themightyant

@Kaloudz Yep it's a minor thing, I finished it twice already. Masterpiece.

@HarmanSmith It's just a shame it's only WHEN you die, and you can't select it before when you know you are going to die.

Hardly surprising considering their flooded PlayStation with high quality releases this last quarter. We will see if that keeps being representative, but probably not, they don't seem to have as many games slated for release the next 6 months right now.

Extremely niche product at those prices, but it will be great for a few users. Especially the higher end model. But the specs on the lower-end model are disappointing.

@Ricky-Spanish It's a simple d*** measuring contest. Because all the recent CODs , Warzone etc. all launch from the same launcher they can say they have higher concurrent players and compete with Fortnite and other 'Games' that are really now their own mini-platforms that launch many games.

It's certainly not helpful for the consumer!

@Pac_Bot Was thinking the same! The fact my Microsoft account it over the age limit itself should give it a pass right?

Regardless I used the Yoti face scan service and it literally took less than a minute, they don't keep the image on record, so I don't think this one is too bad all things considered.

Frankly it would take longer to moan about it than actually do it, but this is the way of the internet.

So basically testing xbox game streaming on PC ahead of mass using it next gen.

Yes. Though also a bit concerned how long it's taking.
First one raised the bar for metroidvania's - a perfect blend of tight gameplay, beautiful art, intrigue and a great soundtrack - and that bar has been risen again.

More interested in Silksong tbh

That was what people have been suggesting online, saying Sony is going the same route as Microsoft, which is what I was pushing back against. Though in competition I think their businesses are different enough that what works for one isn't necessarily what works for another. I'd expect this to be live services, and perhaps, though less likely, after the game sales have stagnated elsewhere some single player games.

@Millionski Maybe you are right, maybe if Sony did make their games available everywhere they wouldn't lose any market share... maybe. But i'm not convinced Sony will want to take that risk, especially with Xbox seemingly having a pretty pro-consumer pc/xbox hybrid next gen. They make FAR more money from gamers from OTHER developers on their platform than they do on their own.

It's not quite so simple though. The difference PlayStation and Xbox is that Sony makes most of their profit in gaming through third party games on PSN - game sales, but particularly microtransactions. THAT is their golden goose, exclusives are really just a way to steer people onto the platform and stay there to spend more, they don't actually need to make all that much profit from first party games directly.

Whereas Xbox, with a much smaller console market share, but now with over twice as many developers does need to make money from their titles directly, hence going multiplatform.

Would be bigger news if they were Xbox exclusive imho

@Nintendo4Sonic you are conflating two different things. Yes the percentage of games completed on game pass is quite low BUT that’s because millions more people get to try games at no added risk. It may be that more actual people compete the games on Game Pass, but we don’t have that data.

This is quite normal and actually a good thing, it shows people with game pass are trying a wider selection of games.

Not for me, but you can’t win them all.

@Fiendish-Beaver So unbelievably tone deaf. As if no human ever proof read the speech and it was only AI...

This is better that before, not least that a disc can be resold, it means ownership of a sort.

But part of the reason people want discs is for preservation and if they won't confirm "Whether or not the full game will be on disc" then it's only a half step. Still better than nothing.

@Coletrain Fortnite (in FPS mode), The Finals, Stalker 2, Immortals of Aveum, Unrecord (Super realistic body cam game)

@Fiendish-Beaver @Millionski I get what you are both saying. But I think there is a problem with the way we score games, espeially review aggregators. Often quite boring run-of-the-mill games get high 80ish scores because they are well made and do little wrong. but they also don't surprise of delight.

Whereas a game with several flaws, OR a game that is divisive and gets both 10s and 4s but averages 6s or 7s might be a far more interesting game than those 8s to me.

I guess having played games since their inception I am often looking for new novel experiences, even if they are janky, more than polished ones that are repeating the same ideas.

@PcTV Yes. But not all engines are as simple to use, or allow your skills to be transferred from one to another so easily.

Additionally Halo: Infinite reportedly had an extremely high turnover rate of staff exacerbating this problem, whereas if you keep the same staff for many projects they get used to the tools.

@Coletrain Which it MIGHT have done considering all the horror stories coming out of that development. i.e. that staff turnover was HUGE; getting new staff up to speed was taking the experienced devs a lot of time and pulling them from other tasks; that they basically ran out of time even with the year delay. Their biggest takeaway seemed to be that their custom engine had been a big problem for the project, hence the move to Unreal. it was exactly the same problem CDPR had with Cyberpunk.

Whether it's the next couple of weeks or not... of course they will.

Probably Starfield - Complete Edition with the last DLC.

Probably not. The problem was the game design NOT the engine.

Going open world was a let down for several reasons. e.g.

• Halo is known for it's glorious set pieces e.g. taking on a pair of scarab tanks in the middle of a battlefield. This almost entirely disappeared in Infinite.
• What is the point of going open world if the open world is boring, almost nothing to do and nothing to see. Large swathes of emptiness and almost nothing interesting to find, it's all the same.

Plus the story was very average and was, once again, left unfinished... only to be continued in a book series. (I hate this)

Being on UE5, or more likely UE4 considering it's release date, probably wouldn't have fixed that... Except one of the problems they noted was all the time wasted in onboarding new staff to the bespoke engine and getting them up to speed. If this really did impact development so much perhaps they would have had more time to fix all the above had they been on UE4/5.

@Fiendish-Beaver I'm behind you, lurking. /jk

My point was, reading the reviews for this game, similarly to Cyberpunk, it wouldn't have gotten 4s either if the performance wasn't so dire. I'm not saying it's as good as Cyberpunk though (enjoy btw. It's on my playlist. Soon).

And apologies if I got the wrong end of the stick, i'm old, most people are kids to me

Hardly surprising. Money is tight for a lot of people and Game Pass (and other subscription services) represent excellent value for money. Plus a lot of people DON'T care about ownership. They are quite happy to rent a game play it once and never play it again.

Personally i'd say two thirds of the games I play I will never play again. It's only that third (or perhaps even less) that I might want to own. The trouble it you don't know until after you play them, but by the time I might want to replay them, they are usually on sale.

It’s quite unusual to see a game get such a wide range of review scores from 40 - 95. This usually happens when there’s a solid game in there somewhere but it has severe performance issues or bugs holding it back, same happened with Cyberpunk or Stalker 2.

@Fiendish-Beaver the game currently has a very respectable 75 on Metacritic. Hyper-focusing on the lowest 4/10 score to try and prove a point isn’t all that useful. It’s like saying Cyberpunk is 4/10 because one outlet scored it that. Would you play that game? Be fair / leave the kid alone.

@darylb24 I never understand why people are so fussed whether a game is next-gen “exclusive”. If I can play GoW Ragnarok, GT7 or Horizon on my PS4 that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable on PS5.

Moreover the fact they are cross-gen means they can be giant AAA productions. Games cost so much to make now that making a game only for a new next-gen console it basically HAS to be cross-gen to have a giant budget or they likely won’t make the money back. It was the same on Xbox at the start of the gen.

Nor does being a sequel make the games any less good. Are Mario, Zelda, Gears all played out? Are they any worse for being the nth game in a series? I don’t think so.

Where I do agree is that there hasn’t been enough new IP. Though Sony has tried a few that failed Concord, Destruction Allstars etc. plus Returnal and some first/second party games like Stellar Blade, Rise of the Ronin etc.

Though to be honest I see that more of a problem of the times. It’s a problem with consumers. WE buy sequels to known IP in higher numbers than new IP. It’s same in movies (see MCU etc.) Tv, Literature, Comics and other mediums. Until we, collectively, stop spending more on old IP they will keep making it. It’s very basic supply and demand.

It’s rare to see a company LISTEN and revert a decision like this. Well done Microsoft.

@FarmDog08 I'm not so sure. People's memories are fickle. PS4 had a couple of pretty big first party lulls in the middle but finished REALLY strong. And you know what? No one much remembers those lulls now, it hasn't really affected their image.

Considering the timeline of studio releases i'd expect PS5 to be very similar with a lot of major studios releasing in the last 2 years of PS5 or start of PS6. Assuming they deliver great games or don't get stuck in development hell I think PlayStation's image will be just fine in the long run even if it's currently taking a bit of a hit.

People, especially gamers, are too focused on the short term picture and flip-flip constantly. You see this a lot with Xbox news where one month they are awful because of some price hike, the next they can do nothing wrong with back-to-back-to-back Game Pass bangers, then they are awful again. It's tiresome. I prefer to sit back and just enjoy the games and let the longer term narrative take shape rather than kneejerk reacting to every minor 'crisis'. I think the future is quite bright for PlayStation and Xbox, and for us Gamers.

God of War: Ragnarok, Spiderman 2, hell Spider-man Miles Morales also, Astro Bot, Astro's Playroom, Returnal, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Horizon: Forbidden West, Demon's Souls, Gran Turismo 7, MLB the Show every year, Sackboy: ABA, Horizon: CotM and several more even before we get to the remasters (about a dozen of them), less successful games (a couple of them) and second-party games they helped fund (Death Stranding 2, Helldivers 2, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Stellar Blade, Rise of the Ronin, Lego Horizon etc.)

Sony have actually released quite a lot in just over 4 years imo. The difference is Sony filled the first 3 years with games but is now in a bit of a lull, whereas Microsoft was very quiet for several years already, with few noteworthy releases, but has had a flurry of great games in the last year or so. It ebbs and flows.

Sounds like a good game but a wait to play to me with all the technical problems mentioned in reviews. Hopefully they have a will to fix these and get them sorted soon. But Asia often doesn't have the same high standards for smooth performance we do in the West, they accept a lot more jank and choppiness.

@TheGrizMan Indeed. Having a PS5 Pro kind of makes your first platform an obvious choice and as you said so much uncertainty about Xbox makes it an even easier one. But I do think Xbox will weather the storm and are quite well positioned for the future where the next generation seem to care less about specific devices and brands... if Satya Nadella wants to stick it out.

@kevinm360 you can but that requires re-wiring years of muscle memory. If you flip it you can still open the game with one press of A, but get the hub with one press of X. Seems better

@KITG_Group_BrunoB it’s a known problem unfortunately. I was losing around 100Gb - a large portion of the SSD - due to duplicate content when I had moved games to store them. Having to manually check this and delete was a pain. I suspect many are blissfully unaware it’s happening.

Swapped the button and haven’t used them at all.

Like many Xbox features it was great when it works. However there are a few problems. E.g. if you have multiple hard drives you can often end up with duplicate copies of games wasting storage. It’s not so smart in that regard. I had to manually delete some.

Additionally it’s not possible to play the Xbox One (or One X) version of a game only the latest version, unlike other platforms. This is a niche issue but occasionally the older version ran better like Elden Ring where the only way to play it at a stable 60fps on console was the PS4 version on PS5. You couldn’t so that on Xbox. Additonally series X games require being on the SSD whereas Xbox One X versions do not. Choice would be good. Again it’s not that smart.

@Balaam_ Did DF say that? I would be surprised. But I don't recall it.

It's always down to time / money. Give developers another year or two to optimise a game and amazing things can happen. Just like Starfield and many others. Whether that is a good ROI is questionable however.

Personally I thought the game was so slow and sluggish that 30fps was fine, though most titles I want 60.

Probably makes sense for anyone playing across platforms but utterly useless for anyone that doesn't. It would be good to have a toggle to turn it off and/or it to be smart and not appear if you haven't been playing on other devices for a month or so.

@Browntrouser Ubisoft are actually pretty good at keeping their single player games updated over time. Whether it's 60fps patches for Odyssey, Origins or updates to Syndicate almost a decade later. It's just dead-services that suffer.

Hard to hear as an Xbox fan, but it makes perfect business sense.

It isn't JUST that PS5 is outselling Xbox 2.3 : 1 but many reports have shown that developers are struggling to sell as many games on Xbox per user, probably due to Game Pass making that gap even wider.

For a small studio who can't do it all at once and want to get each release right this sadly makes sense. Still a shame for Xbox fans.

The horror aspects were the best bit of the original. Running while peeking over your shoulder was terrifying.

Wouldn't surprise me if they drop it at the end of the generation as a stealth price increase.

I haven't used it much but have played the occasional EA banger like Dead Space or Jedi Survivor via it.

Would love more Indy! Though i'd happily take more Wolfenstein too. But feel Indy was a more interesting and unique game with few other games like it.

Hot take: Ubisoft actually does pretty well at supporting most of their games, except dead-services.

@dskatter Exactly this! They were all in a rat race to see who could make a successful digital online store and both Sony and Xbox have lost out to other providers... and likely rental services like Netflix, Disney+ etc. It isn't worth them doing anymore with so few people using the services.

But they are both still doing the right thing and keeping access to all bought content.

There wasn't quite an answer that fitted me in the poll. Xbox is mostly my Game Pass and Xbox backlog machine. But I don't really buy games on Xbox anymore, I believe I have bought a grand total of just 4 games on Xbox this gen. Those were either leaving Game Pass mid-playthrough or a stupidly low sale that was hard to resist.

However I have also bought several hundred of games on other platforms in the last 4-5 years. So I do buy games, just not on Xbox. And I don't quite know why. I had intended to buy more games on Xbox this gen as I preferred Microsoft's approach to backwards compatibility (FPS boost, Auto-HDR etc.)... but it just hasn't turned out that way. Most of my library is on PlayStation with a bit on PC. I guess Phil was right about "the worst generation to lose"...

@DaveTheRave I TRY to keep more balanced, but mostly that is doing other things not involving a TV. Like you when I am in front of a TV I prefer games. But i'll occasionally binge a series or watch a movie.

It used to be that devs would make several games per generation, they would learn the ins and outs of the hardware, improve their tools or workflows around this and optimise for that in later games. But now many devs will only work on one true "next-gen" title each generation and this will never happen.

In that sense we will probably never see the hardware "fully utilised" with many devs just working on one true "next-gen" title each generation and never making all these learnings and optimisations.

Games today DO push the hardware in that they are running in around 60fps with little overhead... but that is the best developers can do today. Given another 15 years with the hardware they would get far more out of it.

Regardless the next few years games will still look better. Look at Death Stranding 2 for an example of what is possible, it's open world and yet it even makes Hellblade 2 look a bit last gen.

I think I have played all the intro's, including on Stadia, but not the full game. It may almost be time.

@DaveTheRave I'm looking forward to Cyberpunk... and all the others. But like heavy movies and deep drama TV I struggle to sometimes start those long 50-100+ hours games and instead want something light and pulp... which is where Game Pass (and indies) come in perfectly.