Jark

It's the only way I can play Dead Island 2 on GP, since I don't have new consoles. My PC can certainly play the game at max, but I don't really wanna buy it tbh.

I don't have time to finish Soul Hackers 2 before it leaves in a week or so, but I'll make the time for SMT V.

Let's play vanilla Dark Souls 2! I still have my 360

@Vipor007 RPGs

There are also SECOND-PARTY games, and I'd be more worried about those if you're concerned about the "chopping block" of exclusives.

Or, y'all could expand perspective and realize you're not beholden to or promised certain things by Microsoft. This doesn't define you, unless you're a "content creator" being paid to talk nonsense and cause bandwagoning / build camp tentpoles.

@Sakai this whole situation is players and people jumping on bandwagons!!!

God no. I'm not buying Tekken 8 until it's umpteenth season pass is out and the deluxe pricing is no longer prematurely padded.

Some USians had their best-in-class point generation hindered, then recently restored, and now this.

Meanwhile we foreigners gotta make do with what we get. Sometimes our changes are lateral rather than buffs or nerfs, like the new requirements for the 1000-point monthlies.

@Gollum oh yeah my bad. Isn't that just Game Pass Core, which is pretty cheap for most people and thus most would forget it's even a factor? Lol

I lost my cloud AND hdd save — minimum 200 hours — of Dragons Dogma on XB360. Played it summer '14, and returned to the console a few years later to consolidate old files and stuff.... And nothing was there. Never figured out what happened.

Yeah reading through these comments time and again paints two different pictures of gamers — sometimes of the same people.

#1. They can't wait

• Buy many AAA titles on release or pre-order and make public figures, like Keighley, important with their trailer/ad preview fests

#2 Buy everything on sale

• Months if not years after release (though even without exaggeration, some titles - Ubisoft or not - have been getting significant discounts for physical AND digital copies just weeks after launch, depending on performance or an imminent seasonal sale).

The #1's usually far outnumber the #2's in vocality, but the reality is that most games don't sell well at their full price (why would they? The market is bloated, we're crunched for time, and notoriously penny-pinching). So, like other harmless dichotomies, it's fairer to say that we kinda hover between both operational/philosophical regimes...

I imagine the consumer is measured by a wave function, in which there is a probability of any of us existing at a certain economic state of mind at any one time. Lol.

Just crunch the numbers a bit better for your budgets, folks, and you should be fine no matter how you operate. Basically: don't let the cart lead the horse (there's one person here reliant on previews to determine how much money they're going to spend on MULTIPLE NEW preorder, when it's the amount of PRE-BUDGETED money that determines whether you spend at all).

@Gollum huh? Why would you even be subscribing for three years if you're just playing CoD and Avatar?

I still haven't played Far Cry 5. I played FC6 + some DLC for a little while around launch (I, uh, got privileged access, don't ask me how)... Should I just skip FC5 then and keep going with 6 now that it is on GP?

Should I keep putting off Immortals Fenyx Rising? Fenix Rysing? Sheesh.

Also, as a closed beta tester for Skull & Bones.... You can put that off, folks. It's okay. But you ain't missing nothing by waiting until it has some more red meat on its bones. It's got an impressive ocean size and nice vistas to sail, though. More than a few upgrades to grind for, but I'm not sure if the actual acts of ship combat and treasure hunting/sailing would withstand the grinder. The game just needs more mechanics — more dimensions of gameplay.

@Nic-Noc20th-C you could be eligible for refund

Hogwarts Legacy is NOT GOTY material!

Lol, 1000 hours is a lot of total playtime across all games played that year?

I played 900 hours of Destiny 2 from February until early December, alone. That's before we even get to the other owned games and game pass titles...

@InterceptorAlpha holy smokes, there were TWO bad Walking Dead games this year?!?!

It's because Microsoft ostensibly put contractor studios (2nd-parties) to work on 1P "content" for the Halo franchise. 343 was tasked with the MP. I wouldn't be surprised their Xbox repertoire received a new Halo spin-off title for campaign gameplay.

Given the amount of stuff that leaves Game Pass that I can't finish on time and end up buying to keep .... No, I will not buy Immortals.

5-10 sec cooldown on Canada, less when using mobile.

Xbox Rewards App has NOT been killed here.

People like me didn't bother with the 60 daily points from Mobile searches — one way or another, we made sacrifices to stretch this out, and bc certain things were too tedious even with "help."

I also hoarded the "mere" half to three-quarter million points I earned in 4-5 years. But it seems too many others got greedy.

As I've been told many, many times by Twitterites:

"This is Twitter; s**t ain't that deep."

Take your own medicine, Twitter users.

@somnambulance He's not gonna give us bubkiss. Very few of those trailers are brand new reveals, all of it gets leaked beforehand anyway, and he doesn't put any of that together (the devs do, but semantically and logistically the trailers are not the "hard part" or the Big Task of his production duties). Not to mention the show itself isn't the exclusive venue for those previews — you could skip most or all of that overblown ego project every year and still get the lowdown in multiple ways.

And you don't need a roadmap.

@somnambulance ***** Keighley

I had only really started dating in my early 20s (dating for real, as an adult). That was over ten years ago now... (closer to fifteen across the board, actually). It was after a youthful relationship at 14.

Jala in that "Thirsty Suitors" game is yet another character playing up the all-too-true caricature of primetime greenhorn adults who have been through the gamut of dating before they even left high school. Yeah, totes realistic for those of us who were lacking in one or multiple of the following aspects: attractiveness, leeway (like having a car or own place or both), viable career (and an attractive career, which translates to the wealth attractor), charm or "personality," wisdom, knowledge (including self-knowledge/awareness and knowing what you want), etc.

Next dating game to make: people who have no clue what they're doing bc they've never done much and are finally in the zone, like that show "The Summer I Turned Pretty" on Amazon. Have a character in it that has a long way to go, for contrast.

@EVIL-C Evil Canevil (sp?) or Evil Canadian?

@AlwaysPlaying I know, got hooked on Chained Echoes the last couple of weeks, and then couldn't finish Exo One or Spelunky 2. Now I gotta choose between finishing The Ascent (tbh I got pulled away from that last year), Marvel's Avengers (which kills its own momentum with how disappointing it is), and continuing with Exoprimal.... All while juggling Destiny 2 (people say it's in a slump right now, but it's actually THEM burnt out from the game).

Games are not called content.

Never put loaded statements as survey answers! That's a taboo for statuary science.

The answer "Yes, anything from Capcom is worth a go" is one. Besides introducing the idea of brand name loyalty (a tangential discussion), it's otherwise not meaningfully different from the other "yes" answer.

@NorthwestEagle - if Atlus publishes its own games, doesn't it technically count as indie? haha jk

@Dan1283 No there doesn't. If you don't need to sub for a month, downgrade or cancel out temporarily... or just (re)play something else, even on GP. Kinda the whole point of it is to get a library in your hands, low-risk to you. Side effect - the amount of unfinished games in your history will double or triple, lol.

@FraserG lol that's probably it. I think I need an assistant or something to tell me I'm not going crazy over insignificant details, haha.

Ok, I'm going a little crazy here. Help me out.

I could've sworn that the last time I logged onto my Xbox was Monday night (June 26th). Spent around 45 minutes in the store, window shopping. Y'know, usual stuff lol. (I once spent like 3+ hours trying to spend bonus credit, late on a Friday night at the end of August 2020). Mortal Shell: EE had caught my eye in particular. TBH, it could've been Sunday night instead.

But just now, before reading this, I was wondering if it was in fact TUESDAY night that I last logged in. Yesterday, basically. But that can't be, bc I remember coming home from a lengthy outing at 7:23pm, having some dinner, and then playing Destiny 2 around 8pm on my PC. (Speaking of that, it's REALLY eating up my Road 96 time and I gotta finish another playthrough before Friday night. Sigh).

This article though is gaslighting my memory even more. Did the sale for Mortal Shell start on the 27th, yesterday? Or was that one in particular ALSO part of the previous week, starting 20th? I remember having thought that there was a lot of stuff for me to check up on bc I hadn't logged on since early last week (yes, Destiny 2.. Iron Banner was last week and it ended yesterday).

Anyway, thanks for reading. If there's a way to find out your last log date, please LMK bc minutae like this wracks my brain. I'm probably an undiagnosed something.

@UltimateOtaku91 IPs.

This seriously needed clarification?

Now? It has been like that for ten years.

For Zelda games, protracted "college"-length development has been the norm for about twenty.

My grandmother - and my last grandparent to be alive - died well over a month ago... and I had to do the same thing as Mimi. Went to wrap up her affairs at the family home in the ancestral country (but she had also lived with us and some of her kids - my father and his siblings - here in North America). Might be a little hard for me to play this.

Wherever and whenever possible, such as in a game like Hades (though maybe not to the extent of Hades), try to evaluate plot/narrative TOGETHER with gameplay. Relate or correlate them in the contexts of game design and the UX. It's too old-fashioned to compartmentalize each dimension or aspect of a game when genres are becoming hybridized and narrative design is FINALLY interweaving itself with the crux of the gaming medium (gameplay; the one thing that makes a game a literal game).

@Widey85 Give yourself some credit. Watch some Digital Foundry or similar series of videos and soon you'll be able to visually differentiate between a framerate and half or double its amount, i.e. 30 vs. 60.

@Tharsman turns out I might be wrong about Armored Core VI. The store page trailers and initial reveals some months back were obviously 30fps to me, but last week's SGF gameplay demo seemed to be running at 60. I think a lot of us, including myself, can tell the relative difference between 30 and 60 fps at a glance (though if I had had a 120Hz screen and got used to 120fps gameplay, I'm not sure if I could differentiate the differences between 30 vs 60 and 60 vs 120 in trailers... not like there are any 120 fps trailers anyway).

(I can't abbreviate it as "AC" as that'll just confuse my brain with "Assassin's Creed" if I were to come back and read any response to this later lol).

@Magabro Thank you, though I would appreciate a news website being explicit with their information and not relying on a fellow patron, such as yourself, to elaborate.

Whatever it MIGHT be (as it isn't confirmed to exist as a project), this is exactly how a 2nd-party title comes to be.

Gears, probably. Though it'd be a bit late to get started on Gears 6, so it is likely another side story or spinoff.

Armored Core VI is also another hyped AAA franchise that's resorting to 30fps! Embrace it as the norm, folks, as we're probably not getting mid-gen refreshes to push out 60fps again.

@WallyWest Um, I played 40 through 55 fps on a 60Hz IPS monitor just fine. No screen tearing or wonky feels.

@G1lbo no preview love for that game since it was revealed. So sad, it looks like a real winner. Hopefully it doesn't go the route that "The Last Night" went (an unreleased 2D pixel game, neo noire / cyberpunk fair, with similar art style that was never released)

I was gonna buy Sea of Stars on the Switch. Probably still will; ended up doing that with CrossCode in spring 2022 after losing a 30 hour save on PC Game Padd (during the beta days in summer 2019).

Also, I don't recall these specific titles being mentioned for Game Pass.

As much as I dislike admitting this, prior to the super consoles of last generation - the XBO X and PS4 Pro - the 60fps target may not have been as commonplace or standard as we think. 30fps was still very common leading up to ajd and including the early years of PS4 and XBO.

The hardwares' capabilities for higher fidelity output have increased, yes, but so have the demands. Now 4K is what is actually "common"... though honestly it shouldn't be. Not enough people listened to reason; 1440p and 1080p with better aliasing techniques still looked good even in recent years — yes, including TAA solutions (it's only when TAA is too heavy do we get a ghosting-blur effect in motion-heavy images).

I don't see why it has to be 30fps compromise though. I've played demanding games in the last two years or so at non-standard caps of 40, 42, 45, 48, 50 and 55 fps. The latter is indistinguishable from 60 fps; 40 is very noticeably smoother than 30, and it's a better number than 42 fps for an even frame time, which would correlate to 25 ms and ~ 23.81 ms respectively. I believe 42 fps was chosen for one mode of "Ratchet & Clank: A Rift Apart."

For reference, 30 fps = ~33.3 ms and 60 fps is 1/2 the frametime of that, so ~16.67 ms. 50 fps = 20 ms, also a sweet spot. 55 ms = ~18 ms, which is very close to 16.67 ms. 48 fps = ~20.83, or half the frametime of a 24 ms cinematic like you see in movies. 45 fps = ~22.2 ms, and I only picked that one because it's the midpoint framerate between 30 and 60 fps.

You'll notice that as framerate increases by significant amounts, frametime decreases by insignificant amounts — that means pushing fps beyond 60fps has diminishing returns for resources required (hardware capability and pricing), which is why even amongst the pro scene you're not going to see too many people playing beyond the 120 fps
(~8 ms) regime and why devs can only do so much.

Also, as you probably guess, I'm a PC tinkerer and gamer.

Ori remains the best and possibly only 2nd-party IP on Xbox.... NOPE, Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) & MFS 2024 by Asobo, and Towerborne by Stoic, are also technically 2nd-party!

Persona 5 Tactics is likely a 3rd-party timed exclusive.

Isn't there someone other than Keighley who could put a similar event together? Alanah Pierce? Greg Miller?

Well, at least it isn't more classical European mythology stuff in medieval fantasy, yet again.

Medieval science-fantasy on a formerly-popular tale should spark a resurgent interest.