I'd be willing to bet that MS is getting paid more money for advertisement for those games than they are Dead Cells.
New search engines aren't designed to find just what you are seeking, they want to find and highlight anything that it deems relevant. Think your social media or news feeds. Searched for dog food that one time?, great!, here are endless articles about dogs. Oh, and look at this thing that they're paying us to show you, because we've deemed you to be the target demographic for it.
@UltimateOtaku91 I very strongly disagree with this.
There should be a massive difference between a paid advertisement, usually where one of the platform holders has paid for more favoured marketing, and a journalism based gaming site, that should exist to provide information.
(There is a wider conversation about how game journalism has largely been an extension of publisher marketing, and not so much journalism, but I don't want to fall down that rabbit hole today)
@Dezzy70 Then I think you misunderstand what people mean when they say "MS don't care about console sales". They mean that MS don't care about selling the most consoles, nor do they care to the same degree that Sony or Nintendo care. Would they prefer it? yes, but they've disconnected their platform from the hardware itself.
So where as in previous generations, it really mattered about selling the most consoles because that directly tied to the health of your platform and sales, MS doesn't care about "selling the most consoles" so long as the xbox platform (whether that be on the consoles, or through PC, phones or some one else's consoles) grows.
I don't think anyone that says that MS don't care about selling consoles, truly believes that they don't want to sell any, because then they'd not sell any consoles at all.
About GP. MS aren't offering GP to get people to buy an xbox. GP itself is a part of the XBox platform, it's growth, on or off an xbox console, is growth for the Xbox platform. If Xbox console sales just completely stopped today, but sales of Xbox games, Game Pass subcriptions went through the roof on PC and other devices, causing profits to soar, MS would be very happy with that situation.
I didn't misunderstand, I just disagree with your assessment of the situation.
One of the criticisms I made of 343i and Halo about a decade ago was "If they continue to chase trends, they will alienate everyone that likes what's unique about the franchise, while also failing to draw in people who like the new direction, because those people are already catered to with other franchises".
If anything, the industry is just getting worse as time goes by. Remember when the horror genre was killed off for action titles?, then the indie scene had to fill that market?, Then Capcom and EA was like "actually, maybe we should make more of that genre". And now today, the stealth and military strategy genres are all but dead, and the owner of some of the biggest franchises in those genres is like "but how about more Battle Royale?", it's a joke.
@Dezzy70 How does having Game Pass on PC, phones, and trying to get it on Switch and PS, sell more xbox consoles?
I don't know why people come back to 'selling the most consoles' as if selling consoles hasn't always been a means to an end and not the end itself. The end is to provide software. Always has been.
So drop gold and the basic GP, and have just the one service and its family plan.
Xbox Live Gold = Free Game Pass = $15pcm Game Pass Family = $25pcm
Job done. Gamers will love it and it will look like a much better service than Nintendo and Sony. Even better, gamers like me who have put off buying GP will be more likely to buy it now that I don't have to have multiple subscriptions for me and my family.
If they drop Gold, and price this at less than twice the price (because if it's twice the price or more it's actually not much better than buying two subs and game sharing) then this will be a massive win for the XGP vs PSN.
I have a group dedicated to games from the 360 that I need to play/finish.
And lately I've made EDF 2017 my game of choice to have a few blasts while up in bed before I settle down. I somehow lost my old game save (even though I made sure to transfer all my saves to the cloud when the BC program started) and I have a lot of catching up to do before I can carry on, and hopefully beat, the harder levels.
I'm not even upset with the games themselves, I like Hue ans MTX but I already have them and hundreds of other titles either from the services or from sales. Between those and Game Pass, more monthly games means very little at this point.
XBL already lets you have free cloud saves and party (something PSN doesn't do), so they may as well make online play play free too.
@Kezelpaso But then wouldn't it feel unfair to compare Essential to GP when the two services are quite different in features? One is an online service, the other is a games service.
You can straight compare Essential and Gold.
Why not just note that Sony has nothing that is comparable to GP basic?
@Jark "I'm not humouring any further discussion on my part."
Considering my initial complaint was the ever growing worlds of MP GAAS style games, and you went and unloaded a rant that didn't really address my initial complaint, I'm going to go ahead and assume that's because you had that rant in your back pocket and wasn't really here to engage but to do your rant and leave. And seeing as you responded to several users, that's my bad for taking the bait.
Mad Max takes a fixed 60 hours for a completionist, and you could pick that up today and those hours are the same as they were when the game released.
Destiny 2 takes over 100 for the base game, and over 300 for the Forsaken expansion, and that number grows every year with each new expansion, and you have a limited time to do this else that content gets vaulted before you finish, or actually before yiu even start.
If you can't see the difference between that single player experience and the MP Destiny one, or heaven forbid, see the latter as being preferable, I can't help you.
A lot of indie and small devs manage to be transparent and deliver on their promises. Even with all the issues and uncertainty that comes with being that kind of dev.
Imagine then, that you are the dev behind a flagship series, for a platform holder, for one of the biggest companies on the planet, that specialises in software, and your only job is to make that one series of games, and you still don't have a clue what you're doing?
Yeah, I could see why that's hard to tell that to your customers or parent company's shareholders.
@Jark it's not irrelevant, the number of GAAS that are MP heavily outweighs those that are single player, and the MP ones have far more bloat than the single player ones, primarily due to the FOMO nature of these types of games.
I'm really over large scale MP worlds. It was fun at the start of last gen, but unless you are willing to devote your entire game time, for years, to just that one game, you end up falling away, never finishing it, and never able to jump back in.
I've not seen it yet, but I've caught some of it on YouTube, and between the bad CGI and other stuff I don't want to mention for spoiler reasons, I'm won't go out of my way to watch it.
@FullbringIchigo The 360 and PS3 are terrible quality necause of a change of regulations regarding components that could be used in electronics, and manufacturers scrambled to replace them, and didn't really test or understand the failings.
My 360E has done very well, but about 75% of its library I play on Xbone, so that saves it some stress. My PS3 slim died a month or two back, and I wish the PS5 had something similar to the BCP, because I'm just fearing the day my super slim dies and I have three dead PS3s in the house.
@Rural-Bandit @Would_you_kindly I have tried to do a lot more 3rd party games on PS the last few years, and this week I even went to put my spare PS4 up in the bedroom to help catch up, but the download speed was less than a mbps. Plus, in order to continue games I had started downstairs, I had to manually download my saves. The whole thing was a nightmare.
I put my spare xbox one S upstairs (exact same spot) and I've been getting between 80-180mbps downloads, plus all my game saves automatically sync (plus the cloud saves are free).
Plus the whole BC support, and the Xbox One X (and I guess the Series X) being stronger hardware.
I've found using Xbox as the main console, and PS for exclusives, and Switch for exclusives and portable titles is really what works for me.
@Medic_Alert And the pc and user reviews are sitting at around an 8.
The only way one would think this is a bad game is if you only looked at the PS review or have a very unhealthy obsession with 9 and 10 "masterpieces".
Elden RIng has been one of the biggest releases of recent memory, selling a massive 12 million copies. Which is just 10% of the PS4 install base, or about one 5th of the xbox one install base (if you assumed every copy sold on just one platform). And we have new tyitles like Ghostwire and Wonderlands coming up (both I assume will do well).
What on Earth makes these people think that the gaming community is a monolith that only plays the same games as each other?
"the other school of thought was, we remain small and build sort of high quality indie level games, but because of the hype surrounding the studio, I don't think Microsoft wanted to let The Initiative be that kind of smaller studio"
The industry is so frustrating. They see the finishing line. They know it's a finishing line, and continue to run backwards.
@Would_you_kindly yeah but I consider Halo and War zone different because they are botch jobs and are competitive. They are also the only two I know of that have had issues with this.
@BBB "Or join randoms via matchmaking this is also a thing too but you would know that right?"
I would, which is why I mentioned the fact that the option in BL3 is specifically for turning off crossplay matchmaking.
Let's say for a moment that for some strange reason, that this spin off that uses the BL3 engine, decided to removed an option that is both present in BL3 and more or less an industry standard in crossplay titles, what stops you booting modders or leaving their game?.
People complaining about a cross play option that allows people to join their friends regardless of platform, in a co-op game where you have complete control over the people you play with, will never not be funny to me.
Just so every one is clear. Cross play with PC has been available for nearly a year now, and has the option to turn it off crossplay matchmaking. If you actually played the game, and cared about crossplay, you'd know that.
@Kezelpaso Personally I think that has more do to with the fact that most online games are live service games that have paid cosmetics and microtransactions.
I think if you asked people if AC Valhalla was a live service, they'd say "yes". And if you asked if Splatoon 2 was, they'd say "no". I don't think the online mp part is casual rather it's just correlation.
@Kezelpaso "Of course we're gonna get post-launch content, and by that admission, it's classed as a live service."
Pushsquare used this logic, and tried to call any game that got post launch content, a live service game. Games like Bioshock. Needless to say, the community didn't go for it.
There's a big difference between a game that offers premium or free content post launch, and a game that is intended to thrive on the F2P model.
Halo Infinite is a live service game though. If live service expectations are an issue, then Halo Infinite is an issue for being a live service game and adopting that model and all the downsides and expectations that go with it. You can't separate the two.
And the expectations of live service games are intentionally built up by the model. It's been designed that way to increase weekly/monthly enagagement in order to encourage spending. That's the whole point. To reduce content undermines that engagement, leading to, as with Halo Infinite, reduced engagement.
And to reduce your content output of stuff like maps, while also having plenty of costmetics events, undermines the benefits of live service games because you've effectively traded worthwhile content for useless content.
343i, MS, and Halo did not need to go the live service route. It could have been a contained experience, especially after Game Pass.
Also, not being the worst one in a bad bunch isn't strong recommendation. "at least it's not Cyberpunk" is a really low bar.
@NintendoEternity It took Nintendo 5 years to let you see friends on the paid app, and you still don't have the much requested folders. Nintendo are lazy. No-one here is going to take fanboying over Nintendo seriously.
The concept of the Switch is fantastic, and to some degree, very well executed, but then there's many many areas where they just have not put any effort in at all and it shows.
@BBB They spent 6-7 years developing Dying Light 2, and thought the GPU of the XSS was holding it back, but fixed it in around a month after it launched.
Are we to believe they spent all that time with the system and only figured it out afterwards?
The more likely scenario is just that they didn't spend as much time working on the XSS version as they did the other versions, and tried to cover themselves, but having going back and having a proper look, it turned out to be a rather easy fix. Easy enough to impliment in just a month.
@Tharsman In fairness, this is still baffling. When the justification for F2P models was that it doesn't split up the playerbase (unless you're Bungie), to have GP not include MP DLC is the exact opposite of that.
I'd be ok with single player DLC still being paid, but as far as I'm aware, COD has never had a campaign DLC.
@Roqka Yeah I was really annoyed when I got mine. Partly for the money, but also partly because the rest of the pad is such high quality. I really liked and wanted the pad.The feel of it and its features are the best I've ever felt in a pad, but the face buttons ( the A button especially) is such an important part of gaming that the pad became impossible to use.
If the fix was a simple process I'd probably recommend people do that, but I've been inside the xbox controllers before and they are not an easy job. I'm going to do mine and see how it goes after the fix.
@Roqka I sent back about 8 Series 2's to MS, every single one of them had face button registration problems. I gave up and my current one just sits in the case.
I was convinced it is a fundemental design flaw with these controllers. The face buttons sit much lower than the standard pads, meaning the buttons travel less, and connect to the underlying mechanicisms less, resulting in spotty registration.
You can avoid it by pressing the button hard and centrally every single time, but that's not how I play. And I may just tap the button or just of the side, and the button will give me the pressed feeling, but it won't activate because it never connected.
I did try to let MS know what I thought the issue was, but given that most people don't seem to notice the problem, I'm guessing they left it. And I'm not wasting my money on a new one to find out.
Edit: Based on this post I decided to go back to research this since. Turns out plenty of people are still having this issue and I watched a teardown video to see what's going on inside the pad, and lo and behold, the guy advised placing 2 bits of eletrical tape on the A button in order to make sure it hits the contact point. So in short. I correctly identified what was wrong with these pads back in 2019/2020, and it's present in every single series 2 pad, and MS just never bothered to fix the issue.
And now I'm faced with tearing down my pad to fix this issue on my £160 pad myself.
Considering that the dev built to make the next Perfect Dark was established in 2018 (5 years ago) and has recently partnered with a major 3rd party (most likely to help wrap up developement without a massive need for crunch), and that the game hasn't been announced for 2022, then yea, the smart money is on 2023.
Can someone please pay me for making guesses based on pubicly available information too?
@blinx01 "If it wasn't F2P, they could focus on maps and game modes without the huge focus on battle passes. Obviously the negative would be the player base would be lower."
I 100% agree with the first part, disagree somehwat with the second.
Halo MCC, which released as a full price title, and piecemeal, and was just a collection of old titles, was getting around 6k to 10k players a month before Infinite launched. So I'm just going to average that out to 8k.
Halo Infinite is already down to 10k average players. If it is able to maintain that level of population over two years like MCC did, I'd be very surprised. So it doesn't even look like F2P increased the player count by that much.
My stance, as it has been for years, is that Halo has its audience. These are the ones playing it, regardless of whether it's F2P or paid. And everybody else, all the modern shooter fans, all the F2Players, they don't care about Halo, especially after 10 years of 343i. It's no good offering that group F2P, Battle Royale, fast paced, modern mechinc'd shooting action, becuase they have that in spades in other titles. Titles they have already formed an attachment to. So trying to pry them away was just foolish.
As I've been saying for years. MS should have scaled down Halo development to match its audience. And any growth would have been a natural one, rather than the forced growth they tried to inflict and essentially killed the reputation of the brand in the process.
@BAMozzy Open World isn't a natural evolution of wide levels. It's a completely different world style with different intentions on the player experience.
It's the reason that Bungie went back to linear levels for Reach after the open world hub of ODST.
Speaking of ODST. The game is a clear example of taking in to account how they designed an open world with co-op in mind.
Bungie approached their Halo gamess professionally. None of what you said shifts the blame from 343i. The problems were just "natural progressions" of their poor planning.
@BAMozzy I disagree. I think if the game was able to easily handle split screen co-op on PC and Series, then they'd probably just say it's a feature exclusive to those platforms. With maybe a promise to see if an Xbone split sxcreen update is viable in the future.
Also, the online co-op was also delayed.
There are a couple of split screen open world games on the xbox one. It is possible on that console, but just split screen open worlds are hard to do in general. That's why there aren't many. The big openish split screen games like Borderlands have segmented worlds, for this very reason.
But again, Borderlands is designed from the very start with co-op and split screen at the core of the experience. So the tech and game design is taken in to account. It's a choice taken at the pre-production stage and followed through on throughout development. Halo Infinite just wasn't designed for co-op. They are trying to redesign the game and the tech post launch, which obviously has massive limits to what they can change without drastically altering what people already love about the current game.
So promising split screen and co-op, while commiting to a design that isn't tested against these features every step of the way is a massively rookie mistake. But it's in line with their mismanagement history so...
"We’re also committed to a great 2-player split-screen co-op experience on all Xbox consoles, from the original Xbox One through Xbox One Series X—and the non-linear, wide-open sections of the Campaign present some big challenges for split-screen that have taken us more time to solve."
This problem should have been identified in pre-production.
I'm going to ahead and hazard a guess that their incompetence is having a knock on effect to getting anything, that's not cosmetics, in to the game without breaking it.
Comments 1,237
Re: The Xbox App's Search Bar Is Getting A Lot Of Negative Feedback
I'd be willing to bet that MS is getting paid more money for advertisement for those games than they are Dead Cells.
New search engines aren't designed to find just what you are seeking, they want to find and highlight anything that it deems relevant. Think your social media or news feeds. Searched for dog food that one time?, great!, here are endless articles about dogs. Oh, and look at this thing that they're paying us to show you, because we've deemed you to be the target demographic for it.
Come get your lightspeed briefs.
Re: Remedy Announces Plans To Remake The First Two Max Payne Games
@UltimateOtaku91 I very strongly disagree with this.
There should be a massive difference between a paid advertisement, usually where one of the platform holders has paid for more favoured marketing, and a journalism based gaming site, that should exist to provide information.
(There is a wider conversation about how game journalism has largely been an extension of publisher marketing, and not so much journalism, but I don't want to fall down that rabbit hole today)
Re: Remedy Announces Plans To Remake The First Two Max Payne Games
@awp69 I had the same problem. I just read this on Push first and got the impression it was exclusive for the PS5.
Then I came here and noticed it wasn't, and was pleasently surprised by the casual mention of the other platforms too.
Re: Rumour: Microsoft Paid For 'Chip Priority' To Increase Xbox Series X|S Stock
@RevGaming Where does the new GT game and Psychonauts 2 fit in to that?
Re: Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands Review - A Borderlands Fantasy Spin-Off Worth A Look
Hey, did you guys do cross play co-op with the Pushsquare guys?
And if yes, how was the experience?
Re: Rumour: Microsoft Paid For 'Chip Priority' To Increase Xbox Series X|S Stock
@Dezzy70 Then I think you misunderstand what people mean when they say "MS don't care about console sales". They mean that MS don't care about selling the most consoles, nor do they care to the same degree that Sony or Nintendo care. Would they prefer it? yes, but they've disconnected their platform from the hardware itself.
So where as in previous generations, it really mattered about selling the most consoles because that directly tied to the health of your platform and sales, MS doesn't care about "selling the most consoles" so long as the xbox platform (whether that be on the consoles, or through PC, phones or some one else's consoles) grows.
I don't think anyone that says that MS don't care about selling consoles, truly believes that they don't want to sell any, because then they'd not sell any consoles at all.
About GP. MS aren't offering GP to get people to buy an xbox. GP itself is a part of the XBox platform, it's growth, on or off an xbox console, is growth for the Xbox platform. If Xbox console sales just completely stopped today, but sales of Xbox games, Game Pass subcriptions went through the roof on PC and other devices, causing profits to soar, MS would be very happy with that situation.
I didn't misunderstand, I just disagree with your assessment of the situation.
Re: Ubisoft Is Reportedly Trying Again With A New, 'Different' Battle Royale
One of the criticisms I made of 343i and Halo about a decade ago was "If they continue to chase trends, they will alienate everyone that likes what's unique about the franchise, while also failing to draw in people who like the new direction, because those people are already catered to with other franchises".
If anything, the industry is just getting worse as time goes by. Remember when the horror genre was killed off for action titles?, then the indie scene had to fill that market?, Then Capcom and EA was like "actually, maybe we should make more of that genre". And now today, the stealth and military strategy genres are all but dead, and the owner of some of the biggest franchises in those genres is like "but how about more Battle Royale?", it's a joke.
Re: Rumour: Microsoft Paid For 'Chip Priority' To Increase Xbox Series X|S Stock
@Dezzy70 How does having Game Pass on PC, phones, and trying to get it on Switch and PS, sell more xbox consoles?
I don't know why people come back to 'selling the most consoles' as if selling consoles hasn't always been a means to an end and not the end itself. The end is to provide software. Always has been.
Re: Rumour: Microsoft Might Permanently 'Combine' Xbox Live Gold With Game Pass
So drop gold and the basic GP, and have just the one service and its family plan.
Xbox Live Gold = Free
Game Pass = $15pcm
Game Pass Family = $25pcm
Job done. Gamers will love it and it will look like a much better service than Nintendo and Sony. Even better, gamers like me who have put off buying GP will be more likely to buy it now that I don't have to have multiple subscriptions for me and my family.
Re: Microsoft Reportedly Creating 'Family Plan' For Xbox Game Pass
Hell yeah. A family plan is really needed.
If they drop Gold, and price this at less than twice the price (because if it's twice the price or more it's actually not much better than buying two subs and game sharing) then this will be a massive win for the XGP vs PSN.
Re: Talking Point: How Often Do You Play Backwards Compatible Games On Xbox?
I have a group dedicated to games from the 360 that I need to play/finish.
And lately I've made EDF 2017 my game of choice to have a few blasts while up in bed before I settle down. I somehow lost my old game save (even though I made sure to transfer all my saves to the cloud when the BC program started) and I have a lot of catching up to do before I can carry on, and hopefully beat, the harder levels.
Re: Surprise! Xbox Games With Gold For April Hasn't Gone Down Well
Repeating games is kinda unacceptable.
I'm not even upset with the games themselves, I like Hue ans MTX but I already have them and hundreds of other titles either from the services or from sales. Between those and Game Pass, more monthly games means very little at this point.
XBL already lets you have free cloud saves and party (something PSN doesn't do), so they may as well make online play play free too.
Re: Here's How PlayStation's New Services Compare To Xbox Game Pass
@Kezelpaso In the section titled PS Essential vs Game Pass...
Why not just PS+ Essential vs Gold?, then a separate section for GP and Sony's non-answer to it?.
Re: Here's How PlayStation's New Services Compare To Xbox Game Pass
@Kezelpaso But then wouldn't it feel unfair to compare Essential to GP when the two services are quite different in features? One is an online service, the other is a games service.
You can straight compare Essential and Gold.
Why not just note that Sony has nothing that is comparable to GP basic?
Re: Here's How PlayStation's New Services Compare To Xbox Game Pass
Shouldn't it be;
PS Essential - Xbox Gold
PS Extra - Game Pass
PS Premium - GP Ultimate.
Re: Rare's Everwild Set To Feature A 'Large Scale Multiplayer World'
@Jark "I'm not humouring any further discussion on my part."
Considering my initial complaint was the ever growing worlds of MP GAAS style games, and you went and unloaded a rant that didn't really address my initial complaint, I'm going to go ahead and assume that's because you had that rant in your back pocket and wasn't really here to engage but to do your rant and leave. And seeing as you responded to several users, that's my bad for taking the bait.
Mad Max takes a fixed 60 hours for a completionist, and you could pick that up today and those hours are the same as they were when the game released.
Destiny 2 takes over 100 for the base game, and over 300 for the Forsaken expansion, and that number grows every year with each new expansion, and you have a limited time to do this else that content gets vaulted before you finish, or actually before yiu even start.
If you can't see the difference between that single player experience and the MP Destiny one, or heaven forbid, see the latter as being preferable, I can't help you.
Re: 343 Explains Lack Of Communication Over Halo Infinite Season 2
A lot of indie and small devs manage to be transparent and deliver on their promises. Even with all the issues and uncertainty that comes with being that kind of dev.
Imagine then, that you are the dev behind a flagship series, for a platform holder, for one of the biggest companies on the planet, that specialises in software, and your only job is to make that one series of games, and you still don't have a clue what you're doing?
Yeah, I could see why that's hard to tell that to your customers or parent company's shareholders.
Re: Rare's Everwild Set To Feature A 'Large Scale Multiplayer World'
@Jark it's not irrelevant, the number of GAAS that are MP heavily outweighs those that are single player, and the MP ones have far more bloat than the single player ones, primarily due to the FOMO nature of these types of games.
Re: Rare's Everwild Set To Feature A 'Large Scale Multiplayer World'
I'm really over large scale MP worlds. It was fun at the start of last gen, but unless you are willing to devote your entire game time, for years, to just that one game, you end up falling away, never finishing it, and never able to jump back in.
I just don't have that kind of energy anymore.
Re: Paramount's Live-Action Halo Series Is Its 'Most-Watched' Premiere Ever
I've not seen it yet, but I've caught some of it on YouTube, and between the bad CGI and other stuff I don't want to mention for spoiler reasons, I'm won't go out of my way to watch it.
Re: Leaker Finds Mysterious New Xbox App On The Microsoft Store
@FullbringIchigo The 360 and PS3 are terrible quality necause of a change of regulations regarding components that could be used in electronics, and manufacturers scrambled to replace them, and didn't really test or understand the failings.
My 360E has done very well, but about 75% of its library I play on Xbone, so that saves it some stress. My PS3 slim died a month or two back, and I wish the PS5 had something similar to the BCP, because I'm just fearing the day my super slim dies and I have three dead PS3s in the house.
Re: Ghostwire: Tokyo Studio Is Developing A 'Completely New Title' At Xbox
@Rural-Bandit @Would_you_kindly I have tried to do a lot more 3rd party games on PS the last few years, and this week I even went to put my spare PS4 up in the bedroom to help catch up, but the download speed was less than a mbps. Plus, in order to continue games I had started downstairs, I had to manually download my saves. The whole thing was a nightmare.
I put my spare xbox one S upstairs (exact same spot) and I've been getting between 80-180mbps downloads, plus all my game saves automatically sync (plus the cloud saves are free).
Plus the whole BC support, and the Xbox One X (and I guess the Series X) being stronger hardware.
I've found using Xbox as the main console, and PS for exclusives, and Switch for exclusives and portable titles is really what works for me.
Re: Ghostwire: Tokyo Studio Is Developing A 'Completely New Title' At Xbox
@Medic_Alert And the pc and user reviews are sitting at around an 8.
The only way one would think this is a bad game is if you only looked at the PS review or have a very unhealthy obsession with 9 and 10 "masterpieces".
Re: Destiny Fan Videos Are Receiving Takedowns On YouTube, Bungie Responds
To me, it sounds like Bungie went nuclear to purge Marty and it's backfiring.
Re: Random: The Xbox Kinect Is Still Being Used At A UK Furniture Store
The kinect tech is actually really interesting and useful, just not as direct inputs for game controls.
The original kinect also found lots of uses outside of the 360.
Re: Former PlayStation Exclusive Godfall Arrives On Xbox This April
Give me crossplay and I'll pick it up.
Re: Dying Light 1's Free Next-Gen Update Arrives On Xbox Series X|S
I'm fine with 1080p and 30fps, but I still game on Switch, Xbone and PS4.
These are not next gen figures.
Re: Bizarrely, Some People Think Hogwarts Legacy Might Affect Starfield
Elden RIng has been one of the biggest releases of recent memory, selling a massive 12 million copies. Which is just 10% of the PS4 install base, or about one 5th of the xbox one install base (if you assumed every copy sold on just one platform). And we have new tyitles like Ghostwire and Wonderlands coming up (both I assume will do well).
What on Earth makes these people think that the gaming community is a monolith that only plays the same games as each other?
Re: Perfect Dark Reportedly Led To 'Big Disagreement' At Xbox Studio The Initiative
"the other school of thought was, we remain small and build sort of high quality indie level games, but because of the hype surrounding the studio, I don't think Microsoft wanted to let The Initiative be that kind of smaller studio"
The industry is so frustrating. They see the finishing line. They know it's a finishing line, and continue to run backwards.
Re: Borderlands 3 Is Getting Full Cross-Play, Along With Tiny Tina's Wonderlands
@Would_you_kindly yeah but I consider Halo and War zone different because they are botch jobs and are competitive. They are also the only two I know of that have had issues with this.
Re: Borderlands 3 Is Getting Full Cross-Play, Along With Tiny Tina's Wonderlands
@BBB "Or join randoms via matchmaking this is also a thing too but you would know that right?"
I would, which is why I mentioned the fact that the option in BL3 is specifically for turning off crossplay matchmaking.
Let's say for a moment that for some strange reason, that this spin off that uses the BL3 engine, decided to removed an option that is both present in BL3 and more or less an industry standard in crossplay titles, what stops you booting modders or leaving their game?.
Re: Borderlands 3 Is Getting Full Cross-Play, Along With Tiny Tina's Wonderlands
People complaining about a cross play option that allows people to join their friends regardless of platform, in a co-op game where you have complete control over the people you play with, will never not be funny to me.
Just so every one is clear. Cross play with PC has been available for nearly a year now, and has the option to turn it off crossplay matchmaking. If you actually played the game, and cared about crossplay, you'd know that.
Re: Soapbox: Live Service Expectations Are The Issue, Not Halo Infinite
@Kezelpaso Personally I think that has more do to with the fact that most online games are live service games that have paid cosmetics and microtransactions.
I think if you asked people if AC Valhalla was a live service, they'd say "yes". And if you asked if Splatoon 2 was, they'd say "no". I don't think the online mp part is casual rather it's just correlation.
Re: Soapbox: Live Service Expectations Are The Issue, Not Halo Infinite
@Kezelpaso "Of course we're gonna get post-launch content, and by that admission, it's classed as a live service."
Pushsquare used this logic, and tried to call any game that got post launch content, a live service game. Games like Bioshock. Needless to say, the community didn't go for it.
There's a big difference between a game that offers premium or free content post launch, and a game that is intended to thrive on the F2P model.
Re: Xbox Wants To Provide A 'Steady Flow Of Great Games' Moving Forward
Not having seven 600 man studios working on one big "AAAA" 10 year live service FPS title would help with this.
Re: Soapbox: Live Service Expectations Are The Issue, Not Halo Infinite
Halo Infinite is a live service game though. If live service expectations are an issue, then Halo Infinite is an issue for being a live service game and adopting that model and all the downsides and expectations that go with it. You can't separate the two.
And the expectations of live service games are intentionally built up by the model. It's been designed that way to increase weekly/monthly enagagement in order to encourage spending. That's the whole point. To reduce content undermines that engagement, leading to, as with Halo Infinite, reduced engagement.
And to reduce your content output of stuff like maps, while also having plenty of costmetics events, undermines the benefits of live service games because you've effectively traded worthwhile content for useless content.
343i, MS, and Halo did not need to go the live service route. It could have been a contained experience, especially after Game Pass.
Also, not being the worst one in a bad bunch isn't strong recommendation. "at least it's not Cyberpunk" is a really low bar.
Re: Xbox Series X|S Outsold PS5 In February, Lost Top Spot To Switch
@NintendoEternity It took Nintendo 5 years to let you see friends on the paid app, and you still don't have the much requested folders. Nintendo are lazy. No-one here is going to take fanboying over Nintendo seriously.
The concept of the Switch is fantastic, and to some degree, very well executed, but then there's many many areas where they just have not put any effort in at all and it shows.
Re: Dying Light 2 Patch Adds 60FPS For Xbox Series S, New Mode For Series X
@BBB They spent 6-7 years developing Dying Light 2, and thought the GPU of the XSS was holding it back, but fixed it in around a month after it launched.
Are we to believe they spent all that time with the system and only figured it out afterwards?
The more likely scenario is just that they didn't spend as much time working on the XSS version as they did the other versions, and tried to cover themselves, but having going back and having a proper look, it turned out to be a rather easy fix. Easy enough to impliment in just a month.
Re: Dying Light 2 Patch Adds 60FPS For Xbox Series S, New Mode For Series X
@Tharsman Magic horsepower tree.
Re: Capcom Is Bringing A New Dinosaur-Themed Action Game To Xbox
Watched Bawkba nearly have a heart attack watching the trailer.
I don't see this game fairing very well, especially not after this reveal.
Re: Could 'Keystone' Be The Next Xbox Console? Codename Found In Datamine
My money is on the Series 2, but my heart is on a Series H(ybrid).
Re: Deals: This Week's Backwards Compatible Offers Include Major Call Of Duty Sale
@Tharsman In fairness, this is still baffling. When the justification for F2P models was that it doesn't split up the playerbase (unless you're Bungie), to have GP not include MP DLC is the exact opposite of that.
I'd be ok with single player DLC still being paid, but as far as I'm aware, COD has never had a campaign DLC.
Re: White Xbox Elite Series 2 Controllers Have Been Spotted In The Wild
@Roqka Yeah I was really annoyed when I got mine. Partly for the money, but also partly because the rest of the pad is such high quality. I really liked and wanted the pad.The feel of it and its features are the best I've ever felt in a pad, but the face buttons ( the A button especially) is such an important part of gaming that the pad became impossible to use.
If the fix was a simple process I'd probably recommend people do that, but I've been inside the xbox controllers before and they are not an easy job. I'm going to do mine and see how it goes after the fix.
for reference. Mentions the A fix at around 5 mins; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aS9_t1FZh3A
Re: White Xbox Elite Series 2 Controllers Have Been Spotted In The Wild
@Roqka I sent back about 8 Series 2's to MS, every single one of them had face button registration problems. I gave up and my current one just sits in the case.
I was convinced it is a fundemental design flaw with these controllers. The face buttons sit much lower than the standard pads, meaning the buttons travel less, and connect to the underlying mechanicisms less, resulting in spotty registration.
You can avoid it by pressing the button hard and centrally every single time, but that's not how I play. And I may just tap the button or just of the side, and the button will give me the pressed feeling, but it won't activate because it never connected.
I did try to let MS know what I thought the issue was, but given that most people don't seem to notice the problem, I'm guessing they left it. And I'm not wasting my money on a new one to find out.
Edit: Based on this post I decided to go back to research this since. Turns out plenty of people are still having this issue and I watched a teardown video to see what's going on inside the pad, and lo and behold, the guy advised placing 2 bits of eletrical tape on the A button in order to make sure it hits the contact point. So in short. I correctly identified what was wrong with these pads back in 2019/2020, and it's present in every single series 2 pad, and MS just never bothered to fix the issue.
And now I'm faced with tearing down my pad to fix this issue on my £160 pad myself.
Re: Perfect Dark And Avowed 'Probably' Coming In 2023, Says Jeff Grubb
Considering that the dev built to make the next Perfect Dark was established in 2018 (5 years ago) and has recently partnered with a major 3rd party (most likely to help wrap up developement without a massive need for crunch), and that the game hasn't been announced for 2022, then yea, the smart money is on 2023.
Can someone please pay me for making guesses based on pubicly available information too?
Re: Halo Infinite's Multiplayer Lead Has Left 343 Industries
@blinx01 "If it wasn't F2P, they could focus on maps and game modes without the huge focus on battle passes. Obviously the negative would be the player base would be lower."
I 100% agree with the first part, disagree somehwat with the second.
Halo MCC, which released as a full price title, and piecemeal, and was just a collection of old titles, was getting around 6k to 10k players a month before Infinite launched. So I'm just going to average that out to 8k.
Halo Infinite is already down to 10k average players. If it is able to maintain that level of population over two years like MCC did, I'd be very surprised. So it doesn't even look like F2P increased the player count by that much.
My stance, as it has been for years, is that Halo has its audience. These are the ones playing it, regardless of whether it's F2P or paid. And everybody else, all the modern shooter fans, all the F2Players, they don't care about Halo, especially after 10 years of 343i. It's no good offering that group F2P, Battle Royale, fast paced, modern mechinc'd shooting action, becuase they have that in spades in other titles. Titles they have already formed an attachment to. So trying to pry them away was just foolish.
As I've been saying for years. MS should have scaled down Halo development to match its audience. And any growth would have been a natural one, rather than the forced growth they tried to inflict and essentially killed the reputation of the brand in the process.
Re: Halo Infinite Dev Provides Update On Co-Op And Forge Release
@BAMozzy Open World isn't a natural evolution of wide levels. It's a completely different world style with different intentions on the player experience.
It's the reason that Bungie went back to linear levels for Reach after the open world hub of ODST.
Speaking of ODST. The game is a clear example of taking in to account how they designed an open world with co-op in mind.
Bungie approached their Halo gamess professionally. None of what you said shifts the blame from 343i. The problems were just "natural progressions" of their poor planning.
Re: Halo Infinite Dev Provides Update On Co-Op And Forge Release
@BAMozzy I disagree. I think if the game was able to easily handle split screen co-op on PC and Series, then they'd probably just say it's a feature exclusive to those platforms. With maybe a promise to see if an Xbone split sxcreen update is viable in the future.
Also, the online co-op was also delayed.
There are a couple of split screen open world games on the xbox one. It is possible on that console, but just split screen open worlds are hard to do in general. That's why there aren't many. The big openish split screen games like Borderlands have segmented worlds, for this very reason.
But again, Borderlands is designed from the very start with co-op and split screen at the core of the experience. So the tech and game design is taken in to account. It's a choice taken at the pre-production stage and followed through on throughout development. Halo Infinite just wasn't designed for co-op. They are trying to redesign the game and the tech post launch, which obviously has massive limits to what they can change without drastically altering what people already love about the current game.
So promising split screen and co-op, while commiting to a design that isn't tested against these features every step of the way is a massively rookie mistake. But it's in line with their mismanagement history so...
Re: Halo Infinite Dev Provides Update On Co-Op And Forge Release
"We’re also committed to a great 2-player split-screen co-op experience on all Xbox consoles, from the original Xbox One through Xbox One Series X—and the non-linear, wide-open sections of the Campaign present some big challenges for split-screen that have taken us more time to solve."
This problem should have been identified in pre-production.
Re: 343's January Roadmap Update For Halo Infinite Also Misses February
I'm going to ahead and hazard a guess that their incompetence is having a knock on effect to getting anything, that's not cosmetics, in to the game without breaking it.