Topic: The everything Xbox thread

Hey, I'll take it

@antdickens Wait, WHAT???

Would be nice, though. I'd immediately subscribe, and I know of at least twenty others on here who would as well.

I'd probably ignore Pure XBox as much as I ignore Push Square, but it would be great to see all the same!

@DarthNocturnal 3 really was a huge mistake though.... Nothing about that game was AoE. It was a Warcraft III wannabe, and shredded absolutely everything that made an AoE game AoE.

The problem is really that AoE 3 is basically Banjo Nuts & Bolts on many levels. "Ensemble" was only "Ensemble" in name only at that point, all the real talent, including the founders and original AoE designers, was gone by that point. Rick & Tony Goodman founded Ensemble. Rick was really the mastermind behind AoE in general. During the development of 2 he'd left and founded Stainless Steel, but his template for the game had already been set as a huge influence on the sequel. Brian Sullivan was gone by then as well. Bruce Shelley technically directed both 2 and 3, but without the influence of any of the original creators, and the Sid Meier circle of friends behind the first two, he ended up with a studio that was a shadow of its former self during a time when Microsoft was very into enforcing "the Microsoft Way" of developing things, and that effect was very, very, very visible in all their games of the time (I'd heard first-hand a number of cases of the internal turmoil at that time. Nobody actually wanted to be there, and nobody wanted to make the products they were being told to make, nor the way they were being told to make them. Imagine being a games creative, and basically, having the people behind Power Point telling you how to make it, and the marketing department telling you want you're going to make. Tim Schafer's joke on stage at E3 this year about Excel was only half a joke. That's not how things work when you're bought by Microsoft under Spencer, but that is how things worked in the early oughties.)

AoE III was born from that mess.

Meanwhile Goodman made Empire Earth which was basically the real AoE 3 but never got the credit it deserved because Sierra was the publisher right when they were embroiled in the Vivendi buyout/nightmare, and everything was caught in limbo.

@Dezzy Ooohh Gears Tactics for XBox too? That's awesome!

Lol I feel bad for the people who had an Xbox-specific site or channel this generation.

I noticed one of the main Xbox youtube channels just switched into general gaming stuff and kinda hoped the audience understood.

@Dezzy Well, there's still Xbox Achievements and Major Nelson, so we're not completely without any Xbox specific sites...

@DarthNocturnal WC3 was kind of controversial on its own, honestly. It had a fun campaign. Needed the DLC, but it was clearly built for multiplayer, borrowing from SC's success. WC2 was SO dated it was hard to really follow it up with a direct sequel though so the big tone shift was acceptable. And bad as WC3 may have seemed at the time, the fact that its world got turned into WoW and there's never been a WC4 since is what really became depressing.

AoEIII going from "serious historical documentary style semi-accurate ancient war simulator" RTS to "Lets make comical characters in a cartoon environment and rip out half the evolving civilization idea and just clone Warcraft" was so much a "So, uhmmm, the team over in P&T says the current demographic for this genre has been moving in this direction,. and Blizzard's moved over 8 points YoY since releasing WC3, so we've put together a committee and a conference call so you can identify some tentpoles to move the needle over in that direction." moment.

Technically on it's own it wasn't a bad game. But it wasn't an AoE game, really, it was a focus group product. And it was enough to kill Ensemble. It wasn't a genre shift like N&B, though N&B never claimed to be a direct sequel at all. AoE did claim to be a sequel, but was a semi-genre shift, away from an "AoE game" which at the time was becoming its own sub-genre and into being a Blizzard-esque RTS. I think that's where it really fell flat. AoE didn't just establish a brand, it established an entire subgenre, and was the reigning king of its own genre. Then III came along and wasn't really the same subgenre as its namesake created.

After nearly 100 hours, I think I'm ready for the final quests in Witcher 3 I'll do a NG+ & skip most non-story stuff for the options that matter sometime ....

@Dezzy Purexbox.com is a great site, the only gaming site without sensationalism. It was sad when it stopped for two reasons, being one of the few Xbox sites and being one of the best gaming sites. For some reason Nintendo and Sony players spend a lot of their time on the internet while Xbox players just play and use the console party chats.

It's likely that Sony and Microsoft "war" will be much more balanced next generation, that is next year! Perhaps that's when the Xbox brand will be highly popular again like it was last generation and hopefully we'll see something more than Nintendo and Sony on the net.

I love Nintendo Life but it's like a Nintendo overdose and brainwashing sometimes.

Another Xbontendo here! @XBontendo @antdickens

@DarthNocturnal There are some very vocal hostile zealots on Nintendo Life too but I've realised that the majority of the people here are nice. I love that there are some xboxers here too and people than criticise Nintendo sometimes. It's like there is some variety and genuine people.

Push Square is more radical, more like a sect. I started this generation with 3DS and Wii U and I didn't know where to go after Nintendo abandoned Wii U early on, PS4 or Xbox One. I visited both communities and bought both consoles (Sony's first) and I ended up enjoying the Xbox console, controller, games and community much more.

I think www.trueachievements.com is a great site for Xbox news, and it also has achievement tracking

Huh?!
I never knew Pure Xbox was another sibling of this website.
Too bad, it was closed on 2016 when i found the website just now.

@JoakimZ Personally, I prefer https://www.xboxachievements.com/
It is older than True Achievements, has a nice community and they already did the achievement tracking thing way before any other site.

And for an official news source, I just use https://majornelson.com/.

@ThanosReXXX I check both xboxachievements and trueachievements daily, and they’re both great sites for sure. But i prefer TA because I think they have more news articles and are also more up to date. XBA often upload news that I’ve read several days earlier on TA. XBA is also generally slower to upload new achievement lists.

Also, I’m pretty sure that XBA doesn’t have achievement tracking? I can’t find that function on their site, anyhow.

@JoakimZ Well, what exactly do you mean by tracking, then? There's the forum pages, where people do keep track of achievements, and a friend of mine has always used XboxAchievements to print out achievement lists for games that he owns, so that he knows which ones he still needs to get, so that's also a way of keeping track of them.

As for the latest news: Major Nelson is where it's at. He is mr. Xbox after all, so any and all news concerning Xbox and it's games and events will be on there first, also before the two achievement sites.

@ThanosReXXX TA scans your Xbox profile so you can easily see all your achievement progress along with lots of interesting statistics.
For example I can see that i have completed all achievements in 135 different games; 76 on Xbox One, 57 on Xbox 360, 1 on Windows and 1 on iOS.
I have played a total of 379 Xbox games and unlocked 8020 achievements, which is 61.5% completion. I need to unlock 59 more achievements to reach 62% completion.
And a lot more!

I love that they provide this kind of stuff

It says something about achievement tracking on my XBox above the latest ones Since I don't particularly bother with them, though...

@JoakimZ Ah, okay. Well, can't argue with personal preference, but to be honest, that's the exact kind of thing that I absolutely DON'T like. I don't want any third party scanning any of my personal data, so wherever possible, I will use any and all means to prevent that.

@JoakimZ Thanks, I'll check that one. I only got all the achievements in a few games LOL but for news and articles it looks good. By the way, I need just one more achievement in Fable Anniversary Edition which is impossible to get because you need to use Xbox Glass.

@ThanosReXXX I doubt they have access to any personal information, just the achievement stuff that is already visible for everyone to see on your Xbox Profile.