Xbox Series X|S

Someone needs to bring arena shooters back.

I don't want unlockables, seasons, skins or anything else. I still don't understand what a Battle Pass is.

Just give me a well made, fun to play game with a great selection of tightly designed maps and a few game modes and I'll gladly chuck £50 at it.

I mean, I played the same maps on Unreal Tournament and Counter Strike for over a decade (and still do on the latter).

The problem is that you could feasibly play everything that interests you in 6 months to a year, and then have no reason to sub anymore.
If they keep the full 3rd party library content access on PC, including Day 1 titles, it'd mean that the cost wouldn't be able to be decreased either.

If they kept 3rd party access on PS, I'd expect the price tag to increase, as it'd mean less sales on the platform and higher fees to those dev and to Sony as a platform holder. You'd need to retain PS+ to keep cloud saves and online play, so the sub fee for both services would be too high for most people.

At which point you have to wonder how they make it benefit themselves, Sony and the consumer enough for it to work long term.

Isn't that true of every subscription service though?

I think a Gamepass pipeline on Nintendo and Sony platforms is where this is heading, but limited to the first party software to not disrupt other business models, and with it's own subscriptions tier that may be less than GP Ultimate.

Didn't mind 4 but found 5 really dull. Only having 2 levels as chief sucked.

Me too. Corridor shooters are difficult to get on board with when they don't give you anything to think about except point and shoot. Multiplayer is a really visceral emotive experience that you just don't get with single player. For single player, Immersive sim games are probably my favorite genre.

With this whole Xbox thing...

As long as I still have access to the games I've bought and can get through my backlog catalogue, that's all I care about really.

Would be a little shit to see my gamerscore go, but I've lost more important things/people throughout my life than a 6 figure e-peen.

As someone who has a pretty sizeable collection of old consoles, handhelds and computers, I'm suddenly feeling very self-conscious 😅

What if the next xbox is just a special version of windows 12 that boots straight into the xbox interface? I’d dual boot that on my pc. Could run on handhelds as well. Win 11 already needs a Trusted Platform Module, so wouldn’t be hard to lock it down security wise. I know Steam Deck has one built in.

My thoughts too. They may produce their own Windows Deck.

Yeah I’d take 60fps 1080p every time.

I'm not sure about this. Many games are still offering performance modes, games that are being released now have them. It obviously depends on the game whether a game requires 60fps but I haven't seen an increase in 30fps only games. I mean there's something like Alan Wake 2 that has a 30fps mode with no ray tracing at all, it's just that games are getting more complex with or without ray tracing and there is still an audience of people who want the shiny stuff or don't even go into the options menu and change performance settings.

Fair enough I suppose, Just my perception.

The big problem with ray tracing is that developers have become incredibly good at faking it. The big impact the tech will have is on the developers' work flow, saving huge amounts of time in setting up scenes (and that will obviously only happen when they can completely ditch rasterised rendering).

Also, the form of ray tracing that has the lowest performance impact is shadows, which also has a very minor visual impact, even if the shadows are technically more accurate. It isn't until you start doing reflections and global illumination that you really get a noticeable visual improvement and even then it is going to vary from scene to scene how impactful it is.

When you start getting path tracing going then that is a different conversation and the difference is night and day (although it can bring its own issues). Alan Wake 2 and the path tracing mode on Cyberpunk are a generational leap in visuals on PC. Consoles are nowhere near able to run path tracing though.

I know you guys are talking about RT, but it's worth noting that in terms of resolution 30 vs. 60fps can be a bigger deal depending on your TV or monitor. OLEDs for instance really, really benefit from the added temporal resolution of 60 or more fps, to the point that any significant camera movement in 30fps will completely destroy any benefit you're getting from the higher internal resolution