Connect with us

Video Games

This was the best Xbox showcase in years (and the hardest to root for)

Published

on

AND campaign This looks like an Adam Curtis documentary prequel introducing fans to E-Day and the birth of the series’ iconic “Lancer” chainsaw, in addition to a trailer showing not only is he still alivepotentially blooming. Microsoft’s summer presentation for 2024 was the best the Xbox had looked since the Xbox One. But this comes at an enormous cost, which the company doesn’t seem ready to admit publicly.

Insiders have been raising interest in the presentation for several days, partly because the full list of disclosures and announcements has already been leaked to some media and others. Fans were already furious, expecting Xbox to finally turn the corner, just for football to be dragged out of the field once more and realizing that the platform was still in one other of its inevitable “recovery” years. The proof is at all times in the games themselves, and their effectiveness can only be truly assessed once they’re in the hands of players. For now, though, the presentation has been delivered.

There were over sixty minutes of games small and huge, offering every part from zombie survival to nostalgic teen hangouts, punctuated by massive first-party games and third-party teases. If you own an Xbox Series X/S console, there’s plenty to play this yr and next. Xbox gaming studios lead Matt Booty’s long-running promise of a consistent variety of quarterly Xbox games price appearing in may finally come true. The only thing missing from this event was accountability for what and who Microsoft sacrificed to get here.

Just over a month has passed since the company’s announcement closes three studios and reorganizes the fourth. One of the victims, Tango Gameworks and is the hit of 2023 , seemed to symbolize the best of Xbox in the Game Pass era: a highly stylized passion project from a more moderen team that wowed critics and won awards, and would not have been possible without the “let a thousand flowers bloom” strategy behind the platform go to a subscription library similar to Netflix. But in a devastating turnaround, the deep-pocketed tech giant has parted ways with the team together with renowned immersive sim creators Arkane Austin and others. According to internal comments from Booty and the head of parent company Zenimax, there was simply not enough bandwidth for one in every of the three Most worthy corporations in the world to manage so many studios.

The bad news and nonsense explanations wouldn’t have fallen like a lead balloon if Microsoft had not announced mass layoffs in several departments just a number of months earlier, including the newly acquired Activision Blizzard. The cuts affected everyone from the team to developers Sledgehammer Games and included the cancellation of , a fantasy survival game that would have develop into Blizzard’s first latest franchise in nearly a decade. Microsoft spent $69 billion on the acquisition, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer visited the Activision Blizzard King offices shortly after the deal closed last fall, after which in early 2024 the mask got here off.

In interviews with and , Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer blames the heel activate a mix of investor pressure and a stagnant console gaming market. In other words: capitalism. But completely shutting down Tango Gameworks, originally founded by director Shinji Mikami to train a brand new generation of creators, seemed particularly capricious. The Xbox team didn’t mention the developers it fired or their contributions in its remarks to the live audience before today’s presentation or during the pre-recorded event itself. (Even after learning his fate, Arkane Austin worked hard to post a much needed final update.)

Instead, Spencer opened the presentation promoting the company’s desire to bring one in every of its hottest franchises to much more gamers through the power of a $17/month subscription. This was perhaps unsurprising given the billions Microsoft paid to acquire the series, but the decision to open the series in this fashion underscored a brand new reality for the Xbox brand, which now must return a return worthy of all those investments. “I haven’t talked about it publicly because now is the time for us to focus on the team and the individuals.” Spencer said later that dayaway from the a whole lot of 1000’s of fans watching the show.

He continued:

It’s obviously a really difficult decision for them and I would like to make certain, through departures and other things, that we do the right thing for the individual people in the team. It’s not about my PR, it isn’t about Xbox’s PR. It’s about these teams. After all, as I actually have said again and again, I actually have to run a sustainable business inside the company and grow, and that implies that sometimes I actually have to make difficult decisions that, truthfully, usually are not decisions that I like, but decisions that somebody has to make.

Meanwhile, the presentation didn’t even explain itself the bar set a number of days earlier by Geoff Keighley during the Game Awards host’s presentation. Xbox CEO Sarah Bond, who he responded with a word salad of corpo when asked about the studio’s closure last month, he closed the Xbox presentation by pointing to the future fairly than dwelling on the recent past. “Our mission is to make Xbox the best place to play by including games from our own studios on Game Pass at launch, to take gaming into the future with our commitment to game preservation, to push the boundaries in our future hardware, and to enable you to play games, wherever you want, on Xbox, PC and in the cloud,” she said. “This is what defines Xbox today and in the future, and that’s why we’re working hard on the next generation.”

This was a pledge intended to reassure fans who are still reeling from the shock of the recent changes to the franchise’s history. But the future is built on the past, and every new shiny Xbox game now raises the question of what happens to the teams Microsoft has bought or partnered with when they no longer feel like they’re serving its bottom line.

IGN

This article was originally published on : kotaku.com
Continue Reading
Advertisement
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Video Games

Secret Level: Kotaku review

Published

on

By

Amazon’s stunningly animated video game anthology is either a beautiful, impressive vehicle through which short stories are told or a soulless piece of high-C content, depending on the episode you watch.

The series was developed primarily by Blur Studio with help from Amazon’s MGM Studios. If Blur’s work on a few of these best movie trailers from the last decade, you will not be surprised that the animation of all 15 episodes is de facto beautiful. It’s a noticeable lack of heart and soul within the storytelling within the pursuit of high emotional prestige that lets down several episodes that, if cut, could have made for a more impressive series. Instead, we principally have 15 trailers, all with roughly the identical emotional beat, and only just a few of them manage to inform a story that does not feel like a very expensive business.

When I have a look at the covers of the 15-game anthology episodes, I’m still unsure why the show selected these stories to inform. However, I even have this theory: an Amazon series that may release an episode based on the corporate’s MMO game under the guise of a creative endeavor makes it easier to advertise. , short-lived hero shooter Sony has no intention of promoting anymore, however it clearly hoped that its next big hit on the live service could be a complete episode that plays like an prolonged theatrical trailer dedicated to the world of the stay-at-home mom. In other words, while several of the games featured are massive properties with a cultural base that make them obvious decisions for an anthology paying homage to video games, a lot of the episodes feel like an extension of promoting.

will air on December 10, which implies a few of the show’s biggest games either have not released yet or were in development alongside the series. is clearly the strangest and most awkward addition given the sport’s fate, but this – the upcoming sci-fi game from Wizards of the Coast’s Archetype Entertainment – features one of the crucial exhausting and indulgent episodes yet. The game was announced lower than a 12 months ago and we’ve not even seen it in motion. Wizards of the Coast properties also appear within the episode once more. Again, it makes more sense in a business transaction than in telling 15 stories because someone actually thought they were value telling.

This is not the only episode of PlayStation. By far the worst and least self-aware episode of the series tells the story of a young woman who works as a courier for an organization that rewards employees for one of the best delivery times with proven cosmetic upgrades. He leaves behind his monotonous corporate life by hanging out with a blue slime monster and escaping virtual reality (or possibly real? It’s not entirely clear) versions of PlayStation characters like Colossus and Kratos while riding his bike around town. See, you get up every morning with this attitude, attempting to get one of the best cosmetics, working your whole life on your careless corporate owners, however the really cool kids do not buy this technique with their silly jobs and as an alternative play PlayStation games? Corporations are evil and manipulate you into doing their bidding and providing terrible rewards, but returning to PlayStation is your secure space? Brand won’t ever hurt you? Or something? Unless you might be a developer under his umbrellaI suppose. It trades any type of coherent storytelling for appearances by multiple PlayStation characters in an effort to get fans clapping and cheering, and will easily be condensed right into a Super Bowl TV business.

Several episodes are strangely bland. This episode is a reasonably typical military shooter cutscene, characterised almost entirely by early twenty first century dreariness. The episode is great, but in case you put a gun to my head, I do not think I’d have the option to discover which game it’s from. Episodes from this era really stand out when the show relies on stylistic animation that does not mix in with the remaining of the show. These are 15 unique games, so why do half of them look the identical? This makes an enormous difference when they appear distinct, just like the episode based on , which summarizes the structure of roguelike fighting games, and the one based on , which abandons the photorealism utilized by most and captures the adventurous spirit of Mossmouth’s cave-exploring adventure.

Some adaptations are less faithful. The episode harks back to the early psychological horror arcade mega-hit, and the concept is interesting in a vacuum and leads to a few of the show’s most memorable sequences. However, within the context of a typically centuries-old story, it appears to be the officially licensed equivalent of the Disney character being pushed into the mansion of horror after entering the general public domain. doesn’t go all that tough in that direction, however it nonetheless turns the colourful action-platformer series right into a somewhat dark coming-of-age story that mixes the creator’s prestige storytelling leanings with the father-son dynamic of the titular robot hero and his creator. This is one in every of the standout episodes of the series, however it’s even higher like this one, and it may possibly’t erase the stench of cynical promoting that hangs over your entire series.

is, in a word, unequal. The animation is stunning, however it appears like Blur Studio has leaned too heavily on its experience in creating emotion-building trailers designed to lure customers to the closest game store. When creator Tim Miller announced the show again at Gamescom in Augusthe tearfully called it a “love letter” to video games. The result, nonetheless, is something that appears more like a group of pricey advertisements, one in every of which is for a game that may now not even be played.

This article was originally published on : kotaku.com
Continue Reading

Video Games

December’s can’t-miss game releases, free Amazon games for Prime members, and more holiday season tips

Published

on

By

Picture: : Sony, BioWare, Lucasfilm / Amazon / Team17 / Kotaku, Lego/Kotaku, NetEase / Papergames / MachineGames / Kotaku, Sony, Screenshot: : BioWare/Kotaku, Microsoft, Interactive Warner Bros, Koei Tecmo / Kotaku Games

Holiday sales and giveaways are in full swing this week, and we have got a roundup of all of the games Amazon is gifting away to Prime members, the very best games to purchase within the PlayStation thirtieth Anniversary sale, and more.

This article was originally published on : kotaku.com
Continue Reading

Video Games

This week we got our first look at the Joy-Con Switch 2

Published

on

By

Picture: : Hailey Welch / Kotaku, Sony, Nintendo/Kotaku, Genki / EA / Activision / Capcom / Marvel / Square Enix / Kotaku, Ubisoft, Blizzard, Sega/Xbox/Warhorse/Capcom/Ubisoft/Kotaku, From software, Photo: : Michael San Diego (Shutterstock)

(*2*)

This week’s low-quality video gave us a first look at the Joy-Con that shall be utilized by the Nintendo Switch successor. Additionally, Sony celebrated PlayStation’s thirtieth anniversary by including the original console’s startup sound on PS5, together with customization options that allow people to use familiar sounds from other PlayStation consoles to the current console’s UI. Read these and other top stories of the week.

This article was originally published on : kotaku.com
Continue Reading
Advertisement

OUR NEWSLETTER

Subscribe Us To Receive Our Latest News Directly In Your Inbox!

We don’t spam! Read our privacy policy for more info.

Trending