Xbox Game Pass for Console, PC, and Android

I've heard so much about this game and kinda dig the retro styling but have generally been off JRPGs for the last 15 years. What's the hook?

Trashie wrote:

I've heard so much about this game and kinda dig the retro styling but have generally been off JRPGs for the last 15 years. What's the hook?

Traditional turn-based gameplay, mostly, with high end visuals. Game's story is eight separate characters with eight separate stories who get pulled together.

This isn't your typical JRPG where a kid is the savior of all mankind. It's more low key than that, story-wise.

Actually got around to playing Outriders with friends the other night, and this is a game that clearly shines in multiplayer. Your different class abilities do really help enforce different playstyles, and you can really strategize how to work together to mow through enemies. I don't know I'd spend any money on this, but, for GamePass, it should be fun.

It just feels . . . unambitious? It's like developers just took some Gears, some Destiny, some Mass Effect, and a few other well-known game mechanics, slapped it into a generic sci-fi world that depressingly reminds me of Anthem in terms of world-building, and created what appears to be a competent experience. To use one of my standard metaphors, it's the game equivalent of a hamburger at Applebee's. It's not great, but it wasn't trying to be great, and it succeeded at being the "pleasantly mediocre" it was shooting for.

A bunch of cool indies coming to GamePass this year.

I highly recommend art of rally if you like racing games.

I'm very curious about Backbone (played the prologue and it was quite good), Sable, and Dead Static Drive.

garion333 wrote:
Trashie wrote:

I've heard so much about this game and kinda dig the retro styling but have generally been off JRPGs for the last 15 years. What's the hook?

Traditional turn-based gameplay, mostly, with high end visuals. Game's story is eight separate characters with eight separate stories who get pulled together.

This isn't your typical JRPG where a kid is the savior of all mankind. It's more low key than that, story-wise.

Many many times over I’ve almost bought this for Switch.

Octopath does some neat things with the action economy and with enemy resistances. As you explore an area the enemies get easier, not necessarily because you've leveled up but because you know what moves are effective and how to counter what they're doing. There's also a nice tension between spending your banked extra actions to break an enemy now and interrupt their next move, or saving them until after you've broken the enemy so they'll take a lot of bonus damage.

One character has a move that has a chance of granting you a bonus XP multiplier, and you can optimize the action economy to spam that move over and over. If you do that and get over-leveled then the cool tensions I mentioned above stop mattering and the whole thing becomes a slog. I recommend not doing that.

I just finished Ori and the Will of the Wisps. I played probably the first 40% of it in the months after it came out, last spring, but I was really stuck. The map is so big and yet vague, and I particularly dislike that quest markers seem to be placed around where you got the quest rather than around where you should be looking. But there was enough there that I liked that I kept it installed and occasionally popped back in over the last several months to see if I was ready to play yet. Finally, for whatever reason, a week or two ago I just dug in.

Wherever I had been last stuck, I just looked up a guide video and found that the place I'd been stuck was because I didn't quite understand one of the traversal mechanics. I completed the latter 60% of the game (I'm referring to like % of the story/main game, not the actual percentages in the game) much faster than the initial chunk, for good reasons--as you get more abilities, it becomes much easier to get through various obstacles--and for bad reasons--I came to be quick to look up a video of how to do something (which I say is a bad reason for the developers, because they didn't design it clearly enough, I take no blame for using videos!). It's a very good game with a lot to like, but also pretty flawed.

I know some people like it, but I think the story kind of stinks. It tries to get a ton of mileage out of cutesy characters and big sad eyes. Really, it's not much of a story, which is fine, but any time I had to slow down for some somber narration and for some cute animal to cry big tear drops, I was just kind of bored.

The boss fights are mostly terrible. They're interspersed with very difficult escape sequences, and often the boss fights are multi-staged in ways that are frustrating, and both of those aspects have ungenerous checkpoints. I find it frustrating that the boss combat and the escape sequences have so many moments in them that it is just not possible to navigate through without knowing they're coming. I feel like the reason the escape sequences in particular exist is because, when executed correctly, they look awesome. But it feels way less awesome when you've done it 20 times in a row first, including getting 98% of the way through the sequence but accidentally bouncing off some lip of a ledge and having to do the whole damn thing over. The boss fights, too, you can be doing great on, but suddenly some new stage of the fight is unveiled where, say, platforms start collapsing around you and you had no reason to expect that or prepare for it so you're just dead and have to start over. I found just about every one of these to be annoying and tiresome, and I felt relief much more than accomplishment when they were done.

Overall I do think this is a very good platformer with absolutely gorgeous visuals. If they would make some of the combat and traversal slightly less difficult, I would enjoy it a lot more. It feels like they were trying to make a much more hardcore game than I would like. Some of that is seen in the achievements--I completed the game, completed several of the side quests, got a very large portion of the hidden items, and still ended up with only about 250 achievement points. There are achievements for things like completing the game without dying, or completing the game without ever touching contaminated water and just...who would do that? I guess I can't say they misjudged their audience, maybe they hooked tons of people who are into that sort of thing, but it didn't work for me.

Playing this, I've been tempted to go back to Hollow Knight, which I played a decent amount of on Switch but ultimately got too frustrated by the map situation. That part won't have improved, but maybe the combat will connect with me better after having gotten through Ori's (which I've gotten the general impression that people think Ori was stealing a lot of HK's combat but not executing it as well). We'll see...

A range of Xbox 360 and older games have been added to the cloud streaming service.

IMAGE(https://news.xbox.com/en-us/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/03/Back_Compat_Announce.jpg?w=2400)

I've lost track - is the cloud streaming service only part of Game Pass Ultimate, and thus isn't available to us PC Master Race Scrubs?

Because hell-oooooo Viva Pinata...

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Currently, cloud streaming is only available for Game Pass Ultimate subscribers and is only available on Android. They're expanding that to browsers and iOS in the near future, but it'll still require an Ultimate sub.

I’m very much looking forward to the Windows/Edge app so I can stream to my tv and Surface.

Man I wish I could get that setup they show with my phone. Unfortunately blue tooth technology is the worst and my phone won't pair with my xbox controller. I got what I needed to wire it to the phone unfortunately that doesn't work either because in game the camera just constantly rotates around like I'm holding the right stick the whole time.

I haven't tried xcloud yet, but I have successfully remote played from my Series x to my ipad. Controller synced fine with the iPad.

I need better wifi to really make it work well, though. I'm considering it.

I have that exact clip and if not that phone then a relative of it (I think that's a Galaxy 20; I have a Galaxy A52). It works great.

I have a Samsung A10E phone and just can't get it to work. It will connect to my Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 though. That is what I've been using but just with touch control games as it's a bit uncomfortable to use the tablet with a controller.

Fedaykin98 wrote:

I haven't tried xcloud yet, but I have successfully remote played from my Series x to my ipad. Controller synced fine with the iPad.

I need better wifi to really make it work well, though. I'm considering it.

I have messed around with xCloud on my Samsung Tab A 8.0 and was surprised how well it worked. I also tried the remote play stuff with my One X and the frame rate was horrible. I thought I had pretty decent wifi, but I guess not. I think that was on my iPhone 8 though as I haven't messed with it since I got the Series X or the tablet.

No Jet Force Gemini / Rare Replay full package.

I've got a 3 month Ultimate sub waiting for when that hits and they've got PC streaming up and running.

pandasuit wrote:

The website for EA Play says that Crysis 3 is included in the PC subscription but I can't find it in Game Pass or EA Desktop apps. Are not all Play games available yet?

Even the Origin site says it's available in Play (not just Play Pro):
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Crysis 3 showed up on PC Game Pass today

Fedaykin98 wrote:

I haven't tried xcloud yet, but I have successfully remote played from my Series x to my ipad. Controller synced fine with the iPad.

I need better wifi to really make it work well, though. I'm considering it.

What is a reliable setup wifi to use to stream from xbox to another room via wifi !?, I only use the default modem wifi in the house that has good range, should I consider some eero or deco mesh to add and stream efficiently?

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MLB THE SHOW 21

Day 1 on gamePass.... thats all....

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2021/04/...

I think it's a good thing overall gets more interest in the show. I do think some are over acting that it's a bad thing for Sony but more people playing the show can only make it better.

I know everyone in this thread is aware, but is just astonishing how good a deal Game Pass is. In a different world where Game Pass didn't exist I would have bought far more games over the past couple of years than I actually did, and I would have played far fewer. I was excited about the idea of The Show coming to Xbox but then saw that the next gen version was $70 and figured I wouldn't bother. Now I just get it included with my subscription!

I'm tempted to grab Horizon: Zero Dawn for $30 on gog, but with The Show coming to Gamepass, I feel like there's at least a chance that other Sony games will make their way there eventually, too.

I wouldn’t hold your breath on that. I get the strong impression that the Show went multiplatform only due to pressure from the license holder.

billt721 wrote:

I'm tempted to grab Horizon: Zero Dawn for $30 on gog, but with The Show coming to Gamepass, I feel like there's at least a chance that other Sony games will make their way there eventually, too.

FYI, it's 26.85 on Gamebillet. (I've been thinking about picking it up too)

Blind_Evil wrote:

I wouldn’t hold your breath on that. I get the strong impression that the Show went multiplatform only due to pressure from the license holder.

Yeah, there are no other major baseball games and they needed to find a way to get more $$$.

Honestly, exclusives on any platform seems like a horrible idea from a business standpoint for the developers and the publishers, and possibly even Sony. That’s leaving a lot of money on the table. Are we to assume that Sony is then paying the developers and publishers the same amount of money they would have made on the other platforms?

I know. This should go in the business thread.

I imagine the details will never reach public ears.

RawkGWJ wrote:

Honestly, exclusives on any platform seems like a horrible idea from a business standpoint for the developers and the publishers, and possibly even Sony. That’s leaving a lot of money on the table. Are we to assume that Sony is then paying the developers and publishers the same amount of money they would have made on the other platforms?

I know. This should go in the business thread.

My uneducated guess: developers that sign exclusivity deals are making a business decision to take guaranteed up-front money vs. potential future money.

Random example: Epic probably got a lot of money from MS to make Gears of War. Would they have sold enough on PS3 to overcome that up front money? In hindsight, yes, and they probably would prefer to own GoW as an IP.

Conversely, do you remember Fuse? It was an Insomniac game, and developed during a period where they were strongly tied to Sony. I’m not sure it was a possibility, but maybe they could have gotten some exclusivity money out of Sony (and the increased profile) rather than releasing it on Xbox 360 as well.

I have a annoying message stating my credit card is expiring. I paid through paypal so the message doesn't apply to me. Anyway to get rid of this message besides adding a credit card?