RadioHedgeFund

It's as Xbox has been for the last decade: nothing earthshattering but plenty to keep a variety of gamers happy.

@alex123 I must admit I do miss the old AC games. I recently went back to finish Unity and it has aged remarkably well. The Paris backdrop is gorgeous and the combat and free running are well executed. I also didn't find any bugs!

I think my favourite AC combat system is AC3. Although you have regenerating health there is no way to upgrade it meaning you have no choice but to get better as a player. The endless guards if you set off an alarm encourages stealth-based gameplay. Hiding in the trees and ambushing patrols of British soldiers never gets old.

@XxEvilAshxX Yes, because if you are in combat with anyone other than a forced boss in an AC game you have already failed. Valhall brought back the 1-hit-kills allowing you to, if you were good enough, go exploring the high-level areas without fear of being unable to actually kill anything.

Origins, whilst a great game, introduced the terrible level gating that plagued Odyssey after it meaning you had to grind away at sidequests to progress in the story. This is something that should always be optional in any RPG.

Valhalla's instant kills alleviated this issue somewhat and let you do high-level quests.

Something that seems to have passed everyone by is this year (2022) is the 10th anniversary of the first Forza Horizon title. Surely something has to be on the cards for that beyond some donuts?

I'd put money on the 1st DLC map for FH5 being the Colorado Map from FH1 completely rebuilt with 4K testures and more off-road sections (like the golf course, but expanded) together with a bunch of anniversary events. To go with this would be a return of the cast of racers from the original as well.

@Dezzy70 Right? Perfect Dark did the exact same thing by having the extra objectives on harder difficulties.

@Dezzy70 I'd be amazed if it wasn't at least on the level of Perfect Dark which is a great update.

He's not wrong. Halo Infinite and Horizon 5 were both great titles but they have both been created as a grind to keep the subs rolling in. Come for the fresh meat, stay for the old favourites.

I'd imagine Sony are racing to get a smaller digital PS5 to market, however.

Microsoft can continue to support the Xbox One via game streaming. I can play Fortnite on a ping between 0-10 on my WiFi in a web browser and other games with no perceptible lag.

The other thing about Gamepass is if a player gets used to having the game around and then it goes, they are likely to purchase it at full price.

Whilst it is unlikely Halo Infinite or Sea of Thieves will ever disappear, licencing issues prevent Forza Horizon 4/5 staying around forever so you buy a copy to make sure you can still play it like I did with the first 3.

3rd party titles are not on there perpetually and will eventually migrate to other platforms or just continue being sold.

In many ways the Xbox One was a bit of a downgrade from the 360. Its more the little things I miss, like the segmented controller lights letting you know which player was which. I still think it has the best OS of any console as well.

@Clankylad I certainly would.

Also a game that rhymes with Sable: Fable 2! I know it's not quite open world because the game loads between it's large areas but then again so does Witcher 3.

F2 is actually an incredibly deep RPG if you play it that way because you can play it however you want. Want to live the life of a farmer or woodcutter? Buy a house and start a family? Want to be the King? Capture peasents for your dark cult? Shag as many NPCs as possible? Just want to eat lots of pies and get really fat? All possible in Fable 2.

Crucially unlike many RPGs there is no gameplay advantage for many of these paths and much of them require imagination as much as gameplay.

I am sure there will be big suprises in strore but one thing that seems to have skipped by is this year is the 10th Anniversary of Forza Horizon and we are due whatever 2 DLC packs Playground are working on.

Rather than add-ons for Mexico (which is already pretty exhaustive) could we get a fully remastered version of the Colorado map from FH1 as an extension of the festival from FH5 with additional features like being able to go off-road?

To paraphrase Indiana Jones, I would donate this to a gaming museum.

The first game was a Star Wars take on Metroid. If they've somehow made a Star Wars take on Breath of the Wild, well that would be awesome!

This delay will have been calculated months ago and there will have been measures to either pull some games forward or pull out the chequebook and sign up some 3rd party timed exclusives to fill the gap.

Makes me look forward to the June showcase even more. Its nice Microsoft remembers the importance of gamer christmas (ie the E3 slot)

In many ways he is correct. Microsoft's 1st party gamepass releases are all designed around the idea of long-term engagement via service-type updates and 'seasons'. Halo Infinite's campaign was fun but you stick around for the multiplayer; Sea of Thieves continues to evolve; Forza Horizon is full of weekly playlist rotations and literal season changes. This is all to facilitate continued subscriptions.

This doesn't make them bad games. I certainly enjoy them all! But for PlayStation gamers who have been on-top for the last generation because Sony concentrated on single-player adventure games and weird curio titles it would come as a shock to see that business model changed.

@Grumblevolcano I assume we are talking about L*stprophets?

Addendum: it's the 10th anniversary this year. Maybe it's getting a rerelease for that?

Personally I've been hoping Playground plan on completely remastering the map and offering it as DLC for FH5.

@Tasuki Still my favourite in the series. Playground nailed the whole fictional festival schtick so well the first time around each entry since had watered down the concept (although 5 did resurrect the idea somewhat)

Obviously the rival NPCs are a big part of this but I find its the little details like them being name checked by the DJs, the races all having proper little outposts instead of just floating videogamey text over a track, the way the festival is going on around the garages when selecting cars and such.

And oh how beautiful Colorado is in its late summer/early fall look. FH1 is still a looker to this day and had the best sunrises and sunsets this side of Horizon Zero Dawn. In FH5 you can barely tell the night has fallen.

The Series S was a stroke of genius and its good to see Microsoft providing healthy competition again after a generation that amounted to bad publicity, cancelled projects, studio closures and the only positives really being a backwards compatibility program born of desperation.

Q: What do fans want then?

It can't be easy to maintain the purity of Halo's combat whilst trying to keep it interesting as a live service sort of title.

Fair use doesn't equate to making money off the back of someone elses work. All AJ needs to do is demonetise his video and there is no problem.

At this point an offline single player title would be groundbreaking for Xbox.

N64 Perfect Dark is still the best FPS ever made.

It's rammed full of so many ideas is hard to know where to start praising the game.

In many ways he is right. Microsoft is seeking ways to maintain engagement and that all important monthly sub and games like Forza Horizon 5 and Halo Infinite have slid further into F2P mechanics, 'seasons', playlist rotations and a grind to keep the interest of the player over the long-term. Rare's Everwilds originally sounded great but it looks like its going for the Sea of Thieves Template and I genuinely fear for what Playground will do with Fable.

But this is the current state of play. Microsoft have been buying up studios to build specifically story-driven single player games because this was Sony's key strength during the PS4-era. On the other hand Sony want more service-style titles and have been closing the studios that built their more unique titles (eg Studio Japan)

@FullbringIchigo The OG Xbox emulator ran on the 360 hardware which is emulated properly by the Series X so this should be possible.

Making a new Perfect Dark isn’t actually that hard because the original was so far ahead of its time. They could pilfer loads of ideas from the N64, polish them for modern consoles and it would still be the most innovative FPS on the market.

As an example they could use the variable difficulty objectives where rather than making the AI harder on tougher modes it also gives you more objectives to achieve. The single player should double down on the spy schtick, perhaps taking a cue from Hitman and having larger levels where Joanna has to sneak in and achieve her objectives around some sort of event.

A 10th anniversary recreation of the original Colorado map with the same layout but better graphics, the 2012 soundtrack brought back and the Revenge of Darius Flynt.

At some point Microsoft will launch a £99 streaming stick bundled with a controller and 3 months of Gamepass. Its probably that.

@Quaali The series X doesn't play Super Monkey Ball 2, JSRF, PGR3, Rez, Vandal Hearts: The Great War, Armoured Core, Sega GT, TF: War for/Fall of Cybertron, Lego LOTR, Otogi, or Dino Crisis 3.

You'd probably have been better off suggesting Forza Horizon 2 which is literally based off of the idea of the original 'grand tourer'. The series has never been better tearing italian sportscars right down the Cote De Azure.

FH4 is arguably the worst game in the series despite its rather excellent recreation of the Lake District, Mr. Whippy signs and all. The actual Horizon Festival is largely none existant and much of the content is locked away behind grinding the same races over and over or the bloody wheelspins.

FH5 is marginally better with a better focus on the actual festival side of things but its still ridden with far too many F2P mechanics and has jumped the shark somewhat.

FH3 had the best balance of Festival/Racing/Nuts side events.

The original still has the best depiction of the actual Horizon Festival and sunsets that rival Horizon Zero Dawn in beauty, all on the old Xbox 360.

Why don’t Microsoft spend a few bob porting those older games to iOS and Android? It would be fairly easy and I’m sure there are more people than me that miss the Windows Phone version of Hexic. They could still have all the achievements in them too.

Ergonomically it’s not better. It works well enough for the y-axis aiming but for the x-axis twisting your controller from side to side is uncomfortable.

Boredom.

Halo is at this point as fine tuned as a professional football match but one can only watch or play this sort of way for a finite amount of time.

It lacks the inherent chaos of having a kick around with your mates down the park where you can make up your own modified versions and its just a laugh. The closest gaming has to this is probably Fortnite.

There is no way Microsoft will get away with any more acquisitions until the Activision deal passes regulators and that will take 18 months.

This gives Sony time to react. Bungie was on the cards 6 months ago and likely not a reaction to MS/AB but then again Sony probably caught wind of Microsoft shopping for Activision 6 months ago.

Sony's hand is strengthened by Japanese competition laws preventing foreign takeovers. Square Enix would be a sure bet at this point as Final Fantasy may as well be a PlayStation exclusive and nobody ever brought and Xbox console for its JRPG's lol

Nintendo are notoriously quiet on this sort of thing but might take the opportunity to buy a few developers they work closely with. I could see them going after Platinum Games for example.

If Sammy use this as an excuse to offload Sega it would be between Sony and Nintendo unless another company like Capcom or Namco wanted to expand.

The next game needs a soft reboot IMO. 5 was a big improvement on the grind fest of 4 but still but the story mode still wasn’t as good as 1, the urban environments not a patch on 2 and the biomes not as good as 3. The seasons are frankly a complete waste of time in this game whereas they were the only thing keeping 4 interesting.

I’d like a ‘grassroots’ return of the Horizon Festival proper. No more daft stuff like parachuting out of planes but a little more realistic like 1. Instead of videogamey floating writing can we get the small outposts for races dotting the map? The first game absolutely nailed the idea of the fictional festival.

With that in mind a trip to Japan would be ace. Bring back the variable weather from number 2, ditch the seasons and make the day/night cycle longer. Japan is always associated with a cool night neon aesthetic so make that part of the game with unofficial street races happening after hours. Rather than a shrunken down version of the whole country just try to build a 1:50 replica of Hokkaido in the late summer.

Plot-wise I would make it a more rag-tag affair. Maybe the Horizon Festival went too big and jumped the shark (which 5 has done) and so a bunch of enthusiasts have rebooted the festival to make it more about the racing. Tone down the off-road sections so the map becomes learnable again, again a little like 2.

PlayStation fan over here and I think that this move has been misread. At first glance it looks like big franchise grab. But Phil’s comments suggest that this was a protectionist strategy to keep those franchises out of the hands of an outside player like Google or Amazon.

Not that I play it but PlayStation is the biggest money spinner for Call of Duty (and, as an aside other 3rd party titles like Fortnite) and Microsoft would be dumb to throw all that money away. It is likely we will continue to see Activision games continued to be released on those platforms.

Phil wants to maintain the Xbox/PlayStation/Nintendo status quo and knows the damage a company like Meta or Amazon would do to the marketplace if they just brought up a company like Activision and locked all those games behind a paywall.

It’s not like there has been a popular game out for the last 3 years with a Battle Pass mechanic they could have just copied wholesale from.

Counterpoint: Microsoft's acquisition of Activision was a protectionist move.

In recent interviews Phil Spencer has become wary of outside companies like Amazon, Google and Netflix moving in on the games industry.

Microsoft brought Activision with the goal of continuing to support Nintendo and Sony so it can maintain the current status quo. In effect it sees itself as the keeper of the Games Industry's integrity to outside companies that might see videogames as a 'feature' rather than a whole thing by itself.

Microsoft have been making lateral moves of late, publishing its own games on Nintendo and Sony platforms as well as pushing companies like Epic and Bungie to support cross-play between console platforms.

This may be the larger play to make sure nobody outside Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo tries to upend things or devalue gaming.

@ralphdibny MECHWARRIOR!

Why continue to pump resources into MCC when they could just port all the old maps to Infinite and call it a day?

@Banjo- Were there no chip shortage and they found a way around scalpers it is likely shops would still be struggling to keep the PS5 in stock alongside the Xbox consoles.

And make no mistake Sony will have their engineers working around the clock looking at how to slim down the PS5 or maybe offer a 1080p version but the chip shortage will be putting them from putting it to market.

Gamepass is great value of you play a lot of games but for people like me who only play 2-3 games a year due to time commitments it is a liability to perpetually rent a title for £11 a month when it is likely I can get it in a sale for £30 (and if it's a title you really like you end up buying it anyway when it's gamepass time ends)

I do wonder with FH5. Is it popular because it is really good or because the Xbox is so starved of exclusives?

FH5 is better than 4 but not a patch on the first 3. At 8/10 game at best which is certainly fun but does lack a certain something.

It was only over when Microsoft backtracked. I wanted theat all-singing, all-dancing media centre Xbox One together with a raft of 1st party exclusives.

What I eventually got was a VCR that played 360 games supported by a company that had shut down all its good studios.

@Kienda I appreciate it when Ubisoft put in the ability to turn off the blood in Assassin's Creed!

Family games have long been neglected by the industry at large and it is telling that most of the games on this list are oooold.

Family titles have always been a weak point for Microsoft, particularly when Sony gets it so right. They launched the PS5 with Sackboy and Astrobot and followed it up with titles like Bugsnax. The Series X? Not so many.

The PS4 has a great selection of family titles too as well as the forgotten genre of party games. Playlink (using phones as controllers) was a genius idea for solving the issue of never having enough joypads knocking around.

If you don't have Hexic downloaded them what are you doing?

After many years as an Xbox gamer I got a PS4 😅

1. It's a bit of a laugh. Some people need to lighten their mood.

2. It's difficult for a lot of gamers to hear but most people play Fortnite because it's a really a fun game with a nice adventuring aspect and an utterly chaotic gameplay loop.

3. Seriously, it's a laugh.