Markatron84

Those are all cool.

Xbox seems determined to keep bringing out the defibrillator because Halo is "iconic" and "our flagship franchise".

Well, Xbox, newsflash: it's no longer iconic and it's far from being your flagship franchise. Its relevance has been dwindling for over a decade, because you refused to get with the times or even really evolve it beyond the same tired gameplay loop.

If you're going to continue to flog this dead horse, then at least do something with it. It can't just be the same old Halo but this time it's on UE5 so it runs like arse. Because if it is that, people just won't care that Halo is back.

@TrevorP86 and ironically not enough water. There's just no pleasing them.

I think that, barring any mishaps, it'll end up in the low to mid 90s. Forza Horizon is kind of the safest bet in terms of AAA games.

@fbnaulin He's the guy they're going to have say "WORLD PREMIERE" in showcases from now on.

@dreadful That's a good question actually. It released 15th May last year, so you'd expect it to be on the list above. Of course, there's always the possibility that it pops up out of nowhere. That happens with games on Game Pass sometimes.

Whenever it appears, it's worth the wait. The modern Doom games are excellent and The Dark Ages is no exception. It might actually be my favourite of the three.

Someone bought a Series X? Xbox is saved!

@abe_hikura Precisely. Which is why I chose "Other", because it's not cut and dry.

Did I play the original? Did I like it? Do I like the series as a whole? What have they changed? Are those changes for the better? Is it a one to one remake or a complete reimagining? Who's doing it?

I treat buying a remake of a game in much the same way I treat buying a new game: scrutinise it.

As always, more Mewgenics and more Pokémon Champions. I clawed my way up to Master Ball tier in Ranked Doubles with a massive (and lucky) win streak. Maybe I'll see if I can get to Champion tier within the season's two remaining weeks, maybe I'll just move on to Ranked Singles.

Other than that, I'm right at the end of Mafia: The Old Country, so I'll finish that today. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that game yet, honestly. It's got a lot going for it, but at the same time it's got a lot wrong with it.

Edit: I just found out that to reach Champion tier I have to get into the top 300 trainers. Yeah, that ain't happening 🤣

@Kiltedhaggis Couldn't agree more.

A few days ago, I said:

The recent Triple-I Showcase was a bit of a letdown for me personally. Way too many of the games shown off in that were survival and/or cozy games and while I do like a game in that vein every now and then, generally they're not the sorts of games I play. An ID@Xbox showcase tends to be more console oriented, so hopefully a bigger chunk of what they show off will align with my tastes, or at least have a greater variety of genres.

This showcase was exactly what I hoped. Games from a wide variety of genres; a lot of which looked really cool and some new trailers for games I've had my eye on for a while.

Not everything shown aligned with my tastes: basically anything multiplayer oriented - it's an even bigger turn-off when the trailer has a voiceover of "gamers" "having fun" while "playing" - isn't for me. But overall, a great showcase with a lot of games from different genres with different tones and aesthetics. As far as indie game showcases go, I can't ask for more than that.

@Fiendish-Beaver That's a good call right there. If it's good enough for Charles and Liz, it's good enough for us.

@Fiendish-Beaver oh close to me, mine is 23rd December. Unless I can change it on my account, in which case it's tomorrow 🤣

My birthday isn't until December. Boo-urns.

@Altaria_97 Typical. I assume Microsoft had the foresight to not let users change their date of birth on their account?

Not that I would condone such practises 👀

@ZYDIO very constitutional 👍

@ZYDIO Americans can't resist putting z's in our words, just like they love taking out all the u's. I think it's in the constitution or something.

It's a box filled with examples of restraint and coherent storylines.

I jest.

Or do I?

Yes.

The “Online Story-Link” feature allows you to feel the impact of previous players’ choices

The first person to ever play this must have had a whale of a time 😂

This has been on my wishlist since it was announced as I do love a good narrative game. Another one for the backlog, which at this point is in a storage locker. You might have seen Darrell and Brandon Sheets rummaging through it at some point.

This is like if Usain Bolt beat a bunch of corpses in a race and called it a win 😅

Wow, that was a pretty quick turnaround between the reporting on Asha Sharma saying GP was too expensive and them actually lowering the price. Fair play.

It still devalues games and is detrimental to the industry, but at least it's cheaper now!

Say what you like about Molyneux. He might frequently write cheques he can't cash and that has (rightfully) landed him in hot water over the years, but his creativity, enthusiasm and love for what he does are undeniable.

PC Gamer's review aligns with what I personally felt playing the demo in the most recent Steam Next Fest. I like deckbuilding games and I love Vampire Survivors, but Vampire Crawlers just didn't do it for me.

@Fishmasterflex96 That's the thing though: sometimes it isn't worth it. Not every dev reaps a/the benefit of putting the game on Game Pass, nor is every game is created equal.

And to be honest, one thing I didn't mention in my initial comment is that Game Pass outright devalues games. There's no debating that part, just like streaming services devalue films and TV shows. And I don't just mean in terms of developers getting revenue from their work, because that's a given. I also mean that it potentially puts less of an onus on consumers to give games a fair shake because it makes them disposable. Full disclaimer, the following is, again, my opinion based on personal experiences.

Anecdotally, I've played games that I've bought through to completion that I wasn't vibing with in the first hour or so, simply because I paid money for them, and unless the game was an outright dog, more often than not the game improved the further I got into it. With Game Pass, not so much, because the game was part of a subscription I was already paying for, so if I wasn't feeling it within the first hour I'd bin it off and move on to something else

Now, that's a great model for consumers, but potentially not so much for developers. If the people using Game Pass are dropping games at a faster clip than those outright paying for them are, that means that fewer people are giving the games the attention they maybe deserve and - and I'd bet my left nut on this - forming a misguided negative opinion based on god knows how many games a year solely on what little of the game they actually played. Could be an hour. Could be half an hour. Hell, it could be 10 minutes. They then go online - because if they're subscribed to Game Pass, especially Game Pass Ultimate, they're probably avid Xbox fans and frequent forums, message boards or comments sections on enthusiast websites such as this one - and voice that negative opinion, which spreads like wildfire and has a potentially negative impact on the game's reputation and the reputation of the developer and its future projects.

I'll put it this way: would Crimson Desert - a game with a mixed critical reception - have had the comparatively more positive player reception that it's enjoying had it been on Game Pass, where people could essentially play it for nothing and bounce off of it if they weren't vibing with it? I don't think so. I think players resonated with it more because they had to buy it and gave it enough of a chance before giving up on it despite any flaws or bugs or design foibles it might have and ended up getting the hang of things and deciding for themselves if it was for them. If it'd been on Game Pass - or PlayStation Plus or any other subscription service - I reckon a lot more people would have bounced off a lot earlier on.

I recently bought and played South of Midnight. The first hour or so I didn't really like it. If I'd played it on Game Pass I would've said "ah, no harm, no foul" and moved on and had a negative opinion of the game forever. But because I bought it, I pushed on a bit longer and it became one of my favourite games of all time.

Again, just my thoughts and opinions. 🙂

Again, the Xbox Wireless Headset is mostly the same as the normal one, but with two major differences — the first being the visual design, of course, and the second being the addition of custom sounds.

Speaking of custom sounds, I hope Forza Horizon 6 retains the musical car horns/sound effects. I love rocking up to another player in my garishly tricked out and painted car and blasting them with the Windows XP shutdown noise.

@fatpunkslim

And strangely, he never says a word about PS+, even though the model is exactly the same — except with a smaller catalog and no day-one releases.

Those are two pretty big differences to be fair, and including day one releases is the most common thing that former PlayStation execs have cited as not sustainable as far as games subscription services are concerned.

Also, it's true that many developers have expressed their pleasure with being included in Game Pass, but I feel like we've also heard some developers not pleased with the results. Also, if I were, say, a small indie dev studio whose game performed unfavourably on Game Pass, I'd be hesitant to publicly express bad sentiment towards Xbox or Game Pass at the risk of alienating myself from a potential partner (Xbox) in the future. As others have said, we don't have exact numbers or data or the testimonials of every developer who's ever had a game(s) on Game Pass, so take what anyone says - both good and bad, including me - about the service with a pinch of salt.

Personally, from the outside looking in, it feels to me like the promise and allure of Game Pass is finally beginning to show some cracks. It feels like the cost of securing day one releases on Game Pass is finally proving too costly so Microsoft took it out of the more reasonably priced tier and made it exclusive to the most expensive tier while at the same making both tiers more expensive to try and offset the cost. Xbox has painted itself into a corner. Game Pass is costly and not seeing the growth in subscribers required to sustain itself, but at the same time taking it away would piss off current players and get rid of the one actual draw the Xbox platform has at this point.

But again, I'm just some guy, and that's just my opinion. I'm not saying you're wrong and I'm right, by any means.

I'm in. The recent Triple-I Showcase was a bit of a letdown for me personally. Way too many of the games shown off in that were survival and/or cozy games and while I do like a game in that vein every now and then, generally they're not the sorts of games I play. An ID@Xbox showcase tends to be more console oriented, so hopefully a bigger chunk of what they show off will align with my tastes, or at least have a greater variety of genres.

@FraserG I like little useful things like that. They all add up 🙂👍

I'm not sure what I'd do, to be honest. It's all well and good to say that exclusives are important and they sell systems... but that's only a small part of what sells systems.

If consumers are already invested in a competitor's ecosystem, your exclusives won't draw them in, especially if in a lot of cases those exclusives just haven't been good enough or marketed enough to be draw. If your previous system had horrendously bad initial press months before it even launched, that will deter consumers from investing in your brand as a whole. If a good chunk of your revenue relies on people buying into your subscription service, that further deters (to an extent) people from buying games, or said subscription service eats enough into sales (which it does) that you have to raise the cost beyond what consumers deem to be reasonable.

These are all issues Xbox has faced and is still facing, which is why it's struggled to shift anywhere near as much hardware as its competitors, why it's flip-flopped around in terms of strategy and why it went multi-platform in the first place. I won't pretend to know for a fact what Xbox/Microsoft should do, but bringing back exclusives isn't the fix-all magic wand some people seem to think it is.

One thing I would do - and I'm surprised Xbox hasn't done it yet - is rename the Activision, Blizzard and Bethesda publishing arms to Xbox Game Studios Activision, Xbox Game Studios Blizzard and Xbox Game Studios Bethesda. Obviously people such as us - avid gamers who follow the industry closely - know the score, but I feel like Microsoft hasn't really done much to inform the general game playing masses that franchises like Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Doom, Warcraft, Diablo, Overwatch and - most bloody importantly of all, for god's sake - Call of Duty are Xbox games. They should be pushing the brand wherever they can. If someone boots up Call of Duty or any other Xbox-owned game, it should proudly say "Xbox Game Studios" right from the off.

@Scrubchub thanks, I haven't written anything in about 7 years so I'm very rusty.

I don't think there was one character's story in SoM that didn't hit me right in the feels.

Other than the usual Mewgenics and Pokémon Champions (I'm still languishing in Great Ball tier) I'm kind of at a loss when it comes to what I'll be playing next, because I finished South of Midnight last night and, my goodness gracious, I loved it. Below is the review I put on Steam immediately after finishing the game. It's not comprehensive or even particularly well written, but I think it sums up how I feel about South of Midnight:

South of Midnight has an immediate initial wow factor; the stop-motion style animation is cool and the visuals are extraordinarily pretty. Then I got to the platforming and puzzle solving, which are both inoffensively by the numbers. Then I got to the combat, which is slightly too stiff for my liking and not in the least bit remarkable. At this point, I wasn't sure how much of this game I would actually play.

I'm glad I carried on.

Some might argue that a gorgeous visual style or a fantastically told story that takes inspiration from Southern American folk tales shouldn't excuse the actual "game" parts of a game being so unremarkable or by the numbers. Hell, up until about 20 minutes ago I might very well have agreed with you. But, my god, South of Midnight is exponentially more than the sum of its parts.

Could the story have been told as a film or a TV series? Absolutely it could have, but by being a game - having you guide Hazel through the environments she must traverse and discovering the fates of the various mystical creatures and human inhabitants of Prospero - South of Midnight's tales of heartbreak, suffering, regret and love are so, so much more powerful than they would have been if you were merely passively observing them.

Special mention also has to go to the soundtrack. Every piece of music and every song is exceptional, whether it's just setting the tone for a scene or going full-on musical theatre to further bring the tragic stories of characters like Two Toe Tom, Huggin' Molly and others to life. I'm glad Xbox Game Studios started just giving out the digital deluxe extras with the standard edition of the game, because this is a soundtrack that I'll want to listen to again without question.

I could probably count on one hand the number of games that have made me so invested in a narrative or feel for characters as much as South of Midnight did, or games that are as beautifully animated, or games that are just such a joy to experience. South of Midnight is one of the best games I've played in a very, very long time.

@M20B25 Saturday? Pffft! Pragmaturday!

In the Xbox Spring Sale? Nothing.

HOWEVER, I did buy South of Midnight today on Steam and have just finished chapter 6. Man, I wish I'd taken the plunge on it sooner because it's special.

It feels like there's no clear right path for Xbox going forward. Exclusives are meant to drive console sales, but weren't. Going multi-platform means the potential for more game sales, but doesn't always pan out and opens up the "well, why buy an Xbox?" arguement.

Honestly, if the Xbox console was to go away and Microsoft went to purely third-party publishing on Nintendo, PlayStation and PC, I don't think that would be the worst decision Microsoft's ever made. Even with the amount of money the company has, how long do you keep throwing good money after bad before deciding enough is enough? Xbox has been on the back foot since Xbox One was announced. Maybe it's time to give it up? Imagine the billions they'll probably save in console manufacturing, R&D and marketing.

They could take Fortnite Club or whatever it's called out of GPU for a start. I doubt that came cheap.

Publishers and developers the world over will breathe a gargantuan sigh of relief when GTA VI finally comes out.

"Look sharp, lads! We can release games again!"

@VeganH It boggles the mind that there are still people on Earth who don't own GTA V yet.

@GeeEssEff Coolio, no worries. I'm at work at the moment but I'll drop my friend code somewhere, if anyone wants to add me.

@GeeEssEff I've put 12 hours into it so far and I'm enjoying it for what it is: a way to train Pokémon and battle them. It's not Pokémon Stadium. I wouldn't even really call it a game. It's an app/platform for competitive Pokémon battles; it only having 3v3 singles and 4v4 doubles and not including every Pokémon or held item is testament to this. Competitive Pokémon/VGC has restrictions and it has a meta. I think that a lot of the negativity seems to be stemming from people's pre-conceived notions of what Champions was going to be.

I will be struggling to crack Ultra Ball rank in Pokémon Champions - I'm still experimenting with team compositions and strategies - and also finishing up Hi-Fi Rush.

Forza Horizon (4 or 5)
Master Chief Collection
Psychonauts (1 and 2)
Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts
Tell Me Why
The Gunk

@Tasuki though do bear in mind that some games do override this setting.

I like Invincible, but I'm not liking the art style of the game. Then again, I've only watched a trailer or two and seen a handful of screenshots. Maybe it'll gel more with me when actually playing.

@Fiendish-Beaver @GeeEssEff I've tried to talk my wife into watching Invincible but alas...

I liked the game part of Quantum Break a lot. I don't feel like the TV part really added much but it did give us more Lance Reddick, so it had something going for it.

Probably shouldn't have announced it then, huh?

@Simu001 yeah, Xbox does have a habit of doing that. To be honest, given that Microsoft purchased Undead Labs in 2018 and they've yet to ship a game (State of Decay 2 came out less than a month before the acquisition was announced) and given the current climate, I'm surprised UL hasn't been on the chopping block.

@Simu001 from what I understand, developers label a game as "in alpha" when it's content and feature complete, so the rest of development will be spent finalising art assets, QA testing and other such polishing. This might even mean that the game's not too far off, with any luck; maybe even, dare I say it, as early as next year?

@InterceptorAlpha yeah, if I'm in a play test then I'll fill out whatever feedback forms in the most detail I can, but I don't want to have to fart around in Discord.

@FraserG SOD community 🤣

@Balaam_ I agree. Momentum would be what Xbox has if all the things mentioned in that tweet happen and/or come out and go down well.

Besides, how many times has Xbox had "momentum" only to bork it all up? Bigging up a list of future things as "look guys, Xbox is doing great!" is irresponsible and potentially damaging. Celebrate what Xbox is doing well in the moment, not what might happen.

@ZeD GTA V is Game Pass' on-again off-again boyfriend who's afraid of commitment.

The skin for Forza Horizon 6 seems pointless. Someone will have made a similar or better one and uploaded it within days of the game's release. I have some cool branded user-made liveries I downloaded in Forza games; my favourite being a Tampax branded 2017 Ford Focus RS.

The theme, the tone, the style, it all still comes across as authentically Super Meat Boy, but the gameplay has a slightly uncomfortable edge where it doesn't quite feel right for one reason or another.

This is exactly how I felt after playing the demo. That, and the 3D view makes it difficult to gauge jumps, while some of the camera angles mean scenery obscures the player's view. Super Meat Boy is supposed to be hard but with a 2D side-scroller, you at least always have a clear view of what's going on.

@awp69

Roughly 8/10 is a nice score.

No, 69/100 is a nice score 😏

Show me all the E-Day! Gears 5 feels like it was released a lifetime ago.