MinervaX76

@GamingFan4Lyf although supply likely has a lot to do, there’s a lot of people that just want to play their games and don’t care them look their best, as proven by the number of people playing multi-platform games on the switch or on minimum spec PCs.

Expected. Despite last Gen having PS4 Pros and Xbone Xes, the most sold units were the cheaper base models: PS4 Slim and XBox One S.

This leads me to a grudge I had last Gen with reviewers: most reviewers would only play games on the most powerful model, not the most used models. With pro models, and with Series X|S, i think devs should at least give a bit of a test drive to most games on the hardware most readers are going to be experiencing.

Damn…. Infinite Wealth, Persona 3 Remake and FF7 Remake 2 all back to back… I need to work through Starfield faster!!!

@Moonglow Hexen is owned by ABK. The list of titles here, even the unnamed projects, come from Bethesda pre-acquisition so Hexen is not one of them.

@GeeEssEff A hostile takeover is when a company goes out and attempts to buy every single publicly traded stock directly from shareholders and against the wishes of the board/leadership of that company, or bypassing them entirely. It’s not really a thing that has personal definitions.

The 2008 yahoo “takeover” attempt was a direct negotiation with their board and was rejected, attempted to re-negotiate and eventually didn’t go anywhere.

Edit: This wiki does a good job at documenting every acquisition MS has ever gone through. it isn’t as large as many like to insist, for a company as large as MS. Most acquisitions, especially on the 80s and 90s, were relatively small. What MS was infamous for back then was not acquisitions, but producing vaporeare tech demos of technologies other companies were basing their entire startups around, killing their chances at an IPO and success. This was something Bill Gates personally was… disliked, for pursuing and the practice, as far as I recall, ended at some point when it became either beyond his personal focus or when he started to phase away as CEO.

@Kevw2006 I don't read it that way, but mostly because I’m combining it with their track record. MS, as far as I can tell, has never attempted a hostile takeover in its whole history.

The mock-up is ugly as bleep, imo. I like the touted features, seriously like the “wake up when picked up” feature, but this better be added to the design lab options.

If this is an additional SKU, fine. If they remove the disk model from sale, I’ll be very annoyed (unless they start selling USB disk drives.)

I hate the thought of games that require an online connection because a game requires some server to compute x or y algorithms. It’s one thing if the game is an online multiplayer game and the connection is then leveraged (I hear the water in Sea of Thieves looks as amazing as it does because it’s physics are calculated in the cloud) but I would hate for single player games do demand online connectivity.

Also feel like it would be a nightmare to develop for on a single player game.

Surprised about Doom. I think most people I follow were expecting iD to move on to a Quake reboot instead of a prequel.

I am also a bit surprised about a Fallout 3 remaster. We all heard a lot about a Skyrim-style anniversary release of FO4 but 3 is a bit of a surprise. Recently got all achievements on the FO3 for 360 in BC mode and honestly would do it again with a remaster. Hopefully they improve on some character models and add a few QOL features instead of just making a port.

Similar about Oblivion, aside the fact that we have heard rumors about that one for a while.

Also very happy Ghostwire is getting a sequel as well as a new Dishonored.

Edit : oh wait, is this Day Zero thing for doom just DLC? Thought it was a stand alone title…

Edit 2: yea it’s stand alone, it reads “Doom Day Zero & DLC”

@Trmn8r this and also a lot of the time frames are already obsolete. These leaks are almost all obviously from older targets/plans and very likely a lot of it has by now shifted, canceled or changed.

A Doom prequel was surprising, IMO, as was the expectation they considered Indiana Jones to be out last year.

My biggest surprise was seeing a Doom prequel in that list. Also interesting to see a few things that were scheduled for this year and didn’t make the cut. Indiana Jones was expected this year it seems, so it’s not impossible we will see it hit next year.

I hate the idea of an Xbox series X refresh where they eliminate the disk drive. I am all-digital on Xbox but a lot of consumers have built physical libraries, not to mention a significant number of delisted games that can only be acquired in physical from. (Deadpool and Transformers Devastation come to mind). I would hate a future were it’s impossible to insert such a disk into any current Gen Xbox sold on stores. Relying on discontinued models would be unacceptable.

If they planning to sell a USB disk drive? I might be much more accepting.

I just read a few posts here before I hurt my face with repetitive hits of my palm.

First off: anyone that is anyone and has the money would love to buy Nintendo. MS just happens to have the wallet to do it. If you think Sony would not love to buy Nintendo you are kidding yourselves. Same for the likes of Tencent or Amazon. Nintendo is extremely valuable in IP alone and not having any interest in such an acquisition, if it was on the table, would be absurd.

This letter shows only two real bits of info:

1. MS is ready to jump in and buy Nintendo if they ever mess up again and go the path of the Wii U, making them start to finally give up. Honestly this is an unlikely scenario, but if it was to happen, MS would be willing to buy them regardless their financial status.
2. MS is heavily against hostile acquisitions. No one should really be against willing mergers. Being against them is as much as being against all forms of capitalism, because these are the type of deals that drive all capitalist models. Being entirely against hostile takeovers is the one thing I want to keep seeing in any internal documentation from MS because it’s the one thing I hate. I’ll be worried the day I hear MS is contemplating a hostile takeover of any company, as small as such a company might be.

Doubt I’ll have time to play anything other than Starfield but Lies of P is on my radar to play at some point.

This means nothing until they actually roll back the whole thing. “Changes” might be something stupid as simply re-phrasing what an “install” means.

As far as I care Unity is no longer safe to use regardless what they do unless they do every single one of these things:

• completely roll back this insane install policy
• Fire the CEO
• Make licensing changes (restore them) that specifically make sure no retroactive changes can be forced on developers that don’t agree to them so long they stay on older tools
• Drop the requirement for the SDK to be “always online”
• restore the GitHub to track licensing agreement changes

Even then the trust is gone, but at lest those steps would give room for a developer to use Unity without “trust”, simply continuously keeping an eye on any license changes.

I personally am not going back to Unity regardless.

Starfield if I manage to find some time. Have also not played any FFXIV this week and would like to get my weekly tomes goal so hopefully I find some time for that too. So far the outlook of me playing anything is looking low, though.

Need to finish Starfield before I can vote on this.

Edit: I’ll say this much: for me any Fallout [76 does not count] ranks higher than any Elder Scrolls game.

Whoops. Sure Phil is not happy about this being revealed this way, especially so loosely.

Sad but… 45% means 40 employees? That means 48 or 49 employees left? Sounds like it was a rather small studio.

@Cashews I’m guessing we will see some fun stuff for Xbox in Tokyo game show, my guess is the highlight will be Shin Megami Tensei III+IV+IV Approcalypse+V. Don’t see them revealing anything first party.

Then we will likely see something akin to last year, nothing or minor presence in Games Award but a soon-after Dev Direct, potentially diving deep on Avowed.

@Amigator @Echtzeit No clue what you guys talking about. This game looks fantastic. Also, its WayForward making it! They have a fantastic track record with side-scrolling games. Honestly looking forward to this Contra, and hopefully it does well enough to get them more Contra contracts.

@themightyant I honestly expect Unity to be legally challenged on this whole retroactive thing.

I see only two potential impacts from this:

Larger developers will likely either be able to afford the costs of porting to another engine OR sue Unity.

Smaller developers that were barely making a living will no longer be able to make a living.

A lot of existing successful indie devs are openly talking about porting their games to another engine given how it will be cheaper to do so than to submit to this. The issue is they only have 3 months to do so before they are subject to monthly fees until they finish such port.

Some weeks I get to spend nearly 16 hours a day gaming, others I’m lucky if I can play a full hour the entire week. This week has been on the later side, unfortunately.

This is a bit of a historical glitch for Creation Engine games. Vendors inventories are usually bound to an “invisible” well hidden chest that sometimes can be accessed. Why don’t they put them extremely under the world is unknown to me, but might have something to do with the inner workings of the engine or debugging.

I remember using this on Skyrim to get an achievement, one about either selling a lot or making a ton of money… don’t remember the specific achievement, but remember the vendor. Was in a town near the final Dark Brotherhood base, and the vendor was a traveling Kajit and the chest near some rocks by a mine entrance.

@Cashews I see people ask for minimap, honestly I don’t want one. I just want a real local full screen map when in a planet surface. If I hold that… what’s the 3 line button called? I want to see real local maps. Not the star-chart, and not a grid of dots with a handful of discovered landmarks.

Maaaaaaaaaaps please?

@101Force depends what kind of game you are looking to make. GODOT had made some strong progress and is 100% open source and free. It won’t be as robust but you just know no one will ever come and inject costs.

Never dealt with GameMaker but it exists. There is also RPGMaker, with a very very narrow focus. Not sure how the licensing or quality for either of these two work.

And, of course, there is always the “just make your own engine” approach. It would take a ton of time but might be acceptable for smaller arcade-style retro games. You can’t get more “I own this” than that.

I keep thinking it might be on Xbox’s best interests to start making free licenses of iD Tech or some other of their internal engines now that they own so many, but exclusively for PC and Xbox development.

Edit to add: there is also Cocos engine. Again, I have no much knowledge on that one either, but seen some impressive showcases.

@Titntin it does not matter if PS dominates the generation as much as wether Xbox is in a healthy position. You don’t see Pepsi removed off the shelves simply because Coke dominates the cola market share. So long as they carve themselves enough revenue to keep a healthy business going, they will be fine.

That said, never say never. PS3 was behind for years but managed to catch up to the 360 in the end, internationally. I think XBox still has a chance to catch up with PS5 on the NA market, so long they actually deliver solid game after solid game in the next few years. That would leave them in a position to start the following Gen on very strong footing.

@Cashews I personally use (used) Unity not because it was cheap but because it was simple. Unreal (the only viable alternative when I started) charged a 5% royalty after hitting certain revenue threshold. Although I never expected to hit that threshold, the complexities of keeping accounting for it was beyond what I was willing to consider.

When you think about it, Unreal is actually cheaper. No seat license, and a 5% only if you become wildly successful. Unity was an up-front subscription fee in exchange of not having to worry about tail-end finances.

This change entirely throws the Unity advantage out the window and adds a lot of complexities and risk on indie developers. The ones that will be hurt by this will be the smallest of indie devs. Ones that potentially barely make enough to pay their rent.

This will also disproportionately hurt mobile devs. I am already evaluating just going Unreal or perhaps GODOT. Maybe both depending on the type of project, but I’m never touching Unity again for anything other than non-profit development. It’s not the cost, but the “we will retroactively change terms on everyone” thing.

Side note: last night I went to check Unreal licenses and it seems these days they do offer a “hefty” yearly fee with no royalties. We talking about 1500 per license (dev seat) so suddenly Unreal sounds a lot more appealing than Unity, and provides a way more powerful product.

Edit: btw not saying you have to care about the story, just noting the main reason so many use Unity was not “it being cheap”, but having more control on the future control, and that is now gone.

@Jimboss even if they literally just make all the “low earners” multiplat and the high earners exclusive, it would be true.

If sounds that your issue is that that won’t tell you that high profile games will be exclusive. And honestly, I think all high profile games going forward will be Xbox console exclusive, the only game I see potentially making it to PlayStation is Wolfenstein 3 and the rumored Spyro “4”, if it’s real.

@themightyant due to leaks, we know Redfall was planned with micro transactions. It was only post acquisition that the team managed to convince management to drop them since Zenimax was no longer in the position to demand such service game models. But basically, the day Phill walked in and said “you are no longer doing a PS version”, the plan was still a standard multiplayer service game.

This is what leads me to believe that “new IP”’ is key for acquired publishers going exclusive. That is not to say all legacy IP will remain multiplat. Can see Wolfenstein 3 going either way, and Elder Scrolls 6 going full exclusive.

@Jimboss

So why bother spouting the same old case by case basis rubbish

Yet they releases Quake 2 remaster on all platforms. It’s a lower profile release, but it’s proof that they will indeed work on a case-by-case basis.

@themightyant “it’s about giving players choice” is basically a marketing slogan by this point, and on most situations it comes followed with the “streaming/PC/Xbox console” as “choose”.

It’s almost like BK’s “make it your way (so long your way is that we fire-grill the meat)”.

As for the multiplayer games, I think it’s going to depend heavily on whom is making it. For all purposes Redfall was a multiplayer game, even solo play demands being online, yet it’s still Xbox console exclusive.

I think multiplayer games from existing IP, from Activision (not all of ABK) or Zenimax will be multi-platform. New IP will likely remain Xbox console exclusive. Anything done by pre-existing Xbox games studios (coalition, 343, etc) will be Xbox exclusive regardless what form such game takes.

Edit: anything with the name Minecraft on it will likely also be forever a multi-console release.

@OldGamer999 I’m afraid to look at the Push Square article on this weeks charts. How much would I win if I bet usual suspects will make up excuses and rationalize it as anything but a success?

@Kienda @Kaloudz the toy to lose thing is definitively dead, but thinking about it… Skylanders could make for an interesting Gatcha game.

@Martsmall that is more common with the licensed “toy” sets like Star Wars and Marvel stuff. It’s more common with other IPs for them to simply vanish and then be at the mercy of poachers on eBay.

@Martsmall Lego are expensive and I would expect this to be at minimum $100 extra if it came from them, but that comes with quality. Also they have not called either the NES or Atari sets “limited editions” and the NES has been available since before the pandemic. Would not be shocked if it gets discontinued soon.

@Jaxx420 I usually avoid it as much as I avoid the term “Xbot” for extreme xbox fans (I don’t even know what the word is usually for Nintendo equivalents), but lord the extreme Ps fans have gotten annoying as hell this week.

Also a bit of a separate thing, as much as some want to say they are all equal, I beg to differ. Maybe it’s due to the size of the audience, but the Sony extremists tend to be a lot more click-baity and toxic, and somehow actually be in journalistic positions. You know what… take back that size of the audience thing, because Nintendo fan base is even larger and they don’t resort to as much toxicity.

Anyways when I use a term like that i am not generalizing, im talking precisely about the extremist subset of the audience.

Dear Microsoft: please drop mega and make a deal with Lego!!! Mega quality is… not great.

@Darylb88 verify and time/achievement tracking should also be a requirement for profesional reviewers, imo.

Shows how salty ponies are about Xbox getting a fantastic console exclusive.

@Sakai I have spent too many hours exploring planners trying to get all the data. I kinda get what some people complained about this game not encouraging exploration the same way previous Creation engine games do, but the game still encourages exploration on its own way. Yea, I’m not likely to bump into a full city or camp full of quests just by exploring the wilderness, but the pokemon-like “got to explore them all” feel is a strong driver for me.

I’m still too early in the game for to this exploration, so maybe there will be some more content rewards hidden behind exploration, but if not, maybe we do get them via DLC or mods.

Oh I did bump into a voice acted quest from a guy that needed saving. Sounded like a simple enough quest, hurt, not able to fend for himself, all friends died and needed help to his ship. On the way there I got on a fight and died. Never got to see if there was a twist or if it was a boring escort quest. When I reloaded and got back to the guy, he was not there. It was randomly added there. I was impressed at voice acting actually being involved on random quests like that.

I want to be a cynic and say the real reason is any land vehicle would had been annoying to deal with in most planets since a simple crater would force you to continue on foot or go around a larger detour.

I still hope we get to see vehicles either on DLC or mods.

My biggest grudge right now is total lack of maps outside planner surfaces. Caves and cities having no maps is a crime. Not asking for mini-maps, just maps that get revealed with store and zone line markers as we discover them.

Don’t get me wrong, still love the game but still question the lack of maps.

I'm going to take a wild guess that Mena Sato Kato has a "better pulse on Japan" than random posters on a forum. Me included.

@Cashews I also forgot to mention the Starfield headphones and that new song by Imagine Dragons being on iTunes for sale 😅
Oh and the funko pop….

I passed on those… well I did buy the song 🙃

@Cashews some paid $100, but there are more variables like international price fluctuations and who knows how many of those collectors editions were made, since they sold out. Those PC versions were all Steam, if delivered in time they all counted and cost $300 a pop.

As I expected, my fancy collectors edition is not going to be here until Saturday. Didn’t stop me from being an idiot and buying the $100 digital edition on the windows marketplace. So… I’m a $400 payee… unless you count how much I paid for other “junk” like the Starfield controller and that Starfield cover/wrap/skin for my Series X…

MS is making a lot of money out of this one.

For me, the only reviews that mater are the one that tell me a game is a technical mess that should be a voided. If I'm interested, no review will stop me from playing a game that is on game pass so long as I am interested.

That said, looking at the current state of the reviews, I ignore the percentage average and focus on the positive/mixed/negative ratio since the average gives too much weight to a single person with a biased take (in either direction.)

So far:
90.2% positive
9.8% mixed
0% negative

Sounds like a highly recommended game.

I’m not shocked. I said a long time ago (too lazy to dig it up) that I bet Sony regretted even offering yearly discounts on their Extra and Premium tiers.

I am a bit shocked they dared bump the price on the base plan, though. Xbox Game Pass Core is still the direct competitor to that and now is $20 cheaper. If you want to play CoD soon, not only will you pay a lot more for the game (since it won’t be on game pass) but also have to pay $80 a month to just hop online?

But I’m sure Sony fans will get a second job to pay for this.

The amount of concern trolling I seen over this is baffling. Recently even saw someone try to claim this now means you can’t expect the same frame rate on Series S… when the Series S rarely offered the same frame rate options!!!

Some people just want to find a way to make Xbox look bad, no matter how ridiculous the argument.

@Lightning720 I’m sure eventually that $1 trial will somehow be limited only to the currently logged-in account to stop the infinite $1 renewals. Likely will take some re-engendering of how the console handles authentication, though, reason it has not happened yet.