chesheer

Not that my answer qualifies for a weighed opinion, but I found it off-putting right from the character creation screen. I don't know who came with the idea of fungi faces, but it's gross. The fact that you can turn that abomination off with no consequences proves they knew it would be off-putting for some people and still built the whole game around it.
I deleted the game after 15 minutes and somewhat blame Game Pass for it. My 15 minutes came up in a stats of millions of players who joined the world of Avowed, but 15 underwhelming minutes death-sentenced the game for me because I didn't pay for it. It cost me nothing, I just downloaded it and gave it no second chances.
If I had to pay for it, I probably wouldn't and for me Avowed still would be another Obsidian game I didn't play. Now it's a game with disgusting mushroom faces I wouldn't poke with a ten feet stick.
That's a somewhat strange turn of events.

@SpecialT I probably would've bought 1Tb expansion cart too, but they were non-existent in my region back then.

I am totally disappointed in Game Pass. Right now I am subscribed for the lowest tier just to get multiplayer. Microsoft doesn't release anything worth playing for me and doesn't plan to. Except for E-Day maybe - even then better buy it than spend money on subscription. Third-party titles - again, better pay for one or two interesting titles on sales than spend ever increasing amount of money on subscription that contains crazy amount of games that I'm not interested in.
Game Pass Ultimate is a joke now. Dozens of perk that mean nothing to me. Why the hell I have to pay for Fortnite Crew if I'm not playing and not going to? Why do I have to pay for Cloud Gaming if I won't ever use it? Old Ubisoft games - I own them all anyway, they are dirt cheap on sales every next month. EA Play - yeah, call me when they release something worth playing.

I bought Series S on release along with 1Tb external HDD. Great combination. Used it for years. Totally resolved all the problems with free space for me. Also, it is worth mentioning that in the first years of Series S not a lot of games were released specifically for Series S or received upgrade, so I could run them right from HDD (no problems with loading speed at all).
Now I came to realization that I don't even need an HDD. 512Gb is totally enough for me. I never play more than one or two games. I rarely jump between games. I don't play a dozen of live service games simultaneously.
Also, Series S games finally started to use Xbox hardware compression and game sizes lowered considerably. You can get decent AAA game 30-40 Gb in size instead of 100-150 in the last years of XOne generation.

@Fiendish-Beaver That's a reasonable question. My gaming started in the '90s, so Atari 2600 titles were ancient even back then.
I think it's good to have them for game conservation, but I honestly doubt someone will actually PLAY them. Probably someone would download and run once just because why not, but PLAYING them for a considerable amount of time - I don't think so. Maybe one or two guys who have nostalgic memories of those games.

Having finished Death Stranding on PS4 several times (I'm a big fan of this game), I'm immensely disappointed in Director's Cut. I played it on Xbox, but that's beside the point.
Honestly, people who played DS for the first time in Director's Cut version received worse experience. Kojima turned this brilliant game into clown fest with strange quests and collaborations and numerous additions that make absolutely no sense and definitely had been added only to justify "Director's Cut" in the title.
Also, Director's Cut somehow broke standard Death Stranding on PS4 because since its release most porters turned into "Unknown". And Kojima Productions won't fix it. I am deeply disappointed in this developer since Director's Cut.
And now this game breaking bug (I didn't know about it) that took so much time to fix.

Hellblade 2 was such a massive disappointment after Hellblade 1. It wasn't a game really, it was a several hours long emotional violence.
But I guess they had no other choice than pitch Hellblade 3 to prevent studio shutdown.

Phil, for Chief's sake, just hug Sarah. What the hell are you doing with this hand? What a low "I don't have a Mile High Club achievement" type of vibe. She doesn't bite. Probably won't even sue you.

I'm sorry, but it seems that this article is deliberately or involuntarily misleading.
The subtitle says "Despite the price increase", so for a person who reads only titles and not the article itself it would seem that "over two million" consoles is actually quite a good result, that price increase didn't affect the sales at all contrary to popular belief.
But the article itself says: "Compared to 2024, this is said to be a -45.1% decrease on the previous figure of 4.79 million, but that's absolutely no surprise when you consider both systems have received quite significant price increases".
So the price increase actually heavily affected sales (among other reasons) and "over two millions" is not a good result at all. Twice less consoles sold is never a good result.

@dskatter I agree. I don't see a reason to boost hardware again. We're yet to see true capabilities of our hardware, PS5 or Xbox Series.

Ok, great to know I'm safe: no friends, no messages!

*Nintendo: digital articles are not counted. =)

Whatever you do at Xbox, stop doing that, you're doing it wrong.

Yeah, right. They say this literally every time. This exact phrase. They should probably ask Copilot to write something fresh.

@Scummbuddy Oh, my sweet summer child...

I'll give them $20 for Ultimate edition with all DLCs in a year or two (probably two). Borderlands can be fun, but it's the same game since 2009.

I'm not interested in Silksong personally, but seeing how EVERY storefront crashed — I'm proud of you people! That's the way to love games!

Cataclismo looks pretty cool, I don't have a PC to play it on, though.
Silksong, on the other hand, I don't care about.

That's good (and reasonable) news. So... wait a year or two and buy it physical for $9.99?
If there is a physical edition, that is.

That's a really difficult situation. I have both subscriptions, PS+Extra and GPU. I use neither of them. They add games on such an alarming pace I've just lost interest on what's being added or removed. Too many games, too many flashy icons in my library.
Truth being told, I'd rather play games that I already have for many years.
So, back to developers of Revenge on the Savage Planet, if not for Game Pass, would I play their game? Absolutely not, I'd be too busy playing what I already have. Would I play they game via Game Passe? Probably not, but there is a slight chance. Would it help them in any way? Well, I honestly don't know.

I don't believe they will release E-Day in 2025. 2026 or may be even 2027. They can even turn it to launch title of Xbox Series Next or whatever it will be called.

I think Starfield was abandoned even before Shattered Space, this sorry excuse for a story expansion. I had some hopes for the game. But having played Shattered Space... it has become clear to me they never cared about the game.
I can't comprehend why "Starfield fans" hope to see something big and interesting in the future. It's quite possible to enjoy the game as it is (I spent around 90 hours) or with mods, but at the same time it's clear Bethesda gave up a long time ago, probably, half way through the development cycle.

I already foresee billions of memes with Diana saying "Mhmm".
I think it's on par with Melina saying "I offer you an accord".

Long story short: "Yeah, we got nuthin'".
I mean, they had one hell of a year, let Youtube content creators some rest.

I don't know a thing about Splitgate 2, but man, isn't this soundtrack a breath of fresh air after all those "let's just add some tasteless and bleak rap over it".

It's not a gameplay, it's a tech demo. It doesn't represent the final game state in any way.
We all remember Cyberpunk 2077 running astonishingly great on base consoles.

Imagine them releasing another cool and successful game and later Microsoft buying them again.

@themightyant Exactly. No reason to be hyped about... basically, just a title.

XDefiant turned out to be much better than I thought. It felt like "no ***** CoD". But Ubisoft being Ubisoft... they just don't know how to make live service games.

We're almost at the end of a current generation, and new "big" titles are still being released on Xbox One and PS4!
This is amazing.

Thank you! I don't even like Metro, but hey, free meal is a free meal.

I'm definitely not interested in Doom. I dislike the atmosphere, the gore, the blood and demons. Doom series is not for me.

@Banjo- The thing is, there are many games that have huge problems with QuickResume.
For example, Borderlands 3 doesn't support it all no matter what. It always loads anew. And it also constantly crashes on Series S. That's on developers, but still.
Halo Infinite just won't reconnect to network after Quick Resume. Or it takes so long that you'd better kill it and run again.
Some Ubisoft titles with constant network connection like Breakpoint or Division 2 throw tantrums and 5 times out of 10 spam with constant error not being able to reconnect to servers. It's faster to kill them and reload again, because SSD is so fast.
As you mentioned, backwards compatible games sometimes have problems with, and you never know for sure.
Also, there are mentions about some achievements in certain games breaking due to Quick Resume.
Again, it may happen you never have problems with it, but there are cases when this feature breaks something. And I think that for one of the selling points of the console this is unacceptable. It should not work MOST of the time. At least you should have the opportunity to turn it off completely. But that's just me.

I can criticize Microsoft all day long, but I'm pretty happy with my Series S. I preordered it back in 2020.
If only it had disk drive, but, oh well... Physical collecting on Xbox is pointless anyway.
QuickResume is a good feature WHEN it works. Most of the time it's a hit or miss. I'd like to turn it off completely as it simply breaks many games that I've played. Even Xbox games can't use it right (Halo Infinite, for example).
Other than that it's a great console, and I have never thought that Xbox Series X would be better.

I've been waiting Hellblade 2 for all these years and dropped it after an hour or so. It's just the same game, albeit a little fancier on the graphics side.
I thought it's just not good to torture Senua for this.

I wouldn't care about any of these comparisons. I honestly tried to find the difference between RDR2 on my PS4 Slim and RDR2 on my PC running on Ultra 90fps and couldn't. That's when I've come to an understanding all this crap doesn't make sense to me. What matters is the game.
Same goes here. If Series S manages to run the game without crashes, that's great enough.

It's so funny to see CEO of a big company saying: "Yeah, we're gonna raise the prices. Nah, it's gonna be fine. It's worth it".
Yeah, sure, whatever you say. =)

I think each successive installment was better than previous (yes, including Judgement). So for me - Gears 5. It was just shockingly good.

@Millionski 2 gens - I bet you're being too generous here. This would probably happen much faster.
It's very sad, honestly.

It sounds like trying to sue Activision for buying Bungie now.

Perfect timing! =)

Absolutely definitely not. And it's not even just about the price. I bought my Series S on release and had a great time with it. Mainly because I had an opportunity to play amazing old Xbox titles I've never had an opportunity to experience - Gears series, first of all.
But now, with these prices and constant flow of games that range in quality from "you should've taken it behind the barn years ago" to "well, it's okaaay? -ish, I guess" - no, definitely not. Even Xbox One would seem a better investment, to be honest.

@RiverGenie Yeah, I'd say it's a very competently made game. But, as it stands, there's not that much people who are into these type of games. They are too special, and a whole bunch of failures from the biggest publishers only proves it.

@Cakefish You're probably right.

I don't know if it's "a Game Pass influence for me", but I can't make myself play Expedition 33. The game is amazing, I love everything about it. I've played ~6 hours so far and just don't want to continue.
I don't really know why. Like I saw everything I wanted to see, loved everything and just called it a day. At the same time I've finished South of Midnight and didn't like the game at all.
Does it happen to anyone else?

Problem is, console subscriptions are basically a tax. PS+, NSO and Game Pass Core don't offer much (especially PS+), they just take your money to let you play online games you have already bought. So you pay for nothing.
Making online multiplayer totally free would immediately show their worth - no one's gonna subscribe for two free games a month on Playstation even for half a price.
Offers like Ubisoft+ and EA Play aren't sustainable. These companies aren't offering new games on a monthly basis to justify subscription price tag. They release one or two games a year that you'd sink abysmal amount of hours into (provided you like them). So it's easier to just buy them.
Or, as another option, you'd just pay a month, play a game for a month, unsubscribe and be gone. That's how I did with AC: Shadows. So instead of $100 Ubisoft got from me only ~$10 for a month of subscription.
Game Pass Ultimate is the big boy, but again, in the end your normal Andy the Gamer who has time to play only two-three games a year might think he'd just buy them and that's it.

South of Midnight shines in sound department, which is rare and unexpected, so we can safely say there are talents in Compulsion Games. And a big ones at that.
They need to fire everyone responsible for narrative and story, and find someone who doesn't live on Twitter and meets real people once in a while.
Make gameplay better than "eh, well, okay, I guess".
And they're golden!
Also, making one simple 8-hour 3D-platformer for almost seven years is unacceptable in terms of budget.
So, should they fix that, we'd have another great studio!

I'm really on the fence of buying Death Stranding and completing it for the fifth time, now on Xbox.
If there are games that I probably could play forever, it's Death Stranding and Red Dead Redemption 2.

Yeah, right, and Drug Dealer Simulator is a 100% legit thing, we should advertise it on Xbox home screen.

@Meisfi Well then, following your logic we should condone rape sims, like the one that thankfully got banned recently on Steam. No real women got hurt, right?
There's a huge difference between games like GTA (which I personally dislike either) and Schedule 1. And the difference is context.