RadioHedgeFund

I can see their point. 343 didn’t go too daft but the idea of custom skins in Halo just didn’t sit right.

The problem is that maintaining an ongoing shooter, even server costs isn’t cheap. The upfront cost is one thing but skins do drive engagement and revenue.

Perhaps in the case of Call of Duty they should stick to military-themed licences too. I know they’ve done Rambo in the past; there are loads of other movies and franchises they could include without changing the spirit of the game.

The best game on the Xbox platform of course: Geometry Wars!

Good bloody riddance! The 360 Avatars still look a lot better than the ugly new ones anyway.

Not going to lie: the ability to stream FFXIV without having to download updates on any device is a GAME CHANGER

An easy 10/10. Outside of the bonkers story the game is incredibly chill with a lovely melancholy soundtrack as you traverse the Spartan landscape.

Big single player open world titles were what separated the PS4 from the Xbox One. It’s finally nice to be able to play one of them.

(If Microsoft are reading this a deal with Sony to port their PC titles to Xbox in return for some big tier Xbox games like Halo and Forza would be most welcome)

Given the Series S is more powerful than a PS4 you’d expect it to be better. I’ve been playing it on the XSS and performance has been brilliant. It’s a very welcome game in the single player open world genre, an area the Xbox has been lacking in for some time.

I know Sony didn’t publish it but I wonder if Microsoft could do some sort of ‘swapsies’ with Sony for a few older titles. I’m sure it wouldn’t hurt either of their bottom lines if for example you could get Horizon Zero Dawn on Xbox and Forza Horizon 4 on PS5

I can go either way. I dislike intensely detailed ones because I have to spend hours perfecting it. Give me a nice simple one like Destiny or Phantasy Star Online any day.

It's a difficult one. My favourite time in any consoles life is the first year on the market, where Devs are trying to see what works. The Series X for all its strengths took an entire year to offer any sort of compelling exclusive title. There wasn't really much I couldn't download or stream on the Xbox One.

The launch of Starfield sticks in my mind. Id never really played a Bethesda game before and I found the open ended roleplay to be incredibly compelling.

This is brilliant news! The Xbox has been lacking in the 'single player open world' category for some time and I never finished it on Playstation

I could never get into Gears of War. After the quick-play firefights of Halo I found having to sit in cover against samey bullet sponge enemies to be incredibly dull. I've tried again since but to no avail.

All the imaginative weapons that Perfect Dark 64 still has tucked away to rip off and the best they could come up with was an SMG?

My main question relates to the dialogue. I don't mind branching quest conversations but I recall getting fed up with the original game because every NPC seemed to also have them, taking 10 minutes to extract (say) the location of the local tavern when in an older FF game it would have been one line of repeated speech.

There seems to be more than a few fogged up rose tinted glasses with this one. I'm not trying to beef on anyone's favourite game but it seems like the only people calling for a rerelease of this were the original creators and upper members of Gen Z who played it as small children.

This game did not review well on launch and is objectively pretty terrible. We nicknamed it 'Crock of ****' at school for a reason!

I can't help but feel a 50v50 mode of Spartans Vs Covenant would have been a good laugh.

@Jenkinss You should try number 4. It perfectly nails what it's like to be 17, but for middle aged dudes like us who have nostalgia for that time. The plot deals with some very adult themes including sexuality and gender identity. I know these might make some people groan in 2024 but this was a game that came out in 2008 making it incredibly forward thinking.

It sounds great but when did PureXbox hire Eddie from Friends?

Now can we finally get some ports of old Windows Phone titles that have been lost to the ether? Id quite happily like Hexic and Spartan Assault back please with full achievement support.

They need to try a new structure. I enjoyed Halo 5 but it was too close to Destiny. Infinite was fun but a little too farcry. The grappling hook was brilliant though.

I don't think an open world really works for Halo. Id love to see them tackle the Metroidvania genre. Metroid Prime x Halo 2

Take the template and battle system of Tales of Symphonia/Hesperia. Add in different bending skill trees (eg Earth to Metal or Lava). Tell the story of a previous Avatar and their companions eg Avatar Salai, the earth Avatar before Kyoshi.

Here’s hoping for some square announcements

@LastSaneManOnEarth You know deep down that isn’t true. I enjoyed Starfield but you surely can’t be that blind to its faults? I’m not trying to be insulting here, just realistic.

Terrible main plot. Barren procedural planets. Repetitive space combat. Too many nonsensical ammo types. Dismal space magic ‘puzzle’ on repeat. Footslogging over miles. The same deserted outpost on every planet. Etc etc.

It’s a fun space role playing game with a lot to love but at launch at least it was far from perfect. 7/10 tops.

And whilst we’re here there is no such thing as a ‘real’ video game. People who play titles like Fortnite and FIFA are as much gamers as enthusiasts like yourself or the commuter on the bus playing Candy Crush. There is room
In the industry for all sorts of players, friend. Hobbyists or not, if people enjoy a game then that’s all that matters. Just because you don’t enjoy something doesn’t make it invalid.

Remember those mobile games people despise so much are no different to the simple arcade titles of the 1970’s. They all featured a 25c paywall once all your lives were up.

@KvallyX I really don’t mean to sound sarcastic here but surely you must be aware of the furore over Starfield? I enjoyed the game but nobody would describe it as Bethesdas finest hour.

The expectation is it’s better than Starfield.

That’s a pretty low bar to start from!

(And I like Starfield)

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.