RadioHedgeFund

Now do final fantasy vi

They need to do one of two things here: either go right back to their original influence and base it around the innate simplicity of Phantasy Star Online or finally make the first-person Diablo 3 they’ve always threatened to build.

In the first instance it needs to be all about the gear. Levelling should be old fashioned xp to stat increases that are just there to gate off the better items. The fun of the game becomes fire teaming a dungeon or just the organic PVE mode. No skill tree nonsense or anything like that. Items are fixed-stat with none of this infusion crap. A better gun is a better gun.

In the second instance it becomes all about the character. There should be dozens of different skills to level up and unlock each one mappable to a certain button. The debate then turns from gear to character builds. Gear merely buffs the stats of the character. They should in this case add more classes into the game to vary the gameplay.

In either case for the love of Master Chief can we please get them to sign a contract sticking them to one damned currency! I don’t want to earn ‘thing X’ for character X and ‘thing Y’ for character Y. One again Diablo 3 for me streamlines this so well.

Zero is an absolute mess of a game, nowhere near the peerless original. Perfect Dark 64 remains the best FPS ever made, crammed to the brim with more ideas than entire genres managed in a lifetime.

I think about how modern FPS games have essentially devolved into Space Invaders: move from side to side into (destructible) cover and pop out to shoot waves of enemies. At a base level this is Halo and Call of Duty in a nutshell.

Perfect Dark’s mission objectives get harder and more complex with the difficulty, not just the enemies. The amount of creativity crammed into the multiplayer is absurd, with modes and weapons still being cribbed by modern shooters.

PGR3
Hexic
Geometry Wars

What more do you need from a console launch?

Here’s a few more:

8. On-device voice commands that really worked. A quick ‘Xbox, Pause’ into the Kinect was all that was needed if you needed the loo or wanted a snack.

9. Mobile integration with Windows Phone 7 meaning brilliant mobile titles like Hexic Rush and Halo: Spartan Assault all carried Achievements that contributed to your Gamerscore.

10. Xbox Live Arcade lighting a fire under the indie market with lower priced titles. Geometry Wars is still the best Xbox game ever made.

11. Local console accounts meaning you don’t have to make a Microsoft Account just so your kids can play and enjoy things on their own login. This is probably the biggest thing I miss from the 360.

But we don’t want more powerful. We want affordable. If it’s more than £400 they can go fish.

Nothing. We got zip for the 20th anniversary for the 360 back in September.

We say tight level design, but we’ve known for years that the Call of Duty single player maps are designed by an intern with a set square.

Xbox have never really got it, have they? If you want to be the centre of a digital living room or whatever then you have to capture the family market. The Kinect was an admirable attempt but sank with the Xbox One and its lack of family titles and need for your kids to have a Microsoft account to even log in. Yeah, no.

Kids are naturally curious and want to see what their parents are up to. The Switch might be a handheld but it recognises that online opponents may as well be bots and real relationships are built on the couch: you can share the experience on the big screen.

A kid seeing their parent buried in a dedicated handheld is no different to seeing them doomscrolling, giving the impression the device is more important than them. Don’t get me started on VR.

If we want to develop healthy gaming habits in our kids it needs to be done via the TV like it was for us.

Microsoft will never beat Sony or Nintendo chasing a niche within a niche.

The Series S is the best console of the generation. Ideally priced, looks nice under your TV with, to my eyes at least no loss of graphical fidelity.

Complaints from the industry fall on deaf ears. Devs only have themselves to blame if they didn’t treat the S as the baseline, and then make it run better on the PS5 rather than reverse engineering.

It also has helped the Switch 2 because lower spec ports of games already exist which, once Microsoft bin it next year will be very helpful going forwards.

If they can find the time to throw a few a fistful of yen at a FFX port for mobile, that would be great.

Given that the brand wasn’t really anything other than Halo for the first 4 years it would have been nicer to get something for the 20th anniversary of the 360 back in September, like a PGR3 port or something.

The difference being that on PlayStation there are actually things worth playing!

/s

It all sounds great but all Sony has to do is put out a marketing campaign pointing out the lack of BSOD on the PS6 and it will never get off the ground just like they essentially killed the Xbox One with the ‘game lending’ video at E3.

I would have honestly preferred it if they had baked in offline 4-player PVP just like the original and left online on the floor.

@Ade117 Does it need to? Maybe a series of remakes to tidy up the plot isn’t such a bad idea

The more power you give to devs the more entitled gamers become that they’ve got to use it. Even with all the beefy processors of this generation there are few games on either console that look as good as Forbidden West on the PS4!

Microsoft would do well to build a console that can play current gen titles at stable frame rates without and pop-in. That shouldn’t cost the earth to build

Me replaying Fable 2 and Forza Horizon 1 every year might keep the console under my to but it isn’t selling any new games or bringing in any subscription fees.

It looks mighty impressive, but I refuse to label anything an ‘Xbox’ if it can’t play 360 games.

Isn’t this the racing game you can play by elastic banding the sticks together and putting some duct tape on RT?

I look forward to the Sony E3 video showing how to recover from the BSOD on a PS6, immediately tanking sales of the next Xbox all over again.

Im more interested in another ‘PlayStation’ title coming out on Xbox. I still reckon there is life in those Horizon and Tsushima rumours yet.

Can it play Xbox 360 games?

Then it’s not an Xbox.

So we’re never going to get a new Burnout then.

1. Get rid of seasons. They made sense in the UK game because of the ever changing weather but amounted to a little bit of extra snow on the mountain in Mexico. Just make the game perpetually cherry blossom spring.

2. Bring back the festival schtick. They made something of an effort to do this with 5 after 3 and 4 just kind of felt like videogame multiplayer maps rather than something lived in. I want proper event sites like in 1, not just floating icons.

3. Completely ditch the wheel spins and give every event series its own reward track based on difficulty so you know exactly what you need to do to get that car or outfit you want and it might require getting better at the game.

4. Keep the silly events but dial down the craziness. The tracks floating in the sky and arena were just daft in 5 but I still want to race the Shinkansen!

5. Bring back somebody like Rob Da Bank to curate the soundtrack and amplify the festival feel. The music in these games is normally really good but they’ve been going downhill since 2. I have the entire soundtrack to the first game on constant rotation in my car. A J-Pop radio station is a must!

An ongoing issue I have with Horizon is the silly sense of scale. Colorado was ok because that’s not a country, just a region. It felt like a realistic setting for a motoring festival. Ditto Cote De Azure.

Australia kind of felt like some sort of Minecraft world with the different biomes. The compression in the UK setting was just silly though. You can’t drive from Edinburgh to the Cotswolds in 5 minutes! They should have confined the entire play area to either Cumbria or Derbyshire.

It looks like we’re going to get a silly map again with 6. They should have just set the entire thing on Hokkaido and be done with it.

The fact that it only works with these certain games is rather baffling as is the fact that the URL contains the exact reference to ‘Directors Cut’ or ‘Complete Edition’ without using those terms.

It makes a lot of business sense for Sony. These titles have achieved saturation on PS4 and are on PC. Why not port them to Xbox?

These all sound like incredibly positive moves!

@CaptainCluck I have always argued that the Series S should be the default. If this happened all your PS5 and X games would actually be resolution and frame rates they claim.

Yeah they should be concentrating on lowering the cost of development (without hurting staff numbers with AI) and thus game prices whilst making the console more accessible. The biggest mistake they made this gen was not making the Series S the benchmark.

My Series S generally serves me well as an Xbox 360 that plays Fortnite and Destiny 2. There are precious few modern titles that I bother with but having access to my older purchases keeps me around. I think the Series S is my favourite dinky console since the GameCube.

But I experimented for a few months just using an Apple TV and Gamepass streaming (using Onecast) and the results were so good that I'll probably just use that going forwards.

But they already released Croc….

I’m going to go with Microsoft announcing the Xbox mobile store launching in the EU before Q1/26 with the next ROG Phone as the launch vehicle.

All those Android gaming phones might finally get some titles to push their power!

Relicence and rerelease Forza Horizon 1-4.

@Valhura Destiny is essentially Halo crossed with Phantasy Star Online already

I want the space travel and exploration of NMS, the combat of Destiny and the freeform RPG elements from Starfield.

Somewhere in the Venn Diagram of Destiny, Starfield and No Man's Sky is the space faring game of my dreams

Perhaps more worrying is that tweet saying it's an 'Xbox coded game' by which he means a grey-looking zombie game.

I wonder if this is the backwards.compatkbility plan going forwards: the next console only plays native PC games from your library and streams everything else?

The final 360 dashboard is still better than anything they've launched since.

The on-device voice commands were incredibly handy.

There are a lot of PS4 titles that would run really well on the Series S that us single-player starved Xbox owners would devour. I'm not expecting Horizon anytime soon (unless....) but Infamous Second Son and Spiderman wouldn't go amiss.

Given the current big tech blunders going around I wonder how long it will take Microsoft to completely bugger up Call of Duty?

In many ways it's the end of an era. There was a time when the Xbox 360 was the centre of my media ecosystem, with streaming and live tv (via Sky) complementing rentals and purchases. I'm actually sad to think my my Xbox as 'just' a games console.

As a storyline it's utterly terrible. Some of the missions take upwards of 2 hours to complete and the lack of a way to teleport to the surface of a planet after a lengthy dungeon baffling.

But if you immediately ignore the storyline and play it as a freeform space RPG it's fantastic. There are so many great questions, loads of factions to work with or just roleplay anything from a space pirate to a greengrocer.

A studio is ultimately only as good as their last game.

This is great news! Finding your old purchases used to mean navigating a rather slow list at the bottom of the settings screen.

I really do miss Metro. I think that looks better than the Series X dash!

@Jenkinss That's because most people bought both!

They'll graduate to a streaming service that publishes individual titles on other platforms. I'd be amazed if they bother with any exclusive hardware going forwards, instead just licencing their brand to other companies like they do with Windows. This allows anyone to build an 'Xbox'.

The days of first party hardware are over.

@Jenkinss There is clearly room for all sorts of devices across the market. It helps to keep things healthy. But as consumers we have a finite amount of time to devote to recreation and everything that might eat into that time, from sports to video games to writing to reading to gardening is all in competition with each other on some level.

Sony and Nintendo are both big fish in the same pond.

Microsoft can polish it all they like but they're now a 3rd party publisher who just happens to have a perpetual rental service on their own agnostic hardware.

Sony and Microsoft are going around in circles trying to chase what is becoming an increasingly niche market (the 'Frames Per Second' gamers) whilst Nintendo continue to eat their lunch.

I'm not saying all consoles need to be the Switch, but what Sony need to concentrate on next gen is bringing the cost of development, software and hardware back down. Hobbyists are going to go to the PC regardless and the majority of their PS5 userbase are your FIFA/COD crowd who play titles than run perfectly well on a phone.

I don't mean to sound derogatory there: there is room for every sort of gamer on platforms! But making another expensive technical marvel to run games that still play perfectly well on a PS4 is rather ludicrous.