Topic: The everything Xbox thread

Nintendo Microsoft is doooomeeeed.

@DarthNocturnal Ah, yes. Of course, that makes sense. Although I've also seen plenty of titles on GamePass that have not been a part of Games with Gold before, so it's no guarantee either way, I suppose. And of course, the newest titles also come to GamePass. Gonna be a while before we can download these for free...

@NEStalgia That doesn't really do anything to diminish that reputation, though. They DO have the best network, but even the best isn't perfect, so the odd mishap can obviously occur. At least it's not as bad as Sony's major F-ups...

As for not being able to sign in: I just tried it, and over here, everything works just fine, so must be an American network thing...

@ThanosReXXX actually is even weirder than that apparently. It's working now, but i really lost a lot of sleep troubleshooting.

I realized the phone and pc apps couldn't connect either. So i disabled WiFi and tried the phone app through my cellular. It worked. Then i tried through my vpn to the outside and it worked. Somehow it was specifically the isp unable to connect to any xbox service (but could connect to the xbox.com website, so the problem wasnt just a dns update, and using Google dns didn't help. It was as though they were specifically isolating xbox traffic and either blocking it failing to route it. One note was fine so ms live accounts weren't affected, only when logging into an xbox related service.

Perhaps it was planned or unplanned maintenance or upgrades, but it's beyond weird that as besti can tell, only xbox was affected, not other Microsoft services, and psn and nso worked fine, but using a vpn or other isp xbox worked fine. So somehow there was a specific difficulty in making any xbox related connection, only for xbox, specifically when routing it through that isp, regardless of dns. Seems fishy. (Especially for an isp that sometimes gives a few months of xblg as a sign up bonus....)

Never heard of a network issue like that, and i spend a lot of time dealing with network issues....

This is why cloud everything is a REALLY bad idea.

@ThanosReXXX also, glad you have some game pass waiting. At least you'll get your horizon4 when you get some free time I'll fire it up Tuesday then then probably table it for who knows how long. This backlog is intense, and i have like 6 kingdom hearts to play before January when 3 launches

Gp kinda is weird for me sincei end up buying most of what liked on it, but my year is already paid for soi figure i can play horizon4 until it's cheap and then just buy it on sale ina year it's two.... Preferably with expansions

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.