That’s correct. Has been like that since mods were enabled for the game.
I kinda want to share something here with regards to my Game Pass experience this year, albeit one I suspect is a ‘just me’ thing but whatever.
Overall I’ve been left disappointed in my experience. I don’t feel, rationally, that Game Pass is directly to blame, but have still ended up resenting it. This is purely for the fact that out of the 7 or so games I tried to play on it this year, I was only able to play one to completion (the jazzifyingly good Ape Out).
Dead Cells I couldn’t get to launch properly until I disconnected from the internet, a problem that ground me down to the point where I eventually caved and bought it on Steam. Where it worked fine, incidentally. So very much a game pass specific issue.
Metro Exodus, Wasteland 3, Star Renegades and a couple of others I was left unable to finish due to hitting some game-breaking bug or other.
On one hand, without the weight of sunk costs playing on my mind I was free to move on and do other things, which is exactly what I did. Though I can’t say this made me happy.
On the other hand, I’m fully aware that if I’d instead bought these on Steam I’d likely have hit the exact same issue(s) and, naturally, being outside the 2hr refund window would’ve either lost out or felt compelled to go through my usual gyrations in appeasing the machine spirits to get me past these problems.
On the gripping hand… I doubt I’d have bought (m)any of these anyway; I took a punt on things I probably wouldn’t have purely because they were ‘free’ and, of course, still ended up paying with the ultimate resource any of us have - time.
Perhaps the best observation I can make here is that if your service is built around second rate games, you should expect a second rate experience. I wish I had better reason not to feel this way, but unfortunately I don’t.
Game Pass is built around permanent access to all Microsoft’s published franchises. Sea of Thieves, Gears of War, Forza, Halo, MS Flight Simulator, Wasteland, Bard’s Tale, Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and so on. Game Pass offers a purchase discount up to 20% on included games and 10% on DLC. Game Pass Ultimate includes Xbox Live and xCloud access for supported games. The extra games you can play are gravy.
I’ve now realize there is a literal train in Monster Train. I never understood from videos what the hell was going on with the combat arena.
This is all that matters in the end. I enjoy dropping in for a few months each year to play demos of games I’m vaguely interested in, but there’s no way I’d be a permanent subscriber to take advantage of what’s available to play. I would resent the loss of my time.
I haven’t felt any loss of time into Game Pass games. If anything, it’s been the opposite. When I make a mistake and buy a game I don’t like, I feel like I have to keep playing it to “get to the good part” (because usually I bought it off recommendations from Qt3, so I’m expecting it to get better), which sometimes never comes and I feel like I wasted my time.
With Game Pass games, if a game doesn’t capture my attention, I can move on, guilt free. And I’ve been nothing but surprised so far by how much I like games that I wasn’t expecting to like. Like Wasteland 3 is way better than I was expecting. Darksiders 3 turned out way, way better than I’d expected, etc.
I mean obviously if the library of games doesn’t interest you then it’s not worth your time. At the same time we are talking about something that cost a few bucks a month so even if you just find 1 game that you really enjoy for the month it seems worth it to me. Then you take in the money it might save you by letting you try out games that you would have bought on steam and ended up regretting. For example, I recently tried Phoenix Point, a game I had been close to purchasing on steam, and realized I don’t really like it.
All in all, it seems like a really good deal to me especially when the PC version of Gamepass is essentially free.
I think I just figured out 15 days = 15 days of free games at the Epic Store (which I didn’t realise was also happening). Also Ubisoft is giving out random daily freebies (sometimes DLC, but sometimes games). So good season for new things.
For me, I’ve been saved by Game Pass on things that caught my eye but didn’t end up really grabbing me once I played it. Star Renegades was fine but I didn’t even feel like starting another run once I’d completed a full run. Similarly for Phoenix Point, Doom Eternal, Gears Tactics, Gears of War (I tried 1 and 5) , Master Chef, DQ IX, Age of Wonders Planetfall … Nothing wrong with these, and I might even come back and give them another whirl but more likely I’ll try Monster Train or maybe finish Monster Sanctuary.
Huh…typing out those two games side by side and realising that I spent a lot of time in Monster Hunter World Iceborne this year (as in almost all of my gaming for about six months) …maybe what I should be doing is playing more games starting with “Monster”, rather than trying to think about this critically. Oh wait, I did end up finishing the EDF 4.1 campaign, so at least one non-Monster game this year.
I struggle a bit with the ‘second rate games’ bit of the comment. There are lots of first rate games on that service, and I’ve saved hundreds of dollars getting to play them. Playing CK3 at launch was probably worth it by itself.
I also haven’t had any issues with the app, but I can understand if you’re having issues and how that might sour you on the service.
I should clarify - there are first rate games on there, however I found that they’re all a bit late to my party; I already owned and played them (except the ones I’m just not interested in).
I’m just not seeing a compelling amount of top tier stuff coming through at the point of launch to change my opinion on that. The ones that do have that parity are, and I acknowledge I am being unkind, what I’m referring to as ‘second rate’.
I haven’t played many games on the service, but like I mentioned above, I’ve really struggled with getting things to install and/or run. So for me the successrate of using this platform is pretty crap. Just seems way too much hassle for my liking.
The obfuscated file system and poor download system continue to be the worst part of this.
I guess I’ve been really lucky. Other than a couple games not creating the icons properly for shortcuts so I end up with just a white block for a shortcut, I have had zero issues installing, playing or deleting games.
Sorry, on Epic
Would really dispute, among others, Flight Simulator, Gears Tactics, FH4, CK3, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, The Outer Worlds, Spiritfarer or Streets of Rage 4 being second rate. And, obviously, it’s one of those services that gets better value the longer you have it and you adjust your purchasing decisions so that you don’t already have some of the higher quality games as they get added. It’s why I haven’t, for instance, purchased Yakuza Like A Dragon, as it’s highly likely to be on the service in about 6 months.
I recently played Metro Exodus (purchased on Epic), and I can say that it is extremely buggy there too. Great game but I spent a lot of time researching how to fix game breaking bugs so that I could advance the story. Things where the entire game state froze, scripting stopped working, or NPC characters blocked me from exiting a door…effectively locking me in that space forever…until I rolled back several saves.
At last it’s not obfuscated like the UWP version preventing the benchmark from being accessible at all.
Yeah I’m sure that is an extra layer, but I was just pointing out the game is independently very buggy which is not specifically caused by the Game Pass infrastructure.
Bugs aside I really enjoyed Exodus and will likely add some thoughts in that game specific thread. It is a shame that the game was left in the state it is in. I played a year and a half after release and it seems like post release support stopped long ago leaving really critical problems unresolved.
Yeah this definitely, for me it’s about what not to purchase as it’s likely to appear on Gamepass. Saving £60 on 2 games pays for 6 months of it,making it a bargain. I don’t feel i have to put time in every month, just play the games I fancy.
TBH though Forza Horizon 4 was worth it just for that game and still is
Of the games you mention specifically, I don’t recall The Outer Worlds launching on there - in fact it was an early regret of mine as I’d bought it on Epic just a few months earlier. Gears Tactics I forgot about, which is unfair, because I thought it was pretty good and it worked(!). So that makes 2 games. The others, eh, not for me, first rate or not.
All I’m getting at here is 80+% of the things I wanted to play on it just didn’t work properly. Again, not minor bugs but game-ending problems. Hence the second rate comment.
Perhaps the fact that I was putting all my ‘risk’ on there (games I was sort of interested in but not quite prepared to put down cash for 'em) made this inevitable. Perhaps UWP makes things worse for developers so QA goes out the window. I don’t know.
All I do know is, I walked away from (nearly) a year of this disappointed. I’m sure if you look at my post history you’ll find that initially I was very keen on it indeed - ‘Game changer’ I said. But that doesn’t change how it shook out, or how I feel about it.
Sure, you like what you like, and if what you like has bugs, that sucks. I just think it’s a fundamental mischaracterisation to say the service is “built around second rate games”. It’s built around first party day and date releases and an extensive back catalogue of fantastic third party games, along with a surprising number of decent day and date third parties.
I do also question whether those bugs had anything to do with UWP or Game Pass. There are a lot of bugs around Game Pass, but as far as I know they’re almost exclusively around installation and the app, not gameplay issues once you’ve got a game running. So they’d almost certainly have occurred anyway if you’d bought them on Steam