Hosting servers isn’t free. Someone, somewhere, is paying for it. It’s easy to forget that that someone used to be advertisers via GameSpy for so many games. Now, on PC, you’re paying for it via digital purchases on the same store that hosts the servers.
Indeed, the Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X, with its Xbox Full Screen Experience, is essentially what the next Xbox will look like. It’s not dissimilar to the SteamOS interface and Big Picture Mode, which allows you to exit out into full Linux at will. Similarly, the Xbox Full Screen Experience will allow you to exit out to full Windows if you want to, and run competing stores like Steam, Epic Games Store, Microsoft’s own Battle.net, the Riot Client, and indeed anything else you want. Indeed, you could run Adobe CC or Microsoft Office on the next Xbox, if you so choose.
I’ll grant you that there’s room to interpret this paragraph another way, but it certainly reads to me as though this is it. It can get improvements between now and then for sure, but I think it’s out.
When Microsoft can’t do it on their FSE, it certainly feels special. But no, it’s a bit more than deciding to close something or not. Do you have a Steam Deck or a machine running Bazzite? In gaming mode, check out a game that has one of those stupid pre-launch launchers on it, like most of 2K’s games, and note how it handles that differently from a desktop OS.
If you’re fine with just Big Picture Mode rather than what SteamOS or Bazzite are doing at a lower level, more power to you, but for a lot of us, it makes a huge difference in the experience, and it sounds like Microsoft’s FSE hasn’t gotten all the way there yet.
Background processes can spawn pop-ups, update reminders, notifications, etc. If you listen to Dan and Bakalar’s chat on the Bombcast, even with Bakalar on the proper FSE like he’s supposed to be, you’ll hear examples of the controller inputs just not working the way they’re supposed to, often because something else spawned on top of it. You can hear the same in this GameSpot review of the Xbox Ally X from Tamoor Hussain. And I can tell you from experience, this happens on desktop Linux distros on handhelds as well.
As far as I know, this same advantage isn’t granted to anything other than Steam Deck. On desktop, you often have a Vulkan shader step before the game boots that I rarely see on Deck. I could be wrong though.
Back when Xbox Live first hit the scene, that ~$4/month definitely got you a better experience than you got for free. Now that’s not the case.
Indeed, the Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X, with its Xbox Full Screen Experience, is essentially what the next Xbox will look like. It’s not dissimilar to the SteamOS interface and Big Picture Mode, which allows you to exit out into full Linux at will.
A big difference here, and something that it sounds like the FSE did not nail, is that SteamOS doesn’t just boot into Big Picture Mode; it intercepts how popups and game windows are drawn to the screen so that you never lose focus of the game window. It doesn’t force you to get out a keyboard or use the touch screen to enter a login password or PIN. It’s got those important considerations for the ways a game machine differs from any other personal computer. Microsoft, with all its wealth and the code base of Windows in its control, can make those same changes, but maybe they didn’t plan for it in their code base that now surely goes back almost 30 years at this point. Best of luck to those engineers.
New technology Microsoft is developing, alongside the “fixed” nature of the hardware, should eliminate a lot of the inconveniences that sometimes come with PC gaming. Things like compiling shaders, etc, shouldn’t be an issue on the new Xbox, for example.
I don’t know if it’s actually new technology, but what Valve does for the Steam Deck is to either handle this server side or to have people with a Steam Deck essentially upload their completed shaders back to the server to be distributed to everyone else’s Steam Deck, sort of like BitTorrent. This is what I expect Microsoft will do.
Right now, I’m told the current plan is for the next Xbox specifically to have no paywall for multiplayer.
It’s insane that they’ve kept that paywall for so long when it would be the easiest way to make their console more enticing than PlayStation, before they did this pivot of theirs. If the goal was Game Pass anyway, make online free and make that library on Game Pass attractive. The reason online is free on PC is because your store purchases are supporting the infrastructure that someone like Valve provides, and we crossed the threshold on consoles where digital purchases are the majority some time ago.
Where the Xbox Ally is disadvantaged, at least for Xbox console users, is the lack of the Xbox console library. There are more Xbox Play Anywhere (dual-license PC and console Xbox games) than ever, but most AAA publishers aren’t on board with this ecosystem just yet. Increasingly, though, it’ll become the default ecosystem for publishers, particularly if they want to support a PC gaming universe where they get 88% of the revenue rather than 70%.
This is a delusional paragraph in the wake of the Epic Games Store.
I was a big fan of Uncharted 2 and 3, but Uncharted 4 stopped giving me control of the action and started making it barely interactive or just a cut-scene, and I found The Great Circle to be an excellent counter to that, personally. Even if you saw a T-pose, it doesn’t seem right to call it a typical Bethesda thing. There’s a big difference between Bethesda, the developer of Elder Scrolls, and Machine Games, the developer of Wolfenstein and Indiana Jones; they don’t even use the same engine between them.
In Borderlands 4, there’s a side quest to cure someone of being a psycho. You need to get a handful of macguffins and plug them into this elaborate machine. There’s a lot of whirring and build-up, and then the machine essentially zaps the psycho and makes him explode. “He’s cured!” It got me, lol.
There were actually good, written gags in that game, too. Plus the general “Indy found himself in a place where needed to improvise and punch some Nazis” sort of gameplay that the game did so well. I can’t even recall a single bug from my playthrough.
New games pushing technology features will always lag slightly before they make it to Proton. It’s the nature of reverse engineering. On Kubuntu, on AMD, the only crashes I can name are for The Alters, which I knew from Proton DB ahead of time to expect some chop.
The gaming experience on Windows is to get interrupted by updates constantly, less gracefully handle sleep and resume, and sometimes lose control over the game window when popups come up such that you need to be rescued by a keyboard or the touch screen. Those aren’t just my experiences but also captured in the reviews for this very device. What you gain is compatibility with live service games with invasive anti-cheat and Game Pass. For some people that will be enough, but this isn’t even the first handheld gaming device to show a performance delta in Linux’s favor when tested. I don’t think many people are experiencing this stability problem you are, as it doesn’t reflect in many reviews, and a two year old forum post for a game running on technology that moves this fast doesn’t mean that it’s still happening.
Your source is from a game from two years ago when it was new; not only does Proton get big updates all the time, but it’s far more mature in general now than it was two years ago. You lose access to Windows store, but Amazon, Epic, and GOG work through Heroic. Maybe EA and Ubisoft are a problem for some people, but those also might work through Lutris. I haven’t shopped with either in over a decade, so I’m not the best candidate to check.
I started a new run of Baldur’s Gate II to see if I can actually be good at it this time.
Of more recent releases, I’ve also been going through Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector and The Alters, both being very good resource management games in space.
The major difference being how many recurring costs you incur for chasing live services rather than just making Diablo or Doom clones.
It’s only the campaign, despite the fact that the competitive multiplayer was just as responsible for this game’s success back in the day. Split-screen is only supported on consoles and not on PC for some reason that I definitely cannot understand. And while it’s got online play, it surely won’t support LAN…in Halo…a game known for LAN parties.
Its a non functioning product at launch, something that should be called out in a review.
It literally functions. I’ve played it at launch and will continue playing it. Watch Austin’s review on SkillUp, who had the benefit of releasing his review some time after launch but started during the embargo period, to see why a reviewer would not call it out.
The Suicide Squad was a bad game, someone liking it does not justify a dishonest or lazy review
The quality of a game, and the evaluation of it in a review, is entirely subjective.
Neither of which are true is a bold statement that needs more then a “trust me” level of response.
Try looking right under the comment where someone who has been a paid reviewer called it out as nonsense. Or ask literally anyone in the industry. It’s come up on podcasts like Friends Per Second and Giant Bomb over the years enough times. If this was all a big marketing stunt where reviews were bought and paid for, someone would have blown the whistle by now.
You seem to be pushing the idea that its the audience is wrong and desperately assuming that people don’t like the media state due to an inability to reconcile their own preferences with the articles (wild and odd).
And yet you’re doing it right now. I can see why you would distrust a review if you don’t understand what a review is.
Take the reviews for example, VGC’s coverage on Borderlands 4 Does not even address the games broken state but gives it 4/5 stars
That’s because it’s not broken; it performs poorly relative to its visuals. It’s an excellent game.
You’ve done little to convince me that “mistrust” of games media is any more than people getting upset that reviewers have different opinions than they do. I can tell you right now, for instance, that Jordan Middler loves Pokemon, so it’s no surprise to me when VGC gives good reviews to Pokemon games. I’ve got a friend who really gelled with Suicide Squad as well, so I know it’s possible for people to really enjoy that game. In this very thread, you can see people who are convinced that reviewers are paid off or playing difficult games on extra easy modes, neither of which are true, because they just can’t reconcile that anyone could possibly enjoy a game that they didn’t enjoy or weren’t interested in.
I know you were talking about another part of the article, but you had a similarly uncited reason for the shrinking games media work force. I don’t care if you don’t like VGC, but I really don’t see a time when the writing was better, and I wanted to see what you were expecting.
He’s right. It’s despicable. Trading card games, too. The thing with Valve is that, outside of this monetization of online games, they’ve unquestionably had an enormous positive impact on all sorts of things in this medium just by way of sheer market forces. They’ve done a lot of great open source work, and they’ve helped create a viable exit ramp from Windows. Despite claims of monopoly on PC, they’ve created more market competition than we could have ever hoped to see otherwise. A lot of what they do is informed by what they would want to pay for if they were the customers. That stuff can be true, and at the same time, they have directed their online games in a data-driven way toward whatever creates the best results, and that result is legalized (mostly, for now) gambling for children and other addiction-driven spending behavior via battle passes. The worst part is that if they ever arrived here by accident, they’re not remorseful enough to stop, since it makes so much money.
It’s been years, and I still scoff at the criticism. The Paradox model is to ask a price for a good that they produced. If you don’t feel it’s worth it, you don’t buy it. They don’t obfuscate the details of what’s in the expansion; they don’t make things available for a limited time only; they ask what they feel is a fair price for a product. It’s the only method of monetizing a video game that doesn’t feel scummy to me. If Hall doesn’t like monetizing Icarus that way, he needs to scope his projects down so they can put a bow on the last one and move on to the next one more quickly.