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Xbox consoles are generally not good 4k/UHD Blu-ray players. I tried using my XSX for (physical) movie watching for a while, and my experience was poor enough that I went out and bought a dedicated Panasonic player instead.
Not all discs would play in my XSX, picture was often noisy, and I ran into a fair amount of audio issues up to and including no sound at all.
This is a running joke in the Far Cry games. I know Far Cry 4 does something similar. You meet the big bad at the beginning of the game, he asks you to wait for him, and if you just chill for like 15 minutes he shows back up, honors his word, and you finish the mission that you came to the island for.
I mean “corpos” in the Cyberpunk sense - mega-huge companies that put profits far and above all else, discarding any notion of ethics, morality, or care about others in the process.
They’re the companies that buy up emerging tech solely so they can kill it (their competition). They don’t give a shit about long-term sustainability - if it raises the bottom line today, they do it. They disregard laws and consumer protections because the only consequences are paltry (for them) fines, which they see as the cost of doing business.
Once upon a time, the idea with subscriptions like this was to have customers set it and forget it. Charge them a small/reasonable amount and they’ll keep giving you money forever. Giving people a reason to think about - or worse, evaluate the merits of - the monthly deposit they’re giving you used to be a sin for companies.
But here we are, seeing the difference between “companies” and “corpos”.
I’ve been a big Xbox dude for a long time but I can’t possibly defend this. It’s a garbage move, during a time when everyone’s chief complaint about life is “everything goes up in price way too fast, all the time.”
They call these changes “upgrades” but that’s just PR bullshit. The big value of Game Pass used to be how it was cheaper than buying games outright. Now Ultimate is $360 a year. How many brand new games that you’re interested in come out each year? Would buying them on day one total anything near $360??
The value just isn’t there anymore.
Too much of Silksong’s difficulty is just numbers. Shitty peon enemies hit for two health because fuck you. Touching a boss while it’s stunned hits for two health because fuck you.
And then there’s the whole shard system, which straight-up doesn’t need to exist since it just makes you never engage with tools. Until you use them to nuke a boss in its final phase, of course, because the alternative is playing RNG roulette against the boss’s 3 adds (that each hit for two damage, naturally).
It’s a great game, but it definitely isn’t a perfect game.
They need to remove shards, tweak (lower) the power of tools, and adjust outgoing damage (ideally through armor-like upgrades you earn).
Oh, and crests were not the right call. We all just use the Reaper (unless we’re further exploiting tools with that other crest).
I’m pretty curious (read: leery) about the post-launch monetization. Does the game feel complete or did they obviously hold things back for the battle passes or whatever? Will I have to pay in to enjoy things like a level cap increase?
They were pretty clear about going HAM on paid stuff after launch, and the game is already priced super high, so this might end up being a sale pickup for me.
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Honestly, I think gaming is done with new live service offerings.
Live service used to be a way to get a core-complete, feature-limited games in front of players earlier than if they were fully baked. This was actually good for everyone, as player feedback often guided roadmaps and changes. But now everyone expects every new game to be better than Fortnite, Overwatch, etc. on day one. This just won’t ever happen.
Also, the gaming community of today is OBSESSED with popularity numbers (steam concurrents and twitch view count, mostly), and if players don’t see that everyone else is playing a game then they won’t play either. This is fucking dumb, but we are where we are.
And don’t even get me started on gaming news and influencers, who seem like they love to hate. They bitch about being stuck with CoD, then shit on anything that could someday compete with it. It’s baffling.