I really want to try Lightyear Frontier. It looks like the type of game you can chill out to. Currently unsubbed to GP though and not really interested in anything else this month so might just buy it on Steam if it runs well on the Deck.
@jedinite the narrative that the game is “yesterday’s news”. Personally I think Helldivers 2 has been such a success so far because it’s not competing with some of the best FPS ever made. For starters it’s pure coop which is pretty rare for a half decent shooter nowadays. Secondly nothing new or decent with universal appeal has released in ages. Reskinned CoD aside if you look at steam top played games it’s the same games that have been there for years: counterstrike, PUBG, team fortress 2, overwatch 2, Warframe, Rainbow Six Siege, Battlefield, Destiny 2.
I have absolutely no doubt that Helldivers 2 player count will drop off a cliff when the hype dies down. The question is by how much because at the moment it’s genuinely offering something that not many games are offering, a fun, pure co op, live service experience where everything is unlockable without microtransactions. If Arrowhead can support it in meaningful ways it might actually be around for years just like all the games I listed above. The very fact you mention that you still play Helldivers 1 shows the IP has legs.
@jedinite I’m sorry did you check Steam concurrent player stats at 4.30am GMT on a Tuesday morning when the entirety of Europe is in bed, Asia are in the middle of a working day and it’s averaging about 11pm in US and expect it to be booming?! If that’s live numbers I would say that actually completely disproves the point you’re trying to make as those are incredible stats for an obscure time on a Monday/Tuesday. If you’d checked 2 hours earlier you would have seen 350,000 but really If you want to accurately compare current against all time concurrent at least be reasonable and do it on a Saturday or Sunday where you would have found a peak of 430,000 this weekend just gone….but that might not fit the narrative eh?
Tried it on my iPhone once. Sat in a queue for five minutes before getting into Forza which was horribly pixelated, had huge input delays and felt about 10fps. 1/10 for me. Might have got 2/10 if I didn’t have to queue for it.
@Romans12 Lol yeh always funny when people lose their job and might I add, some expertly delivered, non-biased industry critique you have offered up there. LMAO. MEGA ROFL!
@Krydle I dunno what deals with the devil people are making to get xcloud working but every time I have tried it’s unplayable. Remote play on Xbox and PS works a bit better but I can still only play strategy/turn based type games that don’t require quick reactions.
I desperately hope we don’t go down the all cloud route in the future. I just don’t see it working for regular people who don’t want to pay for the highest tier fibre optic broadband and be tinkering in their router settings to get the lowest latency. The joy of consoles is turning it on and everything working out the box.
I have more friends on PS than Xbox so I’m hoping to rope a few of them into Grounded or Sea of Thieves however I’m not going to hold my breath. It’s difficult to get regular gaming time in with your friends in your 30s. I couldn’t really get into Hi Fi Rush and Pentiment on Xbox.
@GeorgeKal Maybe, that’s why I said it would be interesting to see after the hype has died down. I think Helldivers has probably resonated more than SOT with a certain age group though. You don’t need to regularly get a group of friends together to have fun on it, you can just dive (yay pun) in for a quick 20 minute session or play solidly for 3 hours.
You are right though the ongoing success of Helldivers will depend entirely on its future support but it’s got excellent core gameplay, nothing is locked behind a paywall and it has an interesting global objective system. While you seem to think it’s bad, many gamers and critics are really enjoying it.
@GeorgeKal SOT is a 6 year old game that has HAD 30million players log into it at some point. Comparing those numbers with a game that has been out for 2 weeks is just plain silly. It would be more interesting to see the concurrent players of both in a few months time when the hype has died down a bit but the wording of your comment makes it sound like 30million people are logging into SOT regularly which just isn’t the case.
@Stocksy Yeh it’s not that he doesn’t like live service or grindy games…he doesn’t like games that are on PS.
@Sol4ris so many Xbox “influencers” whatever they are denounced the platform. I saw tons of comments on here questioning the point of an Xbox if all games are ported over. Let’s not pretend it’s the PlayStation community who have been most vocal about this.
There is very little chance the next gen will be the largest technical leap we have ever seen unless the whole platform is AR or something wild like that. Hope I’m proven wrong but this very much feels like standard MS corporate rubbish.
Looks like a solid update. I will be hopping back in more regularly when they change the car upgrade system next month. I’m also hopping they leave the featured career events live a bit longer or release more at the same time. At the moment it feels like I complete the open races, then do one of the featured events and then don’t play it for another week until a new feature event is released. It just feels very sparse for single player content and as you said @BBB multiplayer is basically a write off atm because it essentially boils down to who can survive the first corner without being rammed off the road.
@Shushibda I find the opposite with mine. My Series X and PS5 sit next to each other, equal distance from the router but I seem to get faster download speeds on the Series over PS5.
It seemed pretty good, particularly for people who enjoyed the sailing aspect of Black Flag. It won’t be a buy for me though even if it was dirt cheap simply because I’m not really into the pirates sailing the open seas thing. Couldn’t see myself remaining interested long enough to put in the hours it would need.
@InterceptorAlpha Did you really work on Bloodstained? Congrats mate it’s a top game. What do you do out of interest and what other games have you worked on?
I go back every now and then to play while listening to podcasts. It’s way too grindy though to be a serious sim racer. You need to put in literal hours with a car just to be able to experiment with custom setups. They either need to drop this car levelling rubbish or make it wayyy faster to level up. No idea who thought this would be a popular system but they are tone deaf to what the Forza audience actually wants.
Probably fallout new vegas or stick of truth for me but what impressed me most about this list was the sheer variety. Obsidian will dabble in literally anything and it’s super cool to see.
I have been 90% digital since about 2017 mainly due to convenience but with the cost of living crisis I have found myself buying more physical games again recently. For example Tekken 8 was £15 cheaper on Amazon and I can resell if I ever get bored of it. Regardless of how consumer trends are going, an all digital future is not going to be popular with everyone and will only increase the value proposition of the PS against the Xbox if Sony keep offering the option and MS decide not to.
@Trmn8r Yikes…someone hasn’t tuned in to literally any Xbox showcase ever. It might surprise you to find out they don’t end the third party trailers by saying “Btw this will also be on PlayStation and Switch!!!”
Community: Please improve the gameplay, exploration, AI, Storage, Levelling up, vendors, mods on console…
Bethesda: Shhhh. One person gets a spacesuit….which they must design themselves…..🤗
A - Really good show. Avowed looks like an excellent stop gap before ES6. I’m not at all fussed about Hellblade as I found the first one pretty boring but Indiana Jones looks excellent. Ara seems to be pushing 4x into the future and I was really impressed with it so I’m disappointed it won’t be day one on console but as long as it comes eventually I can wait.
@OldGamer999 I 100% agree about the marketing and the brand recognition but I think the explanation is a lot simpler than being a cult. MS had a rocky start with the Xbox One and then proceeded to spend the latter half of the generation pushing a sub service where people didn’t actually own anything (not criticising it just stating facts). PS4 had a solid start and then focused the entire generation on selling games.
We come to this generation and users are simply going to buy the system where most of their current library exists. More PS4 sales equals more game sales which results in more people buying PS5 to play said games. As genius as gamepass is, MS kinda shot themselves in the foot with it because it’s changed the mentality of gamers. You now have people referring to their Xbox as a “gamepass machine” and their PlayStation is where they build up their libraries. Most people’s primary focus is going to be the ecosystem where they have pumped the most money into already. Just my thoughts I might be wrong.
@Aizen82 Huh?! That didn’t make sense. No one is saying five year olds should be allowed to watch porn or action movies. They are saying that they can record a 1 minutes gore fest on Gears, Doom, CoD, Duke Nukem etc but the moment someone takes a screenshot of some boobles they are slapped with a ban….its inconsistent. Also no one is suggesting that kids should have access to this content but really it’s on MS and the parents of the to moderate this in a sensible way, not your average gamer. I am a mid 30s and all my friends on Xbox are a similar sort of age…why should I change my gaming habits because MS designed their system so that some random kid on the other side of the world might see a clip of something I record? It’s madness.
In comparison to PlayStation their default settings are that if you record a clip or screenshot it doesn’t leave your console/cloud storage until you actively choose to share it with friends or the wider community. This is called common sense.
@Markatron84 Straight off the back of an article yesterday applauding an AEW wrestler for saying console wars are stupid. You can’t say console wars are stupid and then have the strapline “another one bites the dust” on a non-article about a third party game arriving on PS. Bizarre double standards.
6 years of GDPR in the UK might have changed my mindset a bit but from a pure privacy perspective I would expect to have to opt in to auto uploads rather than opt out…especially when it auto uploads to the world and not just your friends. Admittedly it’s been a while since I set up my Series X but I don’t ever remember being given the option or even being notified of this. If they are going to continue throwing out lengthy bans they need to change the default settings or be much much clearer about what happens with your screenshots and clips.
@BacklogBrad This is such a good idea which I will be adopting. I love a good spreadsheet so recording exactly how much I am spending will hopefully make me rethink some of my purchases.
@J_Mo_Money shouldn’t it really be Microsoft learning a lesson in this instance? Gamers shouldn’t need to change the way they use an integrated feature on a console they have spent good money on just to cater for an overly aggressive censoring system.
D. Microsoft were all hype and very little substance as per. Starfield was not the endless space epic that we will be playing for the next decade, it was a tedious slog. Months of beautiful Forza trailers before releasing a buggy, soulless grind fest. Redfall…..sigh. Although at least they have worked on improving it since release. You’d hope they learn from the fact that their highest rated and best received game this year was a shadow drop AA title which no one even knew existed.
If MS are going to continue their trend of announcing games 5+ years out before hyping them up to fever pitch levels they need to actually ensure the game is worth hyping because all I’ve seen from them over the last decade is a drastic decline in both the number and quality of their yearly releases. Without Bethesda their first party AAA output 3 years into this gen would be two Forzas and a Halo. That’s just insanely bad but uncle Phil wears retro gaming t shirts and posts his gamerscore on X so all is forgiven.
“Push a button and it goes away” yeh duh. People aren't angry about the extra time it takes to get to their games. They are angry about the principle of Microsoft forcing even MORE advertising down our throats in ever increasingly intrusive ways. As someone said previously when we buy an Xbox we are the consumer, not the product. If I was getting a free service I would expect to see forced ads (e.g YouTube) but when I paid £450 for a series X and then £12 a month for gamepass I don’t need or want it. Would everyone please just stop accepting and making excuses for Microsoft’s mediocrity.
@J_Mo_Money You’re right my commitments don’t have anything to do with me forming my own opinion. They do however have everything to do with where I focus my free time which is the point I was making. Don’t get me wrong I will try a game Im super interested in if it’s on a service like gamepass but outside of that I’m not going to spend money and time on a game that 90% of critics think is bad to average when there’s hundreds of other games that 90% of critics think are excellent. Regardless of the state of gaming websites nowadays they tend to align on most games and come up with very similar pros and cons which I will look into before investing. My system is not so different to yours in that I will look at overall scores, read/watch some reviews from critics I trust and then decide whether I want to buy the game or not. It’s not like I just go “ahhh that one was 8.7 and that one was 8.5…I really like the look of the 8.5 but I better go with the 8.7 because Metacritic says so”…I’m not that basic.
I have just got a lot more precious with my time this year because I own all three systems and there’s a hell of a lot of quality games releasing on them but not enough time to play them all. Metacritic for me is an excellent tool to help.
@JayJ @J_Mo_Money Personally for me Metacritic is a godsend. I have a full time job, family commitments, pets and social engagements most weekends. If two games I am interested in release the same day, one scores 9 on metacritic and the other scores 5 I am absolutely going to use my limited time to play the 9. General consensus is, has always been and always will be an excellent indication of how good something.
I was loving Forza until I started getting booted out the game and losing progress on Friday. I have stopped playing since it happened two days on the trot. It’s a grind enough to get the car xp and decent amounts of money without it randomly kicking you and erasing your last few races. What makes it even more frustrating is I don’t understand the point of it always being online if it’s not going to cloud save after every race.
It could be amazing in a year. Hopefully it becomes amazing in the next few months. At the moment it’s a game I want to play but won’t because my gaming time is at a premium and I don’t want to waste it.
@BAMozzy a survival horror spin off could be really cool. It would be interesting to follow the stories of some regular people handling emergence day and the following months instead of just playing as jacked up soldiers who shoot anything that moves.
I’m just a bit burnt out on the standard gears format. I completed the first three and have played but not completed 4 and 5. While the first gears pretty much reinvented what a third person shooter could be, in the 15 years following they have barely done anything innovative with the gameplay loop aside from some new weapons and a robot. I dunno what it would look like but if they can reboot the franchise in a way that GoW did in 2018 with fresh gameplay, story and mechanics I would be all up for it.
This is straight on the Christmas list. Like others have said here I was expecting (and in some ways hoping) this would score lower so I wouldn’t be so interested but there’s just too much to play at the moment. I can’t believe I’m actually hoping for a quieter 2024 just so I can catchup on the backlog.
@K1LLEGAL I am the same. I don’t particularly expect or even want a game to last hundreds of hours usually but Skyrim in particular I have happily played for days on every gen since 360 because the content felt consistently engaging….although nostalgia probs played a part. I’m just not getting that with Starfield and my own unrealistic expectations will take some blame although Bethesda themselves hyped it as a game people will be playing for the next decade.
@ebony-shabba Fair play mate. Apologies I came across as a bit of a D*** in my reply to you I’m sorry. Caught me on a rough day I just sometimes feel on this website the moment you’re slightly critical of anything Xbox people jump on you.
@themightyant It’s a weird phenomena I don’t think I have seen with any other game. Reddit boards (I know can’t be taken too seriously) are filled with people who have put in 40-70 hours and then just hit a wall and concurrent/daily steam numbers have just dropped off a cliff. But I don’t regret playing it and I will definitely drop back into it in the future. Like you said it’s good but unfortunately I was hoping for great.
@K1LLEGAL happy to justify mate. I really enjoyed it for the first few weeks. And thought I would be playing it for years to come. Then it just started getting very samey. Same mission structure, same process of getting new powers, same trek back to a shop to manage my inventory, same enemies, same wildlife models on planets, same everything just in different barren environments. I loaded up cyberpunk on 2.0 release just to see what it’s like and basically haven’t gone back to Starfield since. It felt like it did loads of stuff but none of it particularly well so allot of my time with it was exploring these systems and finding that I didn’t particularly love any of them. Also didn’t help I have been playing Baldurs gate along side which really highlights the illusion of choice most RPGs present. If Starfield came out in any other year I probably would have been way more into it but it’s competing with too many exceptional games atm which show it’s weak points.
@ebony-shabba chill out not everything is a personal attack on you. I didn’t say I hate it I said it was a disappointment…the reason I say this is because the Bethesda buyout is basically the reason I bought a series x with Starfield being the main game I have been excited for since it was announced. Bethesda is one of my fav publishers with Elder Scrolls and fallout being among my fav series. To me (because believe it or not I’m entitled to my opinion) Starfield would have been much better if it tried to scale back, do less and focus on core gameplay. Is that ok? am I allowed to have a negative opinion about an Xbox game? Or do I need to love absolutely everything about Xbox because I could wax lyrical about Forza for hours if you want?
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Re: These Six Games Are Coming To Xbox Game Pass (March 7-19)
I really want to try Lightyear Frontier. It looks like the type of game you can chill out to. Currently unsubbed to GP though and not really interested in anything else this month so might just buy it on Steam if it runs well on the Deck.
Re: Helldivers 2 Dev Urges More 'Compassion' In Response To Negative Xbox Tweet
@jedinite the narrative that the game is “yesterday’s news”. Personally I think Helldivers 2 has been such a success so far because it’s not competing with some of the best FPS ever made. For starters it’s pure coop which is pretty rare for a half decent shooter nowadays. Secondly nothing new or decent with universal appeal has released in ages. Reskinned CoD aside if you look at steam top played games it’s the same games that have been there for years: counterstrike, PUBG, team fortress 2, overwatch 2, Warframe, Rainbow Six Siege, Battlefield, Destiny 2.
I have absolutely no doubt that Helldivers 2 player count will drop off a cliff when the hype dies down. The question is by how much because at the moment it’s genuinely offering something that not many games are offering, a fun, pure co op, live service experience where everything is unlockable without microtransactions. If Arrowhead can support it in meaningful ways it might actually be around for years just like all the games I listed above. The very fact you mention that you still play Helldivers 1 shows the IP has legs.
Re: Helldivers 2 Dev Urges More 'Compassion' In Response To Negative Xbox Tweet
@jedinite I’m sorry did you check Steam concurrent player stats at 4.30am GMT on a Tuesday morning when the entirety of Europe is in bed, Asia are in the middle of a working day and it’s averaging about 11pm in US and expect it to be booming?! If that’s live numbers I would say that actually completely disproves the point you’re trying to make as those are incredible stats for an obscure time on a Monday/Tuesday. If you’d checked 2 hours earlier you would have seen 350,000 but really If you want to accurately compare current against all time concurrent at least be reasonable and do it on a Saturday or Sunday where you would have found a peak of 430,000 this weekend just gone….but that might not fit the narrative eh?
Re: Talking Point: Do You Make Use Of Cloud Gaming On Xbox Game Pass?
Tried it on my iPhone once. Sat in a queue for five minutes before getting into Forza which was horribly pixelated, had huge input delays and felt about 10fps. 1/10 for me. Might have got 2/10 if I didn’t have to queue for it.
Re: PlayStation Follows Xbox In Announcing Significant Layoffs For 2024
@Romans12 Lol yeh always funny when people lose their job and might I add, some expertly delivered, non-biased industry critique you have offered up there. LMAO. MEGA ROFL!
Re: Xbox Cloud Gaming Now Accounts For At Least 10% Of Overall Xbox Playtime
@Krydle I dunno what deals with the devil people are making to get xcloud working but every time I have tried it’s unplayable. Remote play on Xbox and PS works a bit better but I can still only play strategy/turn based type games that don’t require quick reactions.
I desperately hope we don’t go down the all cloud route in the future. I just don’t see it working for regular people who don’t want to pay for the highest tier fibre optic broadband and be tinkering in their router settings to get the lowest latency. The joy of consoles is turning it on and everything working out the box.
Re: Poll: Will You Be Playing Any Of Xbox's New Multiplatform Games On Other Consoles?
I have more friends on PS than Xbox so I’m hoping to rope a few of them into Grounded or Sea of Thieves however I’m not going to hold my breath. It’s difficult to get regular gaming time in with your friends in your 30s. I couldn’t really get into Hi Fi Rush and Pentiment on Xbox.
Re: Xbox Petition For Helldivers 2 Goes Viral Overnight, Aims To 'Redefine The Console Wars'
@GeorgeKal Maybe, that’s why I said it would be interesting to see after the hype has died down. I think Helldivers has probably resonated more than SOT with a certain age group though. You don’t need to regularly get a group of friends together to have fun on it, you can just dive (yay pun) in for a quick 20 minute session or play solidly for 3 hours.
You are right though the ongoing success of Helldivers will depend entirely on its future support but it’s got excellent core gameplay, nothing is locked behind a paywall and it has an interesting global objective system. While you seem to think it’s bad, many gamers and critics are really enjoying it.
Re: Xbox Petition For Helldivers 2 Goes Viral Overnight, Aims To 'Redefine The Console Wars'
@GeorgeKal SOT is a 6 year old game that has HAD 30million players log into it at some point. Comparing those numbers with a game that has been out for 2 weeks is just plain silly. It would be more interesting to see the concurrent players of both in a few months time when the hype has died down a bit but the wording of your comment makes it sound like 30million people are logging into SOT regularly which just isn’t the case.
@Stocksy Yeh it’s not that he doesn’t like live service or grindy games…he doesn’t like games that are on PS.
Re: Xbox Petition For Helldivers 2 Goes Viral Overnight, Aims To 'Redefine The Console Wars'
@ZuneTattooGuy “I am not a fan of repetitious grindy games”….don’t you love the new Forza?
Re: Xbox Announces Four Games Going To Other Consoles, 'Not Starfield Or Indiana Jones'
@Sol4ris so many Xbox “influencers” whatever they are denounced the platform. I saw tons of comments on here questioning the point of an Xbox if all games are ported over. Let’s not pretend it’s the PlayStation community who have been most vocal about this.
Re: Xbox's Next Console Will Feature The 'Largest Technical Leap Ever' In A Generation
There is very little chance the next gen will be the largest technical leap we have ever seen unless the whole platform is AR or something wild like that. Hope I’m proven wrong but this very much feels like standard MS corporate rubbish.
Re: Forza Motorsport Update 5 Out Today, Here Are The Full Patch Notes
Looks like a solid update. I will be hopping back in more regularly when they change the car upgrade system next month. I’m also hopping they leave the featured career events live a bit longer or release more at the same time. At the moment it feels like I complete the open races, then do one of the featured events and then don’t play it for another week until a new feature event is released. It just feels very sparse for single player content and as you said @BBB multiplayer is basically a write off atm because it essentially boils down to who can survive the first corner without being rammed off the road.
Re: Pick One: Which 2024 First-Party Game Are You Most Looking Forward To From Xbox?
@Vipor007 I absolutely care about Ara it looks like the next generation of 4x but I don’t have a decent PC.
Re: Pick One: Which 2024 First-Party Game Are You Most Looking Forward To From Xbox?
Avowed for me but it probably would have been Ara if it was on console.
Re: New Xbox Update Makes More Improvements To Installation Speeds
@Shushibda I find the opposite with mine. My Series X and PS5 sit next to each other, equal distance from the router but I seem to get faster download speeds on the Series over PS5.
Re: Random: Phil Spencer Has Been 'Liking' Tweets About Xbox And Handhelds
@KlipKlop New here? Phil Spencer farts and it’s a headline article.
Re: Poll: What Did You Think Of The Skull & Bones Beta On Xbox?
It seemed pretty good, particularly for people who enjoyed the sailing aspect of Black Flag. It won’t be a buy for me though even if it was dirt cheap simply because I’m not really into the pirates sailing the open seas thing. Couldn’t see myself remaining interested long enough to put in the hours it would need.
Re: Xbox Game Pass: All Games Coming Soon In February 2024
@InterceptorAlpha Did you really work on Bloodstained? Congrats mate it’s a top game. What do you do out of interest and what other games have you worked on?
Re: Forza Motorsport Update 6 Changing 'Car Progression' Next Month
Yesssss this is what I have been waiting for. Bring it on!
Re: These Eight Games Are Coming To Xbox Game Pass (February 6-20)
Cool month. Tales, Bloodstained and Resi 3 are pretty excellent additions for people who haven’t played them.
Re: Talking Point: Are You Still Playing Forza Motorsport On Xbox Game Pass?
I go back every now and then to play while listening to podcasts. It’s way too grindy though to be a serious sim racer. You need to put in literal hours with a car just to be able to experiment with custom setups. They either need to drop this car levelling rubbish or make it wayyy faster to level up. No idea who thought this would be a popular system but they are tone deaf to what the Forza audience actually wants.
Re: Xbox Reveals Black History Month 2024 Plans, Including Free Content
Good stuff Xbox. I love that dynamic background.
Re: Pick One: Which Is Your Favourite Obsidian Game On Xbox?
Probably fallout new vegas or stick of truth for me but what impressed me most about this list was the sheer variety. Obsidian will dabble in literally anything and it’s super cool to see.
Re: Xbox Games Are Reportedly No Longer Being Stocked At Some European Retailers
I have been 90% digital since about 2017 mainly due to convenience but with the cost of living crisis I have found myself buying more physical games again recently. For example Tekken 8 was £15 cheaper on Amazon and I can resell if I ever get bored of it. Regardless of how consumer trends are going, an all digital future is not going to be popular with everyone and will only increase the value proposition of the PS against the Xbox if Sony keep offering the option and MS decide not to.
Re: Roundup: All The Xbox Reveals From January 2024's State Of Play Event
@Trmn8r Yikes…someone hasn’t tuned in to literally any Xbox showcase ever. It might surprise you to find out they don’t end the third party trailers by saying “Btw this will also be on PlayStation and Switch!!!”
Re: Random: Starfield Invites You To Become An Actual Explorer With Custom, Real-Life Spacesuits
Community: Please improve the gameplay, exploration, AI, Storage, Levelling up, vendors, mods on console…
Bethesda: Shhhh. One person gets a spacesuit….which they must design themselves…..🤗
Re: Poll: How Would You Grade The Xbox Developer Direct 2024?
A - Really good show. Avowed looks like an excellent stop gap before ES6. I’m not at all fussed about Hellblade as I found the first one pretty boring but Indiana Jones looks excellent. Ara seems to be pushing 4x into the future and I was really impressed with it so I’m disappointed it won’t be day one on console but as long as it comes eventually I can wait.
Re: Limited Run Gets Brutally Honest As Xbox Misses Out On Two New Ports
@BaldBelper78 “PS fans would buy a paper bag with the Playstation logo on it”…..the Xbox fridge and toaster say hello.
Re: Limited Run Gets Brutally Honest As Xbox Misses Out On Two New Ports
@OldGamer999 I 100% agree about the marketing and the brand recognition but I think the explanation is a lot simpler than being a cult. MS had a rocky start with the Xbox One and then proceeded to spend the latter half of the generation pushing a sub service where people didn’t actually own anything (not criticising it just stating facts). PS4 had a solid start and then focused the entire generation on selling games.
We come to this generation and users are simply going to buy the system where most of their current library exists. More PS4 sales equals more game sales which results in more people buying PS5 to play said games. As genius as gamepass is, MS kinda shot themselves in the foot with it because it’s changed the mentality of gamers. You now have people referring to their Xbox as a “gamepass machine” and their PlayStation is where they build up their libraries. Most people’s primary focus is going to be the ecosystem where they have pumped the most money into already. Just my thoughts I might be wrong.
Re: Xbox Developer Direct 2024: Event Date, Start Times & Where To Watch
I missed last years but have nothing on next week so will tune in. Fingers crossed for some exciting surprises.
Re: Xbox Divides Opinion With Controversial Response To Baldur's Gate 3 Bans
@Aizen82 Huh?! That didn’t make sense. No one is saying five year olds should be allowed to watch porn or action movies. They are saying that they can record a 1 minutes gore fest on Gears, Doom, CoD, Duke Nukem etc but the moment someone takes a screenshot of some boobles they are slapped with a ban….its inconsistent. Also no one is suggesting that kids should have access to this content but really it’s on MS and the parents of the to moderate this in a sensible way, not your average gamer. I am a mid 30s and all my friends on Xbox are a similar sort of age…why should I change my gaming habits because MS designed their system so that some random kid on the other side of the world might see a clip of something I record? It’s madness.
In comparison to PlayStation their default settings are that if you record a clip or screenshot it doesn’t leave your console/cloud storage until you actively choose to share it with friends or the wider community. This is called common sense.
Re: Another Xbox Console Exclusive Makes Its Way To PS5 Later This Month
@FraserG apologies I misread. Still failing to see the point of this article though. It has absolutely no bearing on Xbox whatsoever.
Re: Another Xbox Console Exclusive Makes Its Way To PS5 Later This Month
@Markatron84 Straight off the back of an article yesterday applauding an AEW wrestler for saying console wars are stupid. You can’t say console wars are stupid and then have the strapline “another one bites the dust” on a non-article about a third party game arriving on PS. Bizarre double standards.
Re: Xbox Divides Opinion With Controversial Response To Baldur's Gate 3 Bans
6 years of GDPR in the UK might have changed my mindset a bit but from a pure privacy perspective I would expect to have to opt in to auto uploads rather than opt out…especially when it auto uploads to the world and not just your friends. Admittedly it’s been a while since I set up my Series X but I don’t ever remember being given the option or even being notified of this. If they are going to continue throwing out lengthy bans they need to change the default settings or be much much clearer about what happens with your screenshots and clips.
Re: Talking Point: What Are Your Gaming Resolutions For 2024?
@BacklogBrad This is such a good idea which I will be adopting. I love a good spreadsheet so recording exactly how much I am spending will hopefully make me rethink some of my purchases.
Re: Talking Point: What Are Your Gaming Resolutions For 2024?
To buy less games on release day and wait for sales. I will be breaking this resolution on 26th Jan when I buy Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth.
Re: Xbox Has Changed Game Pass Quests For 2024, And Fans Aren't Happy
@BacklogBrad But if you get rid of the backlog you will just be….Brad
Re: Xbox Owner Receives Year-Long Ban After Uploading Baldur's Gate 3 Clips
@J_Mo_Money shouldn’t it really be Microsoft learning a lesson in this instance? Gamers shouldn’t need to change the way they use an integrated feature on a console they have spent good money on just to cater for an overly aggressive censoring system.
Re: In The End, Are You Happy With Xbox's First-Party Lineup For 2023?
D. Microsoft were all hype and very little substance as per. Starfield was not the endless space epic that we will be playing for the next decade, it was a tedious slog. Months of beautiful Forza trailers before releasing a buggy, soulless grind fest. Redfall…..sigh. Although at least they have worked on improving it since release. You’d hope they learn from the fact that their highest rated and best received game this year was a shadow drop AA title which no one even knew existed.
If MS are going to continue their trend of announcing games 5+ years out before hyping them up to fever pitch levels they need to actually ensure the game is worth hyping because all I’ve seen from them over the last decade is a drastic decline in both the number and quality of their yearly releases. Without Bethesda their first party AAA output 3 years into this gen would be two Forzas and a Halo. That’s just insanely bad but uncle Phil wears retro gaming t shirts and posts his gamerscore on X so all is forgiven.
Re: Some Xbox Fans Aren't Happy About 'Intrusive' Call Of Duty: MW3 Ads
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Re: Some Xbox Fans Aren't Happy About 'Intrusive' Call Of Duty: MW3 Ads
“Push a button and it goes away” yeh duh. People aren't angry about the extra time it takes to get to their games. They are angry about the principle of Microsoft forcing even MORE advertising down our throats in ever increasingly intrusive ways. As someone said previously when we buy an Xbox we are the consumer, not the product. If I was getting a free service I would expect to see forced ads (e.g YouTube) but when I paid £450 for a series X and then £12 a month for gamepass I don’t need or want it. Would everyone please just stop accepting and making excuses for Microsoft’s mediocrity.
Re: Reaction: Forza Motorsport Should Be Feeling The Pressure After New Gran Turismo 7 Update
@J_Mo_Money You’re right my commitments don’t have anything to do with me forming my own opinion. They do however have everything to do with where I focus my free time which is the point I was making. Don’t get me wrong I will try a game Im super interested in if it’s on a service like gamepass but outside of that I’m not going to spend money and time on a game that 90% of critics think is bad to average when there’s hundreds of other games that 90% of critics think are excellent. Regardless of the state of gaming websites nowadays they tend to align on most games and come up with very similar pros and cons which I will look into before investing. My system is not so different to yours in that I will look at overall scores, read/watch some reviews from critics I trust and then decide whether I want to buy the game or not. It’s not like I just go “ahhh that one was 8.7 and that one was 8.5…I really like the look of the 8.5 but I better go with the 8.7 because Metacritic says so”…I’m not that basic.
I have just got a lot more precious with my time this year because I own all three systems and there’s a hell of a lot of quality games releasing on them but not enough time to play them all. Metacritic for me is an excellent tool to help.
Re: Reaction: Forza Motorsport Should Be Feeling The Pressure After New Gran Turismo 7 Update
@JayJ @J_Mo_Money Personally for me Metacritic is a godsend. I have a full time job, family commitments, pets and social engagements most weekends. If two games I am interested in release the same day, one scores 9 on metacritic and the other scores 5 I am absolutely going to use my limited time to play the 9. General consensus is, has always been and always will be an excellent indication of how good something.
Re: Reaction: Forza Motorsport Should Be Feeling The Pressure After New Gran Turismo 7 Update
I was loving Forza until I started getting booted out the game and losing progress on Friday. I have stopped playing since it happened two days on the trot. It’s a grind enough to get the car xp and decent amounts of money without it randomly kicking you and erasing your last few races. What makes it even more frustrating is I don’t understand the point of it always being online if it’s not going to cloud save after every race.
It could be amazing in a year. Hopefully it becomes amazing in the next few months. At the moment it’s a game I want to play but won’t because my gaming time is at a premium and I don’t want to waste it.
Re: Gears Of War Needs A 'God Of War-Like Reboot', Says Original Lead Designer
@BAMozzy a survival horror spin off could be really cool. It would be interesting to follow the stories of some regular people handling emergence day and the following months instead of just playing as jacked up soldiers who shoot anything that moves.
I’m just a bit burnt out on the standard gears format. I completed the first three and have played but not completed 4 and 5. While the first gears pretty much reinvented what a third person shooter could be, in the 15 years following they have barely done anything innovative with the gameplay loop aside from some new weapons and a robot. I dunno what it would look like but if they can reboot the franchise in a way that GoW did in 2018 with fresh gameplay, story and mechanics I would be all up for it.
Re: Roundup: Here's What The Critics Are Saying About Alan Wake 2
This is straight on the Christmas list. Like others have said here I was expecting (and in some ways hoping) this would score lower so I wouldn’t be so interested but there’s just too much to play at the moment. I can’t believe I’m actually hoping for a quieter 2024 just so I can catchup on the backlog.
Re: Three Games Are Available Today With Xbox Game Pass (October 26)
Thanks for the update! I will have Dead Space a go when I get a minute
Re: Starfield Launch Set Record For "Most Game Pass Subscriptions Added On A Single Day Ever"
@K1LLEGAL I am the same. I don’t particularly expect or even want a game to last hundreds of hours usually but Skyrim in particular I have happily played for days on every gen since 360 because the content felt consistently engaging….although nostalgia probs played a part. I’m just not getting that with Starfield and my own unrealistic expectations will take some blame although Bethesda themselves hyped it as a game people will be playing for the next decade.
@ebony-shabba Fair play mate. Apologies I came across as a bit of a D*** in my reply to you I’m sorry. Caught me on a rough day I just sometimes feel on this website the moment you’re slightly critical of anything Xbox people jump on you.
@themightyant It’s a weird phenomena I don’t think I have seen with any other game. Reddit boards (I know can’t be taken too seriously) are filled with people who have put in 40-70 hours and then just hit a wall and concurrent/daily steam numbers have just dropped off a cliff. But I don’t regret playing it and I will definitely drop back into it in the future. Like you said it’s good but unfortunately I was hoping for great.
Re: Starfield Launch Set Record For "Most Game Pass Subscriptions Added On A Single Day Ever"
@K1LLEGAL happy to justify mate. I really enjoyed it for the first few weeks. And thought I would be playing it for years to come. Then it just started getting very samey. Same mission structure, same process of getting new powers, same trek back to a shop to manage my inventory, same enemies, same wildlife models on planets, same everything just in different barren environments. I loaded up cyberpunk on 2.0 release just to see what it’s like and basically haven’t gone back to Starfield since. It felt like it did loads of stuff but none of it particularly well so allot of my time with it was exploring these systems and finding that I didn’t particularly love any of them. Also didn’t help I have been playing Baldurs gate along side which really highlights the illusion of choice most RPGs present. If Starfield came out in any other year I probably would have been way more into it but it’s competing with too many exceptional games atm which show it’s weak points.
@ebony-shabba chill out not everything is a personal attack on you. I didn’t say I hate it I said it was a disappointment…the reason I say this is because the Bethesda buyout is basically the reason I bought a series x with Starfield being the main game I have been excited for since it was announced. Bethesda is one of my fav publishers with Elder Scrolls and fallout being among my fav series. To me (because believe it or not I’m entitled to my opinion) Starfield would have been much better if it tried to scale back, do less and focus on core gameplay. Is that ok? am I allowed to have a negative opinion about an Xbox game? Or do I need to love absolutely everything about Xbox because I could wax lyrical about Forza for hours if you want?