Topic: The everything Xbox thread

Got a chance to play Horizon 4 for a couple hours at a buddy's house. Game is buttery smooth with a proper wheel setup. Crashed a few times but probably just minor launch bugs. Can't wait to play more!!

Hey, no argument there. But I assume you already got that from several of my previous comments...

As for playing (edit: buying) Forza Horizon 4 in about two years: I'm afraid it's going to lose a lot of appeal then, and also what makes it unique/stand out against other offerings, and even against previous games in the series.

I don't know how long Microsoft is planning to support it, or how long they might think it viable to do so (depending perhaps on the number of people still playing it after the first year), but the whole "live" seasons scheme is a thing, much more so than Forzathon, which has already existed ever since the second game.

I'm just going to stick with the demo for now, don't care too much about the live events myself, even though they do seem enticing, this time around. But I don't want to activate GamePass and not get the most out of it, and right now, that would most definitely be the case. Maybe around the holiday season, when I can at least take a couple of weeks off, but we'll see...

Anybody getting AC Odyssey? Could you let me know your impressions? I want to get it but I just bought spiderman and it sat in the shrink wrap so I don't see the point in rushing out to waste money again.

I swear this game annoys me so much. The AC story has gone to pot (I played the series for the Isu/templar/Juno is going to enslave humanity plot) ...don’t get me started on Juno and now the narrative AND genre are taking a dive for marketing reasons (Ubisoft will never make a main line AC with solely a female protag even though the official story is that Kassandra is the heroine. But gotta put all the marketing on Alexios because men have to play as themselves unless the female protagonist is half naked. ) Or take a game that has an in lore reason for a linear narrative and overhaul it with no in lore reason that makes sense. (It’s like they forgot how the animus works) just to latch onto the mass effect system popularity.

Yet despite that I long for this game for basic reasons that annoy me. I adore greek history and culture. Even though Kassandra is canon a character selection game is the only way I am able to get a female play through with ubi. I can have romances that I actually care about (seriously watching ezio flirt was like watching paint dry.). Yet aside from the fact that this shows how desperate I am for female narratives from a story perspective I should not care about this game at all. Sigh. I wish gaming was more about narrative and less about money.

@Ryu_Niiyama will do. Gold edition preordered. I'll give ita spin probably wednesday (early pre access, Forza first tomorrow... Or mm11). I don't have to finish origins beforei really play it, but i do intend to check out the early game.

@DarthNocturnal @redd214

Forza Horizon 4 is the best racing game ever, no exaggeration. 3 was great, but this is greater. Plus, 60 fps on X...

I think that the first six notes of Killer Instinct theme would make a great horn, is it like that @DarthNocturnal?

@Ryu_Niiyama Assassin's Creed Odyssey is the best AC in years and so is Origins because they were made by different teams so they didn't rush the development. I would tell you to play them both but no rush, they are adventure games that you can get and play anytime, not necessarily now. They need some dedication.

@BlueOcean wait, you've played Odyssey? Isn't even early access a day away?

Xbox One X finally got, from Argos instead of Amazon because for some reason it got delayed. Waited for that dispatch notice all of yesterday and it never came, so I suspected something like this might have happened. I'm happy I got it from Argos though, as I saved £40 from Argos. Now just waiting for Forza Horizon 4 to download and I'll be journeying across Horizon Britain.

@DarkRula It feels like Christmas day, isn't it? If you get Gold remember that you can get Overcooked, Livelock, Stuntman: Ignition. If you get Game Pass you can play many games. Otherwise, you already have a huge awesome one to enjoy!

I mean the fast-paced notes before the main melody. I can't wait to check those little things out.

By the way, outside of Deals with Gold and available for everybody, there is a sale called Pixel Art Perfection with things like Owlboy, Stardew Valley, Maldita Castilla Ex, The Escapists 2...

@BlueOcean This is only an upgrade since my old one turned into a furnace. I'll be spending many many hours redownloading stuff. At the same time though, I'll be spending many many hours on Forza.

@Ryu_Niiyama LOL I just saw the rest of your post (I think I saw the original before you edited it.)

I have many gripes to pick with AC, but I'm not sure "not enough Juno" is one of them The last time I cared about the Animus was AC1. They made Desmond interesting, his capture and abuse in the Animus was interesting. The Abstergo facility was interesting and terrifying. The Crusades were such a unique and interesting era, and putting it all together created such intrigue. It's also the last time they really used the Animus in an interesting way, focused on needing to access the sequential memories and unlike the later memories by reliving enough of the character's life, etc. The technobabble made sense. Altair was a [donkey] but it made him interesting. And the assassinations were tied to specific memories and made into a big deal. Starting with II it went off the rails shortly in, and the Animus got pushed behind the story and the memory unlocking stopped playing as much of a role, and I started to get really uninterested in Desmond's space aliens in caves. I've always presumed Jade was the one that had the actual story arc in her head, and when she left nobody else really knew, understood, or cared much about the overarching modern day plot, and like Kojima and MGS, she probably intended the original trilogy arc to end the story and be done with the series. What else can you do with the modern day part if the templar just keep finding endless random people to pillage their minds?

I don't know about the female character part. I mean Liberation had a female protagonist. And Syndicate I just prefer to think it did because who seriously wanted to play meathead Jacob in a stealth game? I just suffered through those parts when they forced me to (though weirdly the best stealth mission in the game, the asylum, they gave to Jacob the brawler and not Evie the stealth character which I never understood.) Now you get to pick your own character. I suppose to be fair, in a game taking place in the ancient world, how many big players in battles and such weren't men in 800AD, 1400AD, etc (let alone the specific cultures in play? Pretty sure Ancient Egypt, The Holy Land, Renaissance Italy, etc didn't let many women do much of anything....and the first game established the order of assassins having an Islamic background based loosely on the Hashashin at Masyaf...so yeah....female characters were going to be really unlikely....(but then they retconned the origins to be in Egypt prior to that so who knows.....) It kind of makes sense. Sure more assassins probably were women in reality who did it quietly and covertly rather than running from armies in the open, but then AC would have to be a legit stealth game.........

@DarkRula Oh, you are the guy with a dying fat Xbox One! I also had one, it was working fine, I sold it and bought an X. I used the same external HDD so I didn't had to redownload any games, just plug the HDD to the new console and download the X upgrades.

@NEStalgia internet is super spotty so this will likely grow. Juno was set up as the big bad. That beyond chaos/order (humans can’t get along.... juno was right) and the coronal mass ejection juno was waiting to enslave or kill off humanity. (I alwas figured it would end in a templar /assassin team up that would end with all isu tech destroyed and humanity forced to make strides on its own. Since all major discoveries/religion were isu influenced) after all there are like 20 assassins left since they are the losing team. Like i said mainline game solo protag. So far we have a side line game with wonky game play mechanics and two sibling duos. The issue with that especially with the new one is the world treats both characters the same. Which is a mixed bag. In an ideal world women are not dismissed/discounted/targeted for being female. However that doesn’t equate to the world reacting exactly the same to men and women ( or what really happens is the female character is written like and treated as a man) Lazy character design uses this as a diversity/representation badge and is annoying. I’ll get into the animus when i come back.

... you know what I’m going to go play horizon zero dawn instead

@DarthNocturnal Thanks for checking, I'll definitely have a look this evening.

@Ryu_Niiyama Finally a deep dive AC conversation! I never knew how I felt about the whole supernatural thing. To me, while interesting as its own sci-fi, it always felt shoehorned into the series as though it was an original idea that had been scrapped but producer x still wanted it so it had to be fit in somehow. The main appeal of the series was always the travel in ancient places. The sci-fi tie-in of modern day evil secret society using tech to pry into the past was a cool twist. But once you got to the end of 1 and found you were recovering some supernatural artifact with magic superpowers it was like "uhm....yeah...ok....so that's a thing..." It felt really disjointed. You knew you were chasing the Apple, but for it to be this supernatural or alien tech just....that's what they threw in at the end? But then you get to 2 and we end with space aliens as ancient divine intervention and that part honestly lost me completely. It could be a cool story but it just didn't fit with the rest of the AC world and what drew people into the game for the first 90% of the first game. So I'm technically glad they moved on from that....they never really made it a focus it was just "there", awkwardly and felt disconnected. It wasn't part of the world itself, it was just a Macguffin. The trouble though is then the game lost any sort of pretense of cohesion. We kind of ignore templars in the modern day and thus why anyone is in the animus at all. It's just kind of "there" and superficially glossed over quickly. Is it just like FF, every game is disconnected and we're just there to see the past? Is there a real tie-in story. Why do we flash back to an animus in a burial cave in Origins only to do nothing (you can read the emails if you want but it seems less focused than in 1.) Maybe they make use of it later (I haven't got to the end yet) but for now it seems kind of disjointed still.

Say what you want about Liberation, but it was still a better AC than III or the pirate simulator that was wrapped in AC skins that was 4 (I call it the Skull and Bones Assassin's Creed DLC 5-year pre-order bonus.) The brother sister duo may have been a duo, but in my head-canon only Evie is canon. Jacob was just stuffed in to appeal to people that started with Connor and don't know how to play a real AC game and prefer it to play like Spider-Man instead. And like Connor he had no personality of any sort, where Evie actually fit the world. And was the, you know, actual assassin rather than wannabe mob boss.

"However that doesn’t equate to the world reacting exactly the same to men and women ( or what really happens is the female character is written like and treated as a man) Lazy character design uses this as a diversity/representation badge and is annoying. I’ll get into the animus when i come back."

Holy heck can you imagine the political fallout of a game daring to treat any differently a female protag versus a male protag? One changed line would have Kotaku and Polygon ranting, demanding apologies, CNN would pick it up. That would never get past legal. Blame the politically correct mob. Women are just men in different clothes (if so chosen), didn't you know? I agree with you, but given the poo-storm of political knee-jerk reactions to this stuff, they probably made the right (safe) call. Even if anyone with sense knows it's stupid.

Still, true though it may be it's probably too much hand wringing over the character choice so long as gameplay and narrative is solid. I mean link is androgynous for that reason and it works well enough for everyone (or used to anyway, he seems less androgynous these days.) In a "build your own character" game like Skyrim I tend to try to pick one that at least relatively reminds me of me (I am a yellow-skinned high elf with golden eyes, so it looks close enough even if the chin depth and cheeckbone extension is slightly off.) but in games with preset characters I've never paid much attention to character gender or wished it was "me" so much....I'm fine with being third person literally and figuratively in a game. Or more specifically I guess I never think of it as me at all, it's "them" and I'm observing, unless it's 1st person.

@BlueOcean Yup, that's me.
Unfortunately I never used an external HDD, so it at least allows me to have only what I really want on it now.

Horizon 4... Wow. They really managed this one extremely well. The feeling of being a part of the world is greater here than any other, aided by the radio presenters being a lot more personal. The handling of events also feels a lot better overall, with influence seeming like a natural progression of the wristband system of the first game.

Overall, it's definitely going to overtake FH3 as favourite of the series.

I held off on FH4 at launch because of backlog, I came to the conclusion that there's not much point buying new XB1 games if I hadn't even finished games I bought back in 2016.

@Grumblevolcano You say this as I need to add about 5 games to my backlog just this week....

@ThanosRexxx btw I ended up re-buying Earthlock since it was on sale 33% off on Switch which is where I should have bought it in the first place but didn't realize it was on there.

@NEStalgia I agree with IV sucking (Edward stole some clothes and somehow sidestepped the whole training aspect...wait what?!)

I like III but I like Connor and I know half the world doesn't. His dad and Charles Lee can fall down a well.
Altair was a donkey in 1 and then a message bearer in revelations. Ezio was pretty much just there to function as an email client to Desmond. The others were messengers as well mostly.

I'll grant you that the AC's plot is a bit jagged but in part because it was a PoP game first before they spun it off into its own thing. (also losing writers is terrible and the best example of that is ME2-A) When I talk about the modern/Isu plot I speak within the context of the games and AC:Odyssey still messes that up. The animus is designed to view genetic memory if the dna is corrupt then it either skips around or mashes up existing memories. But it is a viewer, not a simulation. That is why the dysync thing worked the way it did. If you were doing things that your ancestor didn't do it couldn't show an alternative scenario...it just booted you out. It's not a holodeck...it can't conceptualize anything. Hence linear story (with the added full sync nodes but that is more you didn't follow the memory completely rather than the fact that you just either sucked at the time trials or didn't get all the collectibles or whatever because this is a video game.

Syndicate was already playing a little fast and loose but the similar genetic markers between siblings accounts for two people with a linear story line (hence the lockouts were you are stuck with Jacob) in lore that covers why Ubi didnt want a mainline (key is mainline) female protag. They are ok with a deuter but even in marketing and the cover Evie is off to the side.

However lets go back to in game reasoning. Even if you take the Abstergo (Making a videogame for public consumption ...even though why would they make anything that shows the assassins in a positive light but ok) with the most recent AC games, Layla has an animus. So again no conceptualization but it should just view memories (so no RPG elements) I understand that Ubi is soft rebooting the franchise, but just the same way ME2 did it.. It breaks lore (and since that is why I am playing it makes me not want that game aside from the surface reasons I stated earlier. But that is just a sign of desperation on my part (female protag, homosexual relationships, greece) , not a good narrative on ubisoft's.

The dna being corrupted doesn't hold water. You don't have enough genetic material to tell biological sex but I'm supposed to accept that a full (multi choice) narrative can come from this? and if both people were present during the events but not in the same space they should have different memories (As in this should be 2 games, one with Alexios' story and one with Kassandra's if you are going to use the two dna sources excuse) also if the the dna is so corrupted/fragmented that the animus has to fill in gaps (which it can't in lore unless you count the subject 16 stuff. ..and that didn't look like a world at all) then how is this useful information? How does Layla know that she can trust that it will lead her to more Isu information? It breaks lore. Now before you go "this is game, Ryu chill" I look at what is presented. If you present a world with a lore I expect you to abide by it. I don't analyze mario...cuz there is nothing to analyze. But ME or AC I'm going to tear that apart because the writers promised world building.

Now don't get me wrong. I don't ignore Liberation or Evie in Syndicate and quite frankly if all the AC games had a deuter be it male or female then I wouldn't care so much. I would still long for a female to be the protag but I would understand (Because lore would back it up) Lucy was almost one but she is still just a plot device. Her job is to advance Desmond as an assassin and (via dlc) advance Juno's plot (I really hate the modern thing of putting major plot in comics and dlc...just stop it EA and Ubi...and capcom). Ubi has come a long way from not being able to "animate the female anatomy properly"...but I still want an assassin's game that focuses on a female protag (by the time I'm 80 there will be one about a lesbian and it will just be her back story and not player choice...same as heterosexual protags that I have to suffer though. I'm asking for ONE, not trying to take over the world with an "agenda").

Despite Kassandra being canon she was not featured in the majority of the marketing and she is on the reversible cover...(she should have been the main cover with Alexios as the reversible). (the only way i can get a statue of her is ubisoft's store and ....gamestop. but I can get alexios' all day long). Also again my issue with sex select games (since social gender is now considered interchangeable with biological gender/sex I will have to say sex because I am not dealing with that nonsense) is that the female character is not a female character that is treated like a woman in her time period the game treats her like a male default and they just use female pronouns. Now in a lot of situations...that works (we are all humans after all) but when it doesn't, as a woman it is jarring (and a bit insulting).

Granted, I also blame the use of voice acting. If devs have to devote time/money/resources to everything that goes with Voice acting...dialog gets streamlined. Look at the dialog in a bioware game before voice acting and after...heck look at it with voiced npcs and silent protag and then when everybody speaks. Dialogue shrinks...a lot. So you can't put in those nuances.

Also without Juno the Assassins vs Templars story grinds to a halt (imo). The templars are winning.... like absolutely winning. They are wiping out assassins cells left and right, turning assassins to their side.... and the assassins are not regrouping fast enough. (I guess they can make the sage the villain...which given one of the current sages...that could get... um interesting)

As for isu tech. They are our gods litteraly. Humanity was created to be chattle we are essentially domesticated dogs mad in their image. (That they can breed with) Tech so advanced to appear as magic. I think the isu story only works with some sort of human narrative in conjunction. Since they aren’t literal gods. Just the Architect. Lol.

"Holy heck can you imagine the political fallout of a game daring to treat any differently a female protag versus a male protag? One changed line would have Kotaku and Polygon ranting, demanding apologies, CNN would pick it up. That would never get past legal. Blame the politically correct mob. Women are just men in different clothes (if so chosen), didn't you know? I agree with you, but given the poo-storm of political knee-jerk reactions to this stuff, they probably made the right (safe) call. Even if anyone with sense knows it's stupid."

-yeah and that is why I am a second wave/radical feminist instead of this-snowflake-but-everybody-is-the-same-becuase-biology-doesn't-exist-cuz-of-my-feelings-and-we-all-have-sexual-kinks-for-male-titlation-rather-than-female-agency-and-autonomy that is current liberal feminism (Which is fast eroding women's rights as is but this is not the time or place for that.)

@Ryu_Niiyama I think you're the only person that actually likes Connor The Brick. It's a good thing you don't also like the DualShock, otherwise we'd have a real problem.....

I still like Altair. He was unlikable but he was supposed to be unlikable. His status and position as master assassin though made him interesting. I liked the sense of he's the best there is even though he's a total jerk and everyone hates him but his arrogance tripped him up and now he's starting from scratch even though he's really the best. It was much better than all the later protagonists that were pretty much ill fated spoiled little boys that stumbled into being assassin's, a random pirate, and wannabe revolutionary siblings. Aveline was really the only other quasi-seriously-trained assassin in the franchise until Origins. And while I like him, he's a retcon that's now the first assassin even though it makes less sense, but there was no formal training. Only Altair had the true "member of the guild" kind of status.

Well technically with the anime story, all the historical characters are just Minerva's email clients to Desmond....at least in the Desmond arc. In a sense that's the point, but it's also what sucked about the whole aliens triangle.

Animus as a concept was borked after AC1. It almost towed the line through the main #2, but by the time it got to Brotherhood they'd lost the whole concept. Once it left the lab and become a portable display unit it really stopped making sense.

Yeah, I don't get playing down the second character particularly with Syndicate. Odysey, ok it's just a gender choice but they're not really different characters technically but Syndicate was two distinct characters. I'm not sure if that was Ubi not showcasing a female character, or Ubi avoiding stealth gameplay even in the marketing The cynic in me says its the latter. If Jacob were the ghost maybe Evie would have been the prominent character. Or maybe it's a French thing. It's probably a French thing.

I'm not certain the RPG elements are really part of the "lore". I don't think you're really playing as Layla "playing" the Animus. They flipped it around. You're living Bayek/KasAlex original life, thus the RPG choices. Layla is passively watching you (Bayek/KasAlex) from the "future". At least that's how I interpret it. Or it's the only way it makes sense. Playing to match up a former life was the original game's idea, but relaly since then we've been playing the actual ancient person, not the memory of them. Or so it seems? See this is why I hate "looorre!" everyone interprets everything differently. (Sorry dark souls!)

But I think that's the thing, it makes no sense to you because you interperet they've changed the lore of the animus and Layla/Patient is interacting with the historical world because we're Layla/Patient. I don't think that's it. We're not playing the present character reliving the past like in AC1/Desmond. We're playing the past character's life, the modern day Layla/Patient in the present is a side story that isn't us (well ok we control them in their own scenes but you know what I mean.) Thus they didn't break the animus lore, they've just shelved it almost entirely as a functional component of the game, but it presumably works the way we knew it works. Or maybe it's Animus 4.0 that does offer simulation (no reason to believe we're still in the decade old AI-less Abstergo model, is there? That would also make sense lore-wise. Maybe it interpolates where the original couldn't? )

Is Kassandra really the canon protag or is it truly split? Because you're right all the marketing is Alex and I assumed he was the main and Kass was a doppleganger as a result. If she ever was to be canon, it's as though they reversed that decision.

"(since social "

The fact that this sentence needs to exist at all is the reason we can't have nice things. And probably the reason Alex is on the cover because safe is good business.

" female character is not a female character that is treated like a woman in her time period the game treats her like a male default and they just use female pronouns. "

And that follows the previous. I agree, that it makes no sense. In a modern context, ME, CoD etc it makes some sense based on actual military etc. But AC, the Battlefield nonsense, it just bugs me when the historical context is rewritten to suit modern political correctness. Call me crazy but I like even historical fiction to be period accurate. But for business..... political correctness dictates that there must not ever be differentiation between genders (social, physical....none of the seventeen genders should be ever seen portrayed differently than any other.) For a business, nobody's going to step on that landmine. So the male and female choice are the exact same character in accordance with modern expectation.

Good point about voice acting. No doubt they get a budget and are tallied on a cost-per-line basis. Especially at EA with ME they probably told them exactly how many lines they may have from a budget planning body.

I'm still not sure how good an idea it is to have a series about roughly historically accurate time periods and an ancient conflict of two secret groups that spans to today and explain the purpose and methods of the entire thing as:

I mean....how...just.....how can anyone like Connor? If he were transported to the future he'd spend every day whining about how the WiiU was short changed and Switch has no third party games and paying for nothing means NSO will fail.