Final Fantasy X! Finally! They promised that one last year at E3.
Also, I wonder if that’s just the original Xbox version of Psychonauts that I already own, or if either the Xbox version or PC version is adding achievements?
Of course, going for achievements might lessen your enjoyment of the game if it’s like the Steam achievements, but hey, it will be my 3rd time through, so they can’t ruin it for me now!
Remedy got the publishing rights and the IP back from Microsoft in 2019.
I’ve been playing Second Extinction on PC and so far love the gameplay and shooting. I am actually finding it quite challenging (in a good way) as I have attempted the first campaign mission solo a few times now and ultimately failed each time despite being granted 3 revives per attempt. That said, I have been completing a lot of dynamic side missions and picking up all the bones and sinew that dinos drop which inform the meta-progression and let you upgrade weapons (with dino parts!?) and gain account experience.
Another aspect I like is the dynamic map that responds to player activity and success. The map is divided up in different regions that then show how well humans have been fighting back the dinosaur invasion or areas where we are failing and the dinos spread into other regions, become more numerous, or more dangerous with excessive mutations. This has a direct connection to in-match games. Playing the campaign mission I was forced to travel across several different regions so in some cases the threat was lighter and in other cases I was being swarmed with special types of dinos with powerful mutations and barely surviving. There are also dynamic optional objectives that spawn across the map, are shown during region-select, and appear in your matches like drones to capture or supply caches to liberate. That is all a nice touch.
This is still early access though and I have been frustrated by the graphical presentation a bit and I am not sure if what I am seeing is intentional or a bug. Despite playing with the video settings a lot the game seems to have a slightly blurry or unfocused presentation like a very thin layer of vaseline was smeared across my vision.
The other issue that feels more like a bug is that there are regions or areas that are covered in an aqua blue/green fog that is fairly thick. My sense is that was supposed to be more localized or present differently, but there may be something that is glitching here, not sure. I tried watching some YouTube videos to see if it was duplicated for other players, but haven’t seen it yet (actually saw some brief moments of it in a montage of clips). Everything is still quite playable, but the fog feels off. I will play around with settings again and might even reinstall to see if that helps.
So graphical issues aside I quite enjoyed my time with this, and I am eager to see how it develops.
So I guess I got into the Xcloud for PC beta last week. I tried it out this morning playing The Show and Control.
It’s pretty good, but it’s not as good as Geforce Now. It looks pretty low-rez on my 1440p monitor (not sure what rez they display at, but I assume 1080…it doesn’t look terrific and I don’t see any way to increase the resolution)
Also, often jumpy with quite frequent audio glitches. Latency doesn’t seem to be a big problem or, at least, they’ve figured out a way to make it seem like it’s not a big problem. I was able to gun down the Hiss and jump across chasms without any issue anyway.
They’re really going to need to fix the presentation issues if they’re hoping to make this a mainstream offering, though. GFN looks a lot better.
Unless they changed it xCloud runs on XboneS hardware, so think sub 1080p and 30fps. It’s supposed to run on XSX at some point.
I had pretty much the same experience with Forza Horizon 4. I think the biggest thing they need to fix is the audio glitches, it just feels like a bad experience because of that. It controls just fine, and I don’t mind the occasional graphical glitch. But they need a solution for the audio.
Yeah, I’m not going to say it’s unplayable, but it’s not fun to play. The audio skips a beat about every 2 seconds, give or take. It’s not very enjoyable.
And I booted back up Control, and I’m pretty sure stusser is right…it’s not even 1080. More like 720. It’s really pixelated until you get right up on an object and then it snaps into a higher resolution.
The upgrade to Series X servers hasn’t happened yet. All we’ve seen are ‘sometime in 2021’ but who knows how COVID has affected that.
I wonder how long the switch will take. TSMC is churning out as many 7nm wafers as they can but they’re in demand for AMD, Xbox, PS5, the works.
If anyone has played The Show 21 on xbox/ps and also is in the Xcloud demo, I’d be interested to know what you think of the performance. I suck at it, but it’s a split-second timing game that I’ve never played before, and I don’t know if button-press latency or graphic latency is making me worse at it than I would be otherwise.
The experience streaming to mobile sounds so sub par I’m not sure who the target audience is that asked for this except for the handful of people who need to remotely check in on their EVE online spreadsheets or something.
I’ve played a decent amount of xcloud on my tablet and overall have enjoyed the experience. Would I play competitive games like fighting games or rocket league, no, have I enjoyed playing games like Monster Sactuary and Outer Worlds, yes.
Performance varies heavily by title, in my experience. Batman and Outriders haven’t been very good, but Shadow of War has been great and Minecraft Dungeons works so well on mobile you’d think it was an Apple Arcade game.
I’ve played it a little here and there. I honestly can’t tell if I’m always late on the pitching meter because of latency, or because I’m aging and slow.
yeah, that’s where I am too.
See, I played Shadow of War in my Edge browser and it was OK (how do you make it full screen BTW?), but nowhere near as nice as playing the version I own through Steam on my PC. Just felt a bit laggy somehow, and definitely wasn’t being rendered at 1440p. On the other hand it didn’t make my PC sound like a vacuum cleaner either (I strongly suspect the DRM is responsible for that), so there’s that.
FYI, apparently you can buy a 1 year subscription to EA Play for $30 from Amazon and it will convert to 4 months of ultimate game pass which works out to $7.50/month. Not an awful deal for those who can’t do the $1/month trick anymore.
Use F11 to toggle full-screen.
Thank you, works great. Loading up the years!
While not as cheap as the previous method, I personally find this way much more appealing than entering in a thousand 7-day codes. Also feels less risky/icky.
I think the games max out at 1080p currently. Unlike GeForce Now and Luna, I’ve found that the Gamepass games never look as good as locally run counterparts. Until they switch from Xbox ones to Series X’s, that will probably continue to be true.
I tend to grade it on a curve because the library is so huge.