themightyant

@GamingGod it’s got an online store, it’s has live events and they update it with content frequently over time, that makes it a live service. Yes it’s live service lite compared to some, but still a live service. Just like FIFA, Madden etc. theres more than one live service business model.

@swedetrap you are forgetting that GT7 is live service, unlike GT3, game sales aren’t everything when you have an in game store. They will make a lot of additional money there.

One of Sony’s more successful live services along with MLB the Show and Helldivers 2

It’s been a banger year for gaming and Xbox Game Pass has delivered a lot of top games. Happy gaming!

What bizarre timing to come out and refute this MONTHS after it leaked. But their carefully worded statement ONLY really says it’s wasn’t exactly 30%, little else.

@BacklogBrad @SalaciousCrumb The thing is this wasn’t initially reported by some randoms on the internet, the story was broken by proper journalists at Bloomberg who will do due diligence to have multiple sources before reporting on a story.

Horrific news, and at this time of year usually reserved for family. Awful. RIP Vince, you made a massive impact on so many people’s lives.

This is always going to be subjective based on what you like. Personally I thought Xbox had a brilliant year in terms of the number of GOOD games, but of the ones I played I don't think any were near GOTY. But i'd happily take more years like this on Game Pass, not every games needs to be GOTY and what they gave was more than good enough.

@Sy-B look forward to your thoughts. I just finished it after playing through most of the remedy verse.

Probably not a lot. I play less over Christmas as it’s mostly family time. So maybe a bit of Mario Kart World or similar.

But I am already looking forward to my January where I think I will have time to start a big game either CyberPunk or Elden Ring I think.

But first FOMO got the better of me and I picked up Anthem for the princely sum of £1 and I’m looking forward to giving that a go and judging for myself before the servers shut down on Jan 10th.

Merry Christmas one and all.

@Balaam_ I get the impression Phil won’t be a “spill the beans” kinda guy. Long time company man, not a pot stirrer, class act. But I agree he HAS to have a LOT of great behind the scenes stories.

Well deserved! He's been at Microsoft for over 35 years and at Xbox since it started. While I haven't liked all Microsoft's recent decision making, basically since ABK, he's proven to be an asset to the gaming industry and Xbox. Congratulations.

Fingers crossed for Fable and Clockwork revolution, two of my most anticipated games. I doubt Forza Horizon 6 or Gears E-Day / 7 will have a chance unless they significantly reinvent themselves as GOTY usually goes to something that feels new. And a remake? no chance, though I’m looking forward to it.

@Sol4ris yes that statement by Druckmann was stupid too, as it would be from anyone.

But why do you always want to turn everything into a console war? No one ever mentioned Sony, but you always bring them up.

And no it’s not just Microsoft that draw ire, but Xbox has been making a lot of decisions I disagree with lately, from MULTIPLE price hikes, to gutting rewards, to $1000 handhelds. Do you think these things aren’t worthy of criticism? Or does Xbox get a pass? It’s been attritional with Xbox lately. When Sony start pissing me off in the same way I’ll complain about them too. These companies aren’t our friends.

As for crunch at Naughty Dog I have said we don’t have all the facts, and perhaps it will turn out to be worse than reported. But based on what was actually reported I don’t see doing 8 hours a week more for a month or two as “crunch”, which is historically a lot worse. It’s simply working harder for a limited period to get a deliverable over the line, that is common in most industries around key moments. I’ve been doing exactly the same this month to deliver a project and still has plenty of time for life and games. Is it a little inconvenient? Yes. Is it the end of the world and we should all be up in arms? No. You you feel differently, that’s fine.

Not everything is an attack on Xbox dude. People are allowed to have differing opinions.

70% PS5 Pro
20% Xbox
10% Split between Switch 2 & Steam Deck

Since I got PS5 Pro it’s my default platform. Also I play my live services there that suck up time.

@Questionable_Duck OK, that's fair, there are exceptions, but it's the exception not the rule. Still a largely meaningless thing to say, like when console makers say "it's our most powerful console ever..."

This is one of those absolutely stupid and meaningless statements that studios seem to love giving.

"No, actually our next game is much less ambitious than our last"

...said no one ever.

And I would bet it still releases janky AF

Yesterday's technology tomorrow!

(This is usually what I say about Nintendo, but it is a smart way to make a profit, finding a new use for cheaper old tech and making it work for you)

@ilyn absolutely agree. Steam is absolutely the gold standard here, well designed for consumers to make better informed decisions.

Thanks for the update. But if they want to keep costs low, why not just roll out last years wrap script with a few minor changes? Could easily be done on a comparatively low budget, we do this every year on many projects to deliver clients metrics. Not buying this as a reasonable excuse frankly.

@Fiendish-Beaver It's comfort food, like live services, the gaming equivalent of things like McDonalds.

@beltmenot So did I. Do you think the last games have been as good as Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim or Fallout 3? I don't. Still good, but not as good as those.

@Fiendish-Beaver My point with aggregates is that they DON'T always tell the whole story, especially for the 7ish/10s that are the ones that really need the uplift, the 9/10s will be fine.

As for Amazon I am dubious of BOTH very few reviews AND when there are thousands of reviews on a basic product. There are several unethical ways of doing this but it seems to happen a lot. Constant vigilance! lol

@Fiendish-Beaver No worries.

Steam is the ONLY user review system I put much merit on. Most other like Metacritic, Sony or Xbox are all pretty useless for different reasons. Metacritic in particular is useless with most either glazing or grinding an axe, with little nuance. The 0 OR 10 Metacritic with little in between is a meme but also often true.

But I think there is a problem with ALL score aggregators whether that is Steam or Metacritic. The problem is that a well made but safe/boring game will often score better than something that is daring that is far more niche, or buggy. These polarising games that some might give 5/10 but others 9 or 10/10 don't aggregate well. Not all 7/10s are equal, and aggregators do a bad job of highlighting the difference!

Hence I think it's more important to find reviewers that like the same things as you, whether that is a friend or a specific reviewer and I will often put FAR more weight on their opinion than the group ones. If they said it's a 7/10 because it's a flawed game, but it's memorable (e.g. Scorn) I will usually play that when I might skip a lot of other games getting 69 on Metacritic. Opinions eh?

@Fiendish-Beaver If you hover over the "overwhelmingly positive" or whatever the title is it comes up with additional info e.g. "85% of the 16,642 user reviews in your language were positive".

@GeeEssEff @Fiendish-Beaver @FraserG personally I don’t find the number of reviews all that useful on Steam as unless it’s a really small number it doesn’t affect the score much. Similar to how once there are 20-30 reviews on Metacritic it’s rare for a game to change more than a few percentage points.

What I find far more useful is the percentage positive e.g. 85% positive because there can be quite a range between some of the ranges e.g. 80% - 100% could all be “very positive” if it has 50-499 reviews or 80% - 94% if more than 500.

Similarly “mixed” can be 40% - 69% positive reviews which is a really wide range!

Not played OW2 or Avowed yet but tried most of the rest I wanted to. Keeper is probably my favourite. Doom TDA while good was also a bit of a let down imo.

@BritDad It is still a small portion of our libraries, but it is steadily growing. Similar on PlayStation, I use it quite a lot on PS Portal.

@Trmn8r If it's not for you that's cool, but variety and choice is a good thing. This seems like it's a great bit of art/media even if you don't think it's a game.

@ilyn Agree with all your points. Though having just been through a very frustrating looping part of Alan Wake 2, where I kept getting lost, I'm not sure this always works well. I also loved the IDEA of the motel, but it never quite nailed it from a gameplay perspective.

Remedy games in general have a lot of aspects I dislike but, thankfully, there's usually enough good aspects and uniqueness that I enjoy them overall. "Greater than the sum of their parts" for me, but that's subjective, I like their weirdness.

No I didn't notice stick sensitivity on Control at all. But I adapt to this pretty quickly across games and platforms and rarely actually change the setting.

@beltmenot I also want them to take as long as they need to make a good game. But considering the new games they released in the last decade (Fallout 76, Elder Scrolls: Blades, Starfield & Elder Scrolls: Castles) I don't have full confidence in them anymore. Yet I sincerely hope I am wrong and it's amazing, nothing would make me happier!

And this will just be the part of the iceberg visible above water, how many hundreds more were quietly cancelled without every being announced.

@Kezelpaso Black Ops (1) was mostly COD: Vietnam in all but name.

I'd like to feel about the characters (heroes and villians) as much as I did in it's heyday with Modern Warfare 1-3 on X360. Price, Soap, Makarov... these names meant something. Don't even ask me the names of other COD characters.

They missed Blue Prince in Top 5. Totally invalidates their list /s

(more seriously, lots of great games this year)

@Brigurugi While I wish it had a few more accessibility settings, I also respect developers that have a strong creative vision and stick to it firmly. Not every game needs to be for everyone, in fact art is better when it isn't and it's a little divisive. They made the game they wanted to make. Kudos.

I felt very mixed on this game. Taken on it's own it's a decent enough title, but compared to the original they just flub so many parts and drag out the story needlessly. It's still good imo, just not great. I hear Rebirth is better.

@jesse_dylan it’s Deeply personal 😂😂😂 /s

@dskatter Agreed. 30fps on a 15 year old game. Quarter second input lag and a host of other issues. Supremely low effort release.

Still a bit miffed this left Game Pass after a year considering the rough state it launched in. But i'll get to it at some point.

I've only heard of 2 or 3 of those thankfully.

@Sol4ris It's a cool game, enjoy!

I don't think anyone here is up in arms... just a bit baffled. It's a good looking game no doubt, and performant, but "#1 best graphics 2025" that doesn't really tally with what I played.

It's not because it's an Xbox game - Hellblade 2 and Indiana Jones were worthy in DFs best graphics in prior years. This just seems a stretch at #1 versus other games this year. But it is a mighty technical achievement for high performance with RTGI and other features which is their reasoning for giving it.

See what you think when you play it.

I've just finished it and the DLC (and moved on Alan Wake 2) and it was fantastic I have very few notes, just cook like you usually do Remedy.

My only major complaint was 3 of the main characters Jesse, Dylan and Emily were all exceedingly dull or one dimensional... which is especially odd for Remedy. Whereas Trench, Darling and Ahti were all excellent layered characters. So better main characters.

I also MUCH preferred it on PS5 than on PS4 where it ran between 15-30fps -it was one of the few games that ran better on XB One. So better day 1 performance would be my other main request. Other than that I trust Remedy.

@NeoRatt So Earthion, a 16-bit Megadrive game, makes sense in "best graphics 2025"? Perhaps it's just semantics, but to me it doesn't AT ALL. Yet it does make sense in "best technical achievement".

Either way it's just a bit of fun and not a big deal. Just my 2 cents. Doom and id tech are good either way, but didn't make my jaw drop in the way other games did this year, which is more in line with what I would term "best graphics".

@Fiendish-Beaver It's mostly because DF have a complete hard-on for Ray Traced Global Illumination and Doom: TDA does this in a very scalable and performant way, which is worthy of praise. But while they are of course they are entitled to their view they are praising it more from a technical standpoint than what many of us would term "best graphics". It's a misnomer imo, if we think of it more as "best technical achievement" it makes a lot more sense.

Hell they even have 16-bit Megadrive game (Earthion) and a Switch 2 game (Metroid Prime 4) on their "best graphics 2025" list, which I suspect is a major stretch to most people's definition of those words. Personally I think the art design on Metroid Prime 4 is truly excellent, but it's not near the "best graphics" this year really... yet it is a technical marvel literally playing at a locked 120fps on Switch 2.

While I've not played it personally, nor the first game, my mate did show the intro to Death Stranding 2 on PS5 Pro and my jaw dropped from the fidelity both big and small - which is a rarity nowadays in these days of diminishing returns - that would undoubtedly be my #1. Opinions eh?

1. Expedition 33
2. Silksong
3. Blue Prince

These are the only ones I am certain of. For the other 2 I voted Keeper and Doom TDA
But that changes daily.

"Largest world" is often a BAD thing. I just think of games like recent Assassin's Creed games or Just Cause. Give me a smaller, DENSER, world every day. I'm amazed game devs still don't seem to grasp that bigger doesn't always mean better.

@BattleMonkey It was almost certainly the right business call, but it doesn't make it any less disappointing when you are looking forward to the game.

And here I thought you were going to champion Blue Prince as the absolute masterpiece of game design it is.

But here’s the reality. 2025 has been an amazing year for video games, we are blessed that there have been so many good ones that games like Split Fiction, Blue Prince, KCD2… and many more… miss out on some awards.

• Fable
• Clockwork Revolution
• Gears E Day

Those are the main ones for me. I'm less interested in Halo re-re-make or another Forza Horizon unless they make it fresh again. Still feel gutted about Perfect Dark, it would nice to have a surprise too.

What he means is "preorders were piss-poor so we reverted to meet consumers where they were willing to pay. While expected, the push back was stronger than we thought and ultimately would have led to lower profits, so it's not really about you, it's about us"
Thank you.