Balaam_

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.

Isn’t Costco massively huge in the retail space? Like top 5 biggest in the world or something? Unless this is some computer hiccup, this news does not bode well.

For those that prefer the pay-to-rent business model, this has to be awesome news. That’s a 3 fold increase in the amount of partners they’ve invested with. No small increase, that. Let’s just hope the games that get added to the service are of decent quality and not the type of slop infesting the Eshop or PSN. If each Expedition 33 is accompanied by a dozen Jumping Taco’s, that’s a pretty damp squib

@RiverGenie in more narrative focused, slower paced single player titles I’d disagree. But for online competitive multiplayer oriented games with big lobbies I think this is absolutely the correct choice. No one is stopping to nitpick global illumination, the extent to which ambient occlusion fills interiors or the resolution of VSM’s when you’re trying to avoid getting blasted by try hards as you scramble for cover.

Gave it a try. Once it finished downloading, I booted it up only to find my EA account and password evidently expired. It was too much of a chore to bother recovering the password or making a new account, so I just bailed (pun) and deleted it.

Already got my fill of FF7 (heads up to any achievement hunters out there, the trophy list was absolute filth so unless they changed it be prepared for a tedious nightmare of a slog to 100%). But that Fatal Frame 2 remake definitely has my attention, can’t wait for that one. Been ages since I played the original.

The article title implies only the gamepass version of Silksong will get this patch—it’s available for those who bought the game outright too, correct? If so, why the exclusionary verbiage in the title?

This is why online achievements and trophies were a bad idea from the start, or at least their inclusion in among a game’s otherwise offline achievements and trophies.

Once those servers go down, full completion becomes literally impossible. Online stuff should have a separate sku, disconnected from a game’s core list and thus preserve people’s ability to get 100% (or platinum on Sony’s machines). I and many others simply won’t play a game if full trophy/achievement completion isn’t possible, and it’s a deciding factor when purchasing new titles as well. Devs ought to take the achievement and trophy hunting community into account when they design the lists for their games, as realistically we’re the only people who actually care about them to begin with. Or at the very least, if you know your game’s servers are going down, why not simply Auto Unlock any relevant achievements or trophies so as to not permanently screw over those desperately trying to finish them before the axe drops?

Always been curious about this factor whenever those ‘[Game] hit [x] million players!’ headlines make the rounds. Unless it’s regarding a free to play or heavily monetized game, I don’t see how it’s a relevant metric by any stretch of the imagination. If x amount of the x million players only played for 5 minutes and then bounce, that specific percentage is irrelevant. Actual sales figures are what matter, and it seems like corporations attempt to hide poor sales behind a mask of ‘hours played/players engaged’ metrics. Even Sony has their head in the sand now, focusing on MAU’s.

Is there a relevant portion of the quote above that was accidentally clipped out? I see nothing to indicate it was because of PC. In fact, no hardware was mentioned of any kind.

At a glance, the gamepass version seems to be identical to the regular Xbox version they have for sale.

What do I want to see? A firm recommitment to the backward compatibility/FPS boost programs, a doubling down on console hardware focus, and a promise under oath that all first party software will ship physically with the full game on-disc(s).

What will we actually get? Probably a Forza announcement, some dlc for various titles, maybe a new partnership announced with a different hardware manufacturer or some other vague hardware related corporate mumbo jumbo, and maybe if we’re lucky some Fable gameplay.

That visual aesthetic is awesome.

I’ll miss CDPR’s Red Engine. That produced some amazing visuals in its time.

Devs said the same thing about Starfield, Black Myth Wukong and other games, but they eventually found a way to make them work on series S. You can get anything running on it, it’s all about how severely drastic the cutbacks and downgrades need to be. Sometimes it isn’t worth ridiculous compromise to have a game look like crap but be 60fps~. Better to have a decent looking 30fps.

Silksong is the indie equivalent of the effect GTA6 has on AAA games

I wonder how they determine what is ‘personalized’ for a particular person. If they’re just using an ai algorithm like YouTube recommendations or Google or copilot use, I’m guessing the ‘personalized’ ads will be as equally irrelevant as the non-personalized ones.

I wasn’t too worried about this one. The pc port scales quite well across a wide range of hardware, some even weaker than series s. This is a pretty great turnout, all things considered.

@RiverGenie Same sentiment here. Actually, I take it a step further. I would have played both, but the acheivement/trophy lists are equally horrendous. In the time it would take to 100%/Platinum either game on either console, I could completely finish a number of games from my backlog. My time is valuable, so when trophy and achievement hunting I have to make wise decisions with the time I have available. If a game’s list doesn’t respect my time, I can’t really be bothered with it.

Once was enough. I didn’t even bother with the other portions of the game, any of the multiplayer stuff. They don’t respect my time as an achievement hunter, I don’t bother with their content. Promptly made a fresh account after that and chose my games/achievements much more carefully after that, looking up the lists well in advance. 100% completion rate or nothing.

Games like THPS 3+4 or Forza aren’t exactly great barometers to measure performance. They’re awesome games to be sure, but extremely well optimized. It would be far more enlightening to see how something incredibly poorly optimized, like say Starfield, ran on the machine.