Xbox Game Studios Stupidity Hate Thread Game Pass Edition

[guiltyspark85]

The "ray tracing mandate" certainly didn't help. Nothing like automatically soft-locking about 30-40% of your potential audience out of the game.

I question that they're excluding such a large audience. The 30-40%, I assume based on Steam hardware surveys, more the kind of people playing the 'latest and greatest' AAA games, or are they more skewed towards playing older games and indie titles? TDA min system requirements are mid-range first gen RT cards at this point 5-6 years old - not bleeding edge hardware.

But I think the RT requirement could dissuade people from purchasing the game that have RT hardware. There's a quite justifiable association with turning on RT features tanks a games performance, so if TDA requires RT it's going to run like shit.

And I'm not trying to simp for RT and the obsolescence of older hardware. I've heard one of the 'really good' reasons for requiring RT is that lighting is it's significantly more efficient for artists to work with than traditional baked lighting. Fascinating how we hear about such efficiency gains with better technology and tools for game development, but teams sizes are ever increasing for marginal improvements in graphical fidelity.

Sold well on Xbox, or overall? Because I know Silksong broke Steam because demand was so high but I can't imagine people were rushing out to buy Xboxes so they could own a digital copy on their Series X.

Personally I bought Silksong on Steam and a physical copy of Clair Obscur for PS5; it never even occurred to me to use Game Pass,

I'm speaking overall, but I'm not sure how much relevance selling well on Xbox hardware has. In user base it's behind PS5 and well behind PC. TDA peaked at 31,470 concurrent players on Steam. Forza Horizon 6 on the other hand, which I assume would be more Xbox skewed than TDA, peaked at 302,645 players. That's nearly 10 x players as TDA.

I sincerely doubt anybody outside id is even qualified to work with (much less understand) id tech. It's depressing to know now there's only two major general-purpose engines left (Unity and Unreal). id tech has always been state-of-the-art. Their decision to mandate ray tracing in id tech 8 was something a lot of people found baffling. It absolutely didn't need it. Doom 2016 ran silky-smooth on potatoes. Even "low quality" looked good. Losing that tech to history and scattering knowledge of its inner workings to the four winds by laying off its developers is a big technological loss. It being Microsoft-owned means we naturally can't expect them to open-source it like older engines were.

MachineGames and Arkane have used several different versions of id tech. The Indiana Jones game used an enhanced version of the id tech 7 engine, so I'm not sure why they couldn't move over to the id tech 8 engine. Not sure if Arkane have updated to a newer version of id tech with their Blade game, but they supposedly used id tech 6 with Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot

 

[El Chacal De La Trompeta]

i wonder why rockstar doesnt license the rage engine

 

[Samuel Fuller]

Naaah, she'll delegate that shit. There will be like a jeet death squad going from one studio to another. Nobody will even know be able to pronounce their names, but they are feared and there's always something ominous in the air before they arrive.

fixed

 

[Super Hans v2]

I don't get the ire over idtech being killed off. Nobody outside of Zenimax has used it since idtech 4, and 8 was announced last year. It's not like any studio worth complaining about will be affected.

 

[GeorgeFloydFentanylStash]

I don't get the ire over idtech being killed off. Nobody outside of Zenimax has used it since idtech 4, and 8 was announced last year. It's not like any studio worth complaining about will be affected.

It’d be cool if Microsoft could hire some engineers away from Epic that know the inner workings of Unreal Engine to help create a real competitor to Unreal Engine,

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

Who bought that? Outer Worlds 1 sucked. It's wasted potential the game.

Nah, it never had any potential.

It was the blandest game with the blandest gameplay and the blandest setting in the history of the world. The only noteworthy thing about it was the "FALLOUT KILLER! BETHESDA IS DEAD!" hype train prior to release, which all went markedly quiet the very moment people started playing it.

 

[Quijibo69]

I played it for 4 hours and the amount of copy paste assets was mind boggling.

 

[Questions are a Burden]

I played the first one for free and I think I finished it. I'm not certain because the entire thing was completely forgettable.

 

[moocow]

MachineGames and Arkane have used several different versions of id tech. The Indiana Jones game used an enhanced version of the id tech 7 engine, so I'm not sure why they couldn't move over to the id tech 8 engine.

Word is the engine is being discarded/discontinued, not shared with other Microsoft studios or licensed to third parties.

 

[GeorgeFloydFentanylStash]

I played the first one for free and I think I finished it. I'm not certain because the entire thing was completely forgettable.

I pirated the first one and didn’t get 10 hours into the game before I uninstalled it.

 

[Oliver Onions]

I'm speaking overall, but I'm not sure how much relevance selling well on Xbox hardware has.

I consider it relevant because Game Pass was supposed to be Phil's hail mary to save Xbox as a brand, but all it seems to have achieved is the acceleration of its demise while the competition prospers.

 

[Samuel Fuller]

It’d be cool if Microsoft could hire some engineers away from Epic that know the inner workings of Unreal Engine to help create a real competitor to Unreal Engine,

The last thing the world needs is MS having a foot in the door for game middleware.

 

[Korpon]

there's always something ominous in the air before they arrive.

Yeah that's the smell of curry, body odor, and feces

 

[Samuel Fuller]

Yeah that's the smell of curry, body odor, and feces

I don't know what feces are, but they smell like CRAP!