carlos82

It sounds like the increased Xbox sales were simply to get early access but I can't say I'm surprised it hasn't set the world alight. Without multiplayer, Halo's campaign is very plodding by today's standards (and not that interesting compared to many of the time), I played for a couple of hours to get that hit of nostalgia but have already uninstalled it. I'd much rather play the likes of Doom, Duke 3D, Goldeneye, Quake amd Half-Life from back then

I've tried it on my Samsung TV and its passable for quickly playing a game you don't have installed or you don't have other means to play but still inconsistent for me. I will say that Geforce Now utterly blows Xcloud away for streaming quality and as you can link your Xbox account, is often the better option, if more expensive

For £8 I'll give it a go and my son just got excited saying its Caylus's game. It looks fun

@TheGameThrifter he's obviously talking about the Pro but base PS5 isn't significantly weaker than Series X at all, its basically at the point where there is no noticable difference between the 2 consoles

Breaking news, hardware based upscaling provides better results and if you have a high end PC, you can very easily blow the Pro away anyway. Plus in a year or so, Helix is apparently more powerful than the PS6, so it'll swing back but most people don't care.

Had a quick go earlier on my Xbox Ally X and it runs notably worse than Doom The Dark Ages did but is still playable, so I'll wait until I get home to try it on the Series X. I suspect I probably won't finish it as I can't stand the library level and really can't be bothered to play through that stage again but it'll be nice to play through the opening and maybe it'll hold my attention all the way through, we'll see

I'm thinking about the deluxe edition of Sniper Elite 5 for £24, I'm utterly addicted to Sniper Elite Resistance at the moment, so more of the same is exactly what I want

Got to love modern technology. Fortunately my Dreamcast works just fine, so I'll play some Skies of Arcadia

I've never been a big Assassin's Creed fan but absolutely love Bkack Flag as its primarily a pirate game and I appreciate the extra content here, as well as the removal of the modern day stuff. Im only about 20 hours in so far as Sniper Elite Resistance has taken over my gaming recently

I really wish it wasn't open world, Burnout Paradise is by far the weakest entry because of it being open world

I do feel consoles have passed their peak and sales will trend downwards from now on. Prices are an obvious factor, then you have the huge gaps between releases of many popular IP, their advantages over PC are ever diminishing, in terms of ease of use and physical games.

Then finally, the fact they aren't collectively growing their audience, with many kids today being content with the likes of Roblox

Absolutely not, I'm more than happy to wait 5 days after it's real release date to play what is a just a 1 to 1 remake of a 25 year old game. If it wasn't on Gamepass, I wouldn't be playing it at all

Fallout 5 will be a long way out but I hope those remasters aren't too far away. I've been looking to replay New Vegas again but I'll wait for the tine being

I've felt for a long time that both Helix and PS6 will sell significantly less than their predecessors and the current proces have only cemented that. Gaming needs a rethink and not push blindly into ever increasing specs which let's be honest, have no impact on our enjoyment of games anymore

I really like it as a pirate game, I was never a big Assassin's Creed fan but I really enjoyed Black and am loving the remake so far, especially as they've seemingly removed all of that boring nonsense from the present day

@themightyant yeah, Gamepass only makes sense on PC as an extension to console gaming, I wouldn't use it or the Xbox App if I were exclusively PC.

Speaking of the Xbox App, I had an issue the other day where Resident Evil Village absolutely refused to acknowledge the existence of its dlc, no error codes, no clue as to what to do. Turns out the issue was I had more then 10 windows devices registered to my account and they never remove them, even when you resetthe PC. So I had to dig into my account to deactivate decades old laptops and then the dlc was magically recognised

I've been playing it this morning and it might be my imagination but it looked a bit sharper on my Series X. In the couple of hours I played it run flawlessly and I've played a bit on my Xbox Ally X and it had broadly similar performance to the main campaign.

The only weirdness I had was that the spear controls weren't mapped, so I had to reset them to default, other than that, I love the new gameplay and momentum with the spear

Come on now, 1 billion people do not play Xbox games, you're just counting the same people each time they play. There's about 80 million Xbox One's and Series consoles, with a lot sat in 2nd hand shops or not in use at all. Their PC market is much smaller and propped up by Steam and even counting Candy Crush or whatever f2p mobile game to massage the numbers further, you still won't get close to a billion and they'll never achieve that on a daily basis

One of the best engines in gaming, coupled with 3 excellent games and they sack half of the staff and likely just stick to UE5. Hopefully those incredibly talented people find work and for gamers we'll have to get used to the unoptimised mess that is UE5

@themightyant yeah I've just seen that sadly

@NeoRatt @themightyant speaking of Halo, it blows my mind they haven't moved it onto id tech. Why even use UE5 for an fps when they have arguably the best fps game engine in house already?

This is just one of the many things which show how mismanaged Xbox is as a whole

No wonder they got rid of Phil Spencer, it sounds like he was mismanaging Xbox into the ground and hoping Gamepass would grow enough to paper over it

I was expecting this to be a lot worse, not in terms of job numbers as that is still terrible but it does sound like the business is hugely inefficient with it's staff/management structure. At least no studios have been closed and have the opportunity to carry on, whether that be independently or under new ownership.

As for Asha, this does seem like the first time in years that the person in charge has a plan moving forward and is going to be making people accountable within Xbox.

EDIT: It turns out it is a LOT worse

Doom The Dark Ages, I got more than halfway through it at launch but stopped for some reason. So finishing it off before next week's dlc comes, which is looking excellent

I keep forgetting about them but have made more of an effort in the last couple of months and have about 12,000 now. Should have a nice little discount for GTAVI by the time it releases

Great to see it having a disc, though also a shame that they never moved beyond the Xbox One limitation of 50GB discs

I am tempted by the Evercade Nexus and it'll be nice to have a console supporting physical games (funny to think this could be Banjo's last ever physical release), plus I wouldn't really want to play a 3D platformer with a dpad.

I need to go back and finish the main game because the trailer for this looked great and I am oddly excited about the classic levels which should look amazing with RT

Xbox 100% were already going in this direction, at least Playstation took the bullet for them this time. That said, both as digital only, I'd say Helix is infinitely more appealing because of Xbox play anywhere, so you're not locked into their hardware

This makes perfect sense and I'd love for all of these games to be playable on PC. With PS6 confirmed as digital only and Helix likely to be the same, Xbox being play anywhere makes Helix way more attractive than the now completely walled garden of Playstation

@Balaam_ when I say it's the first thing I look for, it's as a means to choose which platform I'll be buying a game for after I've already decided I want to play it. So Crazy Taxi is play anywhere, so I'll get it for Xbox, Re Requiem wasn't so I picked it up on Steam and GTA VI is only on console so I'm buying it on Xbox anyway

I do really like the feature and it is a major selling point for me now and the first thing I look for as I bounce between playing on Series X and the Xbox Ally X. The vast majority of my existing library isn't supported but It's certainly getting better with newer releases. Games like Crazy Taxi I'll be getting on Xbox instead of Steam due to this and FFVII Revelations, I just wish Capcom didn't take years to add Resident Evil games to it.

As much as I like my Xbox, you'd be crazy to pay those prices over the competition as they stand. At this point you may as well wait until the PS6 or Helix anyway, even if they're likely to be over £1000, at least there is a huge jump in performance

Gaming is f****d for the foreseeable future. Large studios are regularly cutting staff, hardware is becoming unaffordable, which in turn means less people buying them and games etc, etc. The term ever decreasing circles comes to mind

Meanwhile in the real world, EA are the least creative major publisher in the world. A long time ago, I played many of their games but these days I pay absolutely no attention to them and can't even remember the last game I played from them

Steam machine has 2 disadvantages price wise to Helix. 1st, they can't get contracts for RAM and merely have to buy stock on a month to month basis and secondly, Valve can't/won't subsidise hardware in anyway.

Memory will still be expensive gor Microsoft but you'd expect that they can get contracts for it and will be buying chips in far higher quantities.

I'd expect it to be perhaps inbetween the 2 Steam Machine prices but as a price per performance prospect, it'll blow it away. What will be interesting is what PC functionality it has

@themightyant I'd still say it's relatively minor (i wish they'd have gone much further) and not something that's going to bridge an 8ms gap, though if you were close to 25 in the first place, then yeah. That said, I do feel games in general should have 40fps modes these days as most of us will have compatible displays now.

Then again as you said, maybe we're wide of the mark looking at a potential CPU bottleneck. Rockstar use a proprietary engine, RDR2 is pretty light on CPU usage on PC albeit with the caveat of it not having a whole traffic system.

Hopefully we find out one way or another soon

I fully expect this to be CPU limited, so 30fps on everything including the Pro as it has no real advantage in that department

This is one of the rare day one purchases for me, I absolutely loved Requiem and played the original Code Veronica back on Dreamcast but I do wish it didn't take years for Resident Evil games to become play anywhere

I couldn't care less about COD, so if it's cheaper because it isn't on there, then great. That said I'd much rather they got rid of Fortnite, EA and Ubisoft classics from it and whatever other perks there are. All I want from Gamepass are Xbox's own games (minus COD) and 3rd parties that I don’t need to install another launcher for on PC

No I won't be preordering it next week, are they going to run out of digital copies? I do want to play this but it's not at the top of my most wanted games and I need to see how close Ocarina of Time is to its release as that's my priority

At this point nobody believes a single thing that any Xbox executive says, that trust has long gone. They'd be better off not saying anything and just get on with whatever they're doing, you don't see Nintendo's bosses chatting with people on Twitter about their plans and even Playstation have largely shut up

@Tasuki this is why I was waiting to see what her actions were and not just celebrating her interacting with a handful of Xbox Twitter accounts

Is it less congested in February? In November you go up against just GTA and I know people bang on about it like it's the 2nd coming of Christ but as with all games, the majority of gamers don't play it. In February there is Tomb Raider and Persona 4 with Resident Evil a possibility and Final Fantasy VII potentially not far away either.

I feel all these developers trying to avoid GTA are putting themselves in a significantly worse position of going up against multiple games instead

It's a bit rich him talking about the lack of components when he's very much a cause of that problem, even to the extent of them having many AI components stockpile that they literally cannot use

“So, if you can’t do that, you may actually have a bunch of chips sitting in inventory that I can’t plug in. In fact, that is my problem today. It’s not a supply issue of chips; it’s actually the fact that I don’t have warm shells to plug into.”

Back to Xbox, it's going to be interesting to see where they are in even just 6 months from now and what those long term plans are going to look like

I can't even remember the last time I saw the boot up screen on my Xbox, I tend to turn it on before changing the input on my TV. This does look nice though

@Balaam_ I have the Xbox Ally X because its portable, so spending that money on a PC would have been pointless as that isn't what I want it for. This will look fine on it's own screen, I also regularly play FH6 on it, Resident Evil Requiem and now Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and have had a great experience with them all, then when I can, I'll play them on the TV with the Series X

I think the last FIFA game I played a lot was FIFA 99 on the N64 with Dennis Bergkamp on the box, after that Pro Evo was a much better game. My favourite FIFA is the first one on the Megadrive because you could push over an opponent by pressing B & C together and then run away from the referee because he couldn't book you until you stopped running 😆

@Banjo- yeah number 2 makes the most sense, no point continuing to release their own games on Steam when it's on their hardware, this is turn would help grow their own PC store which still misses out on many of the biggest games such as RE Requiem

The biggest surprise about Senua 3 isn't that its not exclusive but that it exists at all, I never got the impression that Hellblade 2 was particularly successful or popular.

I would certainly like to hear more about what their plans are for backwards compatibility though as there are still plenty of games unavailable