RadioHedgeFund

@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.

I fell right for Microsoft’s vision when I got my first Windows Phone 7 device. My little Avatar lived in my phone and my mobile gaming counted towards my profile. I bought a 360 a bit late in the day and never looked back. Games like Fable 2 and Forza Horizon 1 I replay at least once a year.

I stuck with the Xbox One because of backwards compatibility and the promise of new Fable and Forza. Horizon has gone on to become Microsoft’s tentpole franchise and they made a dumb mistake shuttering Lionhead.

I stuck with the Series S out of price, legacy purchase access and its physical dimensions. It’s a lovely little console with some great games.

@rustyduck It’s a human killing other humans.

Maybe they’ll finally get around to releasing Final Fantasy X on the iPhone!

If Xbox became Steam and suddenly every purchase I had made over the years was compatible with the PS5, Steamdeck or perhaps my iPhone, I’d be very happy.

I can see them quitting hardware because it’s a loss leader. Or rather a future Xbox console will just be a small PC made from off the shelf parts rather than some custom silicon.

To play devils advocate it may be that HiFi Rush just didn’t do very well at all from an engagement perspective.

$60bn for a match-3 mobile game and an FPS designed by an intern with a set square.

So… don’t bother? Warzone is F2P and nobody cares about the campaign. The older games are cheap as chips. Nobody is calling for COD on Game Pass and it’s not going to tempt over any PS5 owners.

And yet whoever made Starfield stays open

@Fiendish-Beaver I would happily buy a Switch-sized console that could play all my old Xbox 360 purchases. Fable 2 and Forza Horizon would make wonderful portable titles.

@Fiendish-Beaver Xbox could just become a PC you stick under your TV that happens to play games. Microsoft could then open it up to 3rd party storefronts like Steam, GOG and Epic.

If they did make it like a PC it would then be compatible with all Sony’s PC releases. There’s definitely a market there.

“Dammit, Microsoft: we want more something for nothing!”

Some sort of planetary vehicle and expanded ship combat. The mechanics are really good yet there isn’t enough of it!

A rejuvenated skill tree would be nice. Not having simple stuff like a large ship crew locked behind hundreds of hours of grinding would be better.