Balaam_

Fair warning for achievement hunters: the trophy lists for the FF7 Remake games on PlayStation are some of the worst out there. Absolute trash. Nightmarish, ludicrously absurd difficulty related trophies and abysmal, incredibly tedious collection related trophies. I have the platinums, I speak from experience. The game director Hamaguchi has gone on record to issue a public apology for the ***** list, although he seems too lazy to patch his failure. Fingers crossed the Xbox achievement lists are fixed and not the filth the games originally launched with on Sony’s machines. Good news is that piss poor director had nothing to do with FF16, which has a comparably fine trophy list.

This is honestly pretty cool. For those with $1-2K+ rigs you can get basically every Xbox first party game and many PlayStation exclusives will eventualy trickle onto PC as well, so you can play all of that maxed out with maybe a Switch 2 for Nintendo exclusives.

For those of us who prefer the ease, comfort and reliability of console gaming, the PlayStation/Switch 2 pairing is still the way to go—between the two, you can get the best looking, best playing console versions on the Pro and if you want them on the go, Boom you have the Switch.

If only streaming services would follow this route so I could just pay for one or maybe two subscriptions and get all my Netflix/Disney/Hulu/HBO/Paramount/Peacock/etc etc etc all in one place 😔

I’m not really a big AC fan, but Shadows looks alright. What will kill it in the end is the worst possible timing of releasing in the same year as Ghost of Yotei. Take a look at the two side by side and it’s clearly Ghost of Yotei, and ‘We have Ghost of Yotei at home’. I suppose Ubisoft didn’t have any choice left but to ‘Break Glass for Assasin’s Creed in Japan’, but the timing couldn’t be worse.

I’d be cool with any of these suggestions, so long as Bethesda themselves aren’t handling the ports/rerelease. The entire issue with Bethesda as a company is they have great ideas and piss poor execution. What the world needs is for the entire staff to be gutted leaving only the writing talent and then contract a competent studio to actually code the game properly for once. That way we get all the great ideas with none of the endless janky, bug filled, glitch ridden trash we usually end up with. Don’t think so? Just imagine a version of Oblivion or Fallout that isn’t falling apart at the seams and tell me that’s not a tantalizing thought.

Expedition 33 looks like a proper RPG. Turn based combat instead of that rubbish, D tier real time combat most studios try to force down our throats to appease the stupid younger generation. If they don’t screw up the achievement list, I see myself enjoying this game for quite some time. If they decide to curate a trash achievement list (difficulty related achievements, multiplayer/online server dependent achievements, forced multiple replays etc) then they won’t get a cent or even a ‘free’ gamepass download from me.

Takes me back to better times. We had actual, honest to goodness exclusives that made those on other platforms jealous and left them contemplating whether to save their allowances to buy into the brand; we owned the games we bought, none of this ‘pay a recurring rental fee to own nothing’ garbage; and we had a console that was legitimately more powerful in almost every way than the competition—not essentially identical architecture with some slight advantages and some noticeable deficiencies. Better times, better times.

Unless the produce something within the THPS, Crash or Spyro series’ this means nothing to me. And if they do create a new entry in those iconic series, I will only buy-to-own on disc—and I’m more than happy to go elsewhere, if left with no choice.

Lots of reassurances being thrown around in the chat. Maybe they’re valid, maybe they’re not. I have to stop and wonder, If Xbox was spun off from parent company Microsoft tomorrow and its allowance was taken away, would Gamepass actually still be profitable (or even sustainable)?

That doesn’t change whether or not it’s sustainable/profitable now, or the fact that it’s a great deal (for gamers who prefer to spend their money on eternal rentals in lieu of ownership). But it does put into perspective why there are no true gamepass copycats from the other platform holders. When one must earn their keep, one cannot afford to throw daddy’s money at problems to keep one’s strategy afloat.

New law; You can only buy tea if you show proof of purchase for a physical disc/cartridge. Problem solved.

So…no steam OS then. Does this mean that all the ‘Xbox will integrate Steam into their upcoming handheld and it’ll be the best thing ever, we’ll have both Xbox and Steam libraries on one device!’ rhetoric was just a load of copium?

I can’t play Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim/Fallouts 3/4/76 for 20mins straight without getting stuck in the stairs, falling through the floor, literally keeling over dead for no reason as if my character just had a heart attack or encountering any one of a thousand other game breaking bugs or glitches.

If Virtuos wrote come c++ code on a piece of notebook paper and flushed it down the toilet, we’d automatically receive a higher quality, more optimized game than anything Bethesda has ever done.

I’m not worried at all about whatever Virtuos puts out if indeed they are doing this remake.

All I want to know is whether or not it will have a disc drive. I’m not spending $300-$600 or whatever it will cost on a digital only paperweight that takes control away from me and gives it to Microsoft.

Techniques like frame gen aren’t optimization, they’re a crutch because your game isn’t optimized well. Black Mid Wukong comes to mind.

There’s no disc drive in my LG. Not interested.

I smell what the Nadella’s cookin’ and it smells like a slow but patently obvious transition from one of The Big 3 to World’s Biggest Third Party Publisher.

I remember sega tried this decades ago. The Saturn was floundering, so they jumped the gun and launched their next system earlier than expected. I don’t recall how that worked out for them though 🤔

If everything’s an Xbox shouldn’t they be factoring phones, tablets, Maytag washing machines and slow cooker crockpots into the sales figures too?

So close. All I really want is the PS5 Dualsense controller with Xbox’s signature offset sticks layout, then we would have the truly perfect controller.

All I saw in the list of possible Xboxes were two current gen systems, 3 previous gen systems, and a whole lot of mobile crap I’d rather throw in a landfill than try to game on.

PC was also mentioned, but claiming a pc is an Xbox because it can play Xbox games is like saying one of those gargantuan military aircraft carriers is a fighter jet because you can take off from one.

Literally the only reason I would ever use Bing over other, better search engines. Go ahead Microsoft, shoot yourself in the foot and give me a reason to delete the Bing app.

My history with the GTA series is an odd one. I played 3 and Vice City on PS2, then never touched the series again until a month ago. 5 was free, so I downloaded it just to see what it’s like now. What I was presented with was divisive.

The story and world and the sheer amount of detail and physics and things is pretty impressive, although the character models are stiff and poorly animated. That said, I’m having a blast with the story. And that’s where it ends.

Apparently you need to pay to play online(?), I’m not 100% sure. Either way, I immediately lost interest when I saw they do not segregate the achievement/trophy list into separate single player and multiplayer skus. I have no interest in online slop, and I bet the achievements are sketchy at best (all online dependent ones are; you’re either praying the stars align to fulfill some stupid arbitrary criteria or getting screwed over by some a-hole while you’re trying to work toward a goal). That immediately killed any and all desire I have to play this game ‘for real’ on my main account (for achievements/trophies). I won’t be buying GTA6 as they’ll likely have the same piss poor, gamer unfriendly setup as 5.

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.