Has Microsoft put out a single worthwhile AAA title in the entire console generation? I bought an Xbox Series X after the Bethesda acquisition and I’ve used it once to boot up Starfield and then quit after 15 minutes when I realized it was boring as hell.
They have this uncanny ability to spend more money on acquisitions and then completely stall the output from that company until every game blows.
They had one good franchise that they didn’t run into the ground, Halo. And after they got control of it they killed that too. They own half the industry now and I feel like they produce less games than ever before.
I feel like they’re going to get bored, kill their games division in 5 years and the whole industry will have to rebuild.
They’ve actually stated within the last year that they are in fact considering moving away from the games industry if certain things dont happen for them. This game out during the whole court proceedings surrounding their attempted Activision buyout.
I can’t remember the details and I’m too lazy to look into it again lol. There are some interesting articles out there tho
They want to be a cloud gaming provider and sell Xbox fire TV sticks instead of consoles, with controllers that connect directly to the azure server running their games. Why do you think Nvidia and the UK weren’t happy with Microsoft a few years ago and they made so many deals with cloud gaming providers like boosteroid and GeForce now?
Microsoft turned every Windows PC into an Xbox overnight with XCloud and they had little to no overhead costs. That’s where their business is right now, cloud and AI, not gaming, Xbox will take a backseat and I’m going to bet we will see them transition from a console maker to simply publisher that conveniently sells a cloud TV stick that can play games.
Nothing significant has changed since the original modern warfare. At this point they’re bringing back “classic” maps from like 4 years ago? They’re clutching at straws.
Don’t get me wrong; it’s a fun game. It’s probably the best multiplayer shooter out there, but it’s wrapped up in many, many layers of turds and disappointment.
The launcher
I hope the Microsoft acquisition means they do away with it and go back to a regular launcher.
The battlepass
I wish games stopped treating me as a product and made games that were just fun, like Baldurs Gate 3 did. I shouldn’t have a battlepass that prioritises player engagement and forces me to be connected to the game season after season as if I’m on some sort of life support machine. Just let me unlock some cool skins and let me go and play some of the other games without feeling like I’m missing out.
Annual releases
When Warzone came out, and they had their first iteration of the new kind of Call of Duty games (with battlepasses), I won’t lie, it was some of the most fun I’d had since the original Modern Warfare games. Why throw it away and abandon that game for another one that comes out a year later and just sucks? Yes, it makes them more money but it fragments the player base and forces you to abandon all the perks you’ve spent ages unlocking through the battlepass.
This is such a great reply filled with disappointment. I did play MW2 quite a bit. DMZ was fun. My wife and I played MP a lot too. I bought her the battle pass one time and she was able to get it again multiple times just from the coins obtained from completing it.
It doesn’t scratch the same itch though. Battlebit is more for larger scale battles like Battlefield the game it was inspired from. Cod is significantly more arcadey, smaller scale and faster paced.
“Now we support Nintendo Switch and Sony PlayStation! Those platforms, combined with our current offer in Windows, macOS, Android and iOS / iPadOS, cover the whole spectrum of platforms available!”
I prefer having a physical game collection, but with the way physical games are handled now, with more than half the game needing to be downloaded to the console to cut costs or because they didn’t finish the game before release, it doesn’t solve the preservation or ownership problems anymore.
That’s where piracy comes in, even if it does tend to have negative effects on smaller devs. So long as there is no server or internet connection required to play, piracy will rain supreme in preservation.
Ownership, on the other hand, is a lot trickier. I personally say just having, for PC games, the game download .exe (or equivalent file) is enough to be considered owning it, but that doesn’t mean much.
The way I see it, piracy is fine, but only once the format is dead. I recently hacked both my 3DS and Vita to access the whole libraries since those formats are dead with ones digital store switched off and the other half dead and barely functioning.
Starfield could have been a way better game if all they did was fuck it up like 45% less. They could have alternatively just delivered on their promises of making the game easy to mod and let the community handle the rest but they fucked that up too. Only the most dedicated of Starfield fan would have the patience to sit down and do all the shit it takes to add a new quest for example. Iirc even Skyrim came with a mod editor with ui that was easy to understand. Right now all we have is a community xedit project that’s somehow even harder to run on Linux than Starfield is.
Starfield’s big problem is it’s a huge universe built on an engine that really can’t support massive worlds like that. The reason you can’t fly around on the surface of a planet is because their crappy engine can’t cope with that much space existing, and it can’t load more environment when you get to the edges like every other game does because their engine doesn’t support proper level streaming.
If you mod the game to force the issue it gets glitchy very very quickly.
The Starfield Creation Kit was only released a week ago (but I think to remember that there was a big delay in its release for Skyrim and Fallout, too - haven’t done any modding since the Skyrim days).
Starfield could have been a way better game if all they did was fuck it up like 45% less.
Compared to the KOTOR series, it was lifeless. Compared to Mass Effect, it was very boring. Frustrating for a game with such strong precedents to land so weakly. But they put so much energy into quantity of content that they forgot to invest in quality.
They could have alternatively just delivered on their promises of making the game easy to mod and let the community handle the rest but they fucked that up too.
The goal was to create a game that procedurally generated itself, not one where individual hobbyists expanded it manually.
There was this editor that let you make esm files. I can’t remember if it was already in the game folder or you had to download from steam but it must not have been hard to set up. I remember using it to make one of the buyable houses really big on the inside.
Truly, trying to decide between BG3 and Alan Wake 2 when voting for GOTY was like trying to pick a favorite parent, or child. Both so good, and huge achievements in unique ways. Stacked year for awards, that’s for sure!
You could probably steal the Mona Lisa and bring it to GameStop, only to be told they’ll buy it for some crusty, old, pre-chewed gum they found on the sidewalk a year ago. And that’s if you’re lucky.
It should be standard practice for Bethesda games to wait for a game of the year edition (or whatever they want to call it) then wait for a steam sale on that.
gamespot.com
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