Jark

Wow last ever Fifa EA game... Last one I played for real was 18 or 19, might give it one last go. Hopefully it goes out with a hurrah.

Madden, NBA 2K and the latest F1 continue to be my favourite sports games

It's a shame Naraka is a BR game. Good thing they added campaign co-op.

@NEStalgia Well said. Additionally, the vast majority of all those leaks - whether they're ***** or not, whistleblowing or not, from an actual inside source or a rumour-mongering attention grubber - are intentional. Very few accidental ones, if at all. Just thought I'd throw that additional consideration, as a tangent.

Re: Hiring, we should only assume that it's still "early development" iff (if and only if) we know what sort of positions they're hiring to fill. So it is not a factor of whether they're just hiring at all (just what they're hiring for).

Oh yes, because all [of] their 1st/2nd-party games (yes, first and second) sold tens of millions each over their lifespans, netting them ~50-70% or more of MSRP (which was never more than 60 USD; 80 CAD, until now, but as they lower prices for a game then even a 70 USD title becoming 50 bucks averages out to a cool 60 over time).

But of those tens of millions, a few titles netted more than 10-15M NEW sales (the rest were used sales).

The preceding paragraphs are intended to be a bit sarcastic and quite hyperbolic (exaggerated).

Instead of banking the profits from their revenue, they upped their future expenditures, which lead to what, exactly? What does an increased expenditure of millions more do, to attain qualitative results beyond that of HFW/HZD and God of War? Was it for R&D on the fancy SSD IO throughput bandwidth in the PS5? Was it for allowing them to hire more junior writers like Alanah Pearce, in fall 2020 (no less for a game that understandably got delayed seeing as how they were still hiring writers A MERE YEAR out from original planned release)?

What exactly are they doing with their gross budgets, when they also have a hands-off policy on development, too - so who's even telling them that they need to spend more money when they're already doing it right with whatever they already have? (Any C-suite exec would tell you: "Why on earth would I approve of higher budgets when we got it right before with less?").

Instead of answering these questions, Mr. Jim Ryan, which would naturally arise upon analyzing your philosophy, maybe you should ask two questions instead:

1. How much profit is Microsoft and Xbox Game Studios actually making from the various Game Pass revenue streams - GP Ult in particular?

2. Is it actually funding (expenditure) that's the problem with their games, or is it really too many cooks in the kitchens with no clear direction? To wit: Halo Infinite stumbled for years, Everwild stumbled last year or so, and Perfect Dark supposedly stumbling right now as we speak.

{Additionally, my further speculation is that their other projects and contracts are simply delays for various reasons which may not necessarily be remarkable or related to quality control. Examples: Project Mara is still too early in the pipeline, probably bc its older sibling Hellblade II is understandably taking forever; Starfield is too ambitious and probably on the wrong engine, as per usual with Bethesda (and that title is holding up TES 6); Redfall is yet another multiplayer title that very likely wasn't yet offering something revolutionary, so Arkane probably panicked and delayed it; Forza Motorsport 8 is likely sitting in the oven so that they can avoid the promise Uncle Phil made about maintaining "two year" cross-gen support for development. Everything else is just a delay for reasons beyond control (Stalker 2), or just announced too early.}

That's okay. Gotham Knights and Hogwarts are more than enough for me, and I refuse to get around to new games until 4+ months after they released anyway.

Was also getting tired of Keighley making his shows unofficially taking in too much of the limelight, so any excuse to watch less of his stuff is okay with me. (It's nothing personal: there should just be more unofficial "official" shows, and so far the only prominent people competing with him have relegated themselves to podcasts).

And I think that we also just need less stuff coming out, so that publishers aren't stretching themselves so thinly that they push out rushed crap and set schedule expectations unreasonably high for developers. That all usually has an economic backlash which directly affects the consumer, negatively. (I'm at a loss for succinct words here, oh well).

Uh, ok. Greedfall was decent but I've played in-depth modern and classic RPGs of similar or higher calibre over these last two decades or so. If they improve on their take of the recipe, great

My issue is that YouTubers and podcasters of all kind - including former professional studio workers & creators like him - are implicitly doing their "broadcasting" with so much focus because THEY have issues they probably still need to work through. I can't even begin to name all the commentators out there who rant because they have not successfully reconciled their hangups and baggage.

@Balta666 yep, I feel ya right there. The funny thing is that my distaste for early access games didn't even come from officially confirmed ones - it came from games that were early access in all but name only. Titles like Anthem are "excellent" examples of a game released early, but disguised as a full launch, to garner consumer feedback (and generate revenue on an increasingly profitless project).

More proof that the MS Rewards app on Xbox is actually handled by an algorithm, lol.

Netizens, writers and bloggers use the word "seemingly" a lot. Maybe even too much. A synonym here and there would be nice, some thoroughness even better (to ascertain things), and failing all that, confidence - we're in an age where being bombastic, running one' mouth too quickly, or just being opinionated is what counts for making one's words stick out the most. So who really cares if something actually is, versus ostensibly (besides sticklers like me)?

@Rocco81 it would be cheaper to do a trial and/or subscribe for just a month (the max length of time before one gets bored of Ubisoft open world hum drum).

I dunno how many times I gotta keep saying this. It was implied for Xbox, not for Game Pass. Yes, they didn't explicitly state that it would never come to GP, but they also never explicitly said it would. It was just explicit for Xbox, like EA Play once was.

@Banjo- they've been saying that this game hasn't been profitable since last summer.

Didn't help that SE* frequently put the game on sale for like $20 in my country — even as early as summer 2021. They wanna make profit? Have a little more faith in a product's potential for greater profit margins; i.e. treat your customers' wallets with more respect, and make a good game that engages us immediately and for the long-term (but without being immediately cheapened to <60% MSRP to capitalize on sales discounts).

• (Sqex, Squenix, or whatever other nickname they go by, since I'm not mentioning them by name)

@Balta666 I am not too keen on early access either, especially if the quality could bring down the reputation of a service like Game Pass. But, to the unfettered access devs would have to user feedback via GP would be a great boon to the game's final development.

well I prefer my rogues on Switch, but I'll buy it for Xbox in a little while (just bought Sekiro, finally) to support indie exclusives. Can't have Xbox getting excluded or picked last for these things, after all.

The "rumours" surrounding Ubisoft are about non-gaming sharks circling it as it treads water.

@BAMozzy No. Wrong on all accounts, oops, sorry for being polite.

@BAMozzy Please ease up with the excessive apostrophes (aka "single quotation marks" or whatever). I believe we've already commented on that quirk on this website.

However, unlike last time - when I mentioned that it makes the argument strangely seem simultaneously this and that (e.g. satirical and uncertain) - I didn't allude to how it could make a reader feel. That practice makes it seem like we're all misunderstanding things and/or using incorrect terminology (even if only slightly incorrect). It therefore comes across as condescending.

Not really a problem for the myriad of people playing from One X to Series X.

The correct compromise here is to make optional the downloadable upgrades for 4K assets, just as we begged them to do for One X. I still have a 1080p screen for Pete's sake.

Anyway, this is the least of my concerns for the system, so I'll leave it at that.

@Korgon I agree, I'm not a fan of those fandoms as well. Would definitely not want to be constantly having to cater for their "wrath" or worse, their boredom (when they invariably move onto other channels or things as they pass into different phases of their lives).

Nobody who's only accessed the game via GP - anyone who doesn't actually own the game - will be able to get the expansion upgrade price. You'll just get the standard GP discount. So, 20% off of US$60 is US$48 (or 80% of the listed price).

Any water left in the bucket?

My friend bought me SOR4 on Steam when it launched. He was bored during the early pandemic, lol. That was a great gift and it took me a while to reciprocate properly.

The following year he got us Dark Alliance (also a day one XGP release) on Steam, and we both got frustrated with how sucky it was. Unfortunately we both played too much to return it. What a waste of his money. I bought him It Takes Two and we played it before it launched on GP, so that more than made up for DA.

I legit thought this was some sort of mistake on Thursday the 14th, when I was trying to download an invoice from my Xbox Store order history. Called MS support (which is a mess to find a phone # for; even worse was navigating back to my order history from the support website); they told me it was a free gift. Lol

Background: I needed to prove I bought the Middle Earth Shadow bundle, bc I couldn't install the DE of Shadow of War (... it had turned out that I just had to download base game and DLC separately, sigh). Then in my most recent order history entry, I saw a credit from MS, that matched what I paid for Middle Earth, and thought maybe they had refunded me for revoking the credentials.

@Royalblues Square Enix has been very generous with GP, too. Same with Capcom, but haven't seen anything of theirs in a while, and only RE7 has lasted more than a year on GP.

@BAMozzy bc you're using single quotation marks (apostrophes) so much, your spiel comes off as a combination of sardonic and strange.

I've been having this issue for years with Final Fantasy Type-0 HD. Have already figured and tried all of these solutions and settings, doesn't work.

Perhaps it's an error from the early days of Xbox store's ability to give gifts to another account; I received it as a digital gift from my sister for Xmas 2015 or so. Her account is dl on my XBO X, but that wasn't set to her home Xbox when I got it (her partner's is).

You'd think that would be the source of the problem, but it isn't? I still have access to her Rare Replay with no issues, and it's not as we had logged into RR years ago before she switched her home Xboxes (in 2016-17) or before I upgraded to the X (in 2018).

I also had free access to CoD: Advanced Warfare when it launched, when one day I came home, started up my old XB1 and saw that game randomly downloading onto it, lol. (It was revoked a year later or so). So maybe this is the universe's comeuppance on me.

@OneArmedGiant gotten around to my backlog from three months ago, myself

I'd rather play a game like this with 3 randos chattering in my ear than alone. If I wanted a single player game, my NPC companions better be filled with personality and competent AI (and preferably not NPCs, but playable).

@uptownsoul PS+ Extra, Premium/Deluxe tiers do look attractively priced, versus PS+ Essential, when considering the bulk subscription options (3-month and especially 12-month fees)

This is making me upset, now. When are we going to realize these "free games" have always been just the throw-a-bone GIMMICK perks to smooth over the actual reason XBLG and PS+ exist: pay-gating multiplayer services?

Once a consumer remembers this and accepts it fundamentally, the "quality" of these games becomes as important as determining what type of eggs you want for breakfast (if you can even eat them, that is).

@Rmg0731 it wasn't announced four years ago. That was rumoured until summer 2020.

Ostensibly, not seemingly.

@Richnj Well, despite what I wrote above in a related post - which could imply otherwise - MP games don't necessarily have "activity bloat" per se. Neither are they far exceeding big 1P campaigns fraught with icons and filler quests on a world map. Plus, these games effectively replace content (and sometimes actually do that) rather than simply stacking on more stuff to do.

These games are FOMO'd, as you say, but the real danger they have is mindless repetition from the literal same activities & modes, rather than cloned activities/tasks & modes usually gated behind something arbitrary (plot points, for example).

They're not at all bloated by FOMO itself; these two things are independent axes of each other which contribute in their own way to burnout.

Single player games, however, that have Ubisoft or Mad Max style bloat, number in an amount large enough number to make no matter about which is worse in quantity. All the proof you need of this is the # of people who don't finish a campaign (measurable by achievement stats) or the people whining about open world tropes (which is the majority of critics for example, part of the reason why Elden Ring is so well-received too, for bucking trends).

A comparison:

• Destiny 2 isn't played as a 100% collect-a-thon or measured by completionist standards; hundreds of hours in a live service game is spent perfecting the craft on a selection of a smorgasbord of activities (sometimes a singular aspect, like Crucible/Trials, with only some campaign hurdles to overcome just to get there). The collection / checklists grows as a consequence of what you do; for most players it is not the primary purpose or systematic impetus of the gameplay. Part of my og overall point: how often this butter is churned is the burnout, and that's up to the player, regardless of FOMO.
• Mad Max I mention bc the game deliberately goes out of its way to entice you to do most things in its world, just to progress. The activities themselves feel too inspired by checklist mentality (so it's a checklist game with formulaic humdrum), and it could take someone much much longer than they intended just to get past hurdles - dozens of hours longer (I took over 100 to check the checklist on HM). This is not unlike a MP service game to players who are burnt out by the grind, which is my point.
• Note: the hours themselves don't matter; it's how we filled them. Contrary to what some POS website says, open world games take hundreds of hours, potentially, just like live service MP. All of them these days spread content over months and years due to DLC, so it is completely one's own fault if you chug the drink down all at once. Furthermore, many players potentially drop a game before 10-50 hours in, respective of whether its gameplay is good enough to keep going. Again, hence my original point, more or less.

I think we've now addressed what needs to be, replete with definite misconception and probable misunderstanding. As everyone has their own tastes (I'm one who likes everything), the arbitrary player can not definitively deconstruct aspects they don't like without acknowledging similar drawbacks in the stuff they like. Thus, it's irrelevant as to what type of games enable burnout (and bloat & FOMO), bc it's just not based on content rollout (as is typical with GAAS). It's based on the cross section between player mindset, habit and intrinsic game design.

TLDR - Also, bloat is not a good characterization of the problems facing MP games (I shouldn't have implied MP and 1P burnout as similar, originally, in retrospect). Burnout in general has different metrics (hours is actually an insufficient metric) all contributing to it. Big open world titles (or drawn out 1P campaigns) are not exempt. Not relevant as to whether 1P or MP exceed each other in number of examples of burn out content or which is better at mitigating it, either; same with the number of players a game could feature, simultaneously, NOT determining whether it'll burn you out tbw — that only determines the nature of burnout. Your complaint and my points are directly addressed with that; I'm not humouring any further discussion on my part.
(Edit: Don't need to, all this would've been in further rebuttals if it not here).

Other edits:

• Added an overview comparison of D2 and Mad M, and a conclusion paragraph that rolls better into the TLDR.
• removed Ubisoft analysis & commentary on narratives; weren't integral to the thrice-repeated main points.
• Cleaned up the TLDR

Why do I get the feeling Everwild is becoming the Xbox's answer to Pokémon (some people had been spreading gossip about a Pokémon clone on Xbox).

@Richnj you know it's the same with bloated single player open world games tho? The number of players is actually irrelevant to a game's bloat (or rather, whether one burns out from the game itself, at all).

@Bleachedsmiles it won't. Those 2020 trailers were already touted as concept videos, and they already started reworking the game a year ago.

@Rmg0731 last year or so they said they were basically going back to the drawing board, more or less. Not unlike what had happened with Metroid Prime 4 on Nintendo's side.

TBH was coming here to say that I had never liked Rare's 2020 summer special video in which they streamed or recorded two of the senior staffers on the project just talking to each other about this game. The discussion sounded like a brainstorming session, and that's not great; it suggested they still hadn't set a clear direction for the game, and I was right.

There's no way you can find unlisted items unless someone on the inside feeds you tips, or they're breeching security.

I'm not gonna blithely accuse of the latter, but it sounds like Mr. So and So Great Track Record on Twitter has an insider tipper. That tipper is the actual leaker.

@Halucigens I've been hesitant to both download and stream this title. May have to get a new SSD and upgrade my internet to accommodate it, lol.

Also don't wanna play without a flight stick, bc what's the fun in a flight sim with a regular ol' controller?

The article makes it seem like publishers-within-publishers are what makes a second-party contract. This is not so.

It is only second-party publishing development because it'll focus on publishing cloud games from mainly external developers; Xbox Game Studio subsidiary developers - including Bethesda and pals - could very well partner up with the CGO, but that would be redundant with the CGO's very purpose being to seek out & fund new projects.

Enough with the whataboutism stuff on the internet. I'll end it in Xbox's favour right now without besmirching the past:

Sony had barely anything to do with the creation and revival of Crash Bandicoot franchise, and so can't claim it really - it was dead for a generation of time anyway. It's been a part of non-Playstation households for years now (a console generations lifespan almost).

How many of us played it on PSX back in the day, and ended up also owning other systems in subsequent generations? Countless millions. I can't think of ANYONE who just sticks with a single console family, including PS, time after time.

This is moot. Nothing ever belonged to them, the fans. Sony doesn't need anyone to defend itself. Nothing belongs to us really, either, unless you're a significant shareholder of Microsoft, right? Nah.

That's it. Here in my country, we got bigger things to worry about. I don't wanna have to come clean this up, too (that goes for Xbox users as well, as I'm sure we poke the bear now and then too). Someone repost this on some idiot PlayStation website, too, thanks.

@SplooshDmg traditionally, peasants built their ***** homes and non-peasants either inherited (good) ones, or bought new property. Don't throw terms around and also don't bring up anything that has nothing to do with anything. Microsoft is one of about three or four major companies that defined and built the modern day landscape of the computer and software tech industries; as for myself (before you group me in unjustly with a mob I will ALWAYS stand apart of), have always done things the hard and long way, even if I didn't build some ***** peasant residential area house brick by brick.

I aim for strength, not happiness.

@LtSarge I personally don't want a CoD coming out every year. I think it's unsustainable for a publisher to have to requisition & maintain a whole other set of servers for yet another new multiplayer game - and the older I get, the longer I want and need to be able stretch a game as long as possible so I don't feel stressed trying to grind through it as much as possible (and games that have short multiplayer lifespans have their player bases die all the faster).

Reality is, though, that a lot of CoD players don't like one or two of the three main studios developing CoD games. So, every few years or even every other year they'll eschew the current year's title made by the studios they don't prefer. I suspect not much will change for them if the development cycles increase.

(On that note, up until the wacky choice to have the 2020 CoD be Treyarch's Cold War, the dev cycles for CoD have been 3-years anyway. To wit: Sledgehammer titles were in 2014, 2017 with their 2014 title started in 2011; Infinity Ward had 2016 and 2019 CoD, with their 2016 title started after Ghosts released in 2013; and Treyarch had the 2015 & 2018 titles, with Black Ops 3 having started after Blops 2 in 2012. I dunno wtf Activision was thinking changing up the rhythm in 2020 and 2021).

@Beasley2K Sony has done this, though WITHOUT buying publishers. This makes them a bit cleverer at being cutthroat, IMO. Or maybe they have some sweet honeypot executives working the sales rounds.

@IronMan30 Gears, and I think Halo too, weren't even actual first-party during much of the 360 era. Microsoft had to buy the total rights for Gears at least, from Epic, after a few games had already been released. Nevertheless, that ownership doesn't even matter; for as long as an external company (i.e. Epic) develops a title, it automatically becomes classified as second-party (that's the meaning of the "party," as in who else is involved in a transaction).

Sega, Nintendo, Sony and now Microsoft all built at least some of their first-party libraries by "upgrading" second-party franchises. That's the chief advantage of not relying on a third party exclusive, in which the first-party proprietor loses the majority of control. I can't recall Sega or Nintendo's examples, but one of Sony's recent ones is Insomniac Games and their Spider-Man games.

This whole Activision Blizzard buyout by MS, and the Zenimax purchase to a lesser extent before that, upends that traditional practice; now third-party publishers/studios and their IPs are up for grabs — unlicensed entries, no less.

Edit: no not Halo

@Alduin AFAIK, for about 10 years now, Japanese companies limit foreign ownership/investment to a small minority percentage (I think it's 10%). So, unless their government ratifies new law or I'm way off base, it is unlikely that Microsoft will own one of those publishers (or even a development studio).

Conversely, Japanese companies have no problem buying up foreign entities. Shrugs

@UltimateOtaku91 Nor should it have much influence. It's an aggregator with a methodology that will never inherently make full sense: it assigns scores to reviews that don't use them, and absolutely no media outlet has a true standardized metric or process for scoring within their organizations let alone outside of them (to the point where the same John Doe doing a review for a game they rate 8/10 will still mean something different for another game also rated at 8/10; similar case for the Jane Smith's review for the same games, regardless of whether she works at the same employer or not).

Plus, no offense to everybody, but it's kind of lazy to look at an "aggregated" score and be done with it.