Spaceman-Spiff

I loved the Callisto Protocol, so much so that it's one of the only games that I decided to play through twice. I think the comparisons with Dead Space were incredibly detrimental to it as the combat gameplay is actually very different. The focus of the combat in Callisto is on melee, and if you play it on that basis, and upgrade your baton as you go, it's brilliant. If you play it like Dead Space and try to shoot everything then you're missing out on a big part of the game's design.

XGS are now so reliable at releasing somewhat disappointing, middling games that it's tough to have faith in any of their projects going forward. The next Doom and Gears games have to be good right? RIGHT? Six months ago I would have put Hellblade 2 on that same list, and six months before that Starfield too. Another one bites the dust.

@InterceptorAlpha Thanks. Fallout 4 pulls out of the 1st person view for dialog so I was hoping Starfield might do something similar.

What happens with the camera in 1st person mode? Is it just the same as before, i.e. it locks you in and blurs the background?

This would be great if the system actually recognised when you played on console. I've played every day this week but it's only recognised Monday.

I enjoyed The Outer Worlds and am looking forward to this. The combat looks a bit floaty perhaps but the environments look great. My biggest unknown/question mark at the moment is the style of the writing. The Outer Worlds was quite funny at times however this seems to be taking itself much more seriously. I just hope that the dialogue isn't all as earnest and sincere as it seemed to be in the Dev Direct.

No comment on the visuals though! I would love to know what the thought process was and how/why things changed between the original reveal trailer and how the game ultimately released from a visual perspective. Did they know at the time that the reveal trailer was not an accurate reflection of the game, or was that genuinely how good they thought they would be able to have it looking? Or was it viewed as being a cinematic reveal that didn't necessarily need to be representative? FH5 had a similar reveal trailer and went on to look pretty much exactly as was promised - and that's a cross-gen open world game with a huge draw distance. So why did they have to strip the visuals back so much for Motorsport?

It's another example of the Series X version looking and performing worse than the PS5 though. I really hope Microsoft are looking into what the root cause of this is in order to learn lessons for the future. They've got the more powerful (and no doubt more expensive to manufacture) hardware, but more often than not 3rd party games run worse than their PS5 counterparts. It's been said that the discrepancy is down to developers treating PS5 as the lead platform as it's the market leader... But back in the Xbox 360 and PS3 days you again had Xbox with the more powerful hardware and pretty much saw that advantage in every 3rd party game, despite Playstation being the market leader back then as well. Why is it different now? All that extra money MS has invested to produce the more powerful hardware, just for there to be no performance related return on that investment. I would be mad as hell if I was Phil Spencer.

I'm assuming that must be Arkane Lyon whose last game was Deathloop a couple of years ago, rather than Arkane Austin who only released Redfall this year

The game still has elevated black levels (though improved) which cannot be rectified with the new brightness/contrast settings. And it still doesn't have a proper implementation of HDR. The Luma mod on PC fixes these issues but it is beyond belief that a couple of modders can do this within days of the game being released while BGS still can't two months later.

I can't see them doing this. They made a big statement about how 60fps simply wasn't possible on console and was also more cinematic (despite having no such 'artistic' constraint if playing on PC), so to put in a performance mode now would be to go back on their own words. Even before this patch, DF had found that a performance mode on Series X was likely very possible with a reduction in resolution and/or visual settings, but they didn't do it. A 40fps mode would have been possible at the very least, but they didn't offer that either. They just don't seem like the sort of studio that places any kind of importance on maximising the technical aspects of their game - just look at the awful HDR implementation that still doesn't appear to be fixed properly in the latest patch, despite the modding community fixing it within a few days of release.

TLDR - I am not holding out much hope for a performance mode, but I would love to be wrong!

I'm looking forward to the update that makes the game look like it did in that initial reveal back in January 2022! That's coming right?

The only crashes I've had are after using Quick Resume - it pretty much crashes every time. Doesn't look like they've tackled that in this update but I hope they do soon.

The one update I would want is for it to be changed from having a co-op focus to a single player focus, but I can't see that happening unfortunately.

@gdoamara Yup this happened to me too. Can't really be bothered to play through the opening few hours again. Oh well.

@InterceptorAlpha Agreed. I didn't think the skiff sections from Gears 5 were that good to be honest, featuring vast empty areas with very little to see or do. Not to say they couldn't do it better next time round, but there's still a lot to be said for well crafted, linear, mission based action games.

Has PureXbox been furnished with a review copy of Starfield? Interesting to see that Eurogamer has been barred from getting one by Bethesda

Had this for a few weeks now, and it's generally fine, but it's a real shame you can only pin two groups at a time. Gotta keep space free for all those adverts!

Never played a 3D GTA game. Are they any good for someone who mostly dislikes open world games?

It was very disappointing to get an even less revealing showing for this game at the showcase than we got a couple of years ago at the game awards. Hoping it will turn out great but it's slightly concerning they still don't want to show any proper gameplay.

@Savage_Joe Yes I know 40fps is limited to 120hz screens, but with each passing year there are more and more of those out there and it's frustrating that so few games are forward looking enough to include it. I really enjoyed playing A Plague Tale Requiem at 40fps and hoped that more games would follow suit.

Todd Howard said that unlocked the game was often way higher than 30fps, sometimes even reaching 60fps, but they wanted the stability of locking it to 30 (which is fair enough) but it does make me wonder if a 40fps mode could have been an option at least. It saddens me how few games take advantage of that frame rate as it is so much smoother than 30fps.

It looks great, and hopefully representative of what it will actually look like to play. Great that it was captured on Series X though I don't understand why they didn't specify that at the time! I had a concern that the writing might be a problem given that the writing in Forza Horizon is rather cringe-inducing, but thankfully the trailer showed a completely different style of dialogue to that. The addition of Richard Ayoade is inspired!

Can someone explain to me what the point of gamerscore is? Is it purely a way to show off how many achievements you've earned? Does it serve any other purpose? I get the appeal of trying to earn all the achievements in a game as it scratches the completionist itch in people, but the score itself just seems a bit... pointless?

"Improved thread handling when raytracing is turned off."

I'd love to be able to turn raytracing off on console! This would free up GPU resources greatly and allow the game's performance mode to run at a noticeably higher resolution than it does currently.

I imagine this comment is purely intended for PC users though.

This game is comfortably a match for, if not better than, Jedi Survivor graphically, plus it ran at 40fps rather than 30fps. It's a tremendous engine they've developed, and I hope they continue using it for future titles rather than joining the mass migration to UE. I'll be interested to see what cutbacks they've had to make to get it to 60fps.

I hope they haven't stopped work on improving performance of the console versions, even at 30fps there are still noticeable stutters while traversing the world.

Anyone else feel it looks very low-res and blurry?

I do think people need to watch the whole interview rather than just comment on a few quotes. They asked some hard questions and got some pretty upfront responses from Phil. He's clearly very angry about how things have played out, and much of that anger is directed towards himself. I did like that he specifically commented on being more transparent in regards to showing console footage during trailers etc rather than just PC and making sure people know what they're looking at. That is vital for the showcase in June.

So... I had a placeholder on my Series X for this which was around 350mb. Today that placeholder is downloading an update which is just under 44GB. Is my system downloading the Series S version?? Also strange that it's doing this but we're not yet at the 9pm PT preload time

I wish they'd issue a statement explaining why a 1st party game performs worse on Xbox than it does on PS5.

Not really an acceptable way to play a fast paced first person shooter, to the extent that I'm surprised they bothered with a 30fps mode at all. Guess I won't be playing day one then, oh well!

@Balta666 I agree but I would describe Gears as a single player story driven game that is also excellent in co-op. It was never designed or marketed as a co-op game first and foremost. It's the same with Halo.

I really want this game to be good but I cannot think of a single example of a co-op focused game that doesn't feel a bit lacklustre in single player mode - which is how I would be playing it. The fact that you will only have access to one set of special abilities as a single player is going to severely limit how many different approaches you can take with the gameplay, unlike Deathloop or Dishonored where your character is capable of every ability the designers had in mind when crafting the levels and combat encounters. I hope I'm wrong but everything I've seen so far tells me it will feel like a diminished experience in single player.

Whenever I read about Halo Infinite now I just do an imaginary fist shake at the sky and curse the day live service games were ever invented. The Halo campaigns used to be so good and Infinite's campaign is pretty damn good as well... but it could have been outstanding if 343i hadn't had to sink all their resources into creating these trend-chasing live service seasons and cosmetics and events. It feels like such a waste of a once great IP.

Maybe I'm just too old for this sh*t.

@Beermonkey I hope you enjoy it. The critical reception was certainly mixed but it was my second favourite game of last year after Elden Ring. My biggest tip, for what it's worth, is to get used to using the melee attack and GRP as much as possible, practice dodging, and only use guns sparingly. Also give the melee weapon and GRP priority with your upgrades. Maxed out they can make fairly short work of most enemies.

I wish more games had a 40fps option. It made such a huge difference to fluidity in Plague Tale: Requiem without requiring a huge graphical sacrifice to be made.

Would the announcement of a future show be enough for it to count as a "fun week"?

So... Subnautica on Earth?

@GamingFan4Lyf No it's not that I expect a Series X game to look as good as a maxed out PC game, but I just wish that a) promotional materials like screenshots and trailers were produced separately for the console versions and b) that more games were designed with the console as the lead platform. It's no coincidence that Digital Foundry's best graphics of the year winner Horizon Forbidden West looks so good on console - it's because it was designed specifically for the PS5 hardware. Rather than the standard situation on Xbox where the game is designed for PC then heavily compromised for console. Those compromises can always be seen far more on a game that's been scaled back, compared to one that's been designed to be the best it can be on lower end hardware. For an extreme example of this just look at some of the 'impossible' Switch ports - they invariably look far worse than the Zeldas and Marios that were built specifically for the console. For me it's the same story, just to lesser extent, for Cyberpunk on Xbox. It looks compromised.

Again, I cannot really get excited over stuff like this as it will likely look rather different on Xbox. And the performance hasn't been revealed yet has it? I am assuming we will get a 30fps mode that still looks slightly inferior to this, and maybe a 60fps mode that looks greatly inferior. Look at how Cyberpunk looks on Xbox compared to max settings on a 4090. I hope I'm wrong!

No doubt the footage in this trailer was captured on a high end PC rather than an Xbox. I do wish this was labelled clearly at the start of all trailers, and that actual console footage was shown more frequently.

Disappointed there's no Callisto Protocol here, that was only behind Elden Ring for me this year. And who on earth is voting for COD as game of the year?! Did not expect that to feature in the top 10.

No more Mr Nice guy.

@stvevan I imagine he's talking about bringing games to markets and demographics that haven't traditionally been gamers, while Sony is focused very much on the same hardcore market

@Scenes I don't remember them saying that from what I read/saw. The black levels in SDR are correct and John Linneman recommends playing in SDR for that reason. If it was an artistic choice they'd made then surely the black levels would be raised in both modes. Unless the correct black levels in SDR are a bug! Nothing would surprise me at this point tbh.

Having checked it earlier today the black levels are still elevated in HDR, making everything looked washed out. Good to see them address the RT issue though.

@Kaloudz That's interesting, I also felt like I'd 'cheated' a little bit by the end as I always used spirit summons for the boss fights (but never called for help from actual people as I played the whole game offline). I also spent a lot of the early game exploring and levelling up which helped to make tricky encounters more manageable. Now I'm trying to play Sekiro and the lack of spirit summons or really any ability to walk away from tricky sections to level up is making the game incredibly frustrating for me!

Microsoft showed... nothing

Lots of comments talking about how they'll get COD running on the Switch, but with a 10 year timespan and the deal not going through until mid 2023 anyway the chances are they won't have to - it will be the Switch 2 or whatever by that point. And I'm sure the entries from Ghosts onwards would run perfectly fine on whatever new hardware Nintendo puts out, given that they've all had to run on the base Xbox One.

As a word of warning, John Linneman has tweeted that the Series X version of the game has various technical issues compared to the PS5 version. The details will be in the tech analysis video which is due to be up sometime today.