~The Game Pass Thread~

Unfortunately nobody can find out at the moment, at least through Game Pass - the game crashes on startup.

Ysbryd Games on Twitter: “Hey everyone, we’re aware that VA-11 Hall-A on @XboxGamePassPC is consistently crashing for all players immediately after selecting New Game. We’re investigating this & will deliver a fix for the Game Pass build ASAP. Hang tight, soon it’ll be time to mix drinks and change lives! https://t.co/ZL8Ww8yCiu” / Twitter

Is there any way to stop PC Gamepass doing that annoying “take me to the games” on startup? And why is it so slow to load the library every time? Feel the app got worse when the monthly price went up. I can’t even find a way to sort the library (other than “move to top”, yeah, really useful MS), or make it put the text name of the game by default instead of having to click the arrow. If I use “move to top” the order just reverts to random chaos the next time I open the app anyway. Ffffuuuuuuuuuu

There’s something seriously wrong with the app these days. It’s laggy and sometimes dips to 30 fps. Fortunately, I’m only in there for a second.

I haven’t tried the app since I got an Xbox Series X, so after reading these posts this morning, I fired up the Xbox app on my PC, and it loaded up that green loading screen, and then it turned black and showed nothing. I waited a while, and then shut it down. And back when it was in beta when this happened, I would have to shut it from the bottom right icon in the task bar. So I did that. And then I restarted the app.

And it does the same thing. So, it looks like the app isn’t working at all for me now.

I’ll have to troubleshoot it when I get home tonight.

The opening splash screen appearing every. single. time. has to be a bug. Really annoying though.

The “repair” function in Settings → Apps may help with this.

I definitely haven’t seen a splash screen when I open the GamePass (“Xbox”) app (win10 PC) in a long time. Overall though the app is useable but embarassingly slow in the “takes 10-15 seconds to load” timeframes. It’s decently pretty, but the pages are basically just box art and game info - I’m not sure why it’s not near-instantaneous, so I’m never surprised when weird things happen. For me it’s empty boxes in the “Recently Added” row so I know there’s new games coming. I often try to refresh it by going to another page and coming back or restarting the app, which has like a 10% success rate, so usually I’ll I come here or google first to see what’s being added and whether it’s worth the effort to get those boxes to load.

There was an update yesterday that happened to, among other things, change green loading to black loading. But then it normally loads for me and works. Check your microsoft store - updates to see if it can be updated there, or run repair as recommended above.

The app is still shit though. I just hate how the games are still encrypted and all that nonsense. But GP itself is a good deal.

Wasn’t Dragon Quest XI supposed to come out today as well? The new version which has worse graphics but better music?

Yes. It’s supposed to be out today for both PC and console Game Pass.

It doesn’t say what time today though.

Check to see if there isn’t a window underneath awaiting input. Happens to me all the time with this.

Oh wait, are you talking about the pulsing xbox heart thing? Yes, I see that when I open the app and it has turned to a BLACK HEART. But also when I closed and reopened to confirm, DQXI popped up in the Recently Added row!

LeSigh Xbox app - turning it off and on again is the most reliable way to update things…

Yeah, I’m arguing with it as well. Been trying all week to Fallout 76 re-installed. Tried installed to D: drive. Download was RIDICULOUSLY slow, despite having a speedy connection at home. Game wouldn’t run, kept giving an error, was advised to install it on the same drive as the OS. I kinda remember seeing this when it first came out. Oops.

Uninstalled, and for several days now have been trying to get it on the OS drive. The app has completely crashed on me twice, at like 76%, and then had to start over when it came back up. And twice this morning it’s locked up requiring a restart, and had to start the download over (although I’ve only been like 5% in, so not a huge loss…just an annoyance.)

I wanted to check the game out again because I heard it had come a long way, but…this is frustrating.

Although maybe installing games is the metagame? A lot of times I’ll download things and not actually open them (also in Steam) … Goodbye Gears Tactics, I downloaded you in hopes of giving you another shot but you’re gone because I feel I have more of a chance of trying out Dragon Quest… Although I also don’t feel as bad about doing things like uninstalling Wolfenstein Youngblood because it keeps crashing with Vulcan errors - too bad I needed an excuse anyways to move onto DOOM …

If you have Ultimate, you could try out the cloud version on an Android device.

I do! I may do that. Hopefully I’ll be able to get the damn game installed soon, though. Fingers crossed!

I just much prefer playing with mouse and keyboard.

That’s super weird, given that the app on an Android phone seems to be perfectly snappy.

My opinion on Haven: one of the worst mouse implementation I’ve seen in years. First, “Invert y axis” works in normal gameplay but it doesn’t in the scenes inside your base, the game has some weird negative acceleration (moving fast the mouse turn me less than moving the mouse slowly!) and the combat UI is weird in how you have to hold keys or press buttons in specific moments, it was really designed for controllers.
And even forgetting that, I don’t like the jrpg style of combat AND the game already started to be repetitive, with the current quest of ‘collect 25 doodads’.

The couple is cute, but not enough to support the game. And apart from cuteness, I would care more of them if I knew their backstories more, but it seems the game is going to need a good number of hours to get to that.

Awe, that is too bad. My expectations were a lot higher for this game based on the interviews with the developers which seemed to exclusively focus on the relationship and interpersonal dynamics with the couple and didn’t talk much about the open world repetitiveness. Seems like this idea would have worked better without an open world tacked on.

Turns out I had an update that needed to be installed for Gaming Services from the Microsoft Store. That update wouldn’t install correctly until I restarted the PC and tried again. Then the Doom Eternal install worked…

…and I played 10 minutes and decided it is both too retro and too fiddly for me. I really liked the Doom reboot from 2016, and I get the appeal of Eternal’s retro aesthetic, but it’s not for me at this point. (And I really hate the weapon customization. Why make old-school demon killing the center of your game and then throw a bunch of inventory and customization screens in my face when all I want to do is cut demons in half with my chainsaw?

Oh cool. I actually refunded it when I bought it, but this time it’s going a lot better.

I agree it seems fiddly early on. I’m assuming that goes away with familiarity.