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Microsoft Consoles and Updates


Oliath

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All of these being out before May also has the happy benefit of meaning none of them will feature in any showcase Microsoft (usually) do in June... hopefully meaning more room for lots of new stuff, nice.

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Shame Xbox have gone muliplatform. Sony are struggling a bit with releases - especially now they’ve cancelled all those games. Whereas Xbox is starting to finally hit a bit of a stride with releases this year. They may have been able to claw back some market share.

Ah well. Good showing all in all. 

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24 minutes ago, shinymcshine said:

South of Midnight and Clair:Obscur are (unsurprisingly) the ones that appealed to me most - wonder if they'll come straight to GP ?

 

Yeah those two are definitely day one Game Pass titles. 

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Got round to actually watching the trailers during a break at work, I've gone from "well it's on Game pass so may aswell try it" with South of Midnight to being genuinely excited for it... the trailer is excellent. 

 

Clair Obscur just looks better the more we see of it... can't wait for that one.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Saw this when I booted up Fable Anniversary over the weekend. Good riddance. We all consider the Xbox One to be the pivotal point for Xbox where everything started to crumble, but nonsense like this at the end of the 360 era were sort of the breadcrumbs leading to that disaster.

 

Fable Anniversary-2025_02_09-09-40-37.png

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I don't know - that sort of sounded great in principle - like having the Pipboy from Fallout 3 on a screen (arm mounted or not) - but it just wasn't very practical to have a separate screen (esp. in an armchair - maybe sat a desk was fine).

 

But it's this hit & miss innovation that Nintendo often gets praised for, whilst much of what MS or Sony tries gets derided.

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I dunno, for me this was them losing focus and forcing innovation by looking at the competition instead of doing what they were good at it. Xbox never was innovation-less, for better or worse they defined digital distribution and refined online gaming on console and were the first to ship a system with a hard disc. But it added to the usability, not detracted from it. I think the moment you feel like your system becomes better if you attach an otherwise completely unrelated piece of hardware from a different manufacturer to it you kind of lost the plot as to what people expect from a console.

 

Edit: I'm kind of needlessly aggressive about this. In a vacuum Smartglass is a quirky little feature, but when you think about the amount of R&D they had to spend in the backend for something like this I do think it stands as an example as to when it all started to go into the wrong direction.

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I feel we're overcomplicating this, smartglass is just a pretty name for a companion app. RDRII had one as well, which I barely used but it was there. It's a neat gimmick, I think in the case of RDRII you could even read Arthur's journal on it which is one of those details I remember being really impressed by in that game. I don't know that the time and cost investment of integrating these apps with games were so high that it took attention away from different things, but it's definitely gone out of fashion now.

 

I'm trying to think of games where it would be an experience enhancer, not many I'd say because touch screens have their own input limits and annoying friction.

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Whilst not 'MS Smart Glass' there's a few games I can think of which used mobile phone interfaces instead of the controller:

 

Erica & Hidden Agenda - rather underwhelming used a mobile interface for their choose the path / option games

 

Just Dance - switched over from the motion sensors of Move, Kinnect and Wiimotes to using motion tracking in your phone (to some degree of success) - I think the later Singstar games used your phone mic rather than peripheral microphone too.

 

Best in class though were the Jackbox party games that allowed multiplayer games, often with much hilarity - selecting answers, putting in spoofs, drawing etc on your smart phone / tablet - really successful implemented.

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You know what was good was the battlefield app that meant you could change your loadout and stuff when not playing so that it was nice and ready for when you jumped back in.

 

I recall the fable app you could play a card game or something which earned you money to use in game. 

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Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag had a companion app, too. You used to be able to send your fleet of ships on import/export missions, do mini battles and generally accrue all your upgrade materials, which then updated in the game next time you logged on.

 

It was honestly a really good addition. I was gutted when I replayed AC4 and they'd killed the app.

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Destiny allowed you to do your bank stuff as well, which was hilarious because it was actually the best way to deal with your loot unless you wanted to fuck with the awful way they dealt with it in game. I think the grimoire could be read through the app also.

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2 hours ago, Nag said:

Didn't Mass Effect 3 have a companion app you could use to help with the whole galactic readiness thing?

 

ME3 had everything EA could scrape from the bottom of their market research barrel. Probably one the most egregious examples of publisher interference from that generation.

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