Topic: The everything Xbox thread

@BlueOcean

It depends what people notice though really. If someone doesn't notice the difference between 2 effects, and one is a lot cheaper to run (therefore leaving resources for other things), I think you'd have to say the cheaper one is better.
It's not even necessarily just small rooms. Xenoblade X used prebaked directional lighting and shadows on its landscapes, (in a game that had a day/night cycle) and I guarantee almost no-one noticed the difference. They just did a great job of hiding it. It was probably necessary to get a game like that running on the Wii U!

@Dezzy Of course, Wii U and Switch doesn't have that much power!

@BlueOcean I actually watched that video. I watch most of DF's videos. What I found funny is that the ray-tracing really didn't do much for the image quality of Metro Exodus in their comparison shots. And I'm not expecting a similarly dramatic shift in Halo's look, either.

I believe that the game will look better than this on Series X. I'm not sure how it's going to look and perform on Xbox One and Xbox One S, though.

Didn't they say that was an early build .... ? There's a bit of time to tweak things yet! Don't think I'm getting into Halo, myself, though

@Ralizah I've said over on PureXBox a few times (yes, I go there, no I won't touch PushSquare with a 300ft pole, even if it's been sterilized in pure hydrochloric acid first...) that I don't understand pushing Halo as a system seller. I see it as a very "B" franchise, but a fan favorite. "A better Killzone" in a sense (even though Killzone is the Gears clone.) I think it was a mistake to try to make it the "Mario" of the console, and I think MS truly overestimates the market power of the Halo brand in 2020.

All that being said, I saw the presentation for Infinite....honest to goodness gameplay, not brief trailers....and I was impressed with the game. It just looks fun. Pure arcade action. Sort of Halo: Combat Evolved: Zero. A remake in a way of the first game with modern design, which is what the first worked hard to create before doing so was really possible. The first game was ruined by the Flood. It was a cool story element, but a terrible gameplay element that broke the great rock-paper-scissors gameplay that made early game combat so tight. I could see that demo looping on a cabinet in an arcade in my head. You could say late 90's arcades isn't what next gen is about. But you could also say Dreamcasts shouldn't be selling for god-money on eBay, yet they do.

Maybe it's the Nintendo philosophy in me talking, or maybe it's just because it's the only game from all the conferences short of Rogue Squadron that showcased much honest gameplay, but a fun arcade action game loop tops "super amazing next gen graphics."

The art style works against it in a way....but at the same time I don't think it needs reinvention. The "world" of Halo has a certain look. If it were to be made into a comic strip, would we expect it would look much different? I think there's some very conflicting expectations with gamers. Should "next gen" Halo, Starfox whatever look like the best Halo look it can look like? Or should it redefine what Halo looks like simply to meet industry generated expectations of what "next gen" is supposed to look like?

You've said you prefer most indie games to most AAA games. Clearly you're not graphics driven, so you understand all that. But the problem is, what is it the market is demanding here? Great games? Justification to buy an expensive box? And if the latter.....that's the whole point of the XBox strategy, they're not trying to make you justify the box, they're just offering different boxes and services to play the games on. They trying to make you buy games or access passes to games regardless of what box you play it on. It's Sony that wants you to justify the box. Are we really at the point of consumerism where even at the start of the Second Great Depression any fan with enough cash is rejecting the notion of "here's a great game you can play on any level of hardware" in exchange for "we want you to make us feel like we're missing something if we don't run the treadmill of latest & greatest?" "We want to be abused and shamed into buying whatever new MacGuffin you put under our nose!"

Or do people just want a tech demo to puff their chests out with and say "see, hundreds of dollars bought me the BEST, and I have the screenshots to show on Instagram to prove it!"

I'm not anti-Sony or anti-MS but this whole Halo-Gate (heh heh) has my head spinning with just what gamers want and how depraved the market is. I'm not upset with Sony or Microsoft. I'm upset with gamers' twisted idea of what they want.

@NEStalgia You're upset, I just get tired about all this, sometimes. And I fully agree with all your sentiments in this regard. I came away from the showcase feeling pretty satisfied about how the new generation of Xbox is shaping up, but all that all but instantly evaporated like snow under the sun when I entered the various comments sections a mere couple of hours later, leaving me with several questions, such as: "did I just watch a completely different showcase?", "what the hell were they expecting?" and/or "how realistic are people's expectations concerning ACTUAL next gen hardware vs what they think it should be?".

People that were expecting to be wowed/blown away, were always going to be disappointed, because we're never ever going to see another jump like going from SD to HD, so it's still about diminishing returns, meaning it's about subtlety and details, which is what the full use of things like HDR, ray tracing and/or dynamic lighting is going to give us. (I say "full use" because we obviously already have HDR this generation, as well as dynamic lighting).

Sometimes, it annoys me to no end that people don't see or understand that, also because it ruins my personal sentiments. It's like those people that ruin the mood at parties, only focusing on what was wrong with something or on what they DIDN'T get, instead of looking at the upside of things.

And besides all that, I also feel that none of us are able to truly judge the Series X until we see it in person, seeing as we still have to take YouTube's horrible compression algorithm into account. Even with 4K streams/uploads, you're looking at a minimum of between 7 and 12 percent overall quality loss from the original raw video material. In full HD, it can even go up to as high as 20 percent, so it's not fully representative of what we're actually going to get, only marginally indicative at best. That is also why it's really not the best idea to draw final conclusions from only having watched indirect and/or uploaded footage.

But then again: that's only my two cents, so yeah...

Especially if it's an early build of a game with a certain aesthetic that is considered dated now.... Eh, I'm still going to try the ones that interest me

This bit is interesting. Maybe fan uproar of "we want to be sold expensive things because rich boys want their toys" has changed some XBox plans for the worse:

https://www.usgamer.net/articles/microsoft-clarifies-which-xb...

Ugh. I'm starting to hate gamers as much as I hate the general population.

Also @Ralizah, apparently Avowed is set in the Pillars of Eternity universe, which I hadn't realized. So it's AAA-budget PoE 3D. That alone is something to be excited for. And more and more I'm thinking I'll play it on xCloud. Huzzah for streaming!

@NEStalgia I think what people aren't considering is release date. Forza Motorsport, Avowed, Everwild, Hellblade 2 and State of Decay 3 are probably releasing 2022 onwards. Maybe Forza is Holiday 2021 if the 4 year licensing situation applies to Forza Motorsport 7 but apart from that I'm expecting the others to be 2022/2023.

Well, since they were still working on Outer Wilds & now on Grounded, I guess we'd better not expect Avowed too quickly, so that one makes sense .... We'll see about the others, though

@DarthNocturnal Obsidian, when they were the bulk of Black Isle, ran circles around Bethesda and TES. The death of BI and Bioware is what gave TES the chance to rise up around the time of Morrowind. You're right, it's sort of their shot against TES, while Outer Worlds is their shot against "Fake Fallout" from the originators, but it's a bit deper than that, especially now knowing it's set in the PoE world.

It's a really convoluted history going on. You have to go back with Obsidian and inExile back as one as Black Isle/Interplay. BI were the kings of D&D based games, and therefore the CRPG at large. Wizardry aside, that was the root of the CRPG (and thus the JRPG as well.)

So in the day there was (also available on Switch and XBox) Baldur's Gate, BG2, Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights, NwN2, IwD2, (all using the D&D Forgotten Realms license.) There was also the one hit wonder Planescape: Torment, beloved but abandoned, using the D&D: Planescape license.

D&D was getting very expensive to license. Black Isle (inExile + Obisdian, today) was responsible for IwD, Fallout, Fallout 2, Planescape Torment. Bioware worked with Black Isle on Baldur's Gate 1 and 2. Bioware gets all the credit but the made the engine all these games were based on. The scenario writing and design was more a product of Black Isle (Obsidian + inExcile) than it was Bioware.

Bioware moved on to try one more run at a D&D license with Neverwinter Nights. Then they created Dragon Age to be a license-free replacement for D&D: Forgotten Realms moving forward (they actually did NwN in conjunction with working on DA, which they started working in, presumably with Black Isle before Interplay fell apart and they went to Atari, then to MS, then to EA.

Obsidian as we now know them "cleaned up" the mess of NwN with a much more traditional NwN2, and also did Icewind Dale 2. From there they also dropped the D&D licenses and created Pillars of Eternity as a license-free replacement for D&D (with a bit of Planescape mixed in.) Meanwhile inExile created Torment: Tides of Numenera to pick up the Planescape games without licensing D&D.

So we now have 3 companies and 3 "new" IPs that were all created to avoid the licensing fees and combat restrictions of D&D licences they all shared while they were comprising (or in Bioware's case, collaborating with) Black Isle. Bioware/Dragon Age, inExile/Torment-Numenera, Obsidian/Pillars of Eternity, all replacing the D&D games of the Black Isle days they all worked in (Plus Obsidian/Outer Worlds to replace Fallout that got sold out from under them to Bethesda, their former inferior rival....)

Avowed is, apparently, PoE. Which means this is basically "The AAA Baldur's Gate 3D open world game" that never was. Or "Dragon Age: Origins if it had been made by the good scenario writers that made Baldur's Gate great rather than the crummy scenario designers that made the engine and gameplay systems" Being "the other half" of the BG creators, technically speaking, Avowed is more a competitor to Dragon Age, it's sister-spinoff, than to TES.

It's really confusing, because we have a 25 year history across multiple companies splitting in multiple directions all creating their own IPs to avoid royalty payments while trying to recreate the same 4 games they worked on together, more or less in the 90's and '00s.

@Grumblevolcano Maybe....if so it cements the idea that XSeX is rushed and really shouldn't be launching now, it would have been better one-upping Sony in a year or two. XSeX-SeX coming 2024? Still, it seems like more than that. The websites listed X1, and now they're removing the X1 moniker after the fan backlash as though retargeting it. What you say almost connotes they have no more 1st party games coming than Halo and Grounded in the next 2 years, which contradicts their 1st party release every 5 months statement.

Well, since I liked at least the Enhanced Editions of Baldur's Gate, etc, @NEStalgia ... & Pillars of Eternity! Although I like the Dragon Age games, as well I'll certainly keep my eye on Avowed

You know, all this bitching about Halo Infinite (and I don't mean on Nintendo Life) just makes me want to play the game a lot more, for the sake of giving it the chance it deserves and I'm not even a huge Halo fan 🤣.

@NEStalgia Hey, did you pressed "ignore" on me? I agreeing with you on the points you made, but no positive reaction? I don't know how to communicate with you...

Okay, I know, that was a REALLY bad impression of a certain NLife member, but I just couldn't help myself, since I did agree with you...

@NEStalgia I'd guess Series X year 1 is:

• Halo Infinite
• Gears Tactics
• Microsoft Flight Simulator
• Battletoads
• Psychonauts 2
• Age of Empires Definitive Editions (1-3) and 4
• DLC for Outer Worlds, Tell Me Why, Gears 5 and Forza Horizon 4
• Free updates for Sea of Thieves

@BlueOcean Dood, ur not a r33l g@m3r! My rig runs Crysis at 640x480, max settings at 25fps! If you don't have this rig why do you even try to play? Just buy a Nintendo, baby!

I feel like it's 2007 all over again..... Can't we put the next gen genie back in the bottle?

@ThanosReXXX LOL, sorry, you replied while I was already writing the next reply and then that spawned 2 more conversations so I ended up never getting around to it

But yeah, it's...it's worse than frustrating.....it seriously is making me take a step back and think "why do I want to be on this treadmill at all?" The whole point of moving from PC to console was to get away from that nonsense, and now console has all the same mess. It's been getting there, but it seems like this new gen really moved the bar back in the wrong direction. Meanwhile the PC people are using old gaming laptops and not upgrading much....makes me wonder.

@Grumblevolcano That's a depressing list.

@NEStalgia Might as well start calling yourself Hamtaro...