GeeEssEff

@RIghteousNixon blatantly obviously? Shouldn’t be too difficult to provide examples then. When exactly have reviewers been unfair to Xbox?

@IOI Agree it will get hate for being digital only exactly like Alan Wake 2 did. It will get hate for being short exactly like Spiderman 2 did. It will not however get hate just for being an Xbox game. Psychonauts 2, hi fi rush, Forza Horizon 5 are just a few examples of Xbox studio games that are adored by critics and players alike. When Xbox delivers it is acknowledged. The Xbox Tax conspiracy has gained traction recently after a year of hugely hyped but fairly average games in Redfall, Starfield and Forza Motorsport. The media wasn’t underwhelmed by these because of bias, they were underwhelmed because they are underwhelming games.

Plus I’m pretty sure the Starfield on PS5 rumours were started by Jez Corden and that guy from XboxEra, who for the most part are known for being pretty pro Xbox. The media train ran with it because it was a huge story in the gaming world and it gained clicks and engagement. If you want to read less stuff about the doom of Xbox stop clicking on the articles and engaging. Enough people do that and the sites will realise the console war content isn’t driving the ad revenue and fingers crossed we see less of it.

Shall we wait till it releases before assessing its GOTY potential? How can you predict something is going to be GOTY based on screenshots, cinematic trailers and the roughly 2 minutes total gameplay we have seen.

I’m interested but not sure I’m £15.99 interested.

@Grumblevolcano Yep I agree with that to some extent but I think they could have the desired effect just by confirming that they are 100% going to still be releasing future gen hardware which they did already. It’s pretty much a given that the next Xbox will be the most powerful hardware available as it has been for the past two generations so either tell us what is going to be so great about this new console so we know why we should be hyped or shut up till it’s ready to show. With the amount of times they have made promises like this that they haven’t delivered on this gen I can’t see it making a blind bit of difference to most people’s hardware choices. The Xbox players are going to continue Xboxing, the PS players will continue playstationing and the Switch players Switching. In my mind all they are doing is setting themselves up for the usual eye rolls when they release something that, in actual fact, is not the best thing since sliced bread that revolutionises gaming.

It would be cool if I’m wrong but I lost all my trust in the Xbox hype train after the mediocre run of Redfall, Starfield and Forza Motorsport and the June 2022 “everything you see here will release in the next 12 months” showcase.

MS never seem to learn their lesson about overhyping stuff. It would be so much cooler if they just blew everyone away with a surprise reveal. Instead they spend years telling us how great something is going to be and most of the time it doesn’t live up to expectations.

No preference really. My favourite game is Elden Ring but arcadey games like Tekken, FIFA and CoD will get most hours out of me overall because they are easy to dip in and out of.it completely depends on the game genre, how much it costs and whether it outstays its welcome by the end. I wouldn’t feel I was getting my moneys worth for a £50 digital game I couldn’t resell if I complete it in 8 hours.

I’m not really much of a framerate snob but this seems a bit weird. It’s not a massive open world game with vast amounts of moving parts; items that need to stay where they should after being moved, branching quests and NPCs that need to be kept track of etc. I’m absolutely not an expert on any of this stuff but I would have thought if there’s one game where you would be able to squeeze out 60fps it’s an 8 hour linear narrative adventure. Not sure how it can be lauded as a true next gen technical marvel and be running at 30fps tbh.

I found the first pretty boring. I can see why people enjoyed it but I am a gameplay over narrative type of player and walking through pretty environments with the odd bit of basic combat and puzzling doesn’t do it for me. I will try it next time I’m subbed to GP, mainly to ogle the graphics but can’t see myself getting very far before getting bored.

@CutchuSlow Even the human assistance is terrible (when you eventually get through to them). Their support, or should I say lack of support, is one of the main reasons I switched from Xbox as my main to PS last gen. They hacked me off that much.

Personally I have played all the ABK games that I want to already so nothing in that list for me. I would be more interested in the future day one games although not sure what they have cooking outside of Cod?

Pointless waste of hardware. Nothing but a downgrade from the Series X and further confirmation of Microsoft’s idyllic future where the consumer pays them £X a month to own absolutely nothing.

@cardcrusher29 Out of interest what are you doing to get enough points for GPU every month? Last year I gave it a real good shot with the bing daily crap, logging into Xbox app and playing my Xbox regularly (albeit not every day) and it still took months to save up what I needed.

If MS get a handheld right it could be a game changer. They will be entering the market at a time where they have a fair amount of competitors to draw inspiration from and mistakes to learn from as well. They may be on to a winner if they can combine Steamdeck’s user friendliness with the Ally/LegionGo’s adaptability, all wrapped up in a more powerful but affordable package. It is quite a risky move though. No guarantee it will sell well outside the hardcore fans and it would need to be pretty special to tempt people into trading in their current handhelds. Interesting times!

Is anyone else moving to New Zealand today?

The salty comments here are really sad. If it had scored lower overall everyone would be saying “All the PS sites are scoring it badly because it’s an Xbox studios game 😭” and it still would have been classed as “Xbox Tax”. It was never going to get the exact same score because different sites are reviewing it and it has over a years worth of gameplay updates under its belt.

The fact of the matter is there is no journalistic conspiracy against Xbox. Their best games (Forza Horizons, Gears, most Halos, Flight simulator etc) have reviewed exceptionally well and arguably some of their mid games have reviewed better than they should….looking at you Starfield. Also worth pointing out that multiplat games often score higher on Xbox on Metacritic with Dead Island 2, Diablo 4, Alan wake 2, Balatro and new Prince of persia being some recent examples. “Xbox Tax” is nothing more than a justification fanboys came up with for Microsoft’s spell of bang average games. Journalists have proven over and over again when an Xbox game deserves praise it will get it

While it was undoubtedly an amazing generation I do wonder if a lot of people look back with rose tinted glasses due to the time in their life rather than the console and games themselves. Personally for me the 360 generation represents just starting uni, discovering adult freedom while still having very little responsibility, regularly playing online with a group of friends and just having massive amounts of time to devote to gaming. I genuinely believe games nowadays are of a higher quality but nothing will beat that generation for sheer fun…despite 2 red rings of death.

What the f*%# was that because it sure as hell wasn’t Timesplitters.

@K1LLEGAL Microsoft might have helped fund the original Ori but Gamepass certainly didn’t. Ori launched nearly 2 years before gamepass was a thing.

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.

@ZuneTattooGuy “I am not a fan of repetitious grindy games”….don’t you love the new Forza?

@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.

@Vipor007 I absolutely care about Ara it looks like the next generation of 4x but I don’t have a decent PC.

Avowed for me but it probably would have been Ara if it was on console.

@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.

@KlipKlop New here? Phil Spencer farts and it’s a headline article.

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?

Yesssss this is what I have been waiting for. Bring it on!

Cool month. Tales, Bloodstained and Resi 3 are pretty excellent additions for people who haven’t played them.

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.

Good stuff Xbox. I love that dynamic background.

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.

@BaldBelper78 “PS fans would buy a paper bag with the Playstation logo on it”…..the Xbox fridge and toaster say hello.

@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.

I missed last years but have nothing on next week so will tune in. Fingers crossed for some exciting surprises.