- 400 Posts
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IF 2026 was a real date that wouldn’t matter that much. Microsoft wants to be the first one to sell you the last console you will need be able to afford to. People will get it for generationally better experience but there’s not much else to look out for on the horizon. Hardware got too expensive for the consumer and games beyond certain budgets are much too risky. Consider upcoming trade wars and overall bleak economic outlook and you have to assume every player is looking for a survival strategy. Market analysts say that Microsoft is going to become software publisher primarily again but this makes no sense to me. Game Pass Cloud and Xbox are the only places where they don’t have to share the spoils with owners of other platforms. Obviously they’ll want to keep it going regardless of circumstances. Microsoft could be banking on getting high-end market for now and transition with revisions of the same hardware into lower segments with time as market conditions improve.
I’m very stoned currently so I can’t vouch for the quality of my analysis long term but I will stand by it for now.
I call bullshit even if it would make sense.
PS5 Pro wanted to do RT at smooth framerates but turned out to be way too undercooked. We’re seeing glimpses of that on XSX too with Indiana Jones and Dragon’s Dogma 2 (that 40 FPS VRR window makes it work). It’s working as a tech demo that’s building appetite for more because of how transformative to the experience in both games that is. If Microsoft could deliver it at this timing it would be extra awkward for Sony who need to keep on going with current hardware for a couple more years not to look like Sega with 32X and Saturn. Even if Nvidia shows something revolutionary with new line of GPUs it will be prohibitively expensive in the context of consoles anyway.
They made FSR vendor-agnostic for reasons that turned out to be irrelevant in the long run. It was just couple of years ago when games supported DLSS only and engines weren’t ready for plugging multiple different upscaling solutions. Nvidia and AMD tried to get exclusivity deals and things seemed fire for a moment. AMD hoped FSR would be enough for smaller players to adopt it but being vendor-agnostic handicapped them so much that everyone developed their own solution anyway (PSSR, XeSS). Not that it really matters that much because in the end modern AA gives similar results to old FSR and game devs will use what works best.
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It’s up to Nintendo to determine how to run their business best. Nobody needs luxury toys to live. But I will argue that you wouldn’t like Nintendo that releases their games on PC and sells them for $20 5 months after release.
Everything Nintendo does serves philosophy of valuing own work. Nintendo that doesn’t need to figure out how to do cool things with cheap hardware isn’t the same Nintendo that won’t release a new entry in their prestigious franchises unless there’s new kind of gameplay. Nintendo that doesn’t go after pirates has to look for other sources of revenue and people generally don’t like microtransactions and ads. I could go on but I think Nintendo is the only console manufacturer ready to weather upcoming storm in the industry.
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That source code is available and the game is maintained on all major platforms including ARM Mac native.
https://github.com/EpicGames/Signup
https://github.com/JimmieKJ/unrealTournament (public mirror)
I played it at release on PS4 and then with Phantom Liberty on XSX. It was awful game with a great story then. Today it’s a pretty good game with one of the greatest stories in this medium. It’s often brought up as a comeback story for CDPR but lack of polish still rears its head in places. For example clothing pieces still have rarity label based on how much defensive stat it gave prior to patch 2.0 (which detached armour rating from the clothes).
I don’t get it, regular people post on Twitter and traditional media are nice enough to credit them but somehow that becomes some kind of invasion to be stopped in your browser. Yeah, block those share / like buttons but if you just block whole social media platforms outright on purpose then why complain that they don’t work - you chose that yourself.
I’m FFXIII fanboy and the game gets bad rep so apologies for this uninvited tirade.
If you didn’t give XIII a proper shot then please do. FFXIII battle system is extremely unique and although you have to waddle through 20 hours of tutorials it gets sublime and feels really natural by the second half of the game. That story while cheesy can be as serious as Shin Megami Tensei at times, with people doomed to be trapped between divine powers. Main characters decide not to eat their shit and go against all odds to one of the better soundtracks in series. It all happens along a corridor but the sense of scale does not suffer from it. Sequels to FFXIII are awesome too.
Literally never had the need to disable defender or change anything about my Windows install.
This doesn’t mean anything if you’re not saying what hardware are you running. I saw what was happening in task manager no matter how much time I gave it. I don’t have time to debug a product I paid for, especially if the free alternative „just works”.
Driver support is far better on Windows than Linux.
For things that Linux supports (which is most of it and the older the better) it’s a much better experience since everything just works out of the box. You might have trouble with bleeding edge hardware but in year or two stuff gets done and keeps working. You might encounter issues on some cheapo laptops with broken ACPI implementations but those are just trouble in general.
I just contributed to this. My gf bought her old work laptop for cheap (an employee perk) for simple survivors-like games. It should have been perfectly capable machine (i5-8350u, 16GB of RAM, fast NVMe drive) and it’s compatible with Windows 11 so I went with that. I’m a Mac guy these days and but use Windows at work so I’m only familiar with LTSC versions. I wasn’t ready for how much of a shitshow it is.
Couple of hours later I had debloated it and disabled Defender yet it was still running dog slow. The laptop had trouble with Thunderbolt 3 docking station, not recognising anything beyond connected displays. Intel graphics drivers were so unstable games kept crashing left and right.
I got tired of fighting it and installed vanilla Ubuntu (didn’t want to disable Secure Boot). I’m not a Linux newbie by any means but these days it’s home server stuff and the like. I stumbled on Bitlocker protection that I’m 100% sure is there to discourage people from switching. Microsoft set it up so that when you look at it funny you have to find unlock keys at your account page. Funny thing about that - when my gf was typing the address for that page in Safari with Google search on her phone the first autocompleting result was a scam page. I’m fairly sure Google does this to spite Microsoft. Fuck big tech but I digress.
After that it took an hour to install including figuring out that I had to add DisplayLink drivers for the dock myself. The process wasn’t great but I guess it’s a real niche case. Either way, this machine is now flying and Steam+Proton handle everything pretty well.
Last time I used Windows on desktop was around W8 and it wasn’t half that bad. Microsoft is doomed if they offer this kind of experience. I was critical of Proton before but I need to acknowledge that some working solution had to be created ASAP to get people off this dumpster fire.
This is precisely what Digital Foundry specialises in - objective assessment of technical performance. This one seems to be slightly boring due to game running well but for me at least this is important to know before any big game purchase. Not that I plan on buying Veilguard after some other reviews.
I’m not super into CoD and the last one I played (not counting remasters) were Advanced Warfare campaign and some Black Ops 3 multiplayer. They were okay but at that point I was quite tired with the series. I started BO6 on my XSX and the single player campaign is quite fun. I probably won’t be touching multiplayer on the account of being old.
The thing about CoD campaigns is that you have to suspend your disbelief and go with the flow of what game is throwing at you. There’s a lot of scripted scenes where you just have to push through to progress to next scripted scene. If you play to exploit that you won’t get much enjoyment. Treat it like a amusement park ride and it’ll treat you with bombastic set pieces.
I’m not sure if I’m missing anything lore-wise. Black Ops 1&2 which I played were heavy on spy / CIA stuff, plot twists and I enjoyed them a lot. So far I’m just assuming BO6 is cryptic on purpose like older ones so it doesn’t bother me that I jumped without playing previous ones.
Technically CoD games have always been rather accomplished with nice visuals while targeting 60fps (but not making a big deal out of dropping to 50 or so). BO6 looks very good.
Overall it’s not some revolutionary or overly ambitious game but it’s quite competent equivalent of a popcorn flick.
I’m still in Egypt but that’s not only disappointing but also flat out surprising given how interactive the game is so far.