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@Valhura I was more referring to companies putting out engagement to the general public as sales give a better idea of the hype / demand for a game imo. Knowing a game has sold 750k in the first month is much more valuable than knowing it has 3million engagement because there is more investment in the sale.

Engagement at launch is just a fancy way to inflate numbers, because actual play engagement data for devs has existed for as long as trophy / achievement data.

@PsBoxSwitchOwner Engagement is such a garbage metric when compared to traditional sales. It just shows that more people will try a game when you remove the buy in factor as a risk. All it really shows is we need to go back to the era where demos were considered normal, as there is clearly a demand for them.

Not surprising since they were allowed to buy out huge portions of the industry. While the numbers are good for Microsoft Gaming as a publisher, its a shame that it came at the cost of the Xbox consoles which are clearly second fiddle now.

@Kaloudz I have said this multiple times. Day and date would likely see even greater sales as it's at peak hype and people won't have changed their minds based on newer games or feedback.

This always made sense but a fair amount just refused to accept the clear shift in strategy. Xbox simply could not compete in the console space and it would have been a hard sell for MS to keep throwing money at a declining market.

They can however compete in software and the best way to do that it's no red lines. Also by going full third party it allows them to acquire future studios with much less scrutiny, which has to be the long term goal.

@Tasuki Yeah I am alll for playing games as intended for the most part when it comes to level ups / skills etc, but sometimes the limitations just have no place in modern gaming.

@LogicStrikesAgain Yeah its weird to compare the two. Also not sure why they are glossing over the fact that the UE5 overhaul for Oblivion has resulted in general unstable performance across all devices, PC powerhouses included, and calling it a new standard.

Reviews these days seem to excuse performance as it will be patched based on how big the company is and how much they want that game to succeed.

@Evilinsane It was still fully remade, the fact that the changes are barely noticable is testament to the quality of Bluepoints work. Also they did tweak plenty of things like weapon animations that are pretty noticeable, but don't alter the core gameplay much at all. The main change was to Flamelurker where they made him more agressive than the OG version.

@IronMan30 Even worse when they tie it to a STR stat so it makes playing a mage or thief style character more annoying.

@Tasuki This is why if the option is available I always choose PC for these types of games. The ability to easily mod away the annoying parts makes for a better experience overall. It was the same with Witcher 3 where mods just made for a more enjoyable seemless adventure.

@Ricky-Spanish Not for me at all and it boggles the mind to think that people would pay the price of a game just to wrap a box up which as you say will alter the thermals.

But each to their own and I spend more on far worse each week in fairness 😂

They both look good, and either version is completely playable, but there is a very clear difference which is interesting to see. I will say that the difference is purely one of style however and therefore is subject to preferance.

For me the SX version looks more gamey whilst the Pro version looks more cinematic with its natural tones. It curious why they are so different.

@Friendly I think part of it is because no matter how amazing play anywhere sounds on paper, its not actually a big deal for most people.

I, and most people I know, tend to buy a game for the platform where it plays best (subjective I know). If its an RTS / FPS / MMO / Sim I am going to buy it on PC via Steam most likely as I want to play it at a desk with M/KB. If its action / adventure then its front room for the big screen couch and controller option. Having it on both has no appeal if I have no intention of playing it on both.

The only exception would be mobile but PS have that covered with the Portal which is synced to your account anyway.

Its not harsh at all, they could be nominated for every award and win none if the panels things otherwise, it how things work.

@WildConcept6 T'would be nice if it were like one award per game. This just sounds like participation awards and would make the whole thing pointless. It would also make some awards more important than others if you could only appear in one category.

@Fiendish-Beaver Im right with you there, I have a NZXT H710 case in red and black with all the rgb inside running Red. I obviously like the look of my tower but they aint small.

PC: 516h x 230w x 494d
SX: 301h x 151w x 151d
PS: 390h x 104w x 260d

One of those is a hell of a lot bigger than the others and aint fitting in the lounge easily.

@Deshalu I know I was only talking about the SSD as that was my point. M.2 drives are very small and their low profile form factor makes them a very good fit for a console.

Memory however can start go get pretty bulky when you add in heat shields than are on most decent dimms. Also what memory are we running, what speeds can the Mobo take? GPU's are incredibly bulky with the new 5000 series card being also half the size of a series X. How do we factor in cooling when you are replacing stuff willy nilly? How about power consumption or do we also now have to customise the system futher and add a 1000w psu?

By the time you get to all that you are just building a PC in a decent size tower and thats not going to sell the living room console experience.

@Deshalu upgrades using actual PC parts alreasy exists, PS5 did it by using a standard off the shelf M.2 drive for storage but outside of that you would be very limited what parts you could use simply on the size and form factore alone. Take a look at GPU sizes and the higher powered cards are bigger than current gen consoles.

@LogicStrikesAgain It was always clear they would remain a semi independant company with multi platform in mind. Pretty amusing that this morning people where lambasting PS for writing an article about MS and claiming it was just a hit job. Then you get this here which is doing the exact same it seems.

@Fiendish-Beaver I often wonder this about all the platform specific reviews as they always tend to land a point or two higher than the average. For SoM it mentions how the combat is fine but not great and doesn't gel with the rest of the game, to the point that it feels like two seperate games. Then closes with the game is not perfect but its got an almost perfect score.

It reads as a 7 or 8 game based on preference which are both good scores, but everything needs to be 9 or 10 to pass muster these days which just makes reviews kind of pointless.

@IronCrow86 D3 is entertaining enough but I find it has very limited appeal at end game as its just very bare bones. Still well worth a play just to romp through the story if you want to connect the narative from D2 through to D4.

Thinking on it further, System Shock 2 also stands out for me as a genre changing game. Bioshock further expanded on a very heavy narrative driven shooter but System Shock was the blueprint for a lot of modern games.

The Last of Us is certainly missing from this list, they took dramatic story telling to a whole new level. I would also say Goldeneye 007 needs an inclsuion as that redefined what a console shooter could be, and inspired so many games going forward.

@GeorgeKal The steam deck does use unified RAM but a lot of people are playing BMW at low resolutions like 640p with up to 60% FSR in order to lower the VRAM requirements. The scalabilty of PC settings simply allowed for crowdsourced settings to make the game "Playable" despite it not being officially compatible.

Also as the game is not offically supported on SD it has no QC, infact SD has no QC at all as games are not made to specifically target the platform. That would not be the case for the SS version as it would be expected to perform at 1080 / 30fps as a minimum or you would have another Cyberpunk situation.

@Kaloudz To be fair the dev has not been quiet on the issue and they gave a very definitive answer that it was a memory issue because the SS has a very small memory pool (10GB) compared to other platforms. People love to mention the Steam Deck as a counter point, but like the SX and the PS5 its running 16GB, and the game still doesn't run great on PS, Deck or PC either.

Not bashing the SS as its a great little machine but there is no denying that the lower memory has caused some issues for devs.

@Fiendish-Beaver always be a pessimist because at least then you can only be pleasantly surprised 😂

As I said in another article the other day, Sony don't need to share but MS do. If it was reversed it would be exactly the same. If it was another industry then it would still be exactly the same. There is just some wierd belief that because MS need the sales of other platforms that Sony should return the favour out of kindness and that just not how it works.

@IOI Ai is all every tech company cares about these days as its the buzz word. The amount of crap they try and sell you with copilot now is mind boggling.

@Fiendish-Beaver I have said for a long time they are steering GP towards 1st party. They will still get some 3rd party stuff but long term it will just become like EA Play, Ubisofts sub etc. Its how they get it onto other platforms, and even then i bet it still has some extra perks on the Prime.

I disagree that it will get cheaper however, people are used to paying and if they slowly phase out 3rd party then people will just continue to pay. Best outcome would be it remaining the same price so people could claim will be its better value as its not rising at the same rate as inflation. But as I say I can't see that happening.

It makes sense, the game has been out a while so doing DLC now would be kind of pointless. If they really want to continue the franchise they should just time skip and work on a second game. I do wonder how well a second game would do however as exploring hogwarts a second time would lose all its magic.

The main route of the game was a decent story, and the main side quests where goos.Exploration of the castle and hogsmeade was great, with the forbidden forest also being okay. The open world past those main areas however felt pretty generic, repetative and largely pointless however. It was basically 8 areas that all felt the same.

@Tasuki my first comment is in no way invalid. I still believe the game does require heavy use of mods to be enjoyable, and as I said for higher level content even the Devs have said the same as they design the difficulty with the knowledge that people are using mods. They are trying to remove the need for them as I mentioned, but they are not there yet.

All I was pointing out with my reply is that the objective is not solely what you demand it to be, just because how you choose to play. In reality for most players end up at PvP or high endgame and like it or not mods make all the difference there. If you choose to play without them it's fine, but hamstringing 10% of the player base because they are on a console would be awful.

Also add ons don't make anyone toxic, it exists in all games and is just the nature of being protected behind a screen with no real world consequences

@Tasuki the objective is what ever the individual players decide it is. For some that's social and roleplaying so they have RP servers. For some it's PvP so they choose that server type. And for others it's endgame so they pick PvE servers.

Gatekeeping the game behind your expectations makes you sound exactly like the elitists you are railing against.

Its set in the WoD so that means its got about a 20% chance to be decent. The source material is fantastic but outside of Redemption, Bloodlines 1 nothing has made a huge impact. Hunter was good and I really enjoyed it, but it was always a small and simple twin stick game.

Someone like Owlcat / Harebrained need to get their hands on the rights to make a RP that really leans into the PnP system to its fullest.

Lets all cheer on corporate consolidation and then moan about the state of the games industry next time we see a post saying another 5,000 people have been laid off.

No this is a terrible idea, MS have more than enough to focus on without needing more.

@Tasuki I swear we have had this discussion before, or I have had it with someone else but it is not a misconception at all. The Devs have even said that its a problem as they have to keep boosting difficulty to stay ahead of how powerful mods are when developing high end content for the game (Heroic / Mythic / Mythic+). Its why they started using hidden auras because they can't be tracked Also why they have started using clearer graphics in undermine to remove the requirements for addons, there is more going on so keep it clearer.

Clearly if the Devs themselves have admitted its a problem, then yes its a problem. Its just one they can't undo by pulling the rip cord as removing addons now would see 50% of the playerbase quit.

Edit: I to have been playing since it was originally launched, so yes I know how important this stuff is for high end play.

£9 may be more reasonable buy I still dislike this faux early access fomo model which has no impact on the final product. If you want to do early access then do it properly like POE2 or BG3 where you get a very substanial portion of the game, for a long period and use the feedback to actually improve the final product.

It should be day 1 (-5) to everyone with the extra just covering the digital goodies if people want to buy them.

@themightyant Well they did say they wanted to make Xbox more like windows and I swear that requires more clicks to do basic stuff with every iteratinon 😂

@Master_Cthulhu70 can you imagine how many people on Xbox who'd be like me and want to play World of Warcraft for the first time?

Unfortunately as a long time player I think you would be pretty dissapointed. If they went with the retail client then you have 10 previous expansions worth of content but they funnel you through the main levelling process so fast that you would only experience about 40% of one expansion and it would make very little sense.

If they go the route of classic and start at OG WoW then it would be much more rewarding, but the gameplay is pretty poor, very easy and relies heavily on nostalgia. We are talking most classes had a 1 or 2 button rotation in OG. You have to wait for 2-3 expansions before it startes to get better.

I still question how viable WoW will ever be on a console without Mods / Weak Auras. You could certainly level and do basic dungeons, but anything endgame like Raiding / Mythics / High End PVP would be awful especially if you had to play against people on a PC.

I still think that if they want to block them then they will 100% be able to, even if it ends up being a bit underhanded. That said I think all this steam talk simply relates to the Asus Handheld they are badging as an Xbox and I can't even see it doing that well. At that point why bother blocking it as its going to have zero impact when the Ally / Deck already exists.

For the next main machine I would say Steam is just a pipedream people are latching on to.

@Dalamar73 @LogicStrikesAgain I am with you guys in that I just cannot see how this next device will incorporate steam with full compatability unless its just a 100% pure PC. If that is the case then you will just end up paying more long term, and if its a hybrid device then its not suddenly going to gain access to this mythical trove of 10,000 games.

As for PS games they will find a way to block it out if they need to and it likely will not even be that hard. The only way the allow it is if MS goes pure PC because at that point they are basically out of the game anyway.

I still think the steam screenshot was just a mockup for the new MS Ally UI and nothing more than that.

All that looks like currently is the ability to see all your games on one screen for the handheld / PC app. Its basically what Armory Crate already does on the Ally I belive.

@Kaloudz It will likely still keep going. Changing it early would just affect any punitive damages they may be found liable for. Its a toss up of making the changes in good faith, but by making the changes you could be construed to have admitted fault by your actions.

I think it depends on exactly what they are doing them for. Nintendo are clearly not saints when it come to lawsuits, but if it is something like a code lift then Pocketpair dropped a huge clanger and brought it on themselves.

@Kaloudz The patent by all accounts seems to be related to the release sytem of how a pokemon is summoned rather than the fact its a sphere thats used.

Pokemon are summoned by throwing a ball at a patch of ground and the creature appears at that location.
Palworld seemingly used the exact same system (it was suggested it was copied code) and have recently changed it to the ball being held out and the Pal just summons to the side of the character.

As for the patent they were using the arguement of how should we know the idea was patented, but in these situations ignorance of the law is not an excuse.

EDIT: I should say this is not to defend Nintendo as I have no skin in this game as I care for neither Palworld or Pokemon.

@Sol4ris The steam deck has more memory than the SS and they have repeatably stated its the memory issue they are struggling with.

As for insurmountable its more a case of if they have the knowledge and support to make the game run. Its their first game and its not optimised on any platform. So its perfectly believable that they are just struggling. Unfortunately the longer it goes on the more likely they are to give it less resource as they will need to move on to the next project.

I'm not sure why on every article about BMW PX feels the need to lead by repeating rumours that have no evidence to back them up, when GS have made a clear statement multiple times. It just fuels toxicity and the writers should frankly know better.

@Friendly Or we could take them at their word that they are having issues with it on the SS. It's not the first time and if people like Larian struggled its hardly surprising a studio would struggle on their first ever game which was poorly optimised on both PS and PC.

@Runex2121 But it works and thats all that matters for marketing. PS1/2/3/4/5/6 is simple and effective for describing exactly what it is.

I would potentially give it a go, but oblivion was always the weakest of the modern three for myself. It was not a scratch on the setting of Morrowind or Skyrim, and just felt a bit safe overall. I also found the base game to be very repetative.

Knights of the Nine was bland but the armour and free recharge was so good it felt like you had to use it. The Highlight of the game was the Shivering Isles as it was just such a interesting location. It was like they took all the generic safety of the base and turned it round to make something truly bizarre.

@themightyant Haha nah it was more to say you are knowledgable about such things and your posts are always worth a read.

I guess hedging bets on the price at present is a fair strategy as it depends on what the target market is for the device. At present I would say its clear microsft is less concerned about hardware than they are about software, and its smart as thats where the money is for them.

If the target market is moving console players to a PC which I think seems to be their long term plan then the lower price is where they want to shoot. If they are wanting to target PC handheld to grow GP subs then I think the device would steer towards the higher end because PC gamers are less price conscious.

If they do just rebadge something like the Ally, and slap an OS on it, then they could do both with a base and pro model. Even if the main difference is just battery and storage then It would give people the option. Plus as a rebadge it would require far less risk overall.

@themightyant Genuine question as you always have a good amount of thoughs going on about stuff. How much do you realistically think an xbox handheld would launch for because I think we all agree that is going to be the biggest hurdle to start with.

For myself I think it will easily land in the same ballpark as a full console at £500+ and thats where I think it will be a very hard sell if its just a handheld.

@Justifier If they are aligning themselves with the Ally which is looking more and more likely then it will be more expensive than the Steam Deck for sure. You can get a base Ally for a similar price as the top model SD, but the battery life is garbage. If you want an ALLY X the you are talking more expensive than a PS5 Pro so I can't see this landing well.

The portal got flak at launch but I think they have nailed the price point by making it a bare bones streaming device.

@BacklogBrad MS and early access is quickly becoming the scummiest thing in gaming imo. They are just throwing the tag on everything at this point for the fomo payout.

@Titntin I think you are pretty much spot on that it benefits AA far more than AAA as a general rule. However with each and every games thats not 1st party its a gamble on the price. Sometimes MS willl get a great deal, and the dev could lose out if the game blows up. Other times a game might bomb and the dev gets a great deal and MS lose out due to the wasted spend.

Its just that more often for AA it will work out, and I would argue it works out more for XB as the lower install base presents a bigger risk for those games. Which is not a dig at the install base, its just a fact that devs have to address.