Balaam_

My original Xbox is in good company, sitting there on my shelf next to my Saturn and Dreamcast. All remind me of glory days and better times, before poor decisions drove these platforms into the ground and they now barely resemble what they used to be (and why I ever bothered with them in the first place).

And this is why I buy my physical games elsewhere. Thank you, stupid younger pro-digital generation. Thank you, greedy ‘we can make more money if we rent games to our userbase as a service instead of focusing on sales’ Xbox management.

@jesse_dylan my thoughts exactly. I’m extremely grateful it’s standalone and they didn’t try to shoehorn whatever achievements this will have into the main game’s list. Now I can try it on my alt and if the achievements are rubbish I can bypass it without any issues.

All developers should be forced to follow this procedure; why should achievement hunters have to pay the price for developers’ bad decisions? Some people have less than no interest in multiplayer or low-effort, tacked on modes like wave survival trash.

Since Microsoft won’t allow us to delete games with partially completed achievements from our lists, it falls on the developer to make gamer-friendly choices. Sadly, most make selfish choices that needlessly screw over achievement hunters.

Now that I think about it, this might well be one of Xbox’s few permanent exclusives. There’s no way they’ll relicense cars/music even if the series does drop on PlayStation. They’ll never get this one, boys.

I’m just happy to see there are more people who have taken this poll that appreciate a quality, narrative driven experience (namely Indiana Jones) than the D-tier, low intellect experience of running around in circles shooting, killing, dying and repeating ad infinitum (cough cod cough)

Anyone else’s hopes get raised and then crushed when Pope Geoffrey started talking about something Final Fantasy ‘coming to another platform’ and then showed Clive, only for it to be a Tekken crossover?

Idk if the first ever came to Xbox (I played the og on PS2, and the remaster on PS3) but oh man was the original fantastic. If it’s available and you haven’t played it yet, do so immediately. I can’t wait for th sequel!

Astrobot for the win 😊

I thought Resident Evil 4 got 120hz support? No?

Always unfortunate news, layoffs. Especially when they turn out to be because of bad decisions made by a few key higher ups. I wish we lived in a world where those people were the only ones whose paid for their mistakes, and not everyone else but them.

Yet another reason I prefer physical media, where possible, and on devices where the data is actually on-disc and not just an online key. The classic Charleton Heston line doesn’t pack the same punch in today’s cyber age; “I’ll give you this digital data when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.”

The only thing that matters is quality. I would rather wait a number of years for another game of Indiana Jones level production values than another Redfall or Starfield in 6 months.

Glad to see Indy getting recognition. I have problems with this list in general though; there are some glaring omissions and also some fodder whose presence I can’t explain.

This is unbelievable. A game as trash as this gets achievement/trophy protection, while countless other (infinitely better) games say ‘F*** You’ to dedicated achievement hunters and shut the servers down and permanently screw everyone out of any online related achievements? What Rocksteady did here is not only the simple solution to the problem, it’s the only acceptable one. This practice needs to be mandated across the entire industry by all platform holders. We should not tolerate any more lazy, shady behavior by scummy developers.

I’ll be picking this up physically on disc when it becomes available. I have fond memories of playing these way back on PS1; it’ll be nice to revisit them with some modern niceties sprinkled on top.

If the jaws of Tencent have to close on something, I’d infinitely prefer they devour these moldy, putrescent scraps rather than get their grimy claws one share closer to owning FromSoftware.

Not unless the entirety of the game is minted on disc (no digital key BS).

It’s the same old story. I’ve been at this hobby of ours for decades now, long enough that I know what games I’ll like with a nearly 100% margin of error. It just isn’t worth subscribing and paying a nominal fee every month to own nothing; I would infinitely rather invest my money wisely and buy-to-own what I know I’ll enjoy. In the rare instance I was on the fence about something and there was no demo, gamepass has proved an invaluable resource to be dipped into and quickly back out of once I make a decision. I don’t foresee any of this changing in the future, regardless of what’s added or however they choose to restructure it next.

Aside from the Kojima joint I’m not sure there’s anything they could have that would get me all that excited. Indy is out, and that was the big thing on the horizon for such a long time, now it’s pretty much just OD and…tumbleweeds.

That’s a win for Right to Repair. Now we just need a push for Right to Own Physical Media and ensure there’s a pipeline for discs and drives to continue being manufactured by someone down the road.

I’ll be curious to watch DF’s tech breakdown post-release to see whether the Pro’s upscaler works miracles like in Stellar Blade and FF7Rebirth, or if PSSR ends up in the pisser.

Darn it, that’s not the news I wanted to hear. This was quite literally the only thing at the last showcase that I was even remotely interested in, the only thing that didn’t look like crap out of the gate. I was so desperately hoping this would be in the 8-10 range:(

Without spoilers, do we have any idea what the achievement list is like? Is it acceptable, or is it filled with difficulty related achievements, multiplayer/online-server-dependent achievements or other offensive trash like low effort tacked on wave survival slop? I’m a huge Indy fan, I’d even give a game that got a 6 a try, but I draw the line at scummy devs selfishly shoehorning piss-poorly designed achievements into games and ruining them for achievement hunters. I’d sooner not buy the game and laugh as they have to close the studio than contribute to that trash way of operating. The achievement list will determine if I play or skip.

I’ve never used AntStream. Can you buy individual titles and own them in perpetuity, or is it a streaming-only service where you pay monthly and own nothing?

@Fiendish-Beaver The same DF Direct that the above quote is taken from specifically discusses how bifurcating development into two distinct, segregated pipelines is no longer a viable strategy. The Switch exists solely to solve that exact problem for Nintendo, and it’s highly unlikely moving forward that any platform holder will have dedicated console/handheld versions for a given game.

@somnambulance My thoughts exactly. There’s probably some semblance of truth and wisdom in his words, but he’s a good executive. A darn good executive. He knows how to steer perception toward whatever is the current agenda is; he’s done it well at Sony in the past and he’s probably doing just as good at ChinaDime.

I hear the klaxons blaring in the distance, summoning the ‘Play Everywhere Defense Force’

If only it had an extra 2gigs of ram he might have walked away unscathed.

They hyped this up as a GT killer, but what we got was ‘We have GT at home’ :/

This looks so good but I won’t touch it until it’s in a playable state. Less Bethesda-y, more Forza-y levels of polish.

It was always a slow, chugging, unappealing mess tbh. This is like burning down rubble.

My only fear is that they’ll butcher the achievement/trophy lists. I’m praying there’s no tedious, grueling ones forcing multiple replays on ever increasing difficulties, or worse yet, ones for some tacked on low effort mode shoehorned in where it doesn’t belong, like some wave survival type slop. These are cardinal achievement hunting sins.

I don’t care if the text is displayed using hieroglyphs, I just want good exclusives on physical discs.

Hope this gets ironed out to an acceptable state soon. There’s a lot of promise here, but right now it’s bordering on Bethesda levels of unplayable glitchiness.

Spyro Trilogy, without question.

I could see this making waves on Switch specifically, especially if they somehow manage to squeeze all 3 games onto a single cartridge (without any of that ‘additional download required’ crap).

I stand in solidarity with my disc brothers and sisters.

I’d say take whoever decided ‘code in box’ is an acceptable business strategy, throw them in a chair and force them to play Starfield or Concord for 72hrs straight, but I’ll wager the Geneva Convention forbids that sort of cruelty.

This is logical. They don’t have anything quite like this; perhaps those The Crew games come closest, but they’re inferior to Forza Horizon just like Forza Motorsport plays second fiddle to Gran Turismo. Now they’ll have the best ‘sim’ racer (by console standards) and the best open world arcade-y racer on the same system. In other words, there’s a market for this one but probably not FM.

Unless the bonus gift is an attachable disc drive, idgaf

The man had a hand in a number of the greatest titles ever to hit any platform. Well done, sir oo7

So Stalker 2–a game literally developed in the middle of an ongoing war—is a bit buggy, and it gets slammed. Meanwhile Slob Howard and Bethesda churn out broken trash on a conveyor belt and they get unending, unwarranted praise. To this day I cannot play Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim/Fallout 3/4/76 for more than 20mins straight without falling through the floor, getting stuck in the stairs, crashing to the dashboard or encountering any one of an infinite number of game breaking bugs. Most overhyped studio that ever existed bar none.

Darn, I was hoping to get a platform by platform sales breakdown in this article based off that “including Xbox” part, but I guess they didn’t share those specifics. I suppose it’s just for morale?

@MeanBeanEgg Normally I’d point out that it is indeed a common business practice for companies with product that simply is not selling in specific markets to pull out of said markets, but…the reasons really don’t apply to a company worth in excess of 3 Trillion that can eat any losses without blinking. So I defer to your initial statement in this case.

‘We at Xbox aspire to fast food industry rates of employee turnover’

That face you make when you realize MachineGames has a 100% track record of being able to murder knotsies in each and every one of their games

“Your overconfidence is your weakness.”

“Your faith in your brand is yours.”

They aren’t exactly on older consoles, but Crash and Spyro trilogy should have always been 60fps.

Fortnite: Ha, look how many dull, dimwitted, low level D-tier Neanderthals we can get to do nothing more than just run around in circles shooting at each other, dying, and repeating for hours on end!

BO6: Hold my beer.

Good games. I literally don’t care about anything else, not one single other thing. Be a Nintendo. Be a Sony 1st party (when they actually put out games ). Just. Make. Good. Games. None of this half baked, ‘oh maybe we should have left it in the oven another 6 months to iron out the kinks’ garbage. Just give me a finished product that’s a GotY contender. I don’t even care what genre it is.

It’s a light hearted jab to be sure, but I can’t decide who’s on the receiving end. PlayStation because their newly crowned ‘world’s most powerful console’ is an Xbox in disguise, playing Xbox games? Or Xbox, because the brand identity has disintegrated to such a degree that their games are essentially homeless, seeking shelter in the YMCA known as the PS5?