Topic: Official Push Square Xbox Thread

@Ralizah Starfield is actually quite good and worth playing, at least in part, but, like all Bethesda games, you get so far and then there's just so much choice and so many open quests and so little overall quality that you just don't bother any more, and it's never really worth powering through for the story either, as that isn't really their strong suit 😅

I feel like I'll go back to it at some point, but i'll ignore half of the quests that I thought would be worth it. It's worth trying for the onbparding phase though, and maybe it will grip you to some extent.

Shattered Space, however... a 5/10 on pure xbox 😬😬😬 eeeeesh

@Ravix What was the exploration like? I hear that is one of the things that people say is missing the most compared to their previous games. Defo my favourite part of their games.

Yep those reviewers on Pure Xbox must be Sony ponies then lol.

@JohnnyShoulder yeah, I guess exploration wasn't the best as everything is so spread out, and to get there it is mostly clicking buttons on the map before landing. In a way it works, as it is supposed to feel desolate, but the best parts are in the settlements. Each planet will have standard copy/paste bases, place of interest etc. But there's a few big settlements on some planets; a western city, a base on Mars, a cyberpunk city on an oil rig, a futuristic space port, stuff like that, and they contain most of the quests.

Finding a location and building your own base is also alright, although it basically turned into a processing plant for all of the materials that were auto-mining from smaller bases. So it did become mining and shipping materials across the galaxy to craft shipping containers to store the materials to craft more shipping containers. But it looked cool in full operation and it takes care of itself 😅

I honeslty can't remember if the exploration in Skyrim was actually any better though? I feel like it was quite "pathy" obviously more densely packed as it is one section of one world, which helps, but having played Skyrim only a few years ago, I don't think it felt like properly open exploration or that intuitive with discovering stuff and there were loads of places where you're gated in, it seemed.

Quest wise Skyrim was very open ended and left nearly everything to player choice, and Starfield is basically the same structure in those terms, however.

@Ravix I do sort of wonder if Bethesda games haven't necessarily gotten worse, but open world games have just improved overall, and BGS never evolved, so their stuff just looks bad now in comparison.

We didn't have stuff like Breath of the Wild, Elden Ring, The Witcher 3, etc. when Fallout 3 and Skyrim were making waves, after all.

@colonelkilgore The Xboxiest of fanboys see Sony fans under their bed at night. It's incredibly funny.

Although Push Square can be pretty bad with fanboy comments under the articles as well.

@JohnnyShoulder It has certainly been... a generation... for Sony and Microsoft. Although at least Sony seems to alternate Ws and Ls.

I don’t play Starfield since I don’t have an interest in it, but it’s so surprising to hear no one liked the new DLC they released for it, cuz I did hear some say Starfielc was a decent game. I guess the DLC wasn’t the same?

I don’t know, it seems that with the reception for a few of Xbox’s exclusives that recently released, it’s either decent but not entirely amazing or mediocre rather than getting super good reception, and I think the only game I can think of that came out of a Microsoft game studio in recent times that was highly acclaimed was Hi-Fi Rush. I think that’s why I only really stuck to Rare’s games on the Xbox cuz I keep hearing of new Xbox exclusives being only okay. It’s really disappointing to hear that almost all the time since I love my Xbox a lot and it’s my main gaming console.

@Ravix I didn't really get on with Skyrim too well as i think I found too open ended. Got distracted by a load of side quests, had a break from it and when I started playing it again I lost interest in it.

Think I found Fallout 3 the best for exploration and discoverablity.

Hmm.

Tried Genesis Noir a couple of times this week, but I can't work out if I like it or not.

I think it's just making me want a genuine, all-out Noir, point and click advententure - without the creation element on top of it

Hmm

If Xbox made a console PC hybrid, do we think it would run the PS games that got ported to PC 👀

After all the Xbox articles this is what popped into my head: their end goal, after offering up titles to PS and acting like a publisher, is they might be planning to make a PC that functions like a console to say "we finally got PS Studios games on our Xbox, please come back over to our side for the next gen"

Otherwise, what would be the point in making another console after all of their other decisions and game pass being stuck as it is 🤷‍♂️

@Ravix Multiple storefronts and Steam compatibility on an Xbox console would be wild.

That said, the PC-as-console thing didn't take off for Valve (aside from Steam Deck, but that exploited a demand in the handheld/hybrid space left unsatisfied by Nintendo's piddly hardware), and it's difficult to imagine it working much better for Microsoft, either.

Unless they're competitively priced and Microsoft wildly improves its marketing.