RadioHedgeFund

Only if they somehow managed to squash the Series X into a Series S-sized chassis.

“Devs are getting lazier at porting games properly so we’ve launched a £700 console to solve that problem.”

Destiny 2 is an absolute mess of a game, with unplayable old campaigns and obtuse mechanics that confuse complexity for depth.

Rip it all down and build Destiny 3

I enjoyed it and jumped a few times post-game. I actually think the story and the space magic ruins the game.

Bethesda crafted this incredibly deep space role playing experience where you can be anything from a farmer to an academic to a smuggler to Captain Kirk. Running missions for the different factions and doing the side quest plots are a lot of fun. I felt the Delgado one was the best in the game.

But the missions for Constellation and the power collection? Ruins the game. They should have had the balls to cut it completely. Once you’ve killed the pirates on the starting planet and got your first ship it should have been you and Vasco against the galaxy: go where you like, do what you like.

Just a nitpick: why does longevity have to be synonymous with progress? Sports is about fun as much as competition. I don’t badly shoot hoops at the park or still play SWOS on my Xbox because of progress; I do it because I enjoy it. Assuming the game mechanics are as fun as they sound, people will be playing this for years.

@smoreon And as sales of the Switch will testify, graphics do not mean much to the mass market.

Most games built for the Series X and PS5 still have stupid amounts of pop-in, texture filtering and model rendering as you move around the environment.

If devs aimed for a 1080p30 on the Series S within its limitations and then ‘ported’ it to run at better frame rates on the bigger consoles these sort of things wouldn’t be an issue.

And before anybody claims it would make games look worse, they got the PS4 to run Forbidden West and it looked utterly gorgeous. The Series S is a lot beefier than the PS4.

It’s not really ‘Microsoft IP’ is it like Halo or Gears. We’re talking about a 1990’s PlayStation mascot they recently acquired.

@SuntannedDuck2 I’ll admit I prefer unorthodox control methods. I normally map LB to jump so I can leap around in shooters without taking my hands off the sticks.

It’s nice that Konami and Namco remember the Xbox exists.

But come on Capcom, where the heck is that fighting collection? I need some Power Stone on my Xbox.

How is clicking the right stick melee or interact?! Who came up with that one?

It’s 2024 and I’m sick of developers forcing their control schemes on us. Every single platform holder should mandate that every game must have completely rebindable keys AND not have one button do several functions as to mess up custom controls. I’m looking at you, AC Valhalla.

And no, doing it at a system level doesn’t count. On Xbox you can’t switch the triggers for face buttons.

Are these the only two options in Outlaws? How is crouch not R3?!?

This is great news! I love the Arcade version enough that I might buy the drum controller…..

@Kobeandodom What about hardware? Hundreds of Android handsets all run the same OS and play the exact same games. There are dozens of PC vendors whose machines have the same relative hardware under the hood.

If there were no platform exclusivity people would still buy the hardware because it did something different to the PlayStation; it’s just they’d never have to worry about isolating themselves from their friends to play online.

Some people see this as dilution of the brand but honestly I love playing Sea of Thieves with my PS5 owning friends and I’d love to do the same with Forza Horizon and Halo.

If you need exclusive titles to somehow justify to yourself the existence of your console, you need to ask why you even play videogames. It’s not the playground of 1992 anymore; the collapse of the Dreamcast worked wonders for my GameCube library.

If Microsoft can get Valve to bring Steam to the Xbox then it becomes the perfect platform to simplify play of PC titles. You’d also be able to play Sony’s PC ports too, benefiting everybody.

Number 6 please!

@PsBoxSwitchOwner The thing is what vision?

The Series X launched with no first party exclusives. Zero. If somebody bought into some sort of vision it was a combination of a laudable attempt to maintain access to past purchases, the ability to play 3rd party games in 4K and being duped into perpetually renting games for all eternity instead of owning anything.

What difference does it make if Microsoft port their big games to the PS5? Looking at the comments above you’d think it was a life or death situation or something.

The value of your gaming platform is not in its exclusive titles; these aren’t the playground days of Sega vs Nintendo anymore. The value is in what it offers you personally.

Would your lives truly be any worse if Forza Horizon 5 or Halo Infinite came out on PlayStation?

@AccessibleDaydream The asterisk mentioned only being able to run Sonic 2 at those speeds.

All the power of modern consoles and we still have pop-in. Have graphics really moved on since the PS1 or are game worlds just too bloody big?

Not doomed by any stretch, but we are in a recession-like environment where customers are thriftier than ever.

In this market you have the market leader having been around for 7 years and the competitors either costing $400 or people thinking the $249 option is underpowered.

Microsoft need to spend some money on marketing and get the message out there that the Series S is in no way an inferior option. If there was a $249 1080p PS5 it would be flying off the shelves.

We had it on the Xbox 360. It’s really not an issue.

Imagine Modern Warfare 3, the worst CoD game being your game of July 😂

Call of Duty 4 can still be played online. The PC lobbies are stacked!

@Nintendo4Sonic I’ve played most of them. MW3 is the worst. It’s like Activision let their intern level designer, the kid with a set square and a ruler become the director.

I just wish they’d port the NXE over to the Series S/X. The 360 dash was fantastic.

This one is dead easy:

• Don’t install Modern Warfare 3
• Actually install a decent FPS. Perhaps Halo Infinite, Doom or Call of Duty 4.

Sony and Microsoft don’t want to make the same mistake twice and underestimate Nintendo. Do they lose software sales to them? Perhaps not but if I have £50 to spend on a new Switch game or a new Xbox one I’m going to buy the one I can play on my lunch break.

I do wonder if they’ll both chill with the spec beefing a bit and consolidate their software tools so we can get 1080p60 as a minimum across the board? There is lots of room for innovation that doesn’t require faster processors.

@Rodimusprime13 Despite it’s high quality this was a show designed to get new young people interested in Trek and it had the opposite effect and appealed more to nostalgia.

Forza Horizon 1
Fable 2
Geometry Wars

It took me 2 seconds to answer that

The little time I have to play games makes Game Pass pointless. It’s cheaper to wait until a game is on sale, buy it (to keep) and then play it for the next 3 months.

I wish they’d port the Xbox 360 dash to the Series and bin the current one.

@nomither6 With the rising costs of development it won’t end any time soon

@themightyant Amen. I have one just because the other 2 4K consoles are hideously large and would look ugly under my TV.

I’ve yet to play a Series S game that looked or played terribly and I’ve been through every major 1st party title. Forza 5 and Ghostwire looked lovely.

The Xbox platform has always had a gaping hole in it where family games are concerned. Parents generally buy Nintendo or PlayStation platforms to play games with their kids, although there will be exceptions.

Build it and they will come I suppose but there isn’t really a market there. They’ll sell 10x the copies on Switch they would on Xbox sadly.

Counterpoint: it’s endless grindy campaign, unholy squashed Map and loot box mechanics for every. Damned. unlockable. makes it the worst in the series.

5 writers a lot of the wrongs with an avatar creator, the ability to buy clothes and a really good campaign.

@awp69 It’s not just you! We found it a bit dull as well. The Colorado map was much better.

A great game let down by 4 daft things:

• An actual ending to the festival campaign which was arguably the worst in the series.
• A way to unlock avatar items outside of the bloody wheel spins. It was so frustrating having to grind the game for loot boxes just to try and get the shirt or trousers you wanted. There is a running joke with my kids that everything I ever got in that game was some sort of garish pink sparkly item.
• A character creator. The pre-designed avatars represented a very narrow set of players. There was no ginger/redhead options. No east-Asian male or subcontinent female. No non-blonde white guy or girl options. I’m all for diversity but it’s either all or nothing. Whoever signed off on them all should have been fired. How is Mr. Mosby going to make himself?
• A silly map that attempted to squash everything between Edinburgh and the Cotswolds into 5 square miles. They should have set the whole thing in the Lake District instead, a nice facsimile of everything between Carlisle and Barrow-in-Furnace, the M6 to the Irish Sea. They could then have done a Manx TT DLC with motorbikes!

Oh, and mixing the Lego cars into the regular map was dumb.

Apart from this it was an ok game but I’d say it’s easily the low-point of the entire Horizon series.

Knothole Island was a hoot

Not that I’m bothered because none of those games have any appeal to me personally but I think they’ll be drip feeding them in over several months rather than dropping them all at once.

@Lup ^^This

What’s the point in Fable if you can’t create your own narrative? That was half the fun of the Fable 2 and what still sets it apart from more modern RPGs.

Don’t bother. The driving mechanics are strangely ‘gravelly’ and the festival shtick comes off as a bit try-hard.

At the end of the day don’t modders deserve to get paid?

My only complaint is that I don’t really like Gears of War. I would have loved to see something Forza Horizon related. They did naff all for the 10th anniversary back in 2022 and FH5 is getting a bit long in the tooth. Even a rerelease of 1-3 so that we can actually buy and play them would have been ok.

@LocalPenguin It was a throwback because just like the original title it took Dom 5 minutes to kill one enemy 😉

@NEStalgia If they can make it run a miniaturised version of the Xbox One chipset then it has 100% backwards compatibility with your entire Xbox library without streaming. I’d happily play a portable with Fable 2 and Forza Horizon 1!

I love how some of the tweets think there is an actual first party title called ‘Shadow Drop’ on the way. It’s kind of sweet.

If Witcher 3 can run on the Switch and somebody can program bacteria to display Doom then the barrier isn’t the Series S; it’s the ingenuity of programmers.

The PC market is great but being able to pass the spec ceiling costs onto gamers has made developers lazy. What happened to the stories of devs reusing raw code to create static and save a few Kb of RAM or the Ocarina of Time sky cube illusion?

Given the state of their last few games and patches together with Microsoft’s axe wielding they probably need it.

@CutchuSlow Stereo is fine. Were talking about some light incidental music, the directional voices and speech here not John Williams.

Definitely recommended. I would love to play* it at the cinema with the full Dolby experience.

*I say ‘play’ because of the actually gameplay bits the combat is tense but too frequent and the puzzles a chore. Had they have gone with a Dear Esther/Firewatch/Rapture-style linear storytelling experience interspersed with the odd tense boss battle I think it would have been a much better experience. Putting the combat on auto does help.

As a piece of interactive art it’s unparalleled. The sound design is wonderful and it’s very pretty in a bleak sort of way (but not as nice to look at as Forbidden West) The 1-1 fights are intense.

But the puzzles don’t add anything to the experience and after 7 years of development you’d think they could have added a bit of facial variety to the enemies. Remove the combat (which you can automate) and you have a great short film.

And for some reason they forgot to add in a setting to flip the y-axis which is just dumb.

I think a 7/10 is about right. I think it has more in common with games like Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture, two games I really loved which I know are not everyone’s cup of tea.