Xbox One Catch-all

Scorn didn't look like in game footage to me...I guess they say it is "in engine" not necessarily game play.

Everything had a little tag at the bottom that the game and console are still in development and that the footage show is representative of expected quality on the Series X.

I thought it was extremely weird that they had their "we're going to show actual gameplay" flex at the beginning and then have that caveat in every trailer.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

I thought it was extremely weird that they had their "we're going to show actual gameplay" flex at the beginning and then have that caveat in every trailer.

The Killzone disclaimer.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

I'm pretty worn out on AAA games these days (oh look, another open world where I sneak through tall grass and kill animals to make a bigger wallet!) so the focus on smaller, indie games was fine by me.

Amen! I’m also super burnt out on the power-fantasy trope. By that I mean, you're the only one who can save x. replace x with the girl, princess, city, country, world, universe, etc. Add to that any game that’s based on the heroes journey. While that theme works really well within the constructs of a video game, it’s been done too many times.

Any game that breaks those molds will have my attention.

farley3k wrote:

Scorn didn't look like in game footage to me...I guess they say it is "in engine" not necessarily game play.

Don't worry, they showed gameplay three years ago. Basically looked like an FPS set in a hellish, alien, HR Giger environment, where your weapons are made from living tissue.

Personally, I imagine the audience for Scorn to be pretty small, but maybe they're out there.

Jayhawker wrote:

That’s fun. And, yeah, totally would do that. I actually planned on getting Animal Crossing for Teresa, but, she doesn’t like any social interaction in games. She prefers Harvest Moon in that vein.

Rught now she is obsessing over that Goose game, something I doubt she looks at without Gamepass.

I made a "no goose" sign from an Untitled Goose Game screenshot for my Animal Crossing game and have it set up right next to Resident Services. People can see it from the plane when they fly over to visit.

I love that goose game, though I haven't yet completed it! Bought it the very first day I heard about it right here on GWJ!

I wonder how many games are going to end up adopting Microsoft's "smart delivery" system to give cross-gen versions of the game for free. Nine of the thirteen games they showed off today have smart delivery. The ones that don't appear to be next-gen only: Bright Memory Infinite, Dirt 5, Scorn, and The Medium.

Fedaykin98 wrote:
farley3k wrote:

Scorn didn't look like in game footage to me...I guess they say it is "in engine" not necessarily game play.

Don't worry, they showed gameplay three years ago. Basically looked like an FPS set in a hellish, alien, HR Giger environment, where your weapons are made from living tissue.

Personally, I imagine the audience for Scorn to be pretty small, but maybe they're out there.

What I'm reading about it makes it sound like it's also a Metroidvania. I am so all over this game when it releases.

Overall, I thought the Xbox 1st gameplay reveal was a pretty good introduction. Those were a bunch of premieres/1st looks with a nice diversity. Obviously there was racing, footballing, and shooting (xbox duh) but there were also some interesting indie-style games more on the side of walking simulators or just "different".

Similar to ClockworkHouse, I'm way more interested in smaller, interesting games than massive AAA open world things. However, I'm just not into a lot of horror, so Scorn and The Medium weren't real engaging for me. Call of the Sea was the most interesting to me.

Still, I thought AC: Valhalla, Bright Memory Infinite, Chorus, and Scarlet Nexus looked interesting. If they get rave reviews or they're free on Game Pass at some point, I'd be interested in trying them out.

I really liked the emphasis on Smart Delivery, Game Pass, and that there are a lot more games coming later. (:

I'm just surprised Sony hasn't announced a Smart Delivery equivalent yet. Surely the publishers doing it on Xbox will do it on PS5?

Like we discussed when Cyberpunk first announced Smart Delivery, they're really just solving their own problem of people waiting to buy until they can get the better version.

Then again, Sony's cloud saves are ass, so maybe they aren't confident of letting people go back and forth between generations seamlessly. If that's the case, I'd say Xbox's gamer-friendly infrastructure is paying dividends once again.

That said, only the hardcore will even know about this, let alone make a buying decision based on it.

Didn't really have time to chime in on the InsideXbox thing since we had to drive to Missouri to take care of some stuff over the weekend. Some of the games look neat, but as others have pointed out where was the damn game-play? This was such a fail on MS's part. Either people told them it was supposed to be game-play footage and they ran it without verifying or some knob in marketing made them say it was game-play when it wasn't.

Second Extinction is probably the winner for me. Left 4 Dead with dinosaurs? I'm in. Chorus looked cool as well and Scorn looked nightmare inducing.

Deal seems to be dead.

No Man's Sky coming to Game Pass. Thats pretty cool. Game keeps getting better, as does Game Pass.

Xbox Series X backward compatibility will add HDR, 120 fps support to older games.

“In partnership with the Xbox Advanced Technology Group, Xbox Series X delivers a new, innovative HDR reconstruction technique which enables the platform to automatically add HDR support to games. As this technique is handled by the platform itself, it allows us to enable HDR with zero impact to the game’s performance and we can also apply it to Xbox 360 and original Xbox titles developed almost 20 years ago, well before the existence of HDR.

“In addition, the new Quick Resume feature was designed to not only work with new games, but it can also be enabled for backward-compatible titles. Quick Resume enables players to resume exactly where they left off, across multiple titles, ensuring gamers can get right back to the fun in an instant.”

“The team also continues to listen to feedback from the community on additional titles you would like to see added to the compatibility program. Resurrecting titles from history often presents a complex mix of technical and licensing challenges, but the team is committed to doing everything we can to continue to preserve our collective gaming legacy.”

I am loving Control, but twice now it has overheated so bad that the Xbox completely shutoff, and I have to pull the power plug out ofthe pack and wait a minute before restarting.

Mixolyde wrote:

I am loving Control, but twice now it has overheated so bad that the Xbox completely shutoff, and I have to pull the power plug out ofthe pack and wait a minute before restarting.

That's part of the game. It's very meta.

lunchbox12682 wrote:
Mixolyde wrote:

I am loving Control, but twice now it has overheated so bad that the Xbox completely shutoff, and I have to pull the power plug out ofthe pack and wait a minute before restarting.

That's part of the game. It's very meta.

Ok, but how did it go back in time to make Path of Exile overheat the box the same way...

Spooky.

Mixolyde wrote:

I am loving Control, but twice now it has overheated so bad that the Xbox completely shutoff, and I have to pull the power plug out ofthe pack and wait a minute before restarting.

That sounds like a hardware failure. Bad fan, clogged airflow, or heatsink no longer has a tight connection.

EvilDead wrote:
Mixolyde wrote:

I am loving Control, but twice now it has overheated so bad that the Xbox completely shutoff, and I have to pull the power plug out ofthe pack and wait a minute before restarting.

That sounds like a hardware failure. Bad fan, clogged airflow, or heatsink no longer has a tight connection.

That’s a bunch of crap! It’s clearly gremlins or poltergeists.

Geez, a month since a post in the Xbox thread. Anyhoo . . .

I've got a trio of Xboxes, and they've stopped syncing saves to the cloud. Noticed a while back in Minecraft (the upstairs one doesn't get used that much), but I've been picking up No Man's Sky lately, and just fired it up again for some lunchtime space-wandering, and it still has the save time from when I did that yesterday as opposed to all the stuff I did last night. Thoughts? It appears network speed can be blamed frequently for this, but I've got a wired connection on a 100+mb cable connection, so it shouldn't be that at all, and I've certainly done this with other games in the past; AC: Odyssey at the start of the year had no issues. My son says he has Minecraft problems between the other box and downstairs, so maybe it's game-related?

Any thoughts? I can go into Settings/Storage and manually clear the local game saves and it'll reboot and sync up, but that's a pain in the butt at this point.

Doing a quick web search I see suggestions to make sure your Xboxes are set to use the Fast Boot/Low Power mode option or to let them sit a bit before powering them off and before launching your game and that exiting the game completely instead of using quick resume may help.

Rykin wrote:

Doing a quick web search I see suggestions to make sure your Xboxes are set to use the Fast Boot/Low Power mode option or to let them sit a bit before powering them off and before launching your game and that exiting the game completely instead of using quick resume may help.

I've seen a lesser version of this problem that seems to coincide with not exiting the game completely.

Fedaykin98 wrote:
Rykin wrote:

Doing a quick web search I see suggestions to make sure your Xboxes are set to use the Fast Boot/Low Power mode option or to let them sit a bit before powering them off and before launching your game and that exiting the game completely instead of using quick resume may help.

I've seen a lesser version of this problem that seems to coincide with not exiting the game completely.

I had that happen in the past, and now religiously shut the game down from the dashboard. I don't typically wait a while for the box to sit around after shutting it down, but haven't done that consistently in any way. I just actually fired it up, dinked around for a few minutes, saved, and did a full exit, and now letting the box sit for a while. Will see if that makes a difference.

Weird that it seems to be title-specific, though. I'm not doing anything different than I did with Odyssey.

I would also add that I think it's almost exclusively happened when I have been playing on my launch Xbox One, and never when I have been playing on my One X.

I’ve had that happen on my 1X with Control and Two Point Hospital. And I think one other game which I can’t remember. In all instances I was playing a game, then put it in sleep mode, and when I came back a few hours later to continue playing, the game had rebooted rather than wake up and all unsaved progress was gone.

Looks like we can look forward to going over our data caps towards the end of the month thanks to Microsoft's Summer Game Fest Demo Event that is going to run from July 21st through the 27th. They are saying over 60 limited time demos will be available during that time period. Instead of being the normal demos we are used to these will be more akin to what you might see at PAX or E3 and some are for games that might still be a ways off. They haven't announced very many of the games but they mention Cris Tales, Destroy All Humans!, Haven, Hellpoint, Skatebird, The Vale: Shadow of the Crown, Raji: An Ancient Epic, and Welcome to Elk.

Over 60 games (they mention 75 to 100 games elsewhere in the article) seems like a lot to be downloading and trying in such a short amount of time. Seems to me that this would have been a good test for their xCloud stuff.

Destroy All Humans was brilliant, but I played it with backwards compatibility, and it's very much an OG Xbox game where a lot of the gameplay is just running around part of a city collecting stuff and doing wacky things. Wondering if they've tweaked it at all, or if it's just a shiny re-skin.

MilkmanDanimal wrote:
Fedaykin98 wrote:
Rykin wrote:

Doing a quick web search I see suggestions to make sure your Xboxes are set to use the Fast Boot/Low Power mode option or to let them sit a bit before powering them off and before launching your game and that exiting the game completely instead of using quick resume may help.

I've seen a lesser version of this problem that seems to coincide with not exiting the game completely.

I had that happen in the past, and now religiously shut the game down from the dashboard. I don't typically wait a while for the box to sit around after shutting it down, but haven't done that consistently in any way. I just actually fired it up, dinked around for a few minutes, saved, and did a full exit, and now letting the box sit for a while. Will see if that makes a difference.

Weird that it seems to be title-specific, though. I'm not doing anything different than I did with Odyssey.

More food for my thinking that this kind of thing only happens with my launch Xbox One, and not my One X: Saturday night I was playing Saints Row 2 on the launch Xbox One. I manually saved, force quit the game, and turned off the Xbox One. A few minutes later, I checked the saves on the One X, and it loaded without noticing that there was a discrepancy with the saves it had versus what was in the cloud - meaning that the cloud hadn't been updated yet. I waited 24 hours and checked again (without ever using the launch Xbox One) and it prompted me about the discrepancy. I told it I had more recently played on a different Xbox, it downloaded those, and all was good. It wasn't all good in the hood, but I don't want to spoil any of Saints Row 2 for the uninitiated.

Now, this is happening with a 360 game. If it were an Xbox One game, I'm not sure what would have happened. Do they give prompts about mismatches with cloud saves?

xCloud news released today in a blog post by Phil Spencer:

Finally, today we’re announcing that this September, in supported countries, we’re bringing Xbox Game Pass and Project xCloud together at no additional cost for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate members. With cloud gaming in Game Pass Ultimate, you will be able to play over 100 Xbox Game Pass titles on your phone or tablet. And because Xbox Live connects across devices, you can play along with the nearly 100 million Xbox Live players around the world. So when Halo Infinite launches, you and your friends can play together and immerse yourselves in the Halo universe as Master Chief—anywhere you go and across devices.

No mention of what xCloud will cost for non Game Pass Ultimate people. Also still no mention of Windows or Mac or Switch support for xCloud. Also no mention of specifically what games it will support. I am hoping it allows you to run any game you own plus anything on Game Pass, but it doesn't sound like that will be the case at launch.

And in other news Microsoft released a statement today that they are discontinuing manufacturing of the Xbox One X and Xbox One S All-Digital Edition:

At Xbox, we’re making massive investments to forge the future of gaming—a future that puts the player at the center of the Xbox experience. We continue to build great games for Xbox One. We continue to build out Game Pass, now with more than 10 million members across Xbox console and PC. We’re previewing Project xCloud in 15 countries so gamers can play games with their friends on any device. And we’re working hard on the next-generation of console gaming with Xbox Series X—the fastest, most powerful console we’ve ever built which includes backward compatibility with thousands of Xbox games and all Xbox One accessories. As we ramp into the future with Xbox Series X, we’re taking the natural step of stopping production on Xbox One X and Xbox One S All-Digital Edition. Xbox One S will continue to be manufactured and sold globally. Gamers can check with their local retailers for more details on Xbox One hardware availability.