Topic: The everything Xbox thread

I got DA Origins for free on... Origin. But never got very far in it due to my laptop being a laptop. I noticed all three games are on sale, and supposed I might as well just start over with the newest one.

I've been enjoying exploring the mini open worlds given to me. I spent almost 8 hours just running around the hinterlands, learning how to play.

I do notice these are not really meant to be played in a single session, since some monsters are way too strong for my current team, so yes, I'll try to do stuff here and there instead of trying to force myself to 100% each map as they come.

I also created an Archer, been focusing on poison for my ability upgrades.

Every now and then I forget and try to play like it's Skyrim. That's gonna be fun when I do go back to Skyrim and try to play it like this.

So far my only annoyance is how the computer teammates block my way.

Man, YES the teammates! They put stuff for you to pickup/harvest everywhere and then as soon as you turn around there’s two of them blocking you in, even worse with houses!

I was a bit spoilt for choice with upgrades at first with the archer, however noticing i’m a bit squishy if anyone targets me i’m playing with the stealth stuff a lot - leaping shot is a great attack that has an upgrade that puts you straight into stealth when you use it! Interested in the poison stuff now you’ve mention it too but don’t want to be a jack of all trades!

I think for sure not 100% is the way to go - it’s my stupid natural playstyle and I ended up hating on this and ME: Andromeda too largely from burning out on all the dodgy fetch quests. In my mind I have to do them all, but approaching this playthrough as really, I don’t, and having a much better time (although characters aren’t a patch on the first game still for me!).

Enjoy it anyway!

Xbox One X 1tb Console on sale for $399 on Amazon US.

https://www.amazon.com/Xbox-One-X-1TB-Console/dp/B074WPGYRF/r...

I recommend the X to anyone looking. The base X1 is substantially behind the base PS4, PS4 Pro and X1X. And the X just runs circles around the other 3. It costs more but... Man is it worth it IMO.

@Yosheel @BrainOfGrimlock
I really enjoyed Dragon Age Inquisition. The story was blah but the minutia of narrative was fantastic. Loved the battle system too.

Currently playing Dragon Age Origins on the GPD Win 2, which is really cool playing on a clamshell handheld. I say “currently” but, truthfully I haven’t touched in a while. Too much going on with Civilization VI, Diablo 3, Monster Hunter Gen Ult, Dark Souls, Pokémon Let’s Go and soon Smash. But it’s a fantastic game, even as old as it is. And I’m still curious about Dragon Age II.

My battle style basically consists of me jumping into a group of enemies, using toxic smoke, jumping back out and shooting at them

Then they die and become toxic smoke themselves.

Not sure what specialization will complement this playstyle better.

The leap you learn as a rogue is very useful to get around too, it can reach some high places the regular jump can't, and sometimes you can glitch yourself into tight spaces too (for example, I was able to squeeze into one of the blocked-off tunnels in the Oasis by leaping into the corner).

Finally got an Xbox X this weekend. Picked upaster Chief Collection because that's pretty Mucha requirement and Spryo Trilogy. And Lost Odyssey for only $6 on the Xbox store. I'm extremely impressed with how simple playing old games is. They're all on the store and you can even use your old discs.

Also I was anticipating a huge patch for MCC but that 76gb update still hurts

@PikPi I owned a 360 exclusively last gen (my sister owned a Wii at her house, which was how I played Super Mario Galaxy) and still have yet to ever play a Halo game.

@PikPi This is the best time to jump in, with the X bundles (I bought it at launch without games) and the free upgrades on all original Xbox games, some 360 games and hundreds Xbox One games. Everything on the same console plus one month of Game Pass for one dollar/pound with awesome games included. Enjoy!

@redd214 Welcome back....but I didn't know you left....

@BlueOcean XCX is kind of the black sheep of the Xeno family. It does some things better than all the others, and it does some things worse. While the others are JRPGs with an active-ish battle system, XCX has the deepest, most complicated battle system....and explains none of it (healing....sigh.) Be wary, the battle system doesn't stay less cryptic for long. It's easily the most cryptic of the series. That's it's weak point. The big thing is the structure. It's more like an Elder Scrolls game in that the main story isn't a major thing, it's kind of a fast fly by to create a backdrop. The meat of the game (and storytelling) is in the side-quests. It's also set up like a classic MMO. One hub town with raids/expeditions outside. XC1 wanted to be an MMO with its questing, but XCX kind of honed that into a "single player MMO". I think it works well for the series because it's structured that way already.

Funny thing about clicking on on the stick to run: I dislike that. It's always an awkward angle and grip to me, and I've never liked the clickable sticks. The odd force at odd angles also contributes to creating stick drift. That's one reason I love the Elite: I keep the upper paddles usually mapped to L3/R3 so I don't have to click them It's not the end of the world though, and I kind of like run being on "L4". It's better on Joycons though. The little sticks make it a better angle for my thumb.

Yeah, the music is......awkward. Technically some of it is "ok as its own thing" but it unfortunately isn't designed to loop endlessly....yet...it does....which makes it awful. And yeah, during that time it seems like every Japanese dev wanted to ape MonHun. XCX, FFXIII, FFXV (to a lesser extent), all went for the MH thing.

XC to me feels like an experimental series. It's always deeply flawed and yet manages to be great once you look past the deep flaws. XCX is both the most flawed in important areas, and the best in important areas at the same time. The doll/skell insurance system can go rot though. I never used the thing...too expensive to risk!

BTW, I finally got Rare Replay for $15......some great gems in there. Even nuts & bolts which I had fun with back on 360. I had to create a whole group just for "Rare Replay" since it's as big as my "platforming and indie" category. What's with the "Rare-Replay" and non-Rare-Replay versions for every 360 game in the bundle? I wasn't expecting duplicates of everything.

Also, @Ralizah is in the XBox thread? @BlueOcean is on PushSquare? I need to lie down.....

@Yosheel I feel like every game I want to use "ready to play" (partial download to play) with are the games that it only lets me start to the main menu and then tells me I have to wait for the game to install. That's a cool feature though. And Dragon Age is a great series! Ok, EA ruined 2....but it's a great series anyway. If you're curious, DA: Origins was kind of meant as a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate series. The PC version was all isometric like BG games, the console version was 3rd person over the shoulder (DA1 and 2 work on X1 BC. 1 feels very different from the others....it was really tied to the old Infinity engine games in design before the sequels became more action-y.)

@Ryu_Niiyama BTW, speaking of MMOs and TES:O I recall you mentioning that you either bought TES:O or were thinking of buying it but decided not to due to all the pesky players on the interwebs. I just decided to get into it (with Summersett expansion.) My first attempt into it didn't sit well in June. It dumped me in Shimmerene with nothing to do and no direction....I tried picking a lock and got the guards on me. It seemed bland. But apparently that was a Bethesda Launch Bug (TM) and wasn't supposed to be like that. I just started in on it and I have to say I'm completely hooked (I'm not an MMO guy, so that says something!) (Technically the game is not Bethesda, it's Zenimax, Bethesda's parent company that does MMOs and only MMOs. Which probably explains why it's not a broken mess.) It also doesn't use the disastrous Creation Engine that made Skyrim a meme and has made '76 a disaster, it's a custom engine (why does Bethesda not get to use TESO engine which is better rather than having id Soft tinkering on Gamebryo until the end of time for Creation?)

For solo or co-op the game actually works. It looks and sounds and plays pretty much like any TES. It quests like TES, the interface is Skyrim's, it has the same dreadful combat as any TES. There are NPC merchants (I'd read that there weren't and you have to interact with players. Not so.)

Really the only differences between TES:O and normal TES is the main quest doesn't shape the world around you (but who plays TES for the main quest? Side quests are similar, but feel like a hybrid of TES and Baldur's Gate II....or Dragon Age.) You can't "rise to the rank of guild leader" you just do quests. And quest design obviously can't involve the "decide if character x lives or dies" types of decisions, since all characters must always be in the same place.

But it still has exploration, stumbling into quests by hearing a conversation as you go by, scripted quests, etc. Inventory limitations (but not encumbrance) apply as always (more later), I'm doing it mostly 2 player co-op but it seems perfectly servicible to do solo. There are group dungeons that will auto-find randos, but you can skip the group dungeon/quests. I was afraid of griefing/PvP, but it seems like the PvP is contained within Battlegrounds and Cyrodiil (In this storyline, before Oblivion/Morrowind/Skyrim/Daggerfall) Cyrodiil is in ruins and fully invaded by Daedra.) If you don't sign up at a gladiator camp or go into Cyrodiil there's no real PVP. You can turn "auto-decline duels" so nobody can challenge you. But I haven't seen much PvP so far in public areas, mostly everyone ignores everyone and just goes about their business. So it's TES but you see a bunch of randos roaming around doing rando things. They don't seem to affect you at all. Mostly it feels like a GINORMOUS TES game on a better engine, but with less "personal impact." You're just an adventurer, not the savior, so the towns don't treat you with the same reverence/disdain but OTOH you get to visit Summersett, revisit Morrowind, and Daggerfall, and see new areas like Murkmire and Clockwork Tower (DLC.)

So if "a TES game bigger than Skyrim with more variety that has some limitations on quest design/economy due to being multiplayer, and you don't mind seeing tons of other people just dashing around doing their own thing like ghosts" appeals to you, I think you'll like it. That said there's the few down-sides:

Dungeons: It's an MMO so you can't just clear out a public dungeon and empty it as you normally would. Monsters respawn every few seconds right behind you, so you don't want to backtrack and you want to keep moving forward in a dungeon without much delay. One delve dungeon had a quest attached, and it was kind of a mess, where a horde of undead were really brutal and I ended up running past them only to realize I had to go back through there....I fought them....2 soul gems later I got them. And then I had to explore the room and they all respawned on top of me again. That's an annoying necessity when someone else is just entering behind you all the time. But on the up side it's pure PvE and other players joining in to fight can be helpful.

Monetization: Ok, this is the ugly part, but it depends what you want out of it. It's a paid-for game, they dropped the subscription but it has all kinds of F2P type monetization. Most of it is more "Pay because I'm too lazy to play" than "Pay to win", but some of it is more important. Subscription: Subscriptions are no longer mandatory....but they have a lot of compelling features for some. I decided not to sub, but I'm paying the same to get less, without it....it's an auto-renew sub so I figured I don't want to bother. If you DO sub, you get double bank space, infinite inventory for crafting materials (versus each and every material taking one of your 60 (to start) slots (and even at max for like 2 million gold inventory is still too small.) You also get 10% gold and exp boosts, 10% crafting research time reduction, access to all DLC, and 1650 crowns (estore currency) monthly. What does this mean? If you're into crafting, you effectively need a sub. If you don't have a sub, crafting will be painful as storing resources will be close to impossible until you have a maxed bank and uncomfortable even then. And maxing the bank is obscenely expensive (but, of course you can buy each of the 12 upgrades with real money....and the 8 pouch upgrades can be bought with real money too....go figure....) You can do it without a sub if you have, like, infinite free time.

Also, the Crown store is grotesquely overpriced. They're selling a summon-able merchant and banker for like $30 each.... (a little less on sale now, handy things, though you can only sell/store/withdraw, no preparing.) Then there's all the DLC. Even if you get in with base game, Morrowind, Summersett all in a good bundle (I did it for $22), and right now on the XBox black friday sales you can get the complete edition with the 4 base DLCs (Assassin's, Imperial City, southern Skyrim, and Thieves arcs) for $40 which is a steal. ON the crown store the bundle of those DLCs is $45 alone. Then there's several other misc DLCs, plus Murkmire and Clockwork. All tolled, excluding base, Morrowind, and Summersett, there's over $120 of DLC to have the "complete" Nirn. A bit cheaper if you get the collectors bundle that has the $40 bundle included along with the base game and both chapters. OTOH, the 3 main chapters are enormous alone. I haven't actually touched base game yet....it starts you in Summersett if you have it, and that alone is a full sized RPG (of non TES proportions, add all 3 main chapters and it's bigger than Skyrim (game), add in the DLC, and it's probably 150% the size of Skyrim.

There's also soul gems (needed to respawn in place instead of at a shrine), early game they're very expensive...$50 for an empty gem to fill. Later I'm sure I'll be rolling in gold, but the pack and bank upgrades eat up obscene money. Plus there's all those exp scrolls, respec scrolls, horse riding scrolls etc they sell for real money.... most of that is "pay to be lazy", but I can't help but feel the last few storage upgrades are intended to make you buy them in cash, but soul gems...that one is a little unscrupulous.

It's weird, it's an MMO but it doesn't feel like an MMO too much. Most of the MMO things are optional, and aside from essential limitations due to being an MMO it's just another TES game. Which is good, because it sounds like TESVI is a decade away. (at least by the time it actually works....)

The down-side is after discovering TES:O my backlog will suffer more....

@NEStalgia If after your latest effort here, there's still someone left who actually believes that my text walls are longer than yours, they seriously need to have their eyes checked...

And you're amazed by certain people being in certain threads? I'm more amazed at the fact that after the Final Fantasy barrage we had a couple of pages ago, we've now apparently turned the only Xbox thread we have left, into the Nintendo/RPG thread...

@NEStalgia I have it on ps4 (it was 10 bucks) and I have been thinking about getting it on pc but I realize that it is more the fact that I want a new TES rather than me actually wanting to play the online game. I just didn’t feel alone enough there. I may jump in at some point as all the expansions look nice but I am fine adding more mods to Skyrim for now. Glad you are having fun though.

@ThanosReXXX Considering MS just announced they bought Obsidian and ineXile, I think you can be safe to bet that the XBox thread is going to be RPG territory for a long time to come Plus, did Squeenix sit on stage at the XBox show to talk Final Fantasy and announce XIII BC? Yep. Is TES:O currently taking about 6 slots of the XBox Cyber Monday sale? Yep. Can you play TES:O on a Switch? Nope.

At least we're not talking about Fallout 76. Man, that thing is just so, so, so, so bad.

It seems like PS4 is the only place that doesn't have RPGs now with only P5 and NNK2 (and some nichier JPRGs)....which is weird.

OTOH, non-RPG, Spyro looks AMAZING on the X. Arguably the prettiest game on the platform. Plays great too. The games seem short, but tons of fun.

Ok, back to RPGs. I discovered Morrowind and Oblivion are on BC! Morrowind.....has aged very very very badly. That's such a shame. It was a good game, but everything about it is archaic, and it doesn't look or sound great either. But Oblivion BC is spectacular. It looks at least almost as good (better in some areas) as it did at launch on PC with a rig built just for it. Distance grass looks like an N64 but up close everything is very sharp and modern. That's my favorite TES still, so that's exciting.

@Ryu_Niiyama Same for me, I don't care about MMOs really, I just wanted new TES, which is weird because I haven't even played past Whiterun in Skyrim. But what surprised is that it actually is more or less a new TES. Plus, it's "Skyrim with your friends" if you want to coop. Unlike "Fallout with your friends" really became "generic survival game with a Fallout skin with your friends." 76 could have been made by a Chinese mobile company and nobody would know the difference.

@NEStalgia I don't mind reading about RPG's in this thread at all (although I'm definitely no fan of Final Fantasy, so that got boring really quickly), but I would like to keep this thread console-relevant, so entire paragraphs concerning XCX and other Nintendo-related RPG's don't really belong in this thread, in my opinion.

@ThanosReXXX Mostly agreed, though with the caveat that it's an XBox subforum of a Nintendo forum, not an actual XBox forum, so Nintendo is on-topic everywhere on a site that says Nintendo right on the header. Besides, WiiU is a retro console now, isn't it?

Still, there has to be a majority-minority rule. All but that one section of my text wall was related to games available on XBox. And games that want to keep taking my money through the Microsoft store (though I do get a Crown discount of 10% for TESO since it's a GamePass game!)

@DarthNocturnal Interesting about Nuts & Bolts, that's an important tip! What do you do when you start it up to preserve your save? I'm not 100% but I had pretty good progress.

@NEStalgia True that it is a Nintendo site, obviously, but ever since the demise of Pure Xbox, this is the place that a lot of people, that came to know of Pure Xbox through the affiliation with Nintendo Life, turned to when that site was discontinued. And as we had already established before, the Xbox site they now sponsor/mention, simply doesn't compare.

Anyway, forget I mentioned it. Had a bit of a rough couple of days, and as a consequence, I'm a bit more triggered, even by smaller annoyances...

@ThanosReXXX @NEStalgia Oh snap, somebody almost got the infinity gauntlet used on him...

Question for xbox 360 games that are downloads is it possible to switch the save location to the local hdd? Crackdown only gave me a cloud option on the one. Also is it possible to put your 360 saves on the one? Bc is nice but not when i have to start over. I don’t have free time like that. My google fu is failing me here today.

Also feel better Mr. Eternal.

@Ryu_Niiyama To transfer 360 saves from 360 to XB1 you have to move or copy your 360 save files to the cloud. Then once the cloud saves have been synced on 360, you load up the 360 game on XB1 and it'll retrieve your 360 cloud saves. Copy is safer than move given what @DarthNocturnal is talking about.

@ThanosReXXX If there were "a lot of people" that came from PureXBox, it would still be running Seriously though, yeah, I get that, but still, this is Nintendo Life, not PureXBox. It's a great XBox thread, but it can't be isolated from being an XBox discussion among Nintendo players. And all of us involved in this conversation are definitely Nintendo players.

@Ryu_Niiyama IIRC you have to use the cloud storage for BC, though obviously if you're not online, it's saving locally to later sync, for some reason I don't think the XBox emulation works with detecting the local HDD. It strikes me odd, but I'm not complaining since it's the only platform cloud saves are free for everyone

@Ryu_Niiyama No, Xbox One only offers cloud saves for 360 games, but like @Grumblevolcano said,
you can transfer/copy your saves on the 360 to the cloud, and then they will get synced with the Xbox One,
once you start up the Xbox 360 game on that console. I've done that for several games.

Simply go into System/storage on your Xbox 360, and copy the save files (do NOT move them) of the game/games you would like to play on the Xbox One to the cloud. The nice thing about it is that the syncing goes both ways, so the save file on the Xbox 360 will also be updated (with the progress you made on the Xbox One) if you start the game up on that console again.

The reason for the cloud saves might very well be because you're not actually installing the game from your disc. The disc is just used as an access key, to show Microsoft that you own the game, and then it'll allow you to download an optimized/adapted version of the game for Xbox One, that is used with the emulator. That probably all comes from a dedicated server. And even the digital downloads are slightly adapted versions, or they are bundled with the emulator, I don't know exactly, but either way, they aren't 1:1 copies of the ACTUAL 360 games.

And thanks. I'm actually okay myself, it's just company-related, but I'll get over it. Eventually...

@NEStalgia Like I said: forget I mentioned it. The situation was probably not as black and white as that, though, concerning Pure Xbox. I never subscribed there either. Much like the first two/three years that I started to visit NLife, I was just that: a visitor, not a subscriber. And by the time I finally decided to do so, the site was about to go offline, and all I got to see was this thank you page...

And of course I was speaking in relative terms. There's not a lot of people in this thread either, but it IS the only Xbox haven on here, and a decent one at that, most of the times. I've not seen a lot of the old posters from the Pure Xbox site, so I must assume that they really were "pure" Xbox, otherwise they might also have found their way to this forum topic...

But on a side note: personally, I actually DO come here for the Xbox talk. The rest of the site and the topics,
other than the PS4 thread, is already for Nintendo, so yeah, nice to have this little niche out here to talk about the other consoles that I like...

But anyway, let's just skip past this one (again), since it would seem that I am once again that guy calling out in the desert...