ferago42

Great, I already have X, XII, all XIIIs, XIV & XV. Need to buy from I to IX, all under my Series X.

It was good but I was hoping for FFXVI, guess I'll just buy it for Steam.

@StonyKL moving to Unreal would be incredibly stupid, as a lot of what the Creations engine can do, Unreal can't out of the box, so they'd have to build their toolset from scratch, it'll take 10 years and introduce gazillion of new bugs. And for what, a game so heavy (physics, lots subsystems, characters with schedule instead of just being standing there a la horizon zero dawn) that they wouldn't be able to use Lumen or Nanite.

@Browntrouser Xbox uses DirectX technology for graphics, audio and input (Xbox itself means DirectXBox), which is a technology developed for Windows (95 as Direct3D back in the old days). PlayStation, Nintendo, Linux, Mac, etc., they tend to use open source technologies like OpenGL or Vulkan, which are also available on Windows. Once you port your game to PC, if you port it using DirectX, then porting to Xbox is trivial really. But if the port to Windows uses OpenGL, then it's more problematic because OpenGL is not supported on Xbox. Only recently (2023) Microsoft started to map OpenGL APIs to DirectX in their GDK, so hopefully in the future, as the technology matures, it'll be trivial as well.

So the answer really depends on how the dev planned from the beginning. As a rule of thumb, most games made for Windows use DirectX as default, and thus will be ported to Xbox pretty easily, and thus, cheaply. A game made for PS or Nintendo only will have more difficulty porting to PC + Xbox, and thus will be more expensive.

Also note that, in general, game assets like 3D models, textures, audio files, scripts & text files, etc., do not need to be ported, although some minor tweaks might be needed to adjust for platform idiosyncrasies.

This is my guess as to why sometimes you see games like Phantasy Starr Online 2 going to Xbox first, because it's an MMO for PC, it was probably trivial/cheaper to port to Xbox console immediately after having the PC version available. On the other hand, Japanese devs, who historically have put more emphasis on console than PC, have more trouble adapting their tools (probably already tuned to Unix/OpenGL) to PC/DirectX, and thus ports are more expensive. And why games from smaller or medium devs prefer to skip the platform before having to invest a lot of resources in the port. But companies like SquareEnix can fund this effort, even if they only sell 10% more (once your tools are ported/upgraded you don't need to touch them for a long time), or why sometimes Microsoft funds said effort, as what happened with SEGA, and why we're getting everything SEGA on Xbox as well since a few years ago.

Gods, I'm not being skipped again this time around, I'll buy this game on Steam (or my PS5 if the PC port turns out to be poor). It sucks, but if Microsoft doesn't care for their console market -they're too busy chasing PC and Cloud and mobile-, why should developers care? I can understand why we're not a priority for Game Sciencie: we're not even a priority for Microsoft. Oh well.

I still play Morrowind occasionally, on my Series X. It's dated and that line-of-view fog is annoying as hell, but I love it so much!

Love this game, it has been my staple for almost a year now. As much as I love AOE2, that game is very dated (24 years old after all lol), and most civs play samey. In contrast, I love the variety and different play styles each civ has on AOE4. Can't wait to try the DLC this weekend!!

@Kaloudz they changed a few bits to try to hide stuff until you hit certain levels, in order to not overwhelm new players (stuff is still available if you know where to look). In case you ever decide to give it another go, here's the advise I wish I had back when I started lol:

A good rule of thumb is, create the toon, after the tutorial ignore everything and travel to your alliance start city (Daggerfall for Covenant, Vulkhel Guard for Dominion or Davon's Watch for Pact), a "hooded figure" will automagically give you a quest. Follow through, and you'll be taken to the old tutorial zone and then be dropped in a "starter" zone, which is far less overwhelming. Eventually you'll be taken across your entire alliance, if you follow through the main quests (they have a special icon marker), where you'll get to meet the story, lots of characters, the activities step by step, and so on. Once you feel you're comfortable, start exploring the other areas as you please, or do new activities like group dungeons or even trials (once you hit level 160). Ignore additional content like crafting, tales of tributes and guilds until you feel you're into the game, otherwise it's going to be boring having to do dailies and writs! If you want to trave to a zone that you haven't explored yet, open your map and locate a navigator (anchor icon near the sea, or chariot icons on land) and they'll transport you for free!

This looks very cool indeed, if I was still into physical games, I'd buy it in a heartbeat!

This game is fantastic, everything I wanted from them. And it plays even better when one is away from the twitter / media bubble & echochamber, when you don't have angry fanboys telling you how crappy the game is because it didn't come to their favourite platform or didn't include a specific feature. It's my personal GOTY, only rivaled by with Super Mario Bros Wonder.

Skipped the 360 and XB1 until the Xbox One S came out, for some reason, so no hope for me getting this achievement, lol. Oh well.

Fromsoftware would be awesome. They made Xbox exclusives once, they can do it again!