I remember how excited I was for this when it was rumored 2 gens ago. There was a lot of smoke on the rumor that the conversion would be at Gamestop, you'd bring your discs in there and they'd give you a digital code.

At this point I don't know if I'd do it. I have so many games from Xbox and 360, I have two entire 27 gallon totes full and some more floating around. I sort of want them as decoration, when I'm done finishing my basement I was going to build a display for them. I play them so rarely (almost never) that I almost want the decoration/collection more than a digital copy. There's not a ton of value in that, but still more than hundreds of digital icons to scroll past.

Total War 40K is going to sell like f***ing crazy. TW Warhammer fantasy already was by far the most popular TW game by an enormous margin, and 40K is WAY more popular than fantasy.

@TenakaF
It could be worse, you could be a Phantasy Star fan (the JRPGs, not the online multiplayer games). I see you with the Panzer Dragoon Saga shout out though, I never got to play it! Hopefully someday...

Still undecided but nothing to do with early access. I got my money's worth with the FH5 premium addon. But $60 to me is egregious. This is a pre-order bundle for 2 DLCs sight unseen. It should be a steep discount compared to buying the 2 DLCs later. Unless the DLCs are $40 each I'm just not sure about this one.

I only played 4 and 5. Just checked my stats.

I played 4 for 37 hrs.

I played 5 for 485 hours.

There's a clear winner here, lol

2016 is by far my favorite of the 3 modern games. Eternal got a little rock paper scissory in the gameplay, but worse was I could tell what they were doing with the story and how they were telling it. Then Dark Ages was exactly where I knew it was going and it (the story) was God awful.

DOOM is a game that at its best needs to let your imagination fill in a lot of blanks. The last 2 games were mitochlorians cranked up to 11.

@Vordus so hard to keep track of this stuff - Alpha Protocol is a no because Sega published it, and Seikiro is a no because Fromsoft developed it. Just case by case I guess knowing who owns the rights, publisher or developer.

@Fiendish-Beaver same, no idea here, but it's a really interesting discussion about a feature we are both so indifferent to 😂

I will say I did try Albion Online this month because it's a spiritual successor to Ultima Online which I did play for a bit, and the armor I got as a game pass member did look cool. That's the first time I've used it since they were giving away Halo Infinite stuff.

@Fiendish-Beaver I understand your point and if ms is paying for these perks then I agree it is a waste of money. I'm disagreeing with the underlying idea that ms is paying for them. 3 of the top 5 most played games on Xbox are f2p. Lots of devs are chasing that massive audience, and to me it makes more sense they are paying ms for these perks to be on Xbox because all they are is ads.

With MS acquiring Obsidian, Alpha Protocol is a no brainer, no?

@Fiendish-Beaver I would bet the opposite. These are ads for free to play games and I believe MS is getting paid for them.

Imagine beating something with a serious story and the final cutscene starts to play, and you get a "full screen confetti celebration" for achievements. Get out of here with this ****.

If some games are exclusive and others are not, it's a lose lose. The obvious first loss is customer confusion, getting nothing but lost sales. The second is internal strife. We have already seen this, revealed in the FTC trial. Pete Hines was pissed that ABK games would be multiplatform but his wouldn't be. I highly doubt he was the only one.

If they go this ill conceived route, they must spin multiplatform studios into a separate division, or divest them completely.

Looks like Life is Strange for my generation. I'm good.

If I swap from my console to my phone, will there be continuity in the ads I'm seeing? If my screen is littered with unwanted Ford ads and then I switch and now I'm bombarded with unwanted McDonald's ads, immersion is broken and my experience is ruined

Can't we save this for the next hardware? I like the Series start up, and I like that each console had a unique start up. I don't love the Xbox One startup green background but I wouldn't change it, I associate it with the console / generation.

Read the comments after typing this, 100% agree with @Benjamin

@wildcat_kickz I'll probably give it a go again. I replayed Myst when they added it to game pass and it was a great nostalgia trip. I can't be 100% sure why I didn't finish Riven, but I can guess - nothing peeled me away from Quake for very long for those few years, and from memory 97 was probably the height of 3Wave CTF and Team Fortress. It was also when Quakeworld released. What a time.

@RiverGenie How many hours of gameplay do you think are included for someone with the game through Horizons? (sarcastic question you don't need to answer it)

@dskatter
Ok then don't play it. I was pissed when they stopped ongoing development. I don't see anything wrong with them putting it on game pass, it's a game that can be played for thousands of hours. And if someone is that invested and they run out of things to do, there's an option for them.

Disagree with almost all the comments here. It doesn't have the latest expansions. That doesn't mean it doesn't have a ton of content to play through.

In addition if you get hooked and want to keep going with the newer updates, you can migrate your Xbox account to a PC account.

I say all this as someone who has played Elite and was pretty pissed about their decision to end console development.

Raise your hand if you were one of the people who bought it in 97.

*ow, my shoulder

I finished Myst but like @themightyant I didn't finish Riven (or any of its other sequels).

I much prefer the old FMV cutscenes to the 3D animation in the remaster. Judging by the youtube comments I'm far from alone.

This game really screwed up by releasing as early as it did which was already a year late. The bones were incredible but it just didn't get content and died. And the relevant point here is they didn't add firefight until the game had been out a full two years. I have friends who love co-op and I could have gotten into Halo Infinite if Firefight was there at launch. Instead they added it to a dead game, and for some reason are continuing to add to it.

I've only played about 2 hours, but I have to admit I am liking Vampire Crawlers much more than I thought I would. The dungeon crawler fan in me is overpowering the card game critic.

What I wouldn't give for a good blobber on Xbox though, like Might and Magic or Grimrock or even Grimoire.

Very pumped for Speed Freeks!

All I need is the Halo 3 cutscenes remade by Blur Studios. Anything else is gravy.

Laughing my ass off at Bluesky. These news worthy tweets or whatever they are called with 2 likes. Peoples comments on Purexbox get more views.

@Sindayl Oh that's good to know, I still have the disc. I wonder what goes on in the decision making to delist a game that has seemingly no licensed content like cars, music, or the IP itself.

My wishlist has seemingly dodged almost all the deals this week.

and unfortunately, the two people who forced that decision on Sharma'sv predecessor are very much still there. That year of Phil doing interviews hyping up exclusives while Satya was doing interviews saying he doesn't like exclusives was really something else.

The Last Remnant
Enchanted Arms

Really need to find time to try Against the Storm

I played it after the patch as I played Expedition 33 first. I played it long enough to get all the achievements, again. I had 1 crash and 1 major quest bug. The big was from the original game and 20 year old forum posts got me through it. Performance was excellent, as always if there were minor frame drops the series X vrr erases them.

Overall it's one of my favorite remasters.

I don't know of HOMM will be a return to form of the 3D0 days or another dud like all the Ubisoft games, but I will definitely be playing it either way for the Paul Romero score.

This was the one game that MS canned that I really wanted to see.

Hire decent writers. Bring the Spirit of Fire into the main series.

@BustedUpBiker for Xbox, it is dudebros.

I'm a big fan of eurojank games and we've taken some big hits lately between Spiders and Pirranha Bytes. Even though they announced Two Worlds 3 I'm pretty sure Reality Pump is gone too.

I may be boorish but I'm consistent: the idea that anyone is positive that MS is even making another console right now is laughable to me. Obviously we have to wait and see but everything I've seen leads me to believe that Helix is a PC and Xbox is indeed dead as anything but an emulator.

And I've said repeatedly I'm not really interested in the clown argument that "DirectX Box really means video game publisher and not a console." When there's no more console, Xbox is dead. If they keep selling Xbox gear, console are gone but you can still buy an Xbox lunch box, you guys can pretend Xbox is still alive.

Reducing how much gamepass has been hiked since 2023 from 100% down to just over 50% is good-ish, but I don't see it as a direction shift as much as they were bleeding customers so fast they had no choice but to do something or shutter the thing.

I'll say it over and over, there's 1 thing that shows they have interest in continuing (or at this point - reviving?) Xbox, and that's exclusives. Everything else just looks like milking the few people like me still hanging on for some reason.

The sole reason they spent 70 billion was mobile. Full stop. Candy Crush, Hearthstone, Diablo Immortal, etc. If you're hung up on CoD then consider this: CoD on Xbox has less users than it does on playstation. CoD on Xbox + Playstation combined are less than CoD on PC. CoD users on Xbox, Playstation, and PC combined are less than CoD users on mobile. There are over 6 times more CoD mobile users than CoD Xbox users. MS was quick to promise in court they wouldn't make CoD exclusive, or even have exclusive content, because they didn't give a sh*t about Xbox. It was all about mobile and their plans to open a mobile store competing with Google and Apple.

Only my most beloved games get a replay, remaster or not. Certainly not Ubislop, lol.

If they are going the exclusive route again and their mobile dreams are scrapped, the Xbox division needs to separate from all studios that are multiplatform like ABK Mojang and Bethesda assuming they are unwilling to divest them completely. "Some of our games are exclusive" is not a strategy that will work.

Last gen I really wanted to see Xbox buy Sega. I thought they could launch the Series consoles in Japan with Sega branding and it would have had a puncher's chance at finding a market.

Forza Horizon 6

@Master_Cthulhu70 it's coming, it was at this show. It's just not announced to be on game pass. Let's hope that changes. And totally agree it's the best party game, just gotta make you turn on collisions - or as we call it, ball touching 😂

Oh and the confirmed crossplay, Hallelujah!

@SmokeEmAll what is detrimental to you personally is not detrimental to gaming. Having a strong competitor for Sony far outweighs smokeemall not getting every single game he wants on one platform.

Same with all the other stories. This does nothing. Xbox had the best hardware at the best price this gen. It fell behind due to a lack of exclusives. It fell off a cliff when it abandoned exclusives.

One thing matters. Exclusives. That's it.

Pay the price, bring back exclusives and go hard, or don't bother. And that needs to include a lot more than Halo Gears and Forza.

@Gabrie one way or the other, this will likely be the last time.

@Coletrain For many years in MMORPGs going back to the 90s we used rogerwilco, teamspeak, mumble, etc for voice comms. Then separately there would be something like a forum for communicating raid times, events, posting memes, etc.

Discord replaced all that. Voice coms + text channels. It's pretty great. For a few years now it also fully integrates with Xbox, you can join a Discord voice channel on your Xbox the same way you'd join an Xbox party. If you play video games with friends via crossplay, it's nothing less than a godsend.

Just a reminder that Game Pass is still 53% more expensive from what it was only a few years ago in June 2023. I don't see this framed properly enough. A trillion dollar corporation doubling the price from $15 to $30, wait a few minutes, then reduce it to $23 - so much of the narrative is that the cost is "down." I don't know if that's organic or astroturfed. Game Pass is still massively more expensive, just less so. 53% more expensive instead of 100% more expensive.

Bless Asha for... hiking the price... less.

@Questionable_Duck I don't think it backfired for Nintendo, families are their market and they've stayed the course. Their only hiccup was releasing one badly conceived piece of hardware which they quickly buried and moved on. Xbox is the only one who abandoned their entire core fanbase and seemingly will never recover from it.

@Questionable_Duck To me marketing wise they picked up the ball that Sega dropped and they did it perfectly. Peter Moore's tenure continued the trend. Mattrick's Xbox became the corporate follower targeting families, he wanted to be Nintendo. Spencer pivoted to targeting diversity (groan).

Xbox abandoned its identity and core customers and got absolutely nothing in return. This isn't just captain hindsight talking, it's personal for me as I am (was) their core customer, a dudebro. I never saw Nintendo or Sony encroach on their edgy marketing space so I disagree that everyone was doing it. Xbox had their space (carved out by Sega) and they blew it, like they blew everything else in the Mattrick era.

Let me disagree with some media
I will never agree that this was a good idea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9l4z0rgvRQ

Because "everyone else was doing this:"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELPRVu0GxYo

Like... no. You'll never convince me that's the reality of what happened. They just became corporate clowns

@FraserG I just think of them as the console startup animations. I am assuming this new one will be Helix and that green one was during the One era. Fwiw that green one was by far my least favorite.

Aww man, no Golf With Your Friends 2