themightyant

@PeaceSalad Thanks for the suggestion mate, but I've tried that - I've tried them all - but it won't let me turn them in. I know where the prompt is meant to appear, but it doesn't as Gina's not there.

It's a known bug they said would be fixed in a later update, but that was back in December.

Next year seems too soon. Series X doesn't feel like it's been fully tapped yet. Would piss a lot of people off.

Brilliant game, well deserved. Though I wish they would fix some of the bugs, I still can't complete the codes quest and "Tuned In" achievement in Sukhothai as Gina has disappeared and is stuck elsewhere on the map. It's a known problem on their forums, as are a couple of other bugs, but they haven't updated since 1.3.1. It doesn't ruin a brilliant game, but it does leave a bitter taste in the mouth.

@GuyinPA75 totally agree. Too many announcements for too early leading to delays for gamers and added pressure for devs. It’s often lose:lose

Replaced is starting to feel like The Last Night, which was announced way back in 2014 and many said Replaced took a lot of design queues from.

Nice! Blue Prince in particular had my attention, great to get it on Game Pass.

It's currently sitting about where I expected 83 on Opencritic from 58 reviews. I skimmed the review just to check performance, because like @PsBoxSwitchOwner I want to go in as blind as possible.

Masterpiece. Now that it's been fixed (it was a bit rough at launch on Xbox One) it's an easy 9+ out of 10 and one of the very best Metroidvanias out there.

I'll be happy if it's around The Outer Worlds (85) but I think it might just beat it, if it releases in a good state, else just below. All the previews look great and I have high hopes for this one. Regardless of the scores I suspect it's going to be right up my street.

@Old_Man_Harper Not all sales are not equal. I think part of it is deciding whether a sequel will be greenlit is often decided on early 'full priced' sales, and seeing what the market is for the game on Day 1. So it is still important. They will likely include long tail projections based on those early sales too when it 'fails', though a game can get a larger second wind than they expected, or vice versa.

Note that Day 1 full price sales count more than later 30%, 50%, 70%, 90% off sales. I look at a game like Witcher 3, which is fantastic and a huge success, but when they say it has sold 50+ million copies I do question how many of those were at low prices? It had 1.5 million pre-orders and sold an impressive 10 million in its first 10 months, already turning a profit. But then tripled that to 33 million in the first 30ish months, and later 50+ million. But how many of those were sold at $4.99 for the base game or $9.99 with all DLC? I know I triple dipped.

@Kaloudz Many good games have long tail sales nowadays where it sells X million in the first 6 months but 2X million over the next couple of years. Hopefully this continues to do well for Remedy.

Personally I was waiting for all DLC and a physical release bought it was soon as soon as that was available.

I would love them to remaster MW3 as they did MW1 and MW2, it's weird that they remastered two in the trilogy but didn't finish the ongoing story.

Definitely looking forward to trying this, the style looks amazing, but not convinced the gameplay is going to be interesting.

At first I though all the plugged in consoles were red-ringing... which would have been tragically hilarious, but it's apparent;y because they don't have an AV cable plugged in.

Makes sense. If the work is already done to get them working on cloud, there's no reason to stop them being on Cloud just because they leave Game Pass.

@RiverGenie You missed the point. Of course we are happy the game updated and we got to play a less buggy version day 1 - though it still very buggy in my experience - but what is the point of having a pre-load for around 150GB in the case of Stalker 2 and then getting us to download another almost 150GB a few days later overwriting the whole file? (I forget the exact size of the second update but it was similar in size)

But more importantly the Xbox pre-load / update system didn't work properly. I had pre-loaded the 150GB specifically so that I could play the game immediately on release, that's the point of it right? But instead when I tried to play it said I had to download another 150GB.

What is the point of the pre-load then?

@Kaloudz At this point I generally have more faith in my ability to remember to turn the console on earlier in the day and manually start an update than I do in the pre-download service which in my experience doesn't always work as intended.

@Nexozi I used to feel like this, but at some point you have to accept this is an impossible task that requires a mindset change. I suspect you don't download Netflix or Spotify and think I have to watch/listen to everything I can on it, similar with Game Pass. There's only so many hours...

I've not been too impressed by the pre-download service. Some games like Stalker 2 gave a massive download in advance, then made us download an equally massive update... what was the point? Others even though I downloaded the pre-download haven't downloaded the rest of the game by the time I go to fire it up. It's definitely an area that needs some improvement. But i'll try it again.

@Kaloudz You still don't really have to worry about specs on a console, just play games and enjoy.

@Kaloudz 120Hz is mostly only available on higher end TV models from the last 10ish years. I'm not sure if it will become the new norm for ALL TVs as it's mostly only really gaming that uses it. But it is the norm for higher end models.

The reason we usually only have the option for 30fps OR 60fps is that TV panels would be 60Hz and for frames to display evenly they could only be at a whole number multiple of that 60, so 60fps (1x) or 30fps (2x) or 20fps (3x) on older consoles like N64 for Zelda: Ocarina of time, or even 15fps (4x).

A 60Hz Tv can't display at 40fps (1.5x) at evenly paced frames so it is disabled as it would look horribly choppy.

Whereas a120Hz TV can display at 120fps (1x), 60fps (2x), 40fps (3x), 30fps (4x), 24fps (5x), 20fps (6x), 15fps (8x) etc. it gives more choice to developers.

@Kaloudz Yes. Basically the frame time (like 25 milliseconds or 0.025 of a second for 40fps) is how much time the console has to render and display the next frame (30, 40 or 60 every second). So the more time it has to render each frame the more visually rich each frame can be.

This is why the 30fps version will be the 'Quality' version as it has a whole 33.3 milliseconds (0.033 seconds) to render each frame, whereas 60fps 'performance' version has half the amount of time at 16.6 milliseconds (0.016 seconds) to render the scene in each frame.

40fps is a nice sweet spot that FEELS much smoother to play to most users than 30fps but allows more time to render better visuals. It's a great balance between visuals and performance and personally my preference when done well.

@Medic_alert We've seen this before in a few games. A well documented one was Ori and the Will of Wisps which is a wonderful game, but at launch ran pretty badly on Xbox One, including seconds long freezes on opening the map. They smoothed these after launch but it still wasn't great with lots of performance dips.

However after having to optimise for the Switch where they had to find more efficiency they back ported some of the learnings to Xbox One and it now runs like a dream on that console, as well as helping them achieve even more on the later Series S|X ports.

There's a couple of really good Digital Foundry dev discussions on this game and in one (the second I think) they go into detail on this.

@Kaloudz Most of the RE: games have MTX for outfits and early unlocks of infinite weapons etc. that you can get in the game for completing with S Rank (speedrun)

@Kezelpaso Will do. I played all the originals many times over, but have been sitting on all the remakes for a while.

I finally got around to playing RE2 remake last weekend and generally can see why it was so praised, but I gotta say as a fan of the original the B-side (second playthroughs) are pretty disappointing. In the original the two parts made sense and together made a whole story. But in the remake it feels very dialled in, and the story doesn't work e.g. the same NPC dying twice in difference ways. Good game overall but that aspect is much worse.

Onto RE3 and RE4 remakes. Perhaps this RE5 remake will be out by the time I roll around to it.

If it's happening, by the time it releases it will be 15ish years since Arkham Knight, so i'm not too worried about more of the same.

@Titntin Totally agree. 40fps is great and to my eyes feel a LOT more fluid than 30fps and is usually my sweet spot. As you said it's exactly half way between in terms of frame time between 60fps and 30fps modes... for anyone wondering the math is:

• 30fps is 33.33ms per frame
• 40fps 25ms
• 60fps is 16.66ms

There's 8.33ms gap between 30 and 40 and 40 and 60.

NICE! and lovely to see a 40fps balanced mode, we need more of that with 120Hz TV's becoming more commonplace. That will probably be what i'll choose.

@Lup I know what you mean. I loved the Arkham games but we got 3 from Rocksteady, 1 from WB Montreal and several spin-offs. Do we need more? While I’d take a new Arkham over something like Suicide Squad id really like to see what Rocksteady could do on a new project

@K1LLEGAL just came here to congratulate you for “trolling” here for almost 15 years… it’s a long con… right?

Agree with @Weebleman don’t feed the beast

@andrewsqual Indeed! I suspect the big turning points for them were:

1. Seeing ABK's full books and realising how much money you can make on ALL platforms.

2. Seeing Starfield barely shift the needle in terms of console sales and Game Pass subscribers. (Their old plan wasn't working)

3. Acquiring all those studios / publishers + economic downturn meaning in order to make those studios sustainable they needed to get even more revenue. (Their old plan wasn't working)

@GeeForce I believe, please correct me if i'm wrong, that is only available for Elite controllers. I had a look for this when I had drift, but perhaps it's changed now.

@Banjo- They did previously state it was SPECIFICALLY 30fps and had been targeted as that from early on. However they did also say optimisation comes last. It seems they were able to optimise well enough to enable a 60fps mode.

Though "up to 60fps" is a little concerning. Hopefully it's MOSTLY 60fps and not all over the place, though as you say VRR helps smooth this for users with higher end TVs

For those interested in Avowed it's a lovely and enlightening interview. Just 13 minutes long but a lot of rapid fire questions answered. Watch it here

@nomither6 Stick drift didn't start last gen it's been around as long as analogue sticks. I had several X360 controllers that eventually drifted.

However the main difference is that the deadzones have been shrunk more and more with each generation to make the sticks feel more responsive. But the downside with that is even a tiny bit of physical drift will now register as drift on the console, whereas before it might not.

E.g. I have PS5 controllers that only have a 9% drift/error rate (when testing via PC) that drift on PS5 but I have X360 controllers with 15% drift/error rate that don't drift on that console. What's frustrating is it would often be fixable in software, if they would just allow us to increase the deadzone per controller and make them a LITTLE less responsive if we have drift.

@abe_hikura ebay is a pretty great place for this. I got both sticks replaced on my drifting Xbox controller for around £15. Just check the seller reviews first.

The wonders of algorithms and AI! I see Apple is already in some trouble for their news AI incorrectly announcing people are dead as well as other falsehoods.

@TheGameThrifter Call of Duty: BO6 released October 25th last year, this was December. Yes plenty of it was still COD even 1-2 months later but it shows the potential they can make launching multiplatform. Why can’t Halo do the same, or Gears?

Xbox has sold around 32 million consoles this gen, PlayStation around 71 million, Microsoft increase their potential console market by a whopping 222% if they publish on PlayStation and that’s before we get to Nintendo.

This is the new normal, Microsoft is predominantly a game publisher, who also sells hardware.

They dipped their toes in and saw MASSIVE returns. As reported 64% of their revenue in December was on PlayStation, effectively double Xbox, PC, Mobile, Cloud and Switch combined. That's too big a pie to decline.

They were pretty vague all of last year but in the last few months the Xbox leadership has all been saying the same thing and it seems clear most Xbox games are going multiplatform. It will be more surprising now if and when they don't.

@OldGamer999 Very few games actually play at 120fps on console it's usually 60+fps with VRR to smooth it out, but often in the 70-100+fps window. The 120fps is more of a target.

But you usually sacrifice too much on the visuals imho so 60fps is often the more balanced option though your mileage may vary.

@fatpunkslim it’s not all true backwards compatibility, it’s emulation of a small portion of the Xbox (6%) and 360 (29%) library. The only true backwards compatibility is Xbox One (around 95%)

@OldGamer999 in a perfect world I totally agree with you, more games on more platforms is only a good thing now that Microsoft is such a large publisher. So long as Day 1 games keep coming to Game Passalong with Xbox console hardware it’s all good.

My only concern is what would happen to Xbox hardware if less players buy the console? Potentially third parties could stop developing for Xbox as much and it could easily get out of Microsoft’s control and spiral.

@PsBoxSwitchOwner absolutely right based on what they have said most recently it’s going to be almost all games getting ported to other consoles.

And why wouldn’t they? In December Microsoft made 64% of their gaming revenue on PlayStation, that’s effectively twice as much as on Xbox, PC, Mobile, Cloud and Switch combined.

@VoidPunk That's the OPPOSITE of what this is. This is streaming games you already OWN digitally that aren't on Game Pass but you can also stream via cloud.

63 is a start but hopefully the aim is to get the whole library available.

@abe_hikura Totally agree just 3 new additions is a big red flag. Back in 2020 & 2021 it averaged 22 games a month. 2019 & 2022 were 16 a month. The last 6 months has been 9. CHOICE is good in a subscription service.

@FraserG Yes it's clearer. Though I still think it would be even clearer if you separated standard, which is almost a separate service. It currently looks like a lot more NEW games are being to the service when in fact it's just 3 but some older games are also being added to Standard tier.

There better be a lot more coming at ID@Xbox / after 18th because as much as i'm looking forward to Avowed only getting 3 games added including a Madden and a 2019 Far Cry Spin off is weak.

It wasn't just that the console launched early it was the sheer amount of games that launched in the first couple of years of the X360 and the graphical upgrade it offered over anything else on the market for at least a year. It felt like a GIANT leap. As I've said here before I had my PS2 was saving for a PS3 but one look at Gears of War and the cinematic Roadie Run and I went and bought a 360 the next day.

I still think console exclusives will exist, just less so than before.

Some of that is down to logistics like team sizes, development time and budgets but I think there will still also be a demand from platform holders, primarily Sony & Nintendo to bulk out their first party lineup, but also for Microsoft to do the same with Game Pass.

More destructible environments! That is what I was hoping for with next-gen. Hopefully these aren't all just pre-scripted.

@AlwaysPlaying loved The Gunk. Thanks