SplooshDmg

@Sebatrox Pokemon got absolutely roasted, and it should have. The game underneath the mess was a solid Pokemon game, but right out the gate, no that game wasn't ready to ship. Ultimately, that is also an issue of the Pokemon Company, which Nintendo owns only one third of the stake. Game Freak and Creatures have plenty to answer for, as well. Pokemon is published by Nintendo, but it is not exactly an internally developed game. The Pokemon Company owns Pokemon, not Nintendo. Game Freak develops the games and is a 100% privately owned entity.

Star Wars has apparently already seen a pretty solid patch, but it doesn't excuse the state it shipped in.

The GTA Trilogy was an awful port from an awful company that was handled by the people that had a history of working on messes. To say that anyone has any faith in the Rockstar of today... I don't even know what your point is.

Redfall is a poorly designed game. Performance is only one issue, bugs are another. You could squish every last bug, and pump Redfall to 8K and a thousand fps and it would still be a bad game. You're laser focusing on bugs and performance, and that's not what everyone is complaining about.

@Sebatrox I know this might be difficult... But imagine a world where MS never announced Redfall... And we never knew about it. Then they told Arkane, "Hey, we don't feel good about this project. Sorry, we don't want to continue. Let's start something new." Instead, we have this PR nightmare, and Arkane are years behind on something more akin to Dishonored or Prey. Nothing good has happened here. I'm glad you're finding some enjoyment in Redfall on Game Pass. But there is absolutely no spinning this as anything other than the unmitigated disaster that it is. Phil isn't even on your side.

@Fenbops https://twitter.com/tomwarren/status/1654110635582537730?s=20

He's basically blubbering by the time he says, "These games are $70."

@Fenbops Phil was on Kinda Funny, and his entire demeanor was sort of just... Entirely aware of how bad this is, but saying sorry isn't going to make it go away. You can't just close the barn door once the cows have already left. This game seriously should have just been canceled.

@Dezzy70 I am so overly thrilled that MS is just getting absolutely cooked over this. Phil is supposed to be on Kinda Funny tomorrow, and you know those guys are gonna have A LOT of questions. I'm curious to see how that conversation goes. Phil will probably just tell them how he's looking forward to Spiderman 2 and that he'll try harder to not be literally blind during the studio visits.

@Dezzy70 What you're trying to say is the problem with Redfall isn't the 30fps. Redfall only features 30fps because Redfall is basically a beta product and in no way shape or form is a representation of what Xbox hardware is capable of. There's a lot of hills to die on, and Redfall is a really weird one to choose. xD

@Solidchief So, that makes Redfall McDonalds. Got it. Overpriced and terrible all around. Because why should we expect quality when crap is perfectly fine?

@FatalBubbles Honestly, I'm genuinely not a big fan of Zelda. I've played them all, probably more because of peer pressure than anything. I was so sick of BOTW by the time the credits rolled, that I scaled the big rock behind Hyrule Castle and just flew into the backside so I could skip the last dungeon almost entirely and just finish the game. I'm half tempted to buy TOTK just to see if they can change my mind, but I'm still undecided. Lol

@NEStalgia Take a deep breath. It will be fine. I promise. You will be playing TOTK in less than two weeks.

@Tharsman Not saying they aren't, but by and large it's getting harder and harder to cheer for them, because they are serving the customer less and less. When I mentioned low budget JRPG above, I'm literally playing Atelier Sophie DX on Steam. I have the Gust bug big time right now. I just finished Ryza 2 and I have Ryza 3 sitting on the shelf ready to roll. So, yup, you're spot on. They are every single thing I love about Japanese entertainment, and they don't seem to have any interest except continuing to serve their fan base. KT was apparently thrilled with Ryza 3's 300k copies sold.

Yeah, it's a shame the Mistwalker thing didn't pan out, they were fun games. I don't really know what MS does on that front going forward. It just seems like a tough battle no matter how you slice it.

@FatalBubbles Right, I mean, I'm an accountant. Money is what I do. However, that being said, I'm extremely critical of what things like public trading has done to things like entertainment and art. I don't care about the shareholders, because I'm not one and I'm not getting dividends. The two things just don't necessarily co-exist well imo.

Most games these days feature light RPG elements. Heck, CoD features light RPG elements. They're basically just a norm now and shoehorned into basically every existing genre somehow. But I think God of War is just going to fall into the pretty standard action adventure genre. I respect God of War a lot, I've played them all and they are masterfully crafted. But they just aren't something I personally love.

Eh, nothing to feel bad about. I've been mad at Square Enix for two decades now. Nothing has changed. Lol

@Sakisa Yeah, Tim is a rockstar. The guy has always had brilliant ideas and a lack of money. So, hopefully his ideas and MS's money really do pay off in the long term.

@A01 It's 2023. We proudly celebrate failure in 2023.

@NEStalgia So, the choice between integrity and selling your soul for money? Because that's kinda what it is to me. If they wanna sell their soul for money, they can do that. That was always allowed. I'm gonna call them out on it, though. It's kinda like your favorite punk band all of a sudden decides they want to make some serious money, so they shave off their mohawk and release their first pop rock album. It's selling out in my eyes. This is the same company that's obsessed with NFTs in 2023. I have to think that every decision by SE is devoid of integrity. I get it though, we're A LOT more rigid than most people. I don't expect people to get that. I'm not going to yell at the people that love it and tell them to stop having fun, but I'll also defend my sentiment on the subject.

@Fenbops Honestly, this is where I am. I'm excited for a few big Xbox games, but God knows what we'll get or when we'll get it. I'm excited for zero big PS games. I've got a big fat RTX3080ti in my PC playing Sam & Max: Save the World (that I bought for a dollar), and low budget JRPGs. I'm not really sure why developers sink these huge budgets into games anymore. It doesn't seem like it makes them any more fun. Kinda seems like the opposite, really.

@mousieone Pentiment was my favorite game of 2022. Grounded is good, but I think you really need friends for that one, and I don't do friends. But really, I think Obsidian is probably going to be Xbox's bread winner in the coming years.

@FatalBubbles I think in ways yes and no. I do think RPG is pretty broad in scope, especially by today's standards. However, I'm really with NES that nothing about FFXVI looks any more an RPG than God of War, which isn't an RPG at all. However, I'm just not quite bent out of shape about it like he is. I've basically been living without new Final Fantasy since 2006, so odds are I'll just continue living without it. The game looks like something well assembled that the mainstream market will love, but a tee-total dud by what makes a game enjoyable to me. I'm not living under some illusion that Square Enix has to care what I think, they're in charge and can do whatever they want. I just also seem to get raked over the coals for not being thrilled about the new direction. Lol

@mousieone I'd certainly think it has to be getting close. Jez has apparently seen it in action, so it's probably been in a playable state for a while now. I just really hope it's great. I love, love Obsidian games.

My favorite bug so far was aiming down my sight and still being able to see my hands holding the gun in the sight. That one would truly make Todd proud to call Arkane a member of Bethesda.

I just want Avowed. I'd say Obsidian doesn't miss, but that comment might age like milk.

@FatalBubbles If you haven't noticed, NES is really invested in this. Like, actively losing sleep, maybe.

@NEStalgia Didn't this game kinda bomb, though? Not that it isn't of quality, because basically all I've heard is it's a crying shame how good it is, and it just didn't really perform well (or that's what 2K let us believe, anyway). Which goes back to my concerns from the other day that developers may eventually just stop making games like these, because the market has decided they really aren't all that interested. Which comes right back around to our constant complaining that game budgets are absolutely out of control and the AAA industry is just (slowly? Rapidly? Debatable) destroying itself because only a handful of the biggest franchises/publishers can actually sustain themselves financially.

@Sebatrox Good for you. I really don't care.

@NEStalgia I had a Wii U for a pretty short spell. So, I didn't play much of anything on the Wii U, which does make the Switch library a bit more compelling for me. I've still got Tokyo Mirage Session on the burner. But yeah, when it came to Nintendo, I always played the handheld stuff more than the console stuff. Lord, I haven't played Luigi's Mansion 3 yet...

I might get a PSVR2 eventually. I'm definitely interested. If modders get that thing working on PC, I'm 100% in. But really, I like my Switch, I like my PC, I like my PS5. I'd say PC is my favorite, but it really just boils down to what I want to play, when and where I want to play it.

Silly isn't really the word. I mean, it's still a serious plot with a bunch of nations fighting the Fell Dragon. The character designs really do just take some stuff from TMS FE. The characters have very... Idol kind of vibe to them. They aren't just typical high fantasy FE characters, but I absolutely love them.

@NEStalgia I basically had barely played the Switch, so I pretty much have a stack of 1st party games a mile high. I basically don't buy any game on Switch I don't need to. But yeah, I finished BOTW years ago, I just didn't really love it, love it. I mean, it was fine, but I always go back to Zelda trying to find the magic, and mostly just find a satisfying adventure title. Which isn't really bad. TOTK looks neat enough, and I'm sure I'd finish it if I bought it. I mean, I've played literally every other Zelda from start to finish (except Skyward Sword), even the handheld ones.

I'm absolutely in love with FE: Engage. It's stupid in all the best ways. As you said yourself, no one makes waifus like Nintendo, and Engage has GOT waifus. Toothpaste Chan has even grown on me. The story is kinda plain jane, basic good dragon vs evil dragon nonsense. But it's perfectly serviceable and the gameplay is stellar. I just see it sort of as Fire Emblem's Greatest Hits Vol. 1. It's 100% a spinoff, and none of the liberties they've taken feel bad for what's just a fun detour.

I've been playing Atelier Sophie DX on Steam, and it's pretty good, considering it's a super low budget JRPG from 2015 with a slight glow up. I've just really fallen for Gust's games. They're just so... Quaint. They're truly everything I love about Japanese entertainment.

@Fenbops I was thinking this earlier. Jim Ryan himself might have to make a Twitter just to personally congratulate them. "Congratulations on releasing a game so bad, people barely want to play it for 'free'. That takes a truly remarkable talent."

@NEStalgia Eh, at this point, I don't care. So, long as the keep the auteurs on the payroll and making gems like Pentiment and Psychonauts 2, I'm sure to keep buying stuff from them. I'm surely leaving Game Pass once my sub is up next year, so at that point I'll be out of the clutches of MS and over to Steam full time and I'll just buy the games worth buying.

At this point, I've seriously just been playing my Switch more than anything, since AAA gaming in 2023 is otherwise borked. I've found a need for portability and Metroid Prime Remastered and Fire Emblem: Engage are both just lovely. I've never been a huge Zelda fan, but maybe I'll let the fomo take over and just buy TOTK anyway. Might do a voucher and get Zelda and Pikmin 4. I never played Pikmin 3, but I loved the first two in ye olde days. Isn't that crazy? We can comfortably order two new games from Nintendo and think nothing of it, because the risk factor is pretty stinkin low. What've we gotta do to get a Golden Sun reboot?

@mousieone Right, Hi-Fi was a high point for Tango and... Crickets. Redfall is a low point for Arkane, but I'm seeing ads for it. It's like nobody at Xbox has any clue what they're doing or looking at, and it never really seems to improve. It's so beyond frustrating.

@mousieone Don't get me wrong, I was never excited for this. However, a lot of people were. Hi-Fi Rush was some weird anomaly that they didn't even bother to market, and this whole thing just stinks of incompetence. They should have marketed HI-FI Rush and just shadow dropped Redfall as some early access thing. It's a classic tale of Microsoft proving that their worst critics are probably right about them.

@mousieone Oh, for Xbox. We've waited a year and a half for a new AAA 1st party title, and we got Redfall. The mood on Twitter is unique today. Lol

@NEStalgia I think quietly canceling the game and having nothing until Starfield would have been a better look than shoving this clown out on stage. Instead of crickets, we now have something to throw tomatoes at.

Tango doesn't have a good history with tech things, but that's the point of being first party and having access to the actual hardware engineers and getting the most of the hardware. Ghostwire is technically a 1st party game performing like a 3rd party game, and it just shouldn't be. I'd like Xbox at some point to show us they can actually offer us some of these performance targets they've been pitching to us for years now.

Sony 1st party aside, you know I'm not a huge fan, but I respect that the games are at least well put together. There's just tons and tons of content available on PS that isn't on Xbox. It'd be hard to browse the PS store and just not find something to buy. Before I hawked my XSX I was constantly browsing the store and finding absolutely nothing to buy. It's why I just went back to PC. Good luck getting on Steam and not finding a billion things to want to buy.

MS has just screwed this up beyond measure. The problem isn't Redfall itself, the problem is they are proving that their worst critics are absolutely right about them. They don't learn, they don't listen... it's just shove it out there, close your eyes and ears, and eventually people might forget about it. At least if Sony is going to sell you a repetitious cinematic slog for $69.99 you can count on some consistency. MS raised the price ten bucks, lowered the FPS by 30, then slashed about 30 points off the metacritic score. But hey, it's on Game Pass! Woo Wee!

@mousieone I like how today was supposed to be a day of joy, and instead it's some weird mixture of confusion, frustration and sadness. It's honestly kind of surreal.

@mousieone It was about as interesting as Redfall. So, somewhere between kind of boring and utterly intolerable.

@mousieone I've never been nailed to the floor before. I did however once shave off all my hair and glue my head to the ceiling.

@mousieone Wait. Who are you? Have we met?

@NEStalgia I dunno, man. I really don't. Heads should have rolled after Infinite. If this game was really that bad when they acquired it, it should have just been quietly cancelled and shifted Arkane back to something they knew how to do. It's not that weird to cancel a game after internal tests show it's just awful, and this was clearly awful from conception. The idea of making Bethesda 1st party was to fund it and support it to release premier titles for Xbox. However, Ghostwire seems lackluster for Xbox hardware, and this is just a mess beyond belief.

I think it comes right back around to the fact that MS has absolutely no idea what they're doing. Jim and Herman come off as really weird dudes, but hey, I'm a weird dude too. I can't really judge them. At least if anything they'll ship Spiderman 2 this fall, and not 'Spoodermanz let us patch it for a year and then it might be enjoyable'. I'm not making a single apology for Xbox at this point. If Starfield isn't great, I'm out for good. I'll go be a freaking pony and prance and neigh about sad fathers and movies disguised as games.

@FatalBubbles The best part is when I delete my account, and NES just has walls of text tagging me and all my comments are gone. NES is filled with rage on a normal day, but remove the other side of the conversation and he just looks like a looney toon. 😂

@FatalBubbles Nah. I like to randomly disappear for months at a time, and it upsets NES and Mousie because they tag me in stuff and realize I went AWOL again. So, I was threatened to be put into a cage so I can't just up and leave. Lol

@NEStalgia I dunno. The fall from grace was pretty hard. However, we've basically just watched a corporation appear to get it's crap together, only to watch them just come completely unraveled again in real time. It's like Microsoft just decided to relapse back into total inadequacy. I think it really might be time for a new head of Xbox.

@Cherip-the-Ripper I calls em like I sees em.

@Cherip-the-Ripper Eh, it's so-so. It's not working my 3080ti to the max, and I'm still dropping a lot of frames at a 4K 60 target. I'm running DLSS on balanced, but turning the settings down doesn't really do much to help with all the load stuttering, etc. It's surely better than console, but it's a real shart of a game, so I don't recommend even installing it. Lol

@Ralizah I really don't know. This game was probably bad before development even started. I think a 6 is being generous here. I mentioned earlier to someone else that Arkane's previous attempt at co-op game was Wolfenstein Young Blood, with Machine Games, and it was pretty rubbish. Two established devs came together and just somehow made one giant disgusting stew of mismatched ideas and inadequacy. It seems Arkane has achieved that on their own this time. There are very few redeeming qualities here. It's truly a game probably best played when drunk, because you'd surely have some great laughs. An hour was enough for me to know that it's high time to scoot back on over to Atelier Sophie DX. This was truly the cherry on top of the single worst month in the history of Xbox.

@Ralizah Oh, I know. They somehow worked DLSS in here, so I've got that going for me. It still runs like arse. Barely 30% CPU utilization and only 50% on GPU and I'm dropping frames all over the place even with DLSS running on balanced. This is truly awful.

I'm on PC and holy crap. There's like... No settings whatsoever. It's basically a single slider for low, med, high, epic.. and nothing else. I guess at least it's 4K and 60fps... This opening scene is so outrageously bad. I'm literally sitting in my chair laughing at how stupid this is. 😂

@Tharsman Phil: "Todd, this game is broken."
Todd: "It just works."
Phil: "Well, you convinced me. Ship it."

@UltimateOtaku91 If it's anything like Halo Infinite, then no one at Xbox even bothered to see what the game looked like. After all, that's how Craig was born.

@KaijuKaiser Considering the last year and a half of Game Pass has been filled with new indies, I think people are getting tired of those. There's a shortage of AAA's over here, not indies. However, Ravenlok looks good. Cococucumber is a rock solid developer. Echo generation was awesome and was a huge step up from their prior game, Riverbond.

@gollumb82 Who needs games when you could have a controller instead? Think of all the things you could use that controller for. Like... Keeping paper from blowing away while the fan is on. I don't know how we ever did that prior to Xbox controllers.

@NEStalgia Perhaps you're right. I've really determined the only Yakuza I love is LAD. The combat in the others is just... Meh. I tried so hard to play Judgment, but LAD ruined me and now all Yakuza should be turn based. It's like the reverse of the FFXVI effect. I'm okay with that, and it's not hypocritical because I'm self-aware of the bias and just don't care.

I absolutely think Sony lent a pretty hefty hand in the development; they've basically said as much. I don't think anything about FFXVI looks bad, if anything is looks way too good to be a Square Enix game, because Square Enix is mostly a trash fire. They need all the help they can get.

At the moment Microsoft is also pretty dumpster fire aligned. If Redfall is in as bad of shape as we think it is, and this game scores in the 60's... Then... Well... I just don't know. I seriously think this month has been worse for the Xbox brand than the Xbone unveiling.

@Fenbops Yeah, I saw quite a few videos of stuff floating around, and it looks like it's in pretty rough shape. I think the thing is, Redfall probably started development well after Starfield, so I don't think it has cooked for nearly long enough. I think this is also a case like Rocksteady with Suicide Squad. A studio that has no business making an online co-op looter got put on a co-op looter, had no idea what they were doing, and just lit a bunch of money on fire. It's a move ripped right out of the EA playbook 2019 edition. This is Anthem with vampires and hipsters.