Topic: The everything Xbox thread

@Lindhardt With winter coming and being inside a lot more, I'm now considering it too. Gamepass/cloud is the only thing 'next gen' I'm really looking forward to trying out.
I only wish Microsoft and Nintendo would get friendly enough to have the cloud app appear on the eShop (pipe dream, I know lol).

And you do not need Xbox Live for PC play, only for the Xbox itself.

@BlueOcean @Shadowthrone Ok, thanks.

I'm thinking about catching up on the PlayStation thread now, but I see NEStalgia's been posting there too. Dare I?

@gcunit Ignore him and then go there. That's what I did after seeing his huge text walls

@BlueOcean that’s like, the biggest WiFi router I’ve ever seen!

@App Actually, it would make a cool if a bit impractical table 😁.

It was weird. I clicked the link to the PlayStation thread, but it took me to the PC Gaming thread... or at least I thought it did as I ploughed through page after page of NEStalgia and Ralizah talking PC component prices.

But there, I'm up-to-date now with both threads. Turns out I didn't really miss much - who knew? But I'm definitely on Team Xbox right now. Not that I'm planning on buying either for a while yet.

@gcunit Why do you not like NESstalgia?

So a few teases present:

https://twitter.com/Xbox/status/1314234178834034688

So there's a new ad tomorrow and details about the next Xbox event.

@NEStalgia Well I look forward to the speed up. In the interim, I'll be on my switch.

@Lindhardt We're just having fun. He's well known for having huge text walls on a subject. Which isn't wrong, but he does it almost every other comment and it gets annoying fast. I still like him as a user though. I thought he was pretty chill.

@gcunit har har. It's dangerous to go alone, sword sounds, etcetera.

@Ryu_Niiyama switch is nice and fast except that freaking animal crossing load screen.... Best thing I'm looking forward to with series x is the quick resume of multiple games rather than just one. That's The best part of switch and 3ds.... And sort of the 8th gen twins for one game. But goldfish attention span me is vibrating with excitement for that alone. When 3 rpgs at once just isn't enough. Also, you caught the Bethesda buyout by ms by now i presume? Interesting times. I mention it since i know you're a huge tes fan.

@Lindhardt oh, theyre just mocking my text walls, pay them no mind

@Lindhardt NEStalgia must be in my top 5 favourite NL users list. But when a brotha is legit the cause of 50% of why you're 45 pages behind in a thread...

@NEStalgia I love that I've been scarce enough that you are now the resident Text Waller all by your lonesome, cuz we have hijacked some threads in our day.

I mean I saw the bethesda purchase...I figure it can't get any worse at this point right? I mean I'll be in my 40s by the time TES VI comes out (If I am still gaming that is...I think that the 5/X will be my last sony and ms gen...I'm at the point that I've aged out of the focus groups and there aren't enough b listers to keep me playing since AAA games are not made for me. I just don't fit the demographic...) and I'm hoping that ms will make them bug test more. And MS doesn't seem to hate mods so at least that won't change. However while I don't like fallout that much I did play all the new ones (played the old ones too but its been a bit) and 4 was just a buggy janky mess...like more than normal, and I just watch the Wha Happun for 76 every time I need a laugh.

So I don't think being bought by MS will make things worse... I do worry about the state of the franchise overall as each game has gotten simpler and FO4 going full on mass effect dialogue pretty much horrified me. I love bioware for allowing me to have games with same sex romances but I really, really don't like the mass effect dialogue mechanic (I find it annoying that of all the quick changes that EAware made to the series every time someone complained loudly enough that they didn't alter the dialouge...nope make it a waist high shooter, and strip the plotlines but keep the vague dialogue system...sigh) so seeing that in FO4 was kinda where I started looking for the emergency break for Bethesda. At this point it is only the fact that I still really enjoyed all of the modern TES games (morrowind and up) that gives me a little bit of good faith. I did decide not to preorder it this time around though.

I like the idea of quick resume, but since I'm still mostly physical on the one and below I don't think it will benefit me as much. At best I'll juggle a gamepass game and a physical one. Still, it is cool that users are saying around 5 games can be suspended (I'm seeing that it varies but 5 tends to be the magical number).

@Ryu_Niiyama LOL, true, indeed! Funny thing is I try to keep it shorter because it's too time consuming text walling, but it's simply impossible to say anything of value at all with any fewer words than I use....so it usually expands instead of consolidating...

You may be right about "aging out" - I can't tell. I'm not actually sure who the target demos are anymore. I'm not sure they know either. It's not "angsty teens" necessarily, but I'm not actually sure who it is. I think it's less about age groups and more about the fact that they're aiming at a cultural mass market that I disconnected entirely from a long, long time ago. I not in any way part of whatever passes as the American cultural standard anymore, so it makes sense the games that aim for that mass market escape me, I suppose. The "target demo" seems to be people that live on phones with mtx and IAP and like to buy things a lot, plus also like comic books and apocalypse horror? I really have no idea.

I'm not sure what an "AAA" game is anymore. Most of them aren't actual complete games they're just "environments" to make your own game in (with other people.) And Sony's games are more and more interactive movies, and less gameplay experiences (though they still have a few great ones of those.) BUT that's just the advertised hypey stuff. Still plenty of under the radar content, including "AAA grade." Maybe I'll just sink into a nerdy MMO hole and get lost in there.... But yeah my first thought with Bethesda was (I think I said it on the XB thread) that Microsoft didn't acquire Bethesda, Bethesda acquired a QA department.

76 - Beyond it being a mess there's the problem that it's also not Fallout - it's just an apocalyptic survival horror game. I'm a Fallout 1&2 fan. I tolerated 3, liked New Vegas. 4 is a mess. 76 is exp/off-ensive. But I've never liked Bethesda's take on FO. It missed the whole point of the environment and humor. FO 1 & 2 were dark comedies, not survival games. I'm giddy at the idea that Obsidian/inExile (original fallout creators, combined) and Bethesda can do something good with Fallout now that they're all Microsoft together. But I'm also hoping Fallout just hibernates for a while. We've had too much Fallout, not enough TES. TES is still one of my top franchises in gaming, so we'll see how soon we get it. I assume production will accelerate under MS.

FWIW, supposedly according to Pete Hines, basically they found single player was not sustainably profitable anymore, and is what pushed them to GaaS for 76, and Game Pass will let them go back to real single player. I don't buy it, personally, but so they say.

Quick resume still benefits physical, just not as much. You pop in the disc and just start playing rather than waiting for it to load, waiting for the copyright splash screens, waiting for the menu, starting it up, loading the save etc. Just pop in the disc and go where you last left off. And no more "I have to find the save point before I switch games!" I'm impatient. Really impatient. I don't like waiting. At all. I mash A and "START" (I still call it start, not Plus, menu button, Options, Funky Button or whatever the kids call it on new consoles) non-stop every time I load a game. It's like go-faster-stripes. It makes me feel like I'm accelerating the wait even by fractions of a second.....

EDIT: Poor @gcunit . His trouble just doubled.

@NEStalgia Au contraire, I'm just delighted to see @Ryu_Niiyama back in the fold. I value both your opinions so you just carry on and let me stalk you. I've not had much to contribute myself recently, been trying to play more, and the next-gen is never for me until the prices start to drop, but I like to try and maintain a finger lightly on the pulse so I'm trying to not get behind on these threads anymore. I enjoy reading (most of) your text walls, but when I know they're a week old or more I begin to question why I'm bothering, so I just gotta not get behind again.

@NEStalgia If you can't recognize who the demo groups are it usually means you are outside their limits or on the fringes. I'm a female gamer so I'm almost never the target demo (that is a little unfair as there has been an increase in female protags...just many of them are not written well and I'm not sure what is worse; stuck in sausage town or being told that what is essentially a man in a skirt by the way the character is written is representation. And that's with me, according to society and stereotyping, being less "feminine" in some ways than the average.) That being said I'm not upset about possibly aging out. I have enough games to last me the rest of my life and many other hobbies. Until Covid took a hammer to everything, I've been really investing my time in Taiko, as I joined a very intensive dojo and have been to a few conferences. Not to mention work has picked up for me.

I want current young gamers to have their games, my issue/confusion is that it feels like there is less creativity and more marketing trends chasing. I know devs and publishers are companies, but I will always feel that with 90s and early '00s gaming (I can't really comment on 80s gaming as I was only alive for half the decade and was you know...a baby for part of it. I started gaming at 3 but really didn't enjoy it until I was around 7. I do think I understand the dissonance that some females felt with gaming at that time as even though there were a ton of varied games marketing shoved a certain demo in your face by the 90s...as opposed to the 80s which tried to market gaming to families before the hard lean into adolescent males.) there was more of an incentive to just make something and see if it works and less..."here is the formula, don't deviate or we will shut you down" that happens now. I feel that is something that led to bioware's (and anybody owned by EA really) current state. Some of that is understandable as some devs let their mouths write checks they couldn't cash (capcom five anyone?) but still, I hate to see it.

Ugh I don't listen to anything Hines or Howard has to say...I'll just wait on whatever finally comes out the gate and go from there. Anything else makes my head hurt. I get that you are in the "they changed it so now it sucks" camp for Fallout, and as a person that completed the bethesda/obsidian versions before returning and finishing the Interplay ones (I'd played them before but they didn't click/didn't have time/was playing other stuff) I respect that... but this is all we have and they did try to sew in some of the van buren ideas in New Vegas and I respect that. Would I love to see something similar to new vegas with less glitches, sure but I'm not even sure Obsidian is the way forward on that as Outer Worlds was only ok for me. I loved much of the dialogue but the presentation of the game itself, for me was lacking. As a person not into shooters, I like compelling worlds and while Outer Worlds was pretty in some places, it felt very shallow. Which I thought was weird considering it was hub worlds, I had hoped that the constraint would mean vibrant, very diverse biomes, but I felt like you fought 6 creature types and people. and that many of the worlds looked the same with a change in primary color. I'll go back at some point as I have it on switch and game pass but I got really bored with it really quickly.

I can only hope you are right about the new Bethesda QA department. MS may not release amazing games but they tend to ...not be broken...I love the freedom of Bethesda games but I pretty much used to buy day one and leave the game unopened for a year till mods and unofficial patches came out. I wish I had more choice, but nobody does open world in the same fashion as Bethesda.

I still rate AAA by the money, dev team experience and size and marketing behind it. Other than that I suppose I consider it market trend gaming. Even with devs that I love like Nintendo, as they obviously focus more on the popular franchises...which means I'll never see another Sakura Samurai...sigh. The stranglehold of gun games isn't going anywhere anytime soon, so I'll accept that I am slowly being alienated from gaming. OTOH, I am seeing indies try to pick up some of that slack (although they chase the retro platforming trends just as hard as EA chases microtransaction addicts) so I have heavily invested in those games over the past 8 or so years I think. My switch is chock full of indies (and neo geo games).

There is also the issue of retooling games for the modern space. A lot of IPs understandably are dead because holders don't know how to successfully transition them to meet not only modern tastes but also modern game design. Sometimes it works (metroid prime I think is the more widely accepted form of the metroidseries...I feel like metroidvania is used often by younger gamers that don't know its roots...kinda like bye felicia and not having seen Friday...which is a crime against humanity.) While other times it doesn't and the reboot/new entry is the nail in the coffin or at least the trip to the vault for another decade or so. (Sometimes it is ego/hubris of the designer that sinks a ship...Itagaki and Jon Romero come to mind...I still want my money back for daikatana) I am curious what gaming will look like in a decade or so; when the 80s and 90s rockstars have retired or switched careers and the younger devs have full control. When I say younger I'm not talking the middle age folks that rose to prominence in the 00s or got mentored like Kamiya-san and Aonuma-san but the folks after even them. Also there is the fact that the 90s kinda was "throw pasta at the wall" for devs, so many games that got one entry and then faded forever (enix put out/published some of my favorite forgotten gems during that time...)

On Topic:

So I've seen the start up comparisons and but I thought you had to leave the disk in the system...like if you took it out you lost quick resume. If it holds and you can switch disks that becomes a game changer for me. Not enough to buy at launch, but certainly enough to ensure that the series x will be the first of the newborns that I buy. (I've not figured out my nick name for them yet...I'm leaning on SSD Twins since it feels like ms and sony lean on a tech bullet point each iteration.) Considering that I was extremely bored with the xbone this time around due to the lack of diverse 3rd party games (again my need for those smaller b-lister studios) that is a plus. Although MS getting Yakuza is a huge plus for me. If MS pays SEGA to port isshin so more people can play that gem I'd be overjoyed.

Sorry, I tried to keep this short.

@Ryu_Niiyama oof and we thought NEStalgia had the long text walls.

@gcunit haha! Good to know. I don't get a ton of engagement barring NES and sometimes Thanos so I felt that I was just taking up space...part of why I left; I felt like I wasn't having convos (other part is priority shifts and I was being targeted by trolls for a bit). I joined NL because I love to talk about games constructively and had few friends to do so with. (I'm the enthusiast in my social circle, and that is even with me being in a Fighting Game group and a Nerd Girls group.) Now that I'm in middle management I have even less people to talk to as I'm the "baby" (about to turn 35) in my professional circles as well.

@App I think got him started. I still remember when NES joined, he went out of his way to introduce himself to me and say that he read some of my posts. I was pretty shocked as I figured that I'm usually ignored. I think I kinda showed him "oh they won't ban you for talking that much" and he just went for it. I do tend to spoiler tag my posts if I get into a convo that is derailing though. I also usually try to ask a general on topic question so that ya'll don't kick me out.