Markatron84

Ubisoft games go dirt cheap very regularly. For example, Skull & Bones is on sale on Steam right now:

• Premium Edition £5.99
• Deluxe Edition £4.49
• Standard Edition £3.49

And every game included on this Ubisoft Classics thing gets deep discounts with alarming regularity. Who in their right mind wants to pay an extra monthly fee for a library of (old) games that you can regularly get for a song? If I was a GPU subscriber, I'd be pretty pissed right about now.

@Jenkinss the way things are going, you'd be lucky if that $500 got you the controller, never mind the console.

@el_pieablo I'm 41 and the plan is to play videogames until the point I'm physically unable to. Or I die. Whichever comes first.

@Titntin I'll admit to being swept up in the ABK acquisition hype. I'll also fully admit that it was stupid of me to not see the bigger picture.

@FraserG I'm going to leave this here. Everybody make of it what you will 👀

@EvilBear Just got to accept that we probably can't change peoples' minds on this sort of thing, and be content with not being part of the problem 👍

"BETTER VALUE LOL"
Phil Spencer

@Vordus I read all the books, watched all the films; really enjoyed them and the world Rowling built. Then, like with yourself, her politics ruined it for me.

I would love to play Hogwarts Legacy, but I can't bring myself to do so knowing that any money I spend on it helps further her abhorrent goals. My oldest friend (of 37 years) is a trans woman. I don't begrudge anyone playing it, as long as they know what they're funding and can say with conviction that they're ok with that; that way, I know to keep them at arm's length.

@PartyMarty oh nice!! I'm rocking an Intel i9 and RTX 4080; not the top of the line machine it used to be but it still runs most things I throw at it on max settings at 4K/60, and the few outliers at 1440p. Yours is an absolute beast though.

@FraserG Hot Wheels Monster Trucks: Stunt Mayhem is on there twice, fyi 🙂

@Ricky-Spanish I also haven't had Game Pass in over a year. And I only had it then because when I upgraded my internet I got a code for a year's worth of GPU. Having Game Pass isn't a given, just because someone interacts with Xbox

@Scrubchub I haven't regretted stepping away from consoles (apart from Nintendo, because it'll be a cold day in Hell before they put anything out on PC) for one second. I went into PC gaming knowing that things like optimal settings in games aren't going to be spoon-fed to me, and that my first port of call in any game should be the display/graphics settings menu, and that small "inconvenience" has been outweighed by the benefits a thousand times over.

Haven't had Game Pass in over a year and haven't missed it. It's undoubtedly been great value for money, but being on PC there are so many ways to get cheap games that I didn't see the need for it.

@Grackler each time I've jumped ship to a new gaming ecosystem, I just haven't looked back. There's no point in stressing over it, especially as there's no guarantee that the games we own in said ecosystem will even be playable in one or two generations' time, let alone further down the line.

I would argue that including Skull and Bones actually lowers the value of Game Pass Ultimate.

@Valhura I agree. Yet another case of Microsoft's general incompetence.

@Questionable_Duck not my fault Klobrille is an idiot and doesn't know what a roadmap is 🤷

@AverageJoseph Here.

Good work Microsoft. More people whose livelihoods - and lives - are being put in jeopardy because of your incompetence 👍

@AverageJoseph I assume @Ricky-Spanish was referencing Kenan Thompson. Although it was actually Kel Mitchell who used to say "aw, here goes".

OMG EDIT I just watched a clip and he does say "aw, here it goes"! I never heard the "it" as a kid! I'm so disillusioned!!!

@Kendoguk my comment was more on how this "roadmap" - ie. something that's supposed to look ahead - has more past games on it than future ones.

@Questionable_Duck you do realise that a business roadmap is for stating and/or visualising future goals?

@SaltySpitoon957 yep. Lots of different factors at play.

@Kaloudz Same here. Real-time strategy and 4X games just aren't for me. For example, I've tried Civilisation VI on three separate occasions and every time I have quickly become completely overwhelmed by all the systems and information it throws at me.

@SaltySpitoon957 I imagine that already happens. Games get censored and/or altered all the time for all sorts of different reasons in lots of different markets.

I'm one achievement away from getting them all in Vampire Survivors. It's not even a hard one (settle down) so I should get that tomorrow. I also got the super deluxe ultra mega edition of Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 for a song and have been playing that. And I started Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion, but that's not really grabbing me.

I love how they cling to the past five years in these Xbox roadmaps. Guys, you've got some duds lingering on there; just start at the current year.

@Kaloudz you're in luck. The remake of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is coming sometime before the entropic heat death of the universe.

Lost Crown is excellent. Anyone who likes Metroidvanias should try it out.

@ButterySmooth30FPS a game that's announced and never comes out.

Mmmmmmmmm yes please.

Cool, so I've got until 14th March 2027 to keep not playing MyFaction in WWE 2K25. Why anyone regularly engages in those sorts of modes is beyond me. I got around 2 hours into MyFaction before finding myself in the position of either having to grind out the currency or spend real money. Nah.

At this rate it's going to get to the point where the money I spent on my PC won't seem so ridiculous.

I was three years late to the party, but I've been playing Vampire Survivors the past two weeks and am borderline obsessed with it, having put 51 hours into it so far. And I'm definitely going to be looking at Deep Rock and the games some of you have mentioned.

@OldGamer999 pop a laxative and watch the whole thing 👍

@Ricky-Spanish Sammy couldn't be unbiased and objective if his life depended on it.

@Fiendish-Beaver which is why showing restraint is in our best interests. Games launch broken because publishers know people will buy - or even worse, pre-order - them anyway.

@themightyant 🤣 don't forget that it's also a premium product for premium gamers.

@Titntin wait... you were at Bullfrog?! What did you work on? Did you know Peter Molyneux?! The questions are coming quicker than I can type them!

@somnambulance oh, they would have got somewhere. But 8 years is a long time and there was no way either game was going to be the success they'd need to be to warrant the time and money spent on them. Like you said, incompetent management is probably what's to blame when you get down to it. Unless someone like Jason Schreier gets the skinny then we won't know for certain.

@somnambulance I feel like even Microsoft isn't stupid enough to not realise the backlash and ill sentiment it would face if it shut down Double Fine. Tim Schafer alone is just too beloved in the industry and by the people who play DF's games. If, hypothetically, Microsoft decided it didn't want Double Fine anymore, they best have a buyer lined up or set the studio up to go independent again.

The Initiative was a bad idea from the start. A new studio set up that does very little of its own development and partners with other studios who do all the work? Ask Keiji Inafune how well that goes. Now add to that numerous management shakeups, a protracted development cycle and the stress and expectations that come from developing so-called AAAA games? I'm amazed they lasted as long as they did, to be honest.

@Kaloudz thanks for the info, much appreciated 🙂👍

@Jenkinss but it also takes nothing away from your accomplishment if you don't use the escalator and someone else does.

@CenturianShark

I remember this was supposed to be a launch title for the xbox one.

Maybe in your timeline it was. In ours, proper development didn't begin until 2013 and the game was announced at E3 2014.

@Kaloudz is there a way to alter the length of the parry (or party, thanks again autocorrect) window? I played through Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown earlier in the year and while that had a lot of parrying, it let you lengthen the window, which made it a lot more manageable.

@Kaloudz out of interest, what are the accessibility and difficulty options like in Expedition 33? I've had my eye on it - as I heard it wasn't obnoxiously long, for a JRPG-inspired game anyway - but I'm a bit wary of the talk of parrying.

Yes, autocorrect: parrying. Not partying, although I am also wary of that.

@BacklogBrad I don't remember if you can do it in Remake, but in Rebirth you can set hotkeys for stuff like spells, skills, synergy abilities, etc.

I'll never understand people bemoaning the inclusion of optional difficulty options. If it allows more people to play a game, then that is in no way a bad thing and doesn't take a thing away from you if you played the game "normally" or "as intended".

I just finished up Rebirth and had to tone down the difficulty for a few of the boss fights; partly because some of them are quite tricky anyway, and partly because there can be a hell of a lot of visual effects going off in combat, and as someone who is visually impaired I found it difficult to see what was going on sometimes. I dare say that had the ability to adjust the difficulty not been there, I might not have been able to finish the game. The forthcoming extra difficulty options would have been even more welcome.

@Broosh my wife and I invariably make fun of grown men riding scooters in public, so yeah good on them for moving up in the world, I guess.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, which I should finish up today. Also - three years late to the party - Vampire Survivors, which I am almost hopelessly addicted to.

@yeaman Yeah, I could be completely off base. It doesn't look to me like it's going to cater to the people who've been asking for it, but I do hope I'm wrong. One thing that is certain is that if EA doesn't see a big enough return on the investment then they will drop the game long before it reaches a 1.0 release. They'll be very gun-shy about trying again and fans of the series/genre will probably be waiting another 15 years before EA takes another crack at it.

@ScalenePowers they're working their way through the good games first 😜

Sorry, that's my opinion of course. But I imagine it won't be too much longer right? There can't be that many subseries or games left. Off the top of my head I can think of Legends, Legends 2, Soccer and X Command Mission. Oh, and the Game Boy games; were those different from the NES/SNES ones?

I only ever played a demo of one of the Skate games on Xbox 360. Wasn't my thing. Judging by what I've heard and seen from previews and gameplay streams, this isn't going to be the Skate 4 that people want it to be; I think that the free-to-play live service approach is going to rub a lot of the fans of the old games up the wrong way.

I also don't think it's going to be the success that EA might be expecting. They've been bitten at least once before by listening to a vocal minority repeatedly demanding a sequel - Mirror's Edge: Catalyst, anyone? - and now they're not only once again pandering to that vocal minority, but at the same time not pandering to them by not giving them exactly what they wanted? Doesn't seem like a recipe for success to me.

Just my thoughts, though. Hopefully I'm wrong.

@AverageJoseph as Fry would say: shut up and take my money.