Grackler

@theduckofdeath again, so? Why do I give a fig about all this nonsense and your Fischer Price jabs at another console?

I’m not happy with how they are behaving; I’m quitting Xbox over it. It’s a fact they haven’t said anything publicly; that’s what it’s based off. If execs are bravely taking a hit behind the scenes and not telling us, too sodding bad. I’m basing my decision on what I can see: Xbox have releases sweet FA, much of it dodgy and unfinished, and have soaked up devs and fired them. So I’m done with their nonsense. Multi-millionaire Spencer doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt from me when thousands are losing their much more tenuous income.

Never should have announced it the way they did. Better to sit on it until the game is at least started.

Not that I care much ofter yesterday's bombshells. I'm so done with my Xbox. Sad they have all the Rare licences they aren't using.

@theduckofdeath
So? It was public when Iwata took a pay cut. Spencer’s performance bonus was made public last year. It’s public that everyone is being fired from these studios effective immediately. I can draw what I want from the information they chose to give out or not give out. I don’t think I’m out of line to expect an iowta of moral behaviour from a organisation that made $146 billion in net profit last year alone. If they can’t do that they can’t have my custom, for what little it’s worth.

I stuck by it as I had hope and an investment in the platform (games since 360). But I’m done. Getting a PS5 next week, gonna cancel GamePass, unsure if I should keep the Series X for MCC and Rare Replay etc; or just give up on the whole ecosystem.
I don’t think a gaming brand has been run this badly before. Misfire after misfire. And now it’s not just an irritation that I lack good games, but they are ruing livelihoods for nothing. No exec pay cuts beforehand, no attempts to sell the studio to the staff. Find it hard to believe Phil Spencer can sleep at night tbh.

If this was a pricing error in a shop, surely they couldn’t demand it back once you got it home? Seems dodgy to me.

Digital rights should match physical rights, particularly if they want the same copyright laws to apply to piracy.

More currency. So glad they got worked on making yet more pointless made up monies to try and extract real cash from an ever shrinking fanbase. 🙄

Maybe some single player mission with different assets? Local co-op? Some effort on polishing local multiplayer? A decent sequel to wash the taste out? Anything like that?

Store more than one wi-fi password. Be still my beating heart.

GAME was turning around a few years ago, aiming to be the “Waterstones” of gaming (comfy, high quality shopping space that can host events etc). Mike Ashley is a plague on good shops; and has been slowing ruining it. Will be gone soon, just a shelf in his hideous Sports Directs, staffed by glum unpaid people and trying to get their customers into huge debt on his credit card schemes to buy bottom of the barrel Chinese crap.
Tragic what damage one greedy dense man has done to the UK high streets. GAME were never the best, but a bastion of physical sales is essential for them to continue.

I was very hopeful with Phil Spencer taking over as he did a great job on 360 indies, and seems very genuine. But personally Microsoft as a larger business body still seems to be able to foul it up with never-ending issues with game development.

This sounds unlikely? I've pretty doom and gloom on my Xbox from a personal point of view (regret not getting a PS5 frankly, very disappointed with Xbox's software polish, and Phil et al over-promising-under-delivering for years). But there is still a healthy enough market, and porting so easy given the similar architectures. You'd probably need a financial incentive not to bother porting any major game.

Just cycle games on and off the hard disk. Very few games are so immediately playable and polished on Series X that I keep them to hand (and they tend to be retro titles like Perfect Dark). Maybe would be an issue if I was more of a online multiplayer gamer and wanted to keep several large games to hand?

I guess they want to focus on IPs they own. Baldur’s Gate has been great for D&D, but perhaps they are hoping they can get at least a chunk of that user base and popularity over to Divinity?

Not sure AI will help when the basics are so poor. I recall wanting the Resi 4 demo (called “Resident Evil 4 CHAINSAW Demo” on the store) and the only word it would find it with was “Chainsaw”; even “Resident Evil 4” wouldn’t return it!
It one of the many aspects of the Xbox interface that needs some serious work. I’d like to see MS stop chasing the latest buzzwords and get the fundamentals of the OS right!

I really loved this, not sure what people were expecting, but the handling felt very arcade-F1 to me: you need to brake but not to some insane degree of precision! The vibe of Sunday afternoon, Murray Walker F1 is very intact. Worth saying it gets faster as you go through the eras too. Played the demo on Xbox, but got the game on Switch.

Nah, gave up reasonably quick. As others have said, soulless, unpolished, and content-lite…much like Halo Infinite was. I want more than a good core, I want finished games for £70 a pop! Probably comeback in 2-3 years (if I still have a Series X, I’m close to trading in over Microsoft Game Studios lacklustre output)

MCC is pretty good. It has issues (matchmaking is still a bit rough, the remaster on H2 is much better than H1…) but many of them are classics that still play well. Plus they feature split screen co-op! Something Infinite promised but never got.

Overall it’s a good collection, but I still get a sour taste after how long it took to get there. H1 had graphical bugs the original didn’t until only a year or so ago!

Aren’t id more likely to wait for QuakeCon? Not that I would be against a surprise from them, but seems like that’s be the venue for an announcement! I’d love to know about Everwild, but seems like it’s in development purgatory sadly.

I missed the big Duke Hyperkin they did, which is a shame as I wanted it for some nostalgia fueled runs on Halo CE on MCC! I'm less interested in the S, but I do think it was a big step in controller design that helped to create the standard that is used today! With Hall Effect sticks this should be a nice, robust controller.

I can see them getting there in steps, maybe some "hybrid" console/streaming boxes along side just streaming boxes, get it into TVs and such, and make the call from there based on how the user base takes it.
I think it's a mistake, but there is clearly an appetite at the top of tech firms to remove the user's procesing and centralise everything.

I'm not playing BG3, but will you definitly be able to force it from System Settings? Between me and friends, we've found that Xbox updates seem to roll out across users over quite a long time period, no matter if you try and force it (I'm thinking the new dash, and the Discord integration). It took months from when I saw it was "released" on news sites for all of us to be able to get it, hoping they don't do that with this (more vital) update.

It's pure madness to not apologise and fix this ASAP. I have no idea what Xbox Support/PR is playing at. They have designed a system that by default can take shots without asking, upload them without asking, "share" them (to a store front) without asking, and punish the user. Users can disable auto-upload but it shouldn't be an opt-out at least. Or more sensibly, MS should just fix the system when it comes to mature games and uploading images to a store. But ignoring/blaming users is just awful behaviour.

A fantastic remake, glad to see you highlighting it as it’s a real coup for GamePass (imo)

This is ridiculous by MS. My account is my main email, I don’t record game clips, but all these stories of over zealous enforcement with no way to complain (this has got to Larian and still isn’t fixed or even acknowledged!) makes me wary of playing on Xbox anymore.

Resident Evil 2 is an incredible get. Outside of really perfecting the game, many people will enjoy a weekend blasting through it. Kind of game that would have been ideal rental fare years ago, think it’ll be popular with the GamePass crowd!

It looks solid, but I’m a bit put off by how similar it is to other peoples work. It looks a lot like Gang Beasts (movement, controls, even the proportions and skeletons of the characters), the photo thingy at a match end is cool and different; but is straight out of Mario Party, and it is made by a weirdly secretive Chinese studio called “Recreate Games”. I get it’s “original” in that the assets have been remade from scratch, but it’s just very, very close to someone’s else’s game…just feels off to me.

Not really, no. A really disappointing gen for me, I’m regretting going for a Series X over a PS5.

HiFi RUSH was great fun, the kind of AA I wish was scattered though blanks in the launch schedule. But outside of that Redfall, Forza and Starfield all failed to grab me. While Redfall was the worst, Forza felt the most disappointing: just plain, passionless and unfinished. That plain, passionless and unfinished feel is become an Xbox trademark for me, it’s exactly how Halo Infinite felt too (the game I got the console for!). Seems to be a trend with MS this gen: overpromise and underdeliver, patch it to 85% of what it should be over the next 2-3 years.

So weird that Xbox had trailer spots, and didn't announce BG3 during any of them? Even had a whole ass Starfield trailer at one point!
I found the show a bit underwhelming, the awards and interviews didn't flow great this year, and even though it had variety looking back, the way they organised it a lot of the games felt very similar to one another with different skins (also the trailers directorially often seemed the same, vague, shadowy scene with someone saying something ominous with no context). But that SEGA announcement blew me away!

"we have every faith that — much like its Xbox-exclusive sibling Halo Infinite — the developer will build things out over time"

A game that never got the long promised split-screen co-op, and seemingly won't be getting the campaign DLC they said it would be a base for.

Have a Series X now, but always glad to see a game perfectly playable on the old One S with an older 1080p TV!

It was either racing with friends on Forza 2, checking out the decals we'd all made and bumper car-ing about the place; or joining the same people in a game of Cops and Robbers on Halo 3, cheap headset on, last Uni exam done, and a steaming hot pizza next to me.
I also have quite fond memories of signing into 1v100 in the evening between rounds of Battlefield 1943 a few years later!

@Kezelpaso ah, ok! My bad; thought it was immediate when I got the email from MS about it changing (but as I’m on ultimate my profile just says that)

I thought Xbox Live Gold was gone now, only tiers of GamePass? Also, 2 of the games been on GamePass is also a bit of an odd way to do it…

@Trmn8r sadly not; at least not in my region (UK). I did read that you could in the USA at the time; but here it had to be via a 360 itself. That’s not every game mind you; but they don’t clearly indicate which…so I’m hoping with the store closing they or a website might do that! (Although given the number of regions Xbox operate in, it would be a big undertaking form anyone but Microsoft)

Stunning conversion, Nightdive are great at these (and id/Bethesda/Microsoft overlords seem to give them the financial support them to put in lots of time into the ports and still release at a low price)

@dmcc0 constantly was a poor choice of words, I meant over multiple titles, sorry am on my phone at work! On Daytona USA, it couldn’t be purchased on Series X in the UK (only downloaded if already owned), or on the Microsoft website (if you accessed from the UK); you had to either get the webstore to see you as from the USA, or use a 360. Which is fine but I had the same issue with 2 other 360 era games recently; and it seems like they might become inaccessible with this change? I think there are legal reasons to go with music in most of these cases that prevent purchase via the Xbox Store on a Series console; but it something that would be good to have laid out (what’s disappearing, where and when) either by MS or by journalists. (Particularly as MS own back compat listing/articles don’t already detail stuff like where licences affects availability or routes to purchase)

@EvenStephen7 100% this. Might be back luck, but I've been stung by this a few times lately, had to fish out the 360 to buy a back-compat title for Series X.

@Trmn8r "If they are available on there" is my concern. in the UK at least you constantly need to buy via a 360's console, even if it's a back compat you want to play on a series console (Daytona USA recently for me, for example).

Don't promise features you can't supply! This isn't as bad as Halo, but it's another mark against MS for me. I bought the Series X with the promise of split-screen gaming (and why wouldn't there be, it's got the horsepower for something reasonable looking!). But instead it's only retro fare like Quake 2 or Hotshot Racing, and those runs just as well in 4 player on my Switch!

I hope its good still, but it will get less play for sure.

I had to search "chainsaw" to find the resident evil 4 demo, so any improvement would be welcome. The Store on Xbox is smooth to use but the underlying function is terrible!

Ack, was just getting into Octopath Traveller! Might just buy the sequel on Switch, be a shame to lose my progress. Square Enix really seem to be retreating from Game Pass and Xbox as a whole at the moment…