themightyant

1. Expedition 33
2. Silksong
3. Blue Prince

These are the only ones I am certain of. For the other 2 I voted Keeper and Doom TDA
But that changes daily.

"Largest world" is often a BAD thing. I just think of games like recent Assassin's Creed games or Just Cause. Give me a smaller, DENSER, world every day. I'm amazed game devs still don't seem to grasp that bigger doesn't always mean better.

@BattleMonkey It was almost certainly the right business call, but it doesn't make it any less disappointing when you are looking forward to the game.

And here I thought you were going to champion Blue Prince as the absolute masterpiece of game design it is.

But here’s the reality. 2025 has been an amazing year for video games, we are blessed that there have been so many good ones that games like Split Fiction, Blue Prince, KCD2… and many more… miss out on some awards.

• Fable
• Clockwork Revolution
• Gears E Day

Those are the main ones for me. I'm less interested in Halo re-re-make or another Forza Horizon unless they make it fresh again. Still feel gutted about Perfect Dark, it would nice to have a surprise too.

What he means is "preorders were piss-poor so we reverted to meet consumers where they were willing to pay. While expected, the push back was stronger than we thought and ultimately would have led to lower profits, so it's not really about you, it's about us"
Thank you.

Looks great, I look forward to playing it. Thought i'm not sure about having a branching timeline but not allowing you to use it till second playthrough. Bit weird.

Need to give this another go. Didn't love the gameplay or animation when I gave it a brief whirl, then bounced to something else. That's the good and bad of Game Pass, it makes games far less 'sticky'.

Continues to look amazing.

Frankly not a fan of CGI trailers, and this just seemed to be out there to shock. Not a lot to glean. But I trust Larian to make a good game.

A LOT of good looking games. I put checkmarks next to at least 20 games. Probably the stand outs for me were:

• SW: Fate of the Old Republic
• Divinity
• Ontos
• RE Requiem
• Exodus
• Control 2 Resonant
• Fang of the Dragon
• Tomb Raider x 2
• Lords of the Fallen 2
• Saros
• No law
• Phantom Blade 0

And several more I am keeping an eye on. Strong show.

I genuinely thought they were calling it "Another F___ing Zombie Game" which would have been a far better title imo.

Did look very different in a lot of ways, but I am up for that.

@Nerad I'm just about to play that, i've been doing the whole Remedy Verse. Currently half way through Control.

Looked awesome, but it's also a HUGE step up for The Ascent team, I hope they can deliver.

Really disappointing final announcement. Granted I had probably fallen for the pre-show hype and thought it might be something huge.

But the game looked cool, if you like that sort of thing... but I don't.

C. It started pretty well with a LOT of promising trailers but lulled in the middle and then didn’t nail the finish. Also too much CGI not enough gameplay. Lastly too many awards were rushed through.

But there were still a lot of good looking games overall.

That is a quick turnaround, first game was 2023. Amazing art design. Hopefully better technically.

@Johnnel thanks

I love the Jan Dev Direct but that was super weird having a trailer for trailers.

I'd forgotten this game had even come out. It disappeared with a whimper.

In terms of marketing costs that’s not very much for the sort of exposure TGAs give. There were over 150 million streams last year.

This feels like an in-joke i'm not in on... great game though.

Prince or Persia lost crown + DLC for £13.99 is a bargain!

@Fiendish-Beaver @Kezelpaso To be fair Bratz is a series aimed at kids/tweens who are unlikely to leave reviews, so that isn't the fairest metric to judge it by. We're clearly not it's target market! lol. But like Bluey and other kids games they put on Game Pass I think it's cool they add something that parents might want to play with their kids.

I’m fairly certain my Xbox gaming is significantly down this year versus PlayStation. Too many time sapping games over there I need to delete!

But Game Pass has still provided a lot of great games including my top 3 games of the year in Expedition 33, Silksong and Blue Prince.

Last year was a great improvement imo, even the Muppets were funny, ripping into Geoff and TGAs as a comments section would.

There's still too many ads/trailers versus awards, and it's still FAR too long... but that's a near impossible quandary to solve.

If it's as good as last year's I'll be very happy.

Not so Smart Delivery...

I wonder if they might announce the NextBox with compatibility through a translation layer or something similar.

We will no longer do back-to-back releases of Modern Warfare or Black Ops games

This could mean a lot of things, but I wonder if they will skip the campaign every other year, or something similar.

@Pac_Bot Exactly. It's like my nephew who thoughtAssassins Creed Valhalla was the "greatest game he had ever played" (well after Zelda BOTW) but it was his fist Ass. Creed.

How you feel about Forza Horizon 5 probably depends how much you played the other games. It was undoubtedly well made but personally, having put hundreds of hours into the series, it was exceedingly uninspiring, it just felt like a skin swap of Forza Horizon 4 with a different map. I'd played it all before.

Hoping for something fresher.

@rhyno_888 Netflix doesn't have a gaming platform either.

@rhyno_888 Why do you think it would be any different with Paramount though?

@rhyno_888 I think that is unlikely. A game like Oxenfree 2 is comparatively low budget and can be made exclusive without losing much. But it would be madness to buy Hogwarts Legacy (for example) and then limit it only to Netflix, just like Microsoft aren't limiting studios they bought. It makes little business sense, they would literally be devaluing the asset they bought many times over.

No. It’s the only Halo campaign I’ve played just once. Going open world didn’t work. It was OK but that isn’t good enough for Halo.

It's not every game, but it is brilliant, and better than the competition. I wish they would do even more games though, especially with FPS boost and X-enhanced (increasing games to 4K@60fps)

It's pretty embarrassing to lose to the Nex Playground 3rd (whatever that is) but they didn't offer good BF pricing, so these numbers don't mean that much in isolation.

But it is part of a much wider problem where Xbox is hardly selling in any territories we have numbers for. And why would consumers bite when the prices are so much higher than the competition?

It's a shame, as at the start of the gen I was recommending families on the fence go for a Series S + Game Pass, that's a hard recommendation to make right now.

Note to self: Must try and give Eternal Strands a try.

@DeadSpace Sniper Elite: Resistance

This is the model that isn’t selling, and I’m not surprised it’s underpowered for the price, very small slice of an already niche market.

@Fiendish-Beaver It's pretty even. According to Pure Xbox's list it's 155 on console, 163 on PC. But then why does console cost so much more than PC for day 1 games?

As for the 75 day 1 games, I expect it will be like it usually is, lots of third party indie games. But if enough of these are of the calibre of Expedition 33, Silksong and Blue Prince (my top 3 games of the year) then i'll be satisfied.

@Chip-Douglas Came to type almost the exact same word for word. A shame.

@FraserG The fact Netflix and WB haven't mentioned gaming OR Wrestling in their press release or interviews that I have seen isn't reassuring! At least with ABK it was all about games and gaming IP, there is a chance that Netflix simply doesn't care about these parts much.

I'm about half way through it, It doesn't really remind me of Halo at all... except the doors! Mixed bag so far, high highs, low lows.

@FraserG Absolutely. There will almost certainly be job losses and potentially even studio closures, that's a given for almost every large M&A. But it's also fair to say this was always going to happen, regardless of if it was Netflix, someone else, or WB held onto it. For consumers I suspect Netflix prices will also go up sooner than they would have done.

On the gaming side specifically it will be interesting to see how they are going to handle that. Open platforms? Exclusivity? Concentrate on mobile? Or keeping the status quo.

I fear for Rocksteady!

Brilliant little game, that gets better as it goes on. Great momentum.

It's a massively ambitious project, I hope they have the stuff to pull it off, as it's one of my most anticipated Xbox titles.

Carmageddon! That takes me back almost 30 years, was a lot of mindless fun back then.

@Questionable_Duck thanks, see above, their initial article said the opposite.

@Weebleman thanks. The initial article from Push Square said it was no longer part of it. I see they have clarified that, which makes more sense.

It's been a long wait, hopefully it lives up to expectations.