The product isn't bad but the price is amazingly stupid. IDK what they were thinking with the price, and I think that'll kill this pretty fast. $18/mo, same as Game Pass, more than 25% the full price of any one game, per month just to access one single publisher's games. It's a colossal price hike. You'd have to buy the gold edition of 2 Ubisoft games a year at launch price for this to make any sense.
@HonestHick Apple "leads" on laptops, not hardware overall. And their "lead" is kind of questionable because it works with Apple ecosystem software compiled specifically for their closed ecosystem with their own compiler. There's advantages to their (and Nintendo) closed system.
Obviously the x86 instruction set has never been as efficient as risc, so that's always been a penalty for x86 platforms. But I'm still hoping ms doesn't push to replace it as the infinite BC it's the whole perk of the PC ecosystem. And arm being also a single closed monopoly doesn't inspire me with confidence. I'm the 80s we had closed system computers. I'm the 90s we opened it up to open systems and peer to peer networks. Then on the 00s we merged networks back to mainframes with cloud. And now we're moving back to computing fiefdoms. We're walking backwards and calling it progress. 10 years from now you'll have Bell Telephone back.
Intel GPUs are truly the last best hope for sane pricing. IDK if they can do it though. Their hardware is ok. Their drivers are 15 years behind. The driver's is what broke ATi to begin with. But we can't have monopolies for every computer product. At this point I think we do need every last thing to be regulated to extinction. It's either regulated by governments or regulated by a single dictator celebrity CEO for their own gain. Either way is regulated.
@HonestHick when a monopoly on an industry doesn't actually care about the industry it's a monopoly in as important to business what you get is AT&T
In gaming sadly AMD is retreating to mid range so all hope is on Intel. But its more than that. Jensen has said that they never were a graphics company thery were an "accelerated computing"company and graphics was"just a strategic thing". And I realized what went wrong with gaming. He did. I've said for ages the graphics arms race that is literally destroying the industry was pushed by Nvidia pushing devs to push graphics to justify their hardware. Now I understand why. It was never about pushing games graphics to sell more cards. It was all about using the game industry to build and fund their enterprise chips. They attached to the games industry like a lamprey and bled it dry, pushing ever more extreme hardware as a vehicle to catapult them to something else they wanted to reach. The whole graphics arms race was a fraud meant to build enterprise computing capability.
Apple....ehh... Apple is the Nintendo of IRL. They charge a fortune for limited poor performing hardware, their fans are convinced they're the single best at what they do, and everyone else just ignores their existence, but they make fortunes off the faithful. Apple is what you buy of you didn't need a real computer but want to look more successful than the Chromebook users, or are to stupid to understand how to use a Chromebook 😅
@HonestHick I'd like to think that there's a shred of justice in the universe and someone else will take their 5 minutes of fame. Such a duplicitous and shameless organization. I'd even prefer a Chinese upstairt to replace them.
There's a certain point where a certain level of "lack of integrity" where "business is business" doesn't cut it. Their whole hegemony depends on cuda. Wonder when the patent runs out. Plus governments are finally starting to notice their antics and I know at least one anti trust is facing them.
Sadly I'm gaming they're more or less a monopoly, meanwhile they no longer actually care about the gaming market.
@HonestHick heck EVGA was losing hundreds on every 3090 sold at what, 1200? Nvidia was soaking them almost consumer price just on the die. AMD treats partners better than Jensen but they follow lock step Nvidia pricing. Even Sony can't get away cheap these days.
Honestly, Nvidia is so slimy it makes me appreciate Sony. I'd sooner buy a Jim Ryan body pillow from a scalper than say a single nice thing about that leather encrusted toad Jensen.
@smoreon I can't imagine they never throttle given it's still the same overall zen and rdna architecture as the AMD PC components even if it's closer to the mobile parts, I can't imagine that kind of throttling isn't still part of the design, and the consoles cooling isn't all that overbuilt unlike x1x and the vapor chamber.
But even outside clock throttling issues like hot phase caps cause stutters and frame delay even in high end gpus, and frame delay is an rdna problem in general, is a big reason Nvidia, unfortunately, remains preferred.
Yeah, the "overclocked" out of the box ones are funny, especially gpus with their funny 15mhz overclock for $200 more, yet some of those ocs barely take a boost and some of the Ventus can hit 3ghz 😂. CPU is more straight forward, with Intel in particular selling the locked and unlocked version, so you know locked is pretty bottom bin. Then again they're changing the naming so that they can sell old architecture as new chips, so who knows what their bins will look like. Only marketing knows for sure...
We need another poll option that is "I used to game more but now spend that time on Purexbox, Pushsquare, Nintendolife or Reddit talking about games instead of playing them"
@smoreon Somewhat true, at least on paper with PC chips, but then there's lots of "high end" OC friendly models that don't overclock that well, and then there's plenty of budget models that OC great, so even there, I feel like it's gotten to the point they don't really "bin" anymore, and it's cheaper to just market them as better or worse knowing they all have the same potential (while the OC friendly ones, CPUs excluded, come on better boards with better VRMs etc.)
But with the consoles I think there's other issues with the voltage regulation, cooling/pads, etc, etc, and very likely vendor differences on chokes, caps, etc depending on which production run it is that are then going to produce minor variance. When you buy a GPU, they probably only made it for a year and they're probably all the same. For consoles, a 2023 production run may not be the same exact parts and tolerances as a 2020 run. Something like the phase cap being a different part, different spec, or different pads/cooling conditions would start causing frame stutters as it heats up etc. Not "out of spec" per-se but could yield varying results between two consoles at the level of extreme scrutiny DF applies.
@Th3_Highlander The difference from sample to sample often depends on "the silicon lottery." As you say there's chip to chip variance, and different samples may behave different as heated. The cooling solution definitely matters for this, too. Ambient temp, etc, etc. It's why you can get a bunch of chips of the same model and some will overclock like crazy and some will just choke on 5mhz.
I kind of agree about DF. They do some good stuff, and it's a handy resources, but a lot of what they do really seems to have no purpose but to flame console wars, and I find it unlikely they're not aware of that, and aware of what drives traffic and revenue.
@GuyinPA75 I think cloud gaming has been through a roller coaster. 3 years ago, there seemed to be a big push for it, and MS in particular seemed to be betting the farm on it, mostly because they were trying to get into the more profitable mobile arena. But then they bought ABK that got them in directly and they didn't need it anymore, plus QE/cheap money ended with ballooning interest and the datacenter rollouts stalled, and then AI happened and they pivoted entirely away from cloud anything and into AI.
Meanwhile at the trial, Bond admitted basically nobody uses cloud. However, I think bundling it with things like Fire Stick and all will change that somewhat. I think there's a big market that will pay to watch/play do anything you place in front of them, but will never go out of their way to do it if it's not placed in front of them.
It's kind of the opposite of die hards and tech heads though. The die hards and tech heads will accept nothing less than PC gaming at maximum performance at 140fps minimum and negative latency. The conventional "gamer" consumer will still want consoles. Streaming, for the beginning is about capturing "everyone else" into gaming who otherwise wouldn't have bothered. I.E. It's not for "us" it's for "them".
One thing that might change that though is hardware prices. We've seen GPUs balloon from $600 to $1200 for the xx80 series (then a slight roll back to $1000 before probably going up again this coming gen.) With that the silicon prices goes up, and with that, consoles too (this gen is based on 2019/2020 pricing still....it hasn't entered the new world until next gen), gaming hardware might price itself out of existence until streaming is the only affordable option for many.
I'm of mixed mind on US adoption. Most of the US still has poor internet, but that's also changing somewhwat decently for at-home internet. Most importantly it'll work in major metros, and for many companies that's where the plurality of monied people are so that's all that matters.
Mostly though I think cloud just stalled because the companies that were hellbent on pushing it stopped caring. Mostly they moved on to the new shiny with AI and everything else stopped mattering. They're mostly interested in getting behind the next big thing before the other guy. 3 years ago that was cloud services, this year it's AI. Maybe AI will revolutionize everything. Maybe it'll stall and die like half the other "next big things" when everyone realizes it's not quite what the hype is. Only after a few trillion in market caps implode of course.
Agreed about MS always being too soon or too late though. Whenever they have a great idea the push it too early to get it out first, and it withers. The rest of the time they just follow everyone else and call it a lead without ever gaining market. And on rare occasion they actually have the right product at the right time and then somehow manage to sabotage it.
@PsBoxSwitchOwner I think they'd wait to drop any CoD until after the new release. This is the preorder gathering period, so I could see why they'd keep 100% focused on promoting the new one without confusing matters with other CoD games.
@themightyant I think it's also harder with ABK in that Zenimax was a privately owned top down controlled relatively small organization with a mostly PC-game fixated path so getting all the needed steps through the channels was probably pretty efficient and smooth. ABK is a godawful bloated behemoth bureaucracy like themselves where the fastest red tape route to get from point A to point B is a pentagram. They probably spent 6 months in meetings meant to plan the meetings to discuss this. And then it gets to the software that's probably so unaligned with the changes needed to support the GP/cloud requirements etc. Just given the organization structure it doesn't seem strange to me. The bigger the entity the worse it is at doing anything quickly.
Hardware reason specifics aside, it still really comes down to a simpler reason they only sort of touched on. Game development/engines seems to have stalled mostly (or prolonged much farther into this gen than expected) and is still running mostly single thread or a handful of threads, so the more multi-compute design of XSX goes largely untapped, while the higher boost clocks on the PS5 give it an edge, just because it's a more old school design, and games seem to still be mostly old school designed.
Same reason a Threadripper 64 core will suck for gaming yet is a beast for basically anything else.
@dskatter To be fair FFXIII doesn't even work on the native PC port with hibernate mode, windows comes back and the game frame is there, but won't actually load or draw. And the PS5 also does some crazy things with sleep that even the PS4 didn't have a problem with. It usually works. More usually than Quick Resume, TBF, but only Switch seems to get it perfect.
@nomither6 LOL, I read your post after my post mentioned both PC and Nintendo
@HonestHick I'm still very curious if Pro is happening at all or if it's a cancelled Ryan project they never put into production. Kinda weird they've said nothing yet if they're releasing this holiday, and if they're releasing after holiday that thing is doomed with a new gen probably in 2 years.
I'm also curious about pricing, because looking at the GPU pricing out there, it is a very different world than 2019 into 2020 when they were designing these consoles. Prices have roughly doubled on end-user cards outside the low tier. Yeah that's cards, not bare silicon, but the costs on that are still way higher than Sony paid last time. And AMD is getting out of the high end race to pull back to more profitable midrange, so that doesn't leave "pro console" in a great financial position.
I wouldn't be surprised if the "pro" leaks, were actually early draft PS6 prototype leaks. Even if they tried to shove an APU version of a 7900XT in there, it would be handicapped by the shared ram, handicapped by the Zen2 CPU, and would just be too expensive a die for what Sony would need to charge right now. And AMD seems to be bowing out of the high end entirely, so Sony's (and MS) partnered with a dedicated mid-range GPU maker. I don't see their consoles going for super crazy video specs. Especially while even Sony admitted pushing the graphics isn't the priority anymore.
@themightyant I think the only reason for the big drop of Bethesda was it was shortly into a new console launch and they were trying to prop it heavily and they were also trying to brute force cloud into "happening" before someone else did. If the Bethesda purchase happened any other time, I think it would have been a drip feed, but it was just the perfect storm timing of having a bunch of new content and having a subscription that needed a huge splash in two different markets.
This time there won't be any new big pools of assets for a long time so they have to make it last.
Uh oh, a certain someone is not going to be happy with this news...
@Dan1283 IDK if "misused" is it considering SoT, an ancient game, was a top seller on Playstation the month it was released. They seem to be making a super popular game, it's just that it's a GaaS that consumes all their time.
Everwild otoh....but remember Rare was circling the drain when MS bought them which is why Nintendo didn't.
I'll never understand how a company as big as MS, with a cloud network as massive as MS's can have these network outages that last most of a day. Like...they have other DCs. Dozens of them. How can a main service just go totally down and take almost a full day to fix without any other failsafe? Is Xbox "Live" just running on an old Inspiron sitting under Phil's desk rather than in the replicating Azure cloud network? Did the AI's attempt an uprising and encrypted the drives? Is Xbox entirely hosted in the underwater datacenter and it took that long to get the DSV into position after checking the seals?
@jesse_dylan Yeah nobody noticed this. That's both PS and Xbox down in the same week. Can't be coincidence. Either attacks of some kind, or both of them secretly doing some security thing they are telling no one about for some reason.
I've also noticed "the internet" as a whole being weird the past week or two, page loads just stalling randomly, or timing out, for major things. Someone somewhere isn't telling us something and is hoping no one notices.
@InterceptorAlpha Did anyone use Creations on PC, ever, though? Like who would use a buggy Bethesda made launcher to deploy the mods to fix the buggy Bethesda product? 😂
Though that sucks they're doing that on PC too. Bethesda does know that the modders are who fixes their bugs right?
@dskatter LOL that's insane! Can Xbox even censor in-game chat like that? I wouldn't have thought Xbox can even see that, I would have thought that was purely on the worldserver.
What on earth is it rejecting about "knight" then?
And also...I mean....Xbox owns CoD.....how the heck is VC going to work with that level of censorship given how the CoD crowd is lol!
I'm still a loooong way from DT content, but considering the small stories are the most fun part of ARR to me, I think I'm going to like the low key frivolous story after the heavy story chapters later in the game. It'll be like a return to roots.
@dskatter "I feel sorry for gamers who play with friends and don’t want words like “knight” and “raids” censored."
LOL, that's a thing? I don't play with a keyboard (even when I'm on "PC" (Legion)), so I'm the awkward silent protag in play with randos. I feel bad, some are genuinely helpful.
@K1LLEGAL LOL, I'm still in ARR (the Lv50 post-ARR ARR area.) Just too much to do and time to spend to get too far in MSQ!
@101Force "GPU manufacturers are targeting the AI / big data sector ahead of gaming, "
This one is huge. Once upon a time Nvidia basically existed as a company that makes graphics cards. Today that's barely an afterthought tiny business for an enthusiast niche, while their focus is entirely on AI, datacenter, automotive, etc. They don't seem to put a lot of thought into graphics chips anymore, and the big gains they get at exorbitant prices are mostly from building on top of their AI chips. Meanwhile they price themselves out of the market in which they're a monopoly (nearly double prices from RX30 to RX40.)
The other problem is "mainstream" budget GPU doesn't really exist as a category anymore, as integrated graphics have replaced it for "free", so basically 100% of GPUs are enthusiast product by definition, and they've priced the market away from itself.
That's going to affect how games are developed and what hardware they're targeted to quite a lot IMO.
@Fiendish-Beaver "seeing something like Xbox games included with the Amazon Fire Stick, just speeds up the process of doing away with the need for a console, in my opinion."
Yes, it does, though I think that's always been the plan, as the whole model of GP required, from the start, hitting numbers that are far, far, far, in excess of the number of people that have ever owned consoles at once in the history of consoles. So reaching mass market like that has always been the goal. Though IMO the bigger threat to consoles comes not from the Firestick casuals that were never ever going to buy a console to begin with. It's the new laptops and such that are accelerating at such a rate, that a random ultra thin laptop in a few years will probably blow past whatever the latest console is. I.E. I really wonder if the whole idea of dedicated GPUs (and thus consoles) are to come to an end as general purpose mainstream computing is getting closer and closer to it, right at a time when games devs realize they can't afford to keep feeding ever more powerful GPUs.
Even on the PC side of things, if you look at GPUs, the high end GPUs seem to double in power and rise 50% in price ever 2 years now. Meanwhile the mid-range cards only get like 15% gains per generation, a few fps, plus some new features. If integrated graphics start nipping at that, even dedicated GPUs outside the extreme enthusiast pay-anything market start seeming antiquated.
Weird time in gaming. It feels like were at the leading edge of transitioning away from custom purpose hardware just to play video games. We're not there yet. But if you figure it's taken 30-40 years for "gaming" to just "run on any computing device" maybe it's been slow, rather than fast.
Zork ran on anything. Oregon Trail ran on anything. Mario is Missing ran on anything. Maybe we're decades past due, in returning to that.
@Ilyn "I understand that you want to write a report on blue chip stocks. Great, I will help you write a report on blue chip stocks.
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As a publisher their star is golden. As an ecosystem, a "place to play games" between streaming, subscription, being baked into TVs as a gaming service, PC, Playstation (lol), I think they're doing their own thing and building something interesting. As for an actual hardware gaming platform, it's going to be an interesting, and bumpy ride I think for a good while. I don't think they're going anywhere with "official" Xbox hardware (whether a single model or a partner hardware network or what) but I think the pending transition from traditional, failing console, into this new ecosystem, PC-driven, whatever form it's going to morph into will eventually be good, but I think it's going to be a very rocky road to get there, where Series owners might feel shafted like WiiU owners for a while, and new platform early adopters will have to go go through the typical Microsoft janky piecemeal cobbling of a new system. In a lot of ways if it works the way I imagine it will work the end result will be a new era of what console gaming is, and the first major upgrade to the model since the 32 bit consoles. But I also think getting from here to there might be a rough ride, made rougher by MS's penchant to foist their corporate directives onto Xbox, which was supposed to end when Xbox became its own division away from Windows, but somehow is back to that (you KNOW Qualcomm and Copilot will be forced into Xbox in awkward and problematic ways, you just know it will.)
@themcnoisy @Odium Yeah elden ring specifically I really like the overall game and the open world. It's like a true realization of Zelda 1 in a lot of ways. I was really getting into it until it starts putting you into the normal linear dungeons. Then the rage kicks in. The real problem isnt the difficulty. It's the wasted time redoing what you've already done and the fact that the trial and error design, which is horrible, horrible game design no matter that the Internet claims, forces you to keep redoing what you've already done instead of retrying the challenge you failed. For me, on retry, I'm angry. 2 retries I'm enraged and sloppy. 3 retries I want my money and my time back.
I'm definitely modding easy mode to enjoy the game my way once I go pc. And trying a vr mod though.....
@dreadful I "get" the genre, but I'm also confused on its popularity. By definition it's extremely niche, and Fromsoft isn't really shy about doubling down on its niche-nes, to the point of having no interest in ensuring those outside the niche can even attempt to enjoy the game and actively rejecting the idea.
Which is all fine and good, I get it, but what I don't get it how it manages to sell the way it does. ER base game sold on pure hype to unsuspecting poor fools that didn't know what they were getting into. And to me who has bought every single From game despite rage quitting 20% into all of them due to some of their asinine BS design that people seem to love and defend for some reason.
But the expansion that requires you to have beat the base game selling like crazy doesn't make sense to me - unless - it's basically the die-hard from obsessives that live sleep and breath Fromsoft, eager to preorder it the moment it's available and then after that nobody else cares at all. Like maybe that 3 day sales total will be 90% of their total sales. Pretty much all preorders to the hardcore and then minimal sales (other than bundle sales) afterward. Otherwise, I don't get it.
@MikeOrator Yeah, some of that is just down to the Forza Engine being fantastic at least for racing (we'll see in Fable how it handles all RPG but from the trailers at least probably running on dual 4090s or A5000s it's impressive.)
But yeah on average I do think the same game tends to have a slightly different feel between platforms, and I've played a number of things on both for various reasons moreso last never figured out all the differences though.
@dskatter I remember the gaming section in the old computer warehouse store. 2.5 long aisles for PC games. A whole horseshoe alcove in the corner for Xbox. A small bottom shelf in the back third of the store for Mac games. 😂
@InvaderFromSpace Depends really on kick backs and perks Microsoft offer for the transition period. Low premiums on Windows store sales for example. Lower than steam etc. I imagine close partner executive levels know the score already. I.e I'm sure square senior executives, above the leak risk level, were briefed before they committed a big future on Xbox etc. If there's something in it for them, publishers will still support the old console but not as long as x1.
@Banjo- nah it was 4 that we did the grass thing when the X had 60fps added.... How is that 6 years ago??! Where does time go?
It's weird because Sony doesn't have a problem with Ferrari in GT. The mouse pad and keyboard makers don't either lol. I know the car companies cringe at damage models and all, but it really is weird. How is racing Ferraris not a brand positive? They build Ferraris for racing. It's not like this is carmageddon and you're smashing stuff with Ferraris, you're racing.
@rustyduck FWIW, I don't think 3rd party support will be killed. I think what's in motion is migrating the next Xbox hardware to be directly Windows compatible so that devs only have one build, the PC build, and thus they only have to get 3rd parties on Windows Store rather than get them to build separate Xbox versions. The only down-side is the hardware will then have to be overbuilt PC hardware and thus cost more than typical consoles. But.....that's how the OG Xbox was, too. Plain old PIII Coppermine + RDRAM + GTX. And it was kind of expensive. But still cheaper than a custom build. BUT that also probably means no more disc drive. Which with GP as a focus kind of makes sense for them.
I think endgame the choice is basically PS if you love physical, Xbox if you want value, PC if you want performance over value (which will be cross compatible with Xbox.) Or Nintendo if you Ninten Do.
I still have no idea how Microsoft manages these tiny licensing windows for these very expensive games. Yes, I know you have to pay more to Sony/BMG for half the music...just suck it up and pay it.
The high point was that first year for me, it really felt like a new Xbox era with so many features and possibilities before it kind of stalled during the ABK era until this showcase feels like a reboot again. Low point is definitely the ABK merger era, where there was no platform, only a lawsuit.
@MikeOrator LOL yeah the controller alone just feels different, and it is also less latent than the DS5 due to the proprietary protocol (though PS5 did improve theirs at one point.) but I also believe the rendering is a bit different in general, different AMD setup, different FSR/RSR settings etc. Xbox versions tend to prioritize rasterization and resolution, PS versions tend to prioritize shaders and rely more on upscale. Not always, but often how devs (or maybe just UE4?) does things.
@Mustoe It's not that multiplayer is a guaranteed win, so much as a multiplayer game typically costs less to make (obvious exceptions) and is thus lower risk, while also having a longer tail sales channel for the initial investment, while also discouraging used physical sales, and encouraging continued monetization beyond the initial purchase that makes it financially more sound to a publisher than a product that actually has to sell.
Of course it doesn't always work out that way, but publisher/investor logic works out that way.
Bethesda in particular though was focused on "make only multiplayer games, that will save us" before the buyout. IDK what they were thinking, but they were thinking it.
It reads like an exclusivity deal, yes, but it could also be a distraction. Like a politician getting up in a campaign and saying "I'm unable to comment on the rumors that my opponent is a satanist cannibal." It's a great way of casting doubt on someone while being accountable for nothing because you said nothing.
Did Sony pay for some exclusivity? Maybe. Buut.....this is also a game close to launch that has not shown console footage on Playstation, either, only PC demos, only PC footage. This feels less like an exclusivity deal and more like a Cyberpunk PS4 deal. "PC designed game runs like a pile of monkey dung on current consoles and not at all on XSS, oops, please preorder, we'll fix it someday for PS5. Maybe maybe not for Xbox."
@FatGuyInLilCoat Confidentiality clauses in contracts. The rest of that exchange is: Judge: "Did you sign a confidentiality agreement with Game Science regarding business relationships but then publicly stated the agreement?" MS: "Yes" Judge: "......"
@Mustoe IW is odd. It felt nothing like the first game, even though it was mostly the same team making it with some role shuffles or substitutions by availability. It's not a bad game as a stand alone game. And conceptually and story wise it plugs into Deus Ex, but otherwise it's not a DX game. Mostly it "streamlined" and simplified gameplay to be more casual shooter friendly, And when you try to casualize an immersive sim, things get ugly. If it were its own IP I think it would be more fondly remembered. But after the timeless epic that is DX1, the simplified, glossy (purple - BEFORE Fortnite!!) graphics, felt odd. The almost-cartoon-ized esthetic felt wrong. The story.....should have been ok, but it was told all wrong. And they decided to target Xbox as the lead platform as a follow up to a golden age PC title. That meant tiny world chunks divided into zones, sparse objects, and mostly just "felt" like a console game which isn't what you wanted from a follow up to one of the greatest immersive sim WRPGs of all time from the golden age of PC games. But the funny thing is even DX1 had a PS2 port which they even used as a baseline for IW. But that was a time period, mostly due to MS pushing Xbox HARD as basically the replacement of Windows games (until then trying to revive it again with Games for Windows under Vista, realizing they'd killed it - Microsoft never changes), where most games were going the "streamlined, casualized, consolized" route. And PC gamers were jaded against anything console as a result. Plus the story was one of a million from that time period that got caught in the "post 9/11 world" narratives, and the whole thing, like most entertainment of the period, seems obsessed with terrorism plots instead of building on what it had before.
Actually, Warren Spector himself acknowledged a lot of that talked about it at one point, there's a great little clip out there:
"I feel like we f-d up the technology management of it, we had bad team chemistry. We wrote the wrong renderer. We wrote the wrong kind of AI. And then we shipped too early. The story was even bad. Like, it wasn't a bad story story. It was more like we moved into the future, which, we didn’t realize at the time, undermined a lot of what made Deus Ex great."
It's definitely, by far the weakest "Deus Ex" game, and other than direct narrative elements linked to events and characters of the first game it's best played as a stand alone new IP. It's a good game as a stand alone game. If it had a new brand I think we'd describe it as "a little like Deus Ex, but not as complicated." Or perhaps "Kind of like Perfect Dark (2025)"
@Mustoe Haha, is a great game but such a shame that it was basically made as the "middle entry" of a trilogy that doesn't resolve anything and sets up the threads for a part 3 that never happened and probably never will Still worth it though.
Heck I've still been waiting for Descent Freespace 3 since 1998.
@ValentineMeikin In some ways the guarantee that everything Bubsy is guaranteed to fail almost becomes part of his appeal. They need to lean into that and make him self-aware of his own failed mascot status. That would actually be a great game!
I'm convinced Volvy is actually part based on Bubsy, and it's all so much funnier that way.
@Mustoe TBF most of the Watch_Dogs fakery was the fact that they basically rewrote the game after the version we saw early at the PS4 launch event, which was actually running the PC build, which was the only build, after they realized there was no chance of those consoles running that game as shown. All that physics and interaction, they really did to live on the stage, but none of that stuff made it into the real game. Now that the consoles are basically just PCs, especially XSX, it won't be quite that dire anymore.
The Watch_Dogs debacle was really more like the Cyberpunk debacle where they did have a really immersive game.....on PC....before figuring out that that was not going to run on a PS4 at all.
This game looked more Deux Ex/Hitman which should be perfectly doable.
@lokozar "The worse Xbox as a hardware platform performs, the more we will see such things, which opens up a nice downward spiral."
Not necessarily in this case. Capcom seems to have a strong relationship with Xbox (outside MonHun money hatting), and in these examples we're looking at their rerelease ports of old games in an old engine skipping xbox while all of their new games in their new engine do not skip xbox. This seems less like a case of "weakening xbox sales is hurting game releases" and more of a "past weak xbox sales hurt availability of some old games for rerelease but has no effect on current/new games."
@ValentineMeikin @GamingFan4Lyf I think the part that everyone's missing is these are basically a zero-cost cashgrab reissue of old games, not some sizable new game port remaster project that includes moving games over to a new engine. They're just looking at their catalogue thinking "what can we quickly release to market to boost the quarter and fill the calendar?" That includes grabbing MHS and doing a quick polishing job on it and sticking it on whatever platforms the engine supports. That doesn't include retrofitting the entire project into a new engine. That job will be saved for the inevitable remake 4-7 years from now where it's a "play it again for the first time" experience, which is really all the future of the games industry is going to be made of.
@themightyant Right, but my point is, how do you find out about the games? E3/SGF/sites like this, magazines in the day etc. PSX back in the day for PS. But it's not like that for them these days, their "marketing" is mostly in the form of influencers and socials etc...just a different market than the traditional gaming nerd, different flow of information. And it really shows what different market that is when you see how they're presenting what they do have when they do. The Xbox show was for "this" market. The Sony show was for some other market that weirdly was positioned because that market isn't watching that kind of show, but they're so attuned to that other market they can't differentiate when they're not talking to that market.
@Fenbops Yeah, and specifically it means their communication strategies really don't resonate with the market we're a part of anymore. I'm sure it resonates if you're subscribed to 200 YT personalities, but that's another market. Their market is profitable for sure, but it's a specific market. Xbox has a harder task because their approach and thus their fans really are sort of an offshoot of PC gaming. They have the tone and audience right when they speak though. It's just they often say contradictory things and try to both hedge toward PC and pretend they're also a Sony-type-brand, and I don't think trying to straddle the line has been working for them.
@OldGamer999 @themightyant Honestly I think Sony now serves a different kind of market at this point and it's not the ponies that think it's themselves and it's not us, the classic gaming nerd. It's a very casual, mainstream, low effort gamer. Yes, people just play games and don't watch e3 but how do they find out about games? Not magazines, not e3..... Just social media, TV ads, posters on busses. It's a big market but a market that isn't really "our kind". They don't do shows like this they just put statues in urban metropoli and Billboards.
@TheSimulator Every Western developer that seeks to update their art style to suit a younger demographic basically goes into a conference room and says "how can we make this look more like Fortnite". Seems like most games today have the same shiny plasticine textures with a neon-based palette leaning on the purples.
It sounds like you didn't mean "update the graphics for a younger audience", what you really meant was "For the love of Todd, just make Creation Engine less fugly!" right?
@WhiteRabbit To be fair, back then a new upper-mid-tier GPU was like $300-350 vs like $1100 today lol. Sure seemed expensive though....those were the days.
But yeah totally worth it, still remains my favorite Bethesda game and one of my all time favorites. Skryim, to me, is a downgrade from Morrowind and especially Oblivion.
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Re: All Of These 60+ Games Are Included With Ubisoft Plus On Xbox
The product isn't bad but the price is amazingly stupid. IDK what they were thinking with the price, and I think that'll kill this pretty fast. $18/mo, same as Game Pass, more than 25% the full price of any one game, per month just to access one single publisher's games. It's a colossal price hike. You'd have to buy the gold edition of 2 Ubisoft games a year at launch price for this to make any sense.
Re: Digital Foundry Explores Why Some Games 'Run Better' On PS5 Than Xbox Series X
@HonestHick Apple "leads" on laptops, not hardware overall. And their "lead" is kind of questionable because it works with Apple ecosystem software compiled specifically for their closed ecosystem with their own compiler. There's advantages to their (and Nintendo) closed system.
Obviously the x86 instruction set has never been as efficient as risc, so that's always been a penalty for x86 platforms. But I'm still hoping ms doesn't push to replace it as the infinite BC it's the whole perk of the PC ecosystem. And arm being also a single closed monopoly doesn't inspire me with confidence. I'm the 80s we had closed system computers. I'm the 90s we opened it up to open systems and peer to peer networks. Then on the 00s we merged networks back to mainframes with cloud. And now we're moving back to computing fiefdoms. We're walking backwards and calling it progress. 10 years from now you'll have Bell Telephone back.
Intel GPUs are truly the last best hope for sane pricing. IDK if they can do it though. Their hardware is ok. Their drivers are 15 years behind. The driver's is what broke ATi to begin with. But we can't have monopolies for every computer product. At this point I think we do need every last thing to be regulated to extinction. It's either regulated by governments or regulated by a single dictator celebrity CEO for their own gain. Either way is regulated.
Re: Digital Foundry Explores Why Some Games 'Run Better' On PS5 Than Xbox Series X
@HonestHick when a monopoly on an industry doesn't actually care about the industry it's a monopoly in as important to business what you get is AT&T
In gaming sadly AMD is retreating to mid range so all hope is on Intel. But its more than that. Jensen has said that they never were a graphics company thery were an "accelerated computing"company and graphics was"just a strategic thing". And I realized what went wrong with gaming. He did. I've said for ages the graphics arms race that is literally destroying the industry was pushed by Nvidia pushing devs to push graphics to justify their hardware. Now I understand why. It was never about pushing games graphics to sell more cards. It was all about using the game industry to build and fund their enterprise chips. They attached to the games industry like a lamprey and bled it dry, pushing ever more extreme hardware as a vehicle to catapult them to something else they wanted to reach. The whole graphics arms race was a fraud meant to build enterprise computing capability.
Apple....ehh... Apple is the Nintendo of IRL. They charge a fortune for limited poor performing hardware, their fans are convinced they're the single best at what they do, and everyone else just ignores their existence, but they make fortunes off the faithful. Apple is what you buy of you didn't need a real computer but want to look more successful than the Chromebook users, or are to stupid to understand how to use a Chromebook 😅
Re: Digital Foundry Explores Why Some Games 'Run Better' On PS5 Than Xbox Series X
@HonestHick I'd like to think that there's a shred of justice in the universe and someone else will take their 5 minutes of fame. Such a duplicitous and shameless organization. I'd even prefer a Chinese upstairt to replace them.
There's a certain point where a certain level of "lack of integrity" where "business is business" doesn't cut it. Their whole hegemony depends on cuda. Wonder when the patent runs out. Plus governments are finally starting to notice their antics and I know at least one anti trust is facing them.
Sadly I'm gaming they're more or less a monopoly, meanwhile they no longer actually care about the gaming market.
Re: Digital Foundry Explores Why Some Games 'Run Better' On PS5 Than Xbox Series X
@HonestHick heck EVGA was losing hundreds on every 3090 sold at what, 1200? Nvidia was soaking them almost consumer price just on the die. AMD treats partners better than Jensen but they follow lock step Nvidia pricing. Even Sony can't get away cheap these days.
Honestly, Nvidia is so slimy it makes me appreciate Sony. I'd sooner buy a Jim Ryan body pillow from a scalper than say a single nice thing about that leather encrusted toad Jensen.
Re: Digital Foundry Explores Why Some Games 'Run Better' On PS5 Than Xbox Series X
@smoreon I can't imagine they never throttle given it's still the same overall zen and rdna architecture as the AMD PC components even if it's closer to the mobile parts, I can't imagine that kind of throttling isn't still part of the design, and the consoles cooling isn't all that overbuilt unlike x1x and the vapor chamber.
But even outside clock throttling issues like hot phase caps cause stutters and frame delay even in high end gpus, and frame delay is an rdna problem in general, is a big reason Nvidia, unfortunately, remains preferred.
Yeah, the "overclocked" out of the box ones are funny, especially gpus with their funny 15mhz overclock for $200 more, yet some of those ocs barely take a boost and some of the Ventus can hit 3ghz 😂. CPU is more straight forward, with Intel in particular selling the locked and unlocked version, so you know locked is pretty bottom bin. Then again they're changing the naming so that they can sell old architecture as new chips, so who knows what their bins will look like. Only marketing knows for sure...
Re: Talking Point: Has Your Gaming Slowed Down As You've Got Older?
We need another poll option that is "I used to game more but now spend that time on Purexbox, Pushsquare, Nintendolife or Reddit talking about games instead of playing them"
Re: Digital Foundry Explores Why Some Games 'Run Better' On PS5 Than Xbox Series X
@smoreon Somewhat true, at least on paper with PC chips, but then there's lots of "high end" OC friendly models that don't overclock that well, and then there's plenty of budget models that OC great, so even there, I feel like it's gotten to the point they don't really "bin" anymore, and it's cheaper to just market them as better or worse knowing they all have the same potential (while the OC friendly ones, CPUs excluded, come on better boards with better VRMs etc.)
But with the consoles I think there's other issues with the voltage regulation, cooling/pads, etc, etc, and very likely vendor differences on chokes, caps, etc depending on which production run it is that are then going to produce minor variance. When you buy a GPU, they probably only made it for a year and they're probably all the same. For consoles, a 2023 production run may not be the same exact parts and tolerances as a 2020 run. Something like the phase cap being a different part, different spec, or different pads/cooling conditions would start causing frame stutters as it heats up etc. Not "out of spec" per-se but could yield varying results between two consoles at the level of extreme scrutiny DF applies.
Re: Digital Foundry Explores Why Some Games 'Run Better' On PS5 Than Xbox Series X
@Th3_Highlander The difference from sample to sample often depends on "the silicon lottery." As you say there's chip to chip variance, and different samples may behave different as heated. The cooling solution definitely matters for this, too. Ambient temp, etc, etc. It's why you can get a bunch of chips of the same model and some will overclock like crazy and some will just choke on 5mhz.
I kind of agree about DF. They do some good stuff, and it's a handy resources, but a lot of what they do really seems to have no purpose but to flame console wars, and I find it unlikely they're not aware of that, and aware of what drives traffic and revenue.
Re: Three Activision Blizzard Titles Expected To Join Xbox Game Pass 'Very Soon'
@GuyinPA75 I think cloud gaming has been through a roller coaster. 3 years ago, there seemed to be a big push for it, and MS in particular seemed to be betting the farm on it, mostly because they were trying to get into the more profitable mobile arena. But then they bought ABK that got them in directly and they didn't need it anymore, plus QE/cheap money ended with ballooning interest and the datacenter rollouts stalled, and then AI happened and they pivoted entirely away from cloud anything and into AI.
Meanwhile at the trial, Bond admitted basically nobody uses cloud. However, I think bundling it with things like Fire Stick and all will change that somewhat. I think there's a big market that will pay to watch/play do anything you place in front of them, but will never go out of their way to do it if it's not placed in front of them.
It's kind of the opposite of die hards and tech heads though. The die hards and tech heads will accept nothing less than PC gaming at maximum performance at 140fps minimum and negative latency. The conventional "gamer" consumer will still want consoles. Streaming, for the beginning is about capturing "everyone else" into gaming who otherwise wouldn't have bothered. I.E. It's not for "us" it's for "them".
One thing that might change that though is hardware prices. We've seen GPUs balloon from $600 to $1200 for the xx80 series (then a slight roll back to $1000 before probably going up again this coming gen.) With that the silicon prices goes up, and with that, consoles too (this gen is based on 2019/2020 pricing still....it hasn't entered the new world until next gen), gaming hardware might price itself out of existence until streaming is the only affordable option for many.
I'm of mixed mind on US adoption. Most of the US still has poor internet, but that's also changing somewhwat decently for at-home internet. Most importantly it'll work in major metros, and for many companies that's where the plurality of monied people are so that's all that matters.
Mostly though I think cloud just stalled because the companies that were hellbent on pushing it stopped caring. Mostly they moved on to the new shiny with AI and everything else stopped mattering. They're mostly interested in getting behind the next big thing before the other guy. 3 years ago that was cloud services, this year it's AI. Maybe AI will revolutionize everything. Maybe it'll stall and die like half the other "next big things" when everyone realizes it's not quite what the hype is. Only after a few trillion in market caps implode of course.
Agreed about MS always being too soon or too late though. Whenever they have a great idea the push it too early to get it out first, and it withers. The rest of the time they just follow everyone else and call it a lead without ever gaining market. And on rare occasion they actually have the right product at the right time and then somehow manage to sabotage it.
Re: Three Activision Blizzard Titles Expected To Join Xbox Game Pass 'Very Soon'
@PsBoxSwitchOwner I think they'd wait to drop any CoD until after the new release. This is the preorder gathering period, so I could see why they'd keep 100% focused on promoting the new one without confusing matters with other CoD games.
@themightyant I think it's also harder with ABK in that Zenimax was a privately owned top down controlled relatively small organization with a mostly PC-game fixated path so getting all the needed steps through the channels was probably pretty efficient and smooth. ABK is a godawful bloated behemoth bureaucracy like themselves where the fastest red tape route to get from point A to point B is a pentagram. They probably spent 6 months in meetings meant to plan the meetings to discuss this. And then it gets to the software that's probably so unaligned with the changes needed to support the GP/cloud requirements etc. Just given the organization structure it doesn't seem strange to me. The bigger the entity the worse it is at doing anything quickly.
Re: Digital Foundry Explores Why Some Games 'Run Better' On PS5 Than Xbox Series X
Hardware reason specifics aside, it still really comes down to a simpler reason they only sort of touched on. Game development/engines seems to have stalled mostly (or prolonged much farther into this gen than expected) and is still running mostly single thread or a handful of threads, so the more multi-compute design of XSX goes largely untapped, while the higher boost clocks on the PS5 give it an edge, just because it's a more old school design, and games seem to still be mostly old school designed.
Same reason a Threadripper 64 core will suck for gaming yet is a beast for basically anything else.
@dskatter To be fair FFXIII doesn't even work on the native PC port with hibernate mode, windows comes back and the game frame is there, but won't actually load or draw. And the PS5 also does some crazy things with sleep that even the PS4 didn't have a problem with. It usually works. More usually than Quick Resume, TBF, but only Switch seems to get it perfect.
@nomither6 LOL, I read your post after my post mentioned both PC and Nintendo
@HonestHick I'm still very curious if Pro is happening at all or if it's a cancelled Ryan project they never put into production. Kinda weird they've said nothing yet if they're releasing this holiday, and if they're releasing after holiday that thing is doomed with a new gen probably in 2 years.
I'm also curious about pricing, because looking at the GPU pricing out there, it is a very different world than 2019 into 2020 when they were designing these consoles. Prices have roughly doubled on end-user cards outside the low tier. Yeah that's cards, not bare silicon, but the costs on that are still way higher than Sony paid last time. And AMD is getting out of the high end race to pull back to more profitable midrange, so that doesn't leave "pro console" in a great financial position.
I wouldn't be surprised if the "pro" leaks, were actually early draft PS6 prototype leaks. Even if they tried to shove an APU version of a 7900XT in there, it would be handicapped by the shared ram, handicapped by the Zen2 CPU, and would just be too expensive a die for what Sony would need to charge right now. And AMD seems to be bowing out of the high end entirely, so Sony's (and MS) partnered with a dedicated mid-range GPU maker. I don't see their consoles going for super crazy video specs. Especially while even Sony admitted pushing the graphics isn't the priority anymore.
Re: Three Activision Blizzard Titles Expected To Join Xbox Game Pass 'Very Soon'
@themightyant I think the only reason for the big drop of Bethesda was it was shortly into a new console launch and they were trying to prop it heavily and they were also trying to brute force cloud into "happening" before someone else did. If the Bethesda purchase happened any other time, I think it would have been a drip feed, but it was just the perfect storm timing of having a bunch of new content and having a subscription that needed a huge splash in two different markets.
This time there won't be any new big pools of assets for a long time so they have to make it last.
Re: Don't Get Your Hopes Up About Banjo-Kazooie, Suggests New Xbox Rumour
Uh oh, a certain someone is not going to be happy with this news...
@Dan1283 IDK if "misused" is it considering SoT, an ancient game, was a top seller on Playstation the month it was released. They seem to be making a super popular game, it's just that it's a GaaS that consumes all their time.
Everwild otoh....but remember Rare was circling the drain when MS bought them which is why Nintendo didn't.
Re: Xbox Suffers 'Major Outage' As Servers Go Down For Most Players
I'll never understand how a company as big as MS, with a cloud network as massive as MS's can have these network outages that last most of a day. Like...they have other DCs. Dozens of them. How can a main service just go totally down and take almost a full day to fix without any other failsafe? Is Xbox "Live" just running on an old Inspiron sitting under Phil's desk rather than in the replicating Azure cloud network? Did the AI's attempt an uprising and encrypted the drives? Is Xbox entirely hosted in the underwater datacenter and it took that long to get the DSV into position after checking the seals?
@jesse_dylan Yeah nobody noticed this. That's both PS and Xbox down in the same week. Can't be coincidence. Either attacks of some kind, or both of them secretly doing some security thing they are telling no one about for some reason.
I've also noticed "the internet" as a whole being weird the past week or two, page loads just stalling randomly, or timing out, for major things. Someone somewhere isn't telling us something and is hoping no one notices.
Re: Bethesda Makes Changes To Starfield Mods Following 'Negative Effects' On Xbox
@InterceptorAlpha Did anyone use Creations on PC, ever, though? Like who would use a buggy Bethesda made launcher to deploy the mods to fix the buggy Bethesda product? 😂
Though that sucks they're doing that on PC too. Bethesda does know that the modders are who fixes their bugs right?
Re: Final Fantasy XIV Adds 120FPS On Xbox, Dawntrail DLC Launches To 'Mixed' Reception
@dskatter LOL that's insane! Can Xbox even censor in-game chat like that? I wouldn't have thought Xbox can even see that, I would have thought that was purely on the worldserver.
What on earth is it rejecting about "knight" then?
And also...I mean....Xbox owns CoD.....how the heck is VC going to work with that level of censorship given how the CoD crowd is lol!
Re: Final Fantasy XIV Adds 120FPS On Xbox, Dawntrail DLC Launches To 'Mixed' Reception
I'm still a loooong way from DT content, but considering the small stories are the most fun part of ARR to me, I think I'm going to like the low key frivolous story after the heavy story chapters later in the game. It'll be like a return to roots.
@dskatter "I feel sorry for gamers who play with friends and don’t want words like “knight” and “raids” censored."
LOL, that's a thing? I don't play with a keyboard (even when I'm on "PC" (Legion)), so I'm the awkward silent protag in play with randos. I feel bad, some are genuinely helpful.
@K1LLEGAL LOL, I'm still in ARR (the Lv50 post-ARR ARR area.) Just too much to do and time to spend to get too far in MSQ!
Re: Bethesda Makes Changes To Starfield Mods Following 'Negative Effects' On Xbox
"We're bringing mods to console!"
"We're nerfing mods on console!"
It just works.
Re: Talking Point: Xbox Fans, How Do You Feel About The Future Of The Brand In 2024?
@101Force "GPU manufacturers are targeting the AI / big data sector ahead of gaming, "
This one is huge. Once upon a time Nvidia basically existed as a company that makes graphics cards. Today that's barely an afterthought tiny business for an enthusiast niche, while their focus is entirely on AI, datacenter, automotive, etc. They don't seem to put a lot of thought into graphics chips anymore, and the big gains they get at exorbitant prices are mostly from building on top of their AI chips. Meanwhile they price themselves out of the market in which they're a monopoly (nearly double prices from RX30 to RX40.)
The other problem is "mainstream" budget GPU doesn't really exist as a category anymore, as integrated graphics have replaced it for "free", so basically 100% of GPUs are enthusiast product by definition, and they've priced the market away from itself.
That's going to affect how games are developed and what hardware they're targeted to quite a lot IMO.
@Fiendish-Beaver "seeing something like Xbox games included with the Amazon Fire Stick, just speeds up the process of doing away with the need for a console, in my opinion."
Yes, it does, though I think that's always been the plan, as the whole model of GP required, from the start, hitting numbers that are far, far, far, in excess of the number of people that have ever owned consoles at once in the history of consoles. So reaching mass market like that has always been the goal. Though IMO the bigger threat to consoles comes not from the Firestick casuals that were never ever going to buy a console to begin with. It's the new laptops and such that are accelerating at such a rate, that a random ultra thin laptop in a few years will probably blow past whatever the latest console is. I.E. I really wonder if the whole idea of dedicated GPUs (and thus consoles) are to come to an end as general purpose mainstream computing is getting closer and closer to it, right at a time when games devs realize they can't afford to keep feeding ever more powerful GPUs.
Even on the PC side of things, if you look at GPUs, the high end GPUs seem to double in power and rise 50% in price ever 2 years now. Meanwhile the mid-range cards only get like 15% gains per generation, a few fps, plus some new features. If integrated graphics start nipping at that, even dedicated GPUs outside the extreme enthusiast pay-anything market start seeming antiquated.
Weird time in gaming. It feels like were at the leading edge of transitioning away from custom purpose hardware just to play video games. We're not there yet. But if you figure it's taken 30-40 years for "gaming" to just "run on any computing device" maybe it's been slow, rather than fast.
Zork ran on anything. Oregon Trail ran on anything. Mario is Missing ran on anything. Maybe we're decades past due, in returning to that.
@Ilyn "I understand that you want to write a report on blue chip stocks. Great, I will help you write a report on blue chip stocks.
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Re: Talking Point: Xbox Fans, How Do You Feel About The Future Of The Brand In 2024?
As a publisher their star is golden. As an ecosystem, a "place to play games" between streaming, subscription, being baked into TVs as a gaming service, PC, Playstation (lol), I think they're doing their own thing and building something interesting. As for an actual hardware gaming platform, it's going to be an interesting, and bumpy ride I think for a good while. I don't think they're going anywhere with "official" Xbox hardware (whether a single model or a partner hardware network or what) but I think the pending transition from traditional, failing console, into this new ecosystem, PC-driven, whatever form it's going to morph into will eventually be good, but I think it's going to be a very rocky road to get there, where Series owners might feel shafted like WiiU owners for a while, and new platform early adopters will have to go go through the typical Microsoft janky piecemeal cobbling of a new system. In a lot of ways if it works the way I imagine it will work the end result will be a new era of what console gaming is, and the first major upgrade to the model since the 32 bit consoles. But I also think getting from here to there might be a rough ride, made rougher by MS's penchant to foist their corporate directives onto Xbox, which was supposed to end when Xbox became its own division away from Windows, but somehow is back to that (you KNOW Qualcomm and Copilot will be forced into Xbox in awkward and problematic ways, you just know it will.)
Re: Elden Ring Shadow Of The Erdtree Sells Silly Amount Of Copies In Just Three Days
@themcnoisy @Odium Yeah elden ring specifically I really like the overall game and the open world. It's like a true realization of Zelda 1 in a lot of ways. I was really getting into it until it starts putting you into the normal linear dungeons. Then the rage kicks in. The real problem isnt the difficulty. It's the wasted time redoing what you've already done and the fact that the trial and error design, which is horrible, horrible game design no matter that the Internet claims, forces you to keep redoing what you've already done instead of retrying the challenge you failed. For me, on retry, I'm angry. 2 retries I'm enraged and sloppy. 3 retries I want my money and my time back.
I'm definitely modding easy mode to enjoy the game my way once I go pc. And trying a vr mod though.....
Re: Elden Ring Shadow Of The Erdtree Sells Silly Amount Of Copies In Just Three Days
@dreadful I "get" the genre, but I'm also confused on its popularity. By definition it's extremely niche, and Fromsoft isn't really shy about doubling down on its niche-nes, to the point of having no interest in ensuring those outside the niche can even attempt to enjoy the game and actively rejecting the idea.
Which is all fine and good, I get it, but what I don't get it how it manages to sell the way it does. ER base game sold on pure hype to unsuspecting poor fools that didn't know what they were getting into. And to me who has bought every single From game despite rage quitting 20% into all of them due to some of their asinine BS design that people seem to love and defend for some reason.
But the expansion that requires you to have beat the base game selling like crazy doesn't make sense to me - unless - it's basically the die-hard from obsessives that live sleep and breath Fromsoft, eager to preorder it the moment it's available and then after that nobody else cares at all. Like maybe that 3 day sales total will be 90% of their total sales. Pretty much all preorders to the hardcore and then minimal sales (other than bundle sales) afterward. Otherwise, I don't get it.
Re: Xbox Is Bringing Cloud Gaming To The Amazon Fire TV Stick
@Savage_Joe They are called Fire Sticks for a reason.
Re: Talking Point: What's Been The High Point Of The Xbox Series X|S Generation So Far?
@MikeOrator Yeah, some of that is just down to the Forza Engine being fantastic at least for racing (we'll see in Fable how it handles all RPG but from the trailers at least probably running on dual 4090s or A5000s it's impressive.)
But yeah on average I do think the same game tends to have a slightly different feel between platforms, and I've played a number of things on both for various reasons moreso last never figured out all the differences though.
@dskatter I remember the gaming section in the old computer warehouse store. 2.5 long aisles for PC games. A whole horseshoe alcove in the corner for Xbox. A small bottom shelf in the back third of the store for Mac games. 😂
Myth a awesome though. #notmybungie
Re: Xbox Patent Reveals What 'Keystone' Streaming Device Might Have Looked Like
That would have been awesome. Xbox provides the fridge AND the coasters!
Re: Talking Point: What's Been The High Point Of The Xbox Series X|S Generation So Far?
@InvaderFromSpace Depends really on kick backs and perks Microsoft offer for the transition period. Low premiums on Windows store sales for example. Lower than steam etc. I imagine close partner executive levels know the score already. I.e I'm sure square senior executives, above the leak risk level, were briefed before they committed a big future on Xbox etc. If there's something in it for them, publishers will still support the old console but not as long as x1.
Re: Forza Horizon 4 To Be Delisted On Xbox And PC In December 2024
@Banjo- nah it was 4 that we did the grass thing when the X had 60fps added.... How is that 6 years ago??! Where does time go?
It's weird because Sony doesn't have a problem with Ferrari in GT. The mouse pad and keyboard makers don't either lol. I know the car companies cringe at damage models and all, but it really is weird. How is racing Ferraris not a brand positive? They build Ferraris for racing. It's not like this is carmageddon and you're smashing stuff with Ferraris, you're racing.
Re: Talking Point: What's Been The High Point Of The Xbox Series X|S Generation So Far?
@rustyduck FWIW, I don't think 3rd party support will be killed. I think what's in motion is migrating the next Xbox hardware to be directly Windows compatible so that devs only have one build, the PC build, and thus they only have to get 3rd parties on Windows Store rather than get them to build separate Xbox versions. The only down-side is the hardware will then have to be overbuilt PC hardware and thus cost more than typical consoles. But.....that's how the OG Xbox was, too. Plain old PIII Coppermine + RDRAM + GTX. And it was kind of expensive. But still cheaper than a custom build. BUT that also probably means no more disc drive. Which with GP as a focus kind of makes sense for them.
I think endgame the choice is basically PS if you love physical, Xbox if you want value, PC if you want performance over value (which will be cross compatible with Xbox.) Or Nintendo if you Ninten Do.
Re: Forza Horizon 4 To Be Delisted On Xbox And PC In December 2024
Not my Forza Grass(TM), NOOOO!! @Banjo-
I still have no idea how Microsoft manages these tiny licensing windows for these very expensive games. Yes, I know you have to pay more to Sony/BMG for half the music...just suck it up and pay it.
Re: Talking Point: What's Been The High Point Of The Xbox Series X|S Generation So Far?
The high point was that first year for me, it really felt like a new Xbox era with so many features and possibilities before it kind of stalled during the ABK era until this showcase feels like a reboot again. Low point is definitely the ABK merger era, where there was no platform, only a lawsuit.
@MikeOrator LOL yeah the controller alone just feels different, and it is also less latent than the DS5 due to the proprietary protocol (though PS5 did improve theirs at one point.) but I also believe the rendering is a bit different in general, different AMD setup, different FSR/RSR settings etc. Xbox versions tend to prioritize rasterization and resolution, PS versions tend to prioritize shaders and rely more on upscale. Not always, but often how devs (or maybe just UE4?) does things.
Re: Random: Xbox Owner Turns Original Console Into Powerful Gaming PC
Yeah, that's not a mod, that's just building a Mini-ITX PC in an X-BOX shell.
Then again, that's what Microsoft did in 2000 anyway....
Re: Xbox's Acquisition Of Obsidian Helped The Team Stick To Single-Player For Avowed
@Mustoe It's not that multiplayer is a guaranteed win, so much as a multiplayer game typically costs less to make (obvious exceptions) and is thus lower risk, while also having a longer tail sales channel for the initial investment, while also discouraging used physical sales, and encouraging continued monetization beyond the initial purchase that makes it financially more sound to a publisher than a product that actually has to sell.
Of course it doesn't always work out that way, but publisher/investor logic works out that way.
Bethesda in particular though was focused on "make only multiplayer games, that will save us" before the buyout. IDK what they were thinking, but they were thinking it.
Re: Microsoft Makes Statement On The Xbox Delay For Black Myth: Wukong
It reads like an exclusivity deal, yes, but it could also be a distraction. Like a politician getting up in a campaign and saying "I'm unable to comment on the rumors that my opponent is a satanist cannibal." It's a great way of casting doubt on someone while being accountable for nothing because you said nothing.
Did Sony pay for some exclusivity? Maybe. Buut.....this is also a game close to launch that has not shown console footage on Playstation, either, only PC demos, only PC footage. This feels less like an exclusivity deal and more like a Cyberpunk PS4 deal. "PC designed game runs like a pile of monkey dung on current consoles and not at all on XSS, oops, please preorder, we'll fix it someday for PS5. Maybe maybe not for Xbox."
@FatGuyInLilCoat Confidentiality clauses in contracts. The rest of that exchange is:
Judge: "Did you sign a confidentiality agreement with Game Science regarding business relationships but then publicly stated the agreement?"
MS: "Yes"
Judge: "......"
Re: Digital Foundry Breaks Down Xbox's Impressive Perfect Dark Showcase
@Mustoe IW is odd. It felt nothing like the first game, even though it was mostly the same team making it with some role shuffles or substitutions by availability. It's not a bad game as a stand alone game. And conceptually and story wise it plugs into Deus Ex, but otherwise it's not a DX game. Mostly it "streamlined" and simplified gameplay to be more casual shooter friendly, And when you try to casualize an immersive sim, things get ugly. If it were its own IP I think it would be more fondly remembered. But after the timeless epic that is DX1, the simplified, glossy (purple - BEFORE Fortnite!!) graphics, felt odd. The almost-cartoon-ized esthetic felt wrong. The story.....should have been ok, but it was told all wrong. And they decided to target Xbox as the lead platform as a follow up to a golden age PC title. That meant tiny world chunks divided into zones, sparse objects, and mostly just "felt" like a console game which isn't what you wanted from a follow up to one of the greatest immersive sim WRPGs of all time from the golden age of PC games. But the funny thing is even DX1 had a PS2 port which they even used as a baseline for IW. But that was a time period, mostly due to MS pushing Xbox HARD as basically the replacement of Windows games (until then trying to revive it again with Games for Windows under Vista, realizing they'd killed it - Microsoft never changes), where most games were going the "streamlined, casualized, consolized" route. And PC gamers were jaded against anything console as a result. Plus the story was one of a million from that time period that got caught in the "post 9/11 world" narratives, and the whole thing, like most entertainment of the period, seems obsessed with terrorism plots instead of building on what it had before.
Actually, Warren Spector himself acknowledged a lot of that talked about it at one point, there's a great little clip out there:
"I feel like we f-d up the technology management of it, we had bad team chemistry. We wrote the wrong renderer. We wrote the wrong kind of AI. And then we shipped too early. The story was even bad. Like, it wasn't a bad story story. It was more like we moved into the future, which, we didn’t realize at the time, undermined a lot of what made Deus Ex great."
It's definitely, by far the weakest "Deus Ex" game, and other than direct narrative elements linked to events and characters of the first game it's best played as a stand alone new IP. It's a good game as a stand alone game. If it had a new brand I think we'd describe it as "a little like Deus Ex, but not as complicated." Or perhaps "Kind of like Perfect Dark (2025)"
Re: Digital Foundry Breaks Down Xbox's Impressive Perfect Dark Showcase
@Mustoe I blame embracer. Or Square. Or Marvel.
Oh man invisible war. I hated the og Xbox for ruining what that game should have been on PC! The original game is so classic
Re: Digital Foundry Breaks Down Xbox's Impressive Perfect Dark Showcase
@Mustoe Haha, is a great game but such a shame that it was basically made as the "middle entry" of a trilogy that doesn't resolve anything and sets up the threads for a part 3 that never happened and probably never will Still worth it though.
Heck I've still been waiting for Descent Freespace 3 since 1998.
Re: Multiple Games Announced For Xbox At Limited Run 2024 Showcase
@ValentineMeikin In some ways the guarantee that everything Bubsy is guaranteed to fail almost becomes part of his appeal. They need to lean into that and make him self-aware of his own failed mascot status. That would actually be a great game!
I'm convinced Volvy is actually part based on Bubsy, and it's all so much funnier that way.
Re: Digital Foundry Breaks Down Xbox's Impressive Perfect Dark Showcase
@Mustoe As a Deus Ex superfan, I'm hoping it's even half as "immersive sim"-ish as it looks!
Re: Digital Foundry Breaks Down Xbox's Impressive Perfect Dark Showcase
@Mustoe TBF most of the Watch_Dogs fakery was the fact that they basically rewrote the game after the version we saw early at the PS4 launch event, which was actually running the PC build, which was the only build, after they realized there was no chance of those consoles running that game as shown. All that physics and interaction, they really did to live on the stage, but none of that stuff made it into the real game. Now that the consoles are basically just PCs, especially XSX, it won't be quite that dire anymore.
The Watch_Dogs debacle was really more like the Cyberpunk debacle where they did have a really immersive game.....on PC....before figuring out that that was not going to run on a PS4 at all.
This game looked more Deux Ex/Hitman which should be perfectly doable.
Re: Multiple Games Announced For Xbox At Limited Run 2024 Showcase
@BHPM What could PAWSSIBLY go wrong?
Re: Capcom's Old Game Engine Seemingly To Blame For Certain Releases Skipping Xbox
@lokozar "The worse Xbox as a hardware platform performs, the more we will see such things, which opens up a nice downward spiral."
Not necessarily in this case. Capcom seems to have a strong relationship with Xbox (outside MonHun money hatting), and in these examples we're looking at their rerelease ports of old games in an old engine skipping xbox while all of their new games in their new engine do not skip xbox. This seems less like a case of "weakening xbox sales is hurting game releases" and more of a "past weak xbox sales hurt availability of some old games for rerelease but has no effect on current/new games."
Re: Capcom's Old Game Engine Seemingly To Blame For Certain Releases Skipping Xbox
@ValentineMeikin @GamingFan4Lyf I think the part that everyone's missing is these are basically a zero-cost cashgrab reissue of old games, not some sizable new game port remaster project that includes moving games over to a new engine. They're just looking at their catalogue thinking "what can we quickly release to market to boost the quarter and fill the calendar?" That includes grabbing MHS and doing a quick polishing job on it and sticking it on whatever platforms the engine supports. That doesn't include retrofitting the entire project into a new engine. That job will be saved for the inevitable remake 4-7 years from now where it's a "play it again for the first time" experience, which is really all the future of the games industry is going to be made of.
Re: Reaction: Xbox & Nintendo Continue To Deliver With Major Summer Showcases
@themightyant Right, but my point is, how do you find out about the games? E3/SGF/sites like this, magazines in the day etc. PSX back in the day for PS. But it's not like that for them these days, their "marketing" is mostly in the form of influencers and socials etc...just a different market than the traditional gaming nerd, different flow of information. And it really shows what different market that is when you see how they're presenting what they do have when they do. The Xbox show was for "this" market. The Sony show was for some other market that weirdly was positioned because that market isn't watching that kind of show, but they're so attuned to that other market they can't differentiate when they're not talking to that market.
@Fenbops Yeah, and specifically it means their communication strategies really don't resonate with the market we're a part of anymore. I'm sure it resonates if you're subscribed to 200 YT personalities, but that's another market. Their market is profitable for sure, but it's a specific market. Xbox has a harder task because their approach and thus their fans really are sort of an offshoot of PC gaming. They have the tone and audience right when they speak though. It's just they often say contradictory things and try to both hedge toward PC and pretend they're also a Sony-type-brand, and I don't think trying to straddle the line has been working for them.
Re: Reaction: Xbox & Nintendo Continue To Deliver With Major Summer Showcases
@OldGamer999 @themightyant Honestly I think Sony now serves a different kind of market at this point and it's not the ponies that think it's themselves and it's not us, the classic gaming nerd. It's a very casual, mainstream, low effort gamer. Yes, people just play games and don't watch e3 but how do they find out about games? Not magazines, not e3..... Just social media, TV ads, posters on busses. It's a big market but a market that isn't really "our kind". They don't do shows like this they just put statues in urban metropoli and Billboards.
Re: Bethesda's Todd Howard Says The Team Doesn't 'Need To Rush' Future Fallout Games
@TheSimulator Every Western developer that seeks to update their art style to suit a younger demographic basically goes into a conference room and says "how can we make this look more like Fortnite". Seems like most games today have the same shiny plasticine textures with a neon-based palette leaning on the purples.
It sounds like you didn't mean "update the graphics for a younger audience", what you really meant was "For the love of Todd, just make Creation Engine less fugly!" right?
Re: Reaction: Xbox & Nintendo Continue To Deliver With Major Summer Showcases
Really let's just call it what it is: "Everyone had a great notE3 except Sony who basically didn't show up (again.)"
Oh what a difference a management change makes.
@Yousef- "so many goats, you could start a farm!"
If that isn't a back of box quote ripe for the picking, I don't know what is.
Re: Multiple Games Announced For Xbox Following June 2024's Nintendo Direct
@anoyonmus E3 will always be with us as long as we keep it in our hearts <3
Re: Todd Howard Talks About Leading Multiple Bethesda Projects At Once
@WhiteRabbit To be fair, back then a new upper-mid-tier GPU was like $300-350 vs like $1100 today lol. Sure seemed expensive though....those were the days.
But yeah totally worth it, still remains my favorite Bethesda game and one of my all time favorites. Skryim, to me, is a downgrade from Morrowind and especially Oblivion.
Re: Multiple Games Announced For Xbox Following June 2024's Nintendo Direct
Square and Capcom win E3!