s a textbook example of lousy, incompetent ‘optimization’. There is more of a power delta between the X and the Pro than there is between base PS5 and the X. Anything the X can do, the Pro can do better—but it doesn’t.

Seems like a win, but it isn’t. Consider—if Konami had let Sony develop it in-house, we could have seen a scenario where Nixxes did the PC port. Which would be the best version, and playable on Magnus next gen. Which would mean Xbox would have the best version, but it would be a case of having the best version without any compromises. As things stand, the X version is the ‘best’ version but it’s a poorly optimized port that’s only marginally better than the already garbage PS5 version.

Can’t wait for the DF assessment. It’s a great game, but plagued with incessant performance issues on PlayStation. Very curious if it was fixed, or if they just pushed out the same poorly optimized code. The game deserves better.

Expedition 33 winning ‘Best Visual Design’ is a travesty of justice. The game does a lot of things right, but it’s hideous. The design aesthetic is truly grotesque. I can think of 5 other games already nominated (and several that weren’t) that all have visual design language orders of magnitude above what 33 brings to the table. This is clearly pandering to everyone overhyping this game and trying to turn it from something simply great into ‘Greatest game in the history of the universe times infinity, bar none, and shall never be outdone’ nonsense.

This was basically the equivalent of Sony’s last show; a decent amount of variety, but nothing really screamed ‘must play’. D+ or C-, in that range.

@Cakefish Depends exactly how the guessing game tiles work. If it’s only giving one correct letter clue, possibly. If it’s more like Wheel of Fortune where a correct letter appears in all spots it’s located in, then it’s a No.

Magic 8 Ball says “Signs point to Microsoft acquiring Rockstar, then shutting down studio and cancelling GTA6 prior to release”

This is unintentionally disturbing. Making the nexus button or whatever it’s called one of SpongeBob’s eyes only reminds me of the technique of using x’s for cartoon character’s eyes to insinuate death or some other extremely negative state.