Dround87

@NishimuraX for sure. Not even close. Even at its current level it's wildly underrated.

I'll give it another 6 months! Great ambition. But needs some time.

For sure! I only play Minecraft with the kids and I therefore despise it. But it'll be nice to have something nice to look at while I'm inwardly raging trying to disguise my disdain.

Playing kingdom come 2 recently really scratched the old Bethesda itch! It showed me there's still a big place in my heart for RPG games like this laden with old school systems but starfield sure wasn't it. I feel like a lot of starfields failures were blamed on stuff like inventory management but the truth was that it was just poorly designed and badly written to the point it can never really be salvaged.

Yeah man. Looks good! I don't really care if it's not groundbreaking or particularly deep. Casual good looking fun which isn't broken at launch. Sold!

As a rule I try and avoid playing games until a couple of weeks after release at least. More if it's a really bad launch which let's be fair is more often than not these days. So no! Absolutely not. I won't be paying more to be a beta tester.

Got my ps5 for crimbo (from myself...) so I have an absolutely massive backlog. But yeah I'm excited! It's the one I'm probably most looking forward to. Maybe I'll leave it a few weeks because day one has treated me badly for too long. Maybe this is important enough to wait for a few patches.

I do use cloud semi regularly as a 2nd player in online co-op games with my son. I do it enough to know it's not the best experience and can really suffer badly around big game releases and other things like holidays. It's really not the way. Good for having a quick look at a new game pass game sometimes before you bother downloading it.

NGL I bought myself a PS5 for Christmas. Got a lot to catch up on!

I enjoyed that! It was my favourite too. Beautiful and engaging. The country lane feel was on point. Tbh any map where we are driving on the correct (left) side of the road is great! We've had the UK and Australia. How about Japan?

It does annoy me with the Monday release mostly because it's tempting with a nasty storm outside knowing I won't really be able to put time in until next weekend! I held off anyway. Tbh I am finding the hot mess most titles are released in these days is training me to wait by default. Really looking forward to it though! Great to see it's been working well for people.

@BAMozzy well yeah! I mean there is a speed modifier to deal with that. The the cruise time is not the main event although it can be fun to watch the alpes or whatever pass below you if you're feeling it. It's the cold starts and managing accurate landings I enjoy. I usually did my flights like Cambridge to London or something like that. Landing at London City at night... Probably my favourite thing to do in the game!

@BAMozzy I think if you set your mind to really understanding how a flight works in a real world sense it's a deep thing that could grab you but yeah I agree if you log in and pootle about in a plane without paying attention to any of that it's limited appeal beyond sightseeing. For me... Some of my greatest moments where I've felt a sense of achievement in a game have come from flight sim. Planning and executing the perfect flight according to the rules of the real world takes patience, research and learning. And I think it's a game of great beauty. But it's not for everyone.

Good question! I do tend to buy smaller lightweight games like balatro for example on switch. The sort of game that's nice to play undocked. Also I do buy some ports I wouldn't think about on xbox. Like I bought the crysis remakes on switch. Nice to have some fully formed games that work well on the platform. But wouldn't have bothered on xbox.

Yeah for sure! I'd be annoyed if I bought it though. Luckily I haven't got around to it yet.

That's good. I use this all the time to play online co-op games with my boy and tbh. It's fine. Most of the time it works great. I actually started playing a lot more single player on my handheld android box and it's super convenient. Just around big releases for a week or two the queues creep in and I guess that's when most people actually try it.

Corporate babble as expected. Nothing interesting. No answers.

Xbox is an absolute shambles right now. For those of us with significant investment in the store it's extremely concerning and I don't really see a way how it can be good news unless it's fervently denied and the opportunity for that has been and gone.

Regardless if it's the best case scenario the damaging options are clearly on the table and being actively discussed. I'm not chill about it. I've been using the Xbox store since the very start.

Odds are this statement will be wishy washy corpo babble that will leave far too much to the imagination and we'll be no further forward on the significant question of why I as a customer should spend a single penny more on content when I have doubts about the future security of those investments. It's a joke. MS need to firmly get their act together and start focusing on the games. It's painful to watch at this point and the only thing keeping me here is that I tied myself to the ecosystem. If I was coming in fresh I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot bargepole. That is the true state of xbox in 2024.

Idk but I won't spend a single penny on digital content until everything is absolutely crystal clear with no room for further speculation. Feeling like I should have joined the physical copy of everything crew a long time ago and I might be about to learn an expensive lesson.

@Widey85 I don't understand why achievements would hold you back in any case though? If a game is more fun to you to play in a certain way that clearly trumps fake points which no one cares about. It's a very easy choice.

The only time I ever tried to get a refund was with the Skywaker Saga. I had a game breaking bug about 2 weeks after buying it. I was playing it with my kid and we'd done a couple of chapters. Long story short they wouldn't give it to me. The bug was never fixed either. I download it every now and again to see if my save is fixed but yeah.... bad. I think when a game is completely broken through no fault of the customer you should get the refund. That's fair.

Fantastic when it works! But I'm in the habit of shutting down any games that require server connection immediately because it often takes more time to get them working properly than it saves.

I will buy a PS5 pro. I never owned a PlayStation 3, 4 or 5. My last one was the PS2! So it'll be kind of cool working through all the stuff I missed. 2023 is the year I lost confidence in MS. But I have the series X which will see me through any rabbits MS manage to pull out of their hat. Few and far between these days! But that's just where we are.

Cyberpunk phantom liberty by a mile. Nothing else on xbox achieved anything close to goty status imo. All the heavy hitter exclusives are deeply flawed. This list brings it home pretty hard how badly MS fumbled 2023. To compensate I've been finishing off the year by mopping up a bunch of switch titles I missed. Onward and upward I guess!

It's a lot! I'm a bit behind but not too far. My pattern is kind of don't play for myself for a few weeks then session something hard. Starfield was a big one. So was cyberpunk. I played a lot of DMZ. And my stats are boosted playing minecraft and lego games with my kids. Also subnautica... I played a lot of both.

Come to think of it I bet Phil can justify gaming sessions at work. QC and research... Who would say no?

It'll be amazing obviously. It's GTA. Bummed out by the leaks about the setting though. Vice City isn't my thing. But whatever. Looking forward to it.

Microsoft is embarrassing right now. Make some good games and things will change. Two year drought ending with redfall and starfield. Starfield isn't terrible. It's pretty good and I enjoyed it. But let's be honest it's divisive and it's nowhere near enough. What now? There's literally nothing interesting for there foreseeable. What happened? The big play has now been and gone.

Playing Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty immediately after Starfield definitely shattered the rose tinted specs I went into it with. It really laid Bethesda's shortcomings bare. Still enjoyed it a lot. But mixed is pretty much nail on the head even if it is represented by two extremes!

@InterceptorAlpha me too because kids. Something forza was always great for. Building wacky cars and racing split screen. It's the best thing about it. Major suck.

I don't know how it feels like free to play when all the content is unlocked bar the usual entry packages which add a tiny fraction to the car list. You can play every car and every track in a variety of ways. There's no pay to win on the levelling but yeah I agree that it is a bit wierd. It's faster than I was led to believe. Didn't bother me much in the opening hours. But tedious in the mid game.

Forza motorsport multiplayer is split screen. Dumb dumbs cut it for series S parity. No chance I'm ever joining an online lobby.

Spring 2024 isn't soon. Guess contents going to be sparse if that's the case for something they were teasing well ahead of launch. Can pretty much give up hope of seeing anything actually interesting. By the time they finish adding stuff that was already in previous games it'll be a year or more.

Playing right now. Bought myself a MR2 - a car I owned in real life. Jumped into rivals to level up and get it up to C class so I can take it to the featured event.

It is very good racing. I love the penalty system. I love that it's not all about winning from the back of the grid. These are major improvements. It feels great. I really hated the starter cars but I'm in a vibe now with my lighter more responsive duece.

The upgrade system is a major drag ngl. It'll be fine early game. I'm happy to stick to a particular car that I like. I can see it being a major pain late game when I want to sort cars out for multiplayer and challenges. Or if I just want to get everything in my garage looking race ready. It's annoying. I don't like it. How badly I wanted to slap some slicks on that damn civic so I could get it around a corner can not be understated. Oh well.

Lol idk. Was just suprised how many people with no interest in the subject of the article decided to click the link in the first place and then go on to participate in a poll which has a results button. I like to read things that I find interesting and relevant.

6 percent came here to say they didn't play early access and aren't interested in the game at all?? Why? What motivated you to read this article and participate in a poll? People confuse me...

Just finished with starfield. Tbh I'm glad to be free of it! Need to find something with absolutely zero loading screens.

There's been some stand out racing games that really engaged me hard with names like Test Drive, Need for Speed, Burnout and Gran Turismo among many others. Titles that really pushed forward the genre or were just simply mind blowing for me. But yeah overall as a franchise forza has been reliable, consistent and excellent (except FM5). Forza motorsport 3 and 4 + horizon 2 + 4 are definitely in my top racing games of all time. But it's been a while since I really enjoyed it. If it wasn't for the UK setting in FH4 you would have to go back a decade to find one that really grabbed me. I feel as though it's been degraded by live service crap a lot over the years. So early access isn't on my radar.

Lost my mantis armour on the mannequin ☹️

Starfield is one of the hardest games I've ever played to parse into a final score or to compare with other games. It's captivating and unique. It's massively deep. It's a game you can get lost in for hours at a time and achieve very little! Yet the storys are excellent and crack on when you want to be entertained. The visuals are stunningly beautiful for a game on its scale. The combat is decent.

That said there are many things wrong with it. There are moments of boredom. There are too many loading screens. Ship travel is very disappointing verging on pointless and the world feels off when you really think about it. There are a lot of reasons why immersion is shattered which is actually much worse than in skyrim or fallout 4. Travelling on foot is a mini game as is inventory management and the in game economy. It desperately needs more to really rise above those groundbreaking BGS titles. More of what? I'm not sure. There are many simple suggestions I could make but it would take a lot to make it work in line with what I think people expected from it. It suffers badly from it's own scale and ambition. How do you even begin to fix that?

But it's a start. It's a game that tells me BGS are returning to form. They bit off far more than they can chew with starfield but I am very excited to see what learnings they take forward into the next elder scrolls title. It should be incredible based on what I've seen here. There are many issues introduced by starfield's genre and setting that will be a moot point in the elder scrolls universe.

I played it for 4 hours yesterday following your advice to start with vanguard which has a whole museum of starfield history at the beggining of the quest line. Following it along now and having a blast. No 10 hour grind for me. It's a great tip! Quite clear at this point the 7s are bull. It's a truly amazing game. Bethesda RPG to the core so yeah... there's inventory management and loading screens. I can cope with it. What did they expect?

The trouble with Forza games is that the assets are developed iteratively along with the series. If you make major changes you end up with FM5 which everyone hated because it felt like a shell of its former self. It'll have to happen eventually I guess. But like with other sports titles I think there's no harm in skipping a year or two and coming back to it fresh. Then you see the progress which has been made more clearly, benifit from much expanded car list and they're way more fun.

@Fiendish-Beaver smart plan. Exactly the same as mine except I demolished a delivery of oktoberfest beer and bought it. Oops.

@Fiendish-Beaver it's pretty simple really. No one can sit with a straight face and objectively call a far cry game bad. The broad range of scores reflect the fact many gamers are simply fed up of the Ubi formula. If you're fatigued by it then this game is just going to annoy you. If you like it you'll enjoy farcry 6 immensely. It's more farcry love it or hate it. What more is there to tell you? I'm guessing you know by now if it's for you.