Incomplete list of announced games
A bit of a boring lineup of games this year, people seem to be regarding Metroid Prime 4 as the biggest announcement. In the biggest non-announcement category, Bethesda does not seem to be working on Elder Scrolls 6, but they’re working on trying to foist some version of their paid mods bullshit on the community again, which has received an almost universally negative response. But hey, they announced Skyrim for the 15th time, this time for the Switch.
A surprising price for Project Scorpio - people were expecting $700-800 but it will launch for $500, which is actually fairly impressive. They’ve chosen to extend the poor names in the Xbox series by calling it the “Xbox One X”, as opposed to the current “Xbox One S”, which of course couldn’t possibly confuse anyone.
I probably should’ve started a separate thread a while ago to see what people thought about the new iterated mid-cycle refreshes of the 8th generation consoles - between the PS4 Pro and the XboneX, especially since they’re just fully PC hardware now, it makes you wonder if we’re going to see console generations at all anymore, or if we’re just going to get endless refreshes that are increasingly powerful.
The buzzword around all these things is “4K”, which is what they’re claiming the XboneX is geared towards. This is actually a pretty poor design goal - most people watch their TV from far enough away that you see minimal to no benefit from upping the resolution to 4K. Current consoles generally render around 900p at 20-30 FPS (some games run up to 60) with the equivalent of medium settings comparing the same game to the PC version.
Going to 1080p/60+ fps/High or Ultra settings is a way better experience than trying to push for 4k/20-30/low-medium settings in an attempt to chase a buzz word rather than give users the better experience. I would hope that the console will allow that when ran on a 1080p TV, but I’m not sure. It’s weird enough for me that games have to be specifically updated to run better on the PS4 and XboneX - the better hardware doesn’t just make the games run better by itself, as it would on PC - only games specifically reworked or tuned to take advantage of the new hardware will benefit.
That said, I’m generally supportive of the new iterations of the consoles. Developers putting more effort into low vs high quality modes for their games will trickle over to PC games which will gain the benefits of the high end.
Back to games. Xbone will be getting PlayerUnknowns’ Battlegrounds, which is funny to me since it went from “oh who cares about some PC game” to “OMG OMG I JUST CREAMED MYSELF, PUBG!!!”
Rocket League will come out for Switch, which will allow cross platform play between PC/Xbox/Switch. Sony is being kind of an asshole about it still. Currently, PS4 can play with PC, and Xbone can play with PC, but there’s no PS4/Xbox crossplay. And now that Nintendo is involved, everyone can play with Nintendo except, again, PS4. Microsoft has been a lot more open about their platform lately, sending their first party games to PC (Forza 7 confirmed for PC), allowing cross-platform play, etc.
Sony PlayLink is a way to integrate iOS/Android devices as controller, for stuff like Jackbox games, which seems like a good and obvious idea to me.
Ubisoft announced a multiplayer pirate game that seems to be based off the piratey stuff they did in Assassin’s Creed 17. I’m keeping an eye on it because I’m always interested in pirate games. Sea of Thieves also released some new gameplay footage.
I’m actually a little bit excited for Battlefront 2. Everyone hated the way they milked the game for extra content, especially with the way they do matchmaking splitting the community every time a DLC came out, and so they’ve apparently decided post-launch content for the game will be free. Between this and Titanfall, I wonder if EA has decided to be a lot more generous and less divisive with post-launch content.
Co-op prison break from the guys who created A Tale of Two Brothers looks interesting.
I was hoping for some bigger VR announcements, maybe announcements for the second generation of VR headset with foveated rendering.
Lots more to discuss, just noted a few of the things that interested me. I’m gonna go back and look at some more E3 stuff.
