Support NeoGAF

[RoadHazard]

It's incredible that MS was allowed to gobble up such a huge part of the industry. What is the point of the antitrust agencies if they're not gonna do anything about stuff like this? Seems like they don't really hold any power to enforce anything.

Sony should feel free to buy absolutely anyone and everyone they want with no resistance now I guess.

 

[Jibran#one]

People crying and bitching here while I'm all excited for the next doom on gamepass
Doom is where it's at
Doom eternal is the goat of single player FPS games

 

[RoadHazard]

People crying and bitching here while I'm all excited for the next doom on gamepass
Doom is where it's at
Doom eternal is the goat of single player FPS games

Aren't those games already on GP? They're on PS+.

 

[RaidenJTr7]

..

Yet they have yet to release a good game in decades.

Starfield - 86 mc
Hi fi rush - 89
Forza - 85
Halo infinite 87

80+
"Bad games" now

 

[Fwackoboingo]

People crying and bitching here while I'm all excited for the next doom on gamepass
Doom is where it's at
Doom eternal is the goat of single player FPS games

How do you know if Doom is that good? Did you play it without gamepass? Maybe on different platforms? Without any MS involvement? Interesting...

Well, at least they have to develop the new games for less platforms, everything for the gamers! Right Phil?

 

[Sanepar]

You'd never know Starfield and Forza are 83 and 85 MC rated games with the way some of you are going




Clear proof that typing out long ass paragraphs doesn't mean you know much about the industry.
Describing COD and Candy Crush as 'dying franchises' is quite the take.



Two bad takes in a row. Well done!

Sea of Thieves Reviews

Be The Pirate You Want To Be - With musket loaded and grog in hand, the freedom of the pirate life awaits. What will your legend be? An epic multiplayer adventure. Crew up and set sail on memorable voyages. Make and break your pirates' code on the Sea of Thieves. A treacherous shared world. Plot...

www.metacritic.com

Yeah incredible game. I don't even know how to call that a game. No plot, no variety of enemies or missions, no progression. There is nothing there.

 

[Godot25]

The problem is, it doesn't mean much. Those games have not helped move needle much perception wise and there no real evidence that the needle will move in any significant way anytime soon. You can have plenty of critically acclaimed games, but if that's not what the average Joe wants to play then where is the win? The real issue imo is they just have no soul.....and I'm not sure if deep pockets will ever buy them one.

But it depends on the question.
If you ask me: Did Xbox in last 3 years made enough critically acclaimed games that have potential to be system sellers? My answer would be no.
But I thought we are talking about quality of their games output in last years in relation to mantra "Xbox is mismanaging studios and projects". Yes. I realise that Microsoft Flight Sim is a niche game. But that does not mean it's bad. I would even say that that game is genre defining and groundbreaking in many aspects.
As I provided by Opencritic scores, Xbox has no problems with great quality in last three years. Redfall was a fluke, not a common thing. And everybody who is claiming otherwise should just look at numbers which do not lie.

You can admit that Xbox had great stretch of game making while also admit that games they are making are not for you.

And Call of Duty is pretty much an example what "Average Joe" wants to play, but nobody cares how high OC scores for COD games are

Sometimes I have a feeling that definition of "great game" is exclusively leaned towards "third-person action adventure story driven games"

 

[Ozriel]

Sea of Thieves Reviews

Be The Pirate You Want To Be - With musket loaded and grog in hand, the freedom of the pirate life awaits. What will your legend be? An epic multiplayer adventure. Crew up and set sail on memorable voyages. Make and break your pirates' code on the Sea of Thieves. A treacherous shared world. Plot...

www.metacritic.com

Yeah incredible game. I don't even know how to call that a game. No plot, no variety of enemies or missions, no progression. There is nothing there.

You mean like this?

There's a certain level of ignorance in using the launch state of a live service game to describe its current condition.


16500 concurrent players in the past 24 hours for a 'bad game'

5 million copies sold in 1.5 years on Steam alone, for a late port, between June 2020 and December 2021.

Sea of Thieves - Celebrate Five Million Sea of Thieves Sales on Steam

Another gift up for grabs to mark more PC-playing pirates taking to the seas!

www.seaofthieves.com

And all estimates of lifetime sales have it at significantly more than that.

I've long suspected you argue from a position of cluelessness. At least this confirms it.

 

[MidGenRefresh]

Sea of Thieves Reviews

Be The Pirate You Want To Be - With musket loaded and grog in hand, the freedom of the pirate life awaits. What will your legend be? An epic multiplayer adventure. Crew up and set sail on memorable voyages. Make and break your pirates' code on the Sea of Thieves. A treacherous shared world. Plot...

www.metacritic.com

Yeah incredible game. I don't even know how to call that a game. No plot, no variety of enemies or missions, no progression. There is nothing there.

I swear some of you here are so fucking detached from the reality.

 

[Ozriel]

The problem is, it doesn't mean much. Those games have not helped move needle much perception wise and there no real evidence that the needle will move in any significant way anytime soon. You can have plenty of critically acclaimed games, but if that's not what the average Joe wants to play then where is the win?

Discussion was about quality of the games, and not about 'moving needles'.
Only thing being moved here is goalposts.

The real issue imo is they just have no soul.....and I'm not sure if deep pockets will ever buy them one.

Imagine arguing that games like Psychonauts 2 and Pentiment are 'soulless' because they didn't sell millions of copies. Or games like Media Molecule's Dreams. Or Returnal.

Ah well.

 

[Ozriel]

Yeah, those people are happy because they know they don't have to worry about their salaries for a few years even if they don't do anything.

The employees working on COD at Treyarch, Sledgehammer games weren't afraid for their salaries, and certainly were working hard to put out annual COD titles.

Also who are not happy, won't tell their opinion in public while still employed there.

Not the first time we've heard of multiple rank and file employees at Activision optimistic about the change.

Believe me it's not a badge of honor in the industry to work for MS/Xbox... Everybody knows the best people are elsewhere.

Where are the best people? How do you even measure that?

 

[Hudo]

Hopefully Phil can force Blizzard to unfuck WarCraft 3.

 

[Jibran#one]

How do you know if Doom is that good? Did you play it without gamepass? Maybe on different platforms? Without any MS involvement? Interesting...

Well, at least they have to develop the new games for less platforms, everything for the gamers! Right Phil?

Doom eternal with its both dlcz is my favourite sp shooter game
I actually played eternal on gp then bought the dlcz
Play eternal and its both expansions on hard difficulty and tell me if it's not one of the greatest single player shooters ever made

 

[Flutta]

this deal certainly shouldn't bother you, then.

The Devs themselves seem quite happy to join Xbox. Pretty upbeat reactions from folks 'going down the shitter'.

No it doesn't i don't play any of those games tbh. But that doesn't mean i don't have the right to comment on it, this is a gaming forum after all.

Not sure where you getting any of this info from but i highly doubt that the majority of devs sees this as good outcome. Sounds like forced display of
"happiness" then anything else.

 

[skit_data]

It will be interesting to see how they're gonna organize the release schedules for the games if/once the pipeline is streamlined.
It's gonna be hard not to accidentaly "drown" one of your own games/seasons/bigger updates if it's released to close to one of the bigger ones like CoD for example

 

[FeastYoEyes]

Absolutely terrifying how many studios and publishers they've been able to gobble up in less than a decade. Can't believe it.

 

[Killer8]

If "mixed reviews" had a picture.

 

[FalsettoVibe]

Discussion was about quality of the games, and not about 'moving needles'.
Only thing being moved here is goalposts.



Imagine arguing that games like Psychonauts 2 and Pentiment are 'soulless' because they didn't sell millions of copies. Or games like Media Molecule's Dreams. Or Returnal.

Ah well.

Not trying to move goalposts. I feel what I said was relative to what the user I was responding to said. Also, I never ever said Xbox doesn't have any critically acclaimed games. When I say soulless, I'm looking at MS/Xbox as a whole and their history.

 

[Taycan77]

I don't believe Microsoft have the management competency to fulfil the potential of their studios. Or frankly, come anywhere close.

I can't speak for most titles, although it's well known how mismanaged Halo has been.

I can speak about Forza Motorsport as I follow the genre closely. From the moment of the reveal with an in-engine trailer it was a case of over promising - at best miscommunication - at worst misleading information regarding all aspects of the game. After the most recent 'E3' trailer and subsequent Forza Monthlies, it became clear MS/T10 where holding back footage. That's when fans began to worry, those worries have played out at release.

Now we're at a point where I worry about the viability of Forza Motorsport as a top tier AAA title. I can see it being relegated to AA status, a pure service title that gets content hand me downs from Forza Horizon.

 

[MidGenRefresh]

Imagine going back in time few years and posting on NeoGAF that one day Fallout, Doom, Elder Scrolls, Diablo, Call of Duty etc. will be Microsoft's first party franchises. Nobody would believe you.

 

[Yoboman]

Not very good no career moment acquisitions in there

 

[Yoboman]

It's incredible that MS was allowed to gobble up such a huge part of the industry. What is the point of the antitrust agencies if they're not gonna do anything about stuff like this? Seems like they don't really hold any power to enforce anything.

Sony should feel free to buy absolutely anyone and everyone they want with no resistance now I guess.

Of course there will be resistance if Sony buys anybody. Microsoft had senators crying to Japanese regulators about FFXVI being timed exclusive

 

[Banjo64]

Of course there will be resistance if Sony buys anybody. Microsoft had senators crying to Japanese regulators about FFXVI being timed exclusive

To be honest looking back this acquisition saga has really been hilarious.

You couldn't have made some of this stuff up.

 

[SteelCurtain 59]

The salt in this thread is absurd

Imagine how awesome it would be if that was list of good games. That would have been something to be proud of.

Legends tell us that game studios create games (which can also be good) but I'm certainly no expert

You were talking about Metacritic and green outlet critics pumping up the score. And yeah most critics are positive. If you look at Opencritic where all 173 reviews for all platforms are combined it has a mighty status, 85% critics recommended.

Steam user reviews is, well, user reviews. Always difficult to judge, especially if it's cool to hate on a game for whatever exaggerated reason. You can only give thumbs up or down so no middle ground there.

Still says mostly positive though and have 40-60k concurrent players on work days and higher numbers over weekends so I don't see what's more to say about that, lots of people obviously enjoy playing it.

There is no multiplayer and co-op but it's still doing well and have more concurrent players than many single-player-only games see as their peak values, only just now dropped off the top 10 most played list 1.5 months after the release.

It's no doubt a divisive game but you shouldn't think everyone who like it is "green" and put up some fake score to boost a review score.

How are user reviews fake scores? A divide between press scores and user scores will more accurately highlight that the press got it wrong.

And I was replying to a person who somehow thinks Xbox games are unfairly reviewed by the press, which is false…which was my entire point

User Reviews are basically meaningless for the quality of a game. The vast majority of users lack nuance or the ability to rate games scores other than 5 or 1, and it's incredibly easy for people to review bomb (positively or negatively) games they've never, or barely, played just because of some random bias towards/against a console/studio/franchise. Not to mention how wildly different people's tastes/preferences can be, or the fact that the vast majority of people don't submit user reviews (and in general the people more likely to leave a review for anything (gaming or otherwise) are people with negative opinions). I can't fathom the idea of using user reviews in any serious way for determining whether a game is good or not, unless I personally know that person and what types of games they prefer. Gameplay videos, in depth previews, metacritic/opencritic, and reading multiple critic reviews are all infinitely more useful metrics by which to gauge a game's quality than user reviews.

 

[Gavon West]

You mean like this?

There's a certain level of ignorance in using the launch state of a live service game to describe its current condition.


16500 concurrent players in the past 24 hours for a 'bad game'

5 million copies sold in 1.5 years on Steam alone, for a late port, between June 2020 and December 2021.

Sea of Thieves - Celebrate Five Million Sea of Thieves Sales on Steam

Another gift up for grabs to mark more PC-playing pirates taking to the seas!

www.seaofthieves.com

And all estimates of lifetime sales have it at significantly more than that.

I've long suspected you argue from a position of cluelessness. At least this confirms it.

These boys is HURT, bro. Go easy on 'em. Spouting off empirical facts like some psycho. What is wrong with you?? Lol.

In all seriousness, I'm a huge fan of the deal going through. The industry landscape has changed immensely and I'm here for it. Competition will be fierce between the Big 3. We all will benefit from it.

 

[Ozzy Onya A2Z]

 

[solidus12]

so what's their strategy now? Compete or release the games to more people?

 

[Naked Lunch]

Looks good to me.
Should lead to a steady stream of new stuff - with a massive BC backlog.

I hope they get some Japanese studios next.
And Sega should have happened years ago. I want someone to finally re-release Outrun 2 - and if this is the path, make it happen.

The countless salty replies in here are hilarious. My goodness.

 

[Ozriel]

Not sure where you getting any of this info from but i highly doubt that the majority of devs sees this as good outcome. Sounds like forced display of
"happiness" then anything else.

Schreier says the devs he's spoken to are happy with the deal.
IGN has an article with twitter reactions...and the Activision staff tweets sampled are unanimously optimistic.

I think I'll trust that over your claims that ABK devs were forced to make tweets from their personal accounts praising the deal

 

[Ozriel]

so what's their strategy now? Compete or release the games to more people?

Both are mutually exclusive.

If "mixed reviews" had a picture.

The market's never cared about that. Most of you would have been shitting bricks if Microsoft's lawyers had tried to use "COD hasn't broken 90% metacritic in a decade" as justification to regulators for passing the deal.

This shit reads more like sour grapes, to be honest

 

[El Pistolero]

..

Starfield - 86 mc
Hi fi rush - 89
Forza - 85

80+
"Bad games" now

Starfield, especially, is NOT deserving of that score, imo.

 

[Killer8]

The market's never cared about that. Most of you would have been shitting bricks if Microsoft's lawyers had tried to use "COD hasn't broken 90% metacritic in a decade" as justification to regulators for passing the deal.

This shit reads more like sour grapes, to be honest

"Mixed reviews" is in direct reference to the public's reception and has nothing to do with Metacritic score wars, or the ActiBlizz deal, or whatever other hot topic you're forcing into this conversation:

This is more mind boggling in my honest opinion:

Microsoft's output has been anemic this generation and when they do release a big game, the public's reception has not even been as glowing as the Metacritic score would suggest.

Those studios they've now acquired for tens of billions are not pumping out the bangers either:

People (*unpaid corporate shills) like Klobrille can make as many infographics as they like showing how much Microsoft owns - when the lineup is atomized and analysed, the quality of the output has been aggressively mediocre.

You can say that quality doesn't matter to the market ie. the slop will still sell and make Microsoft money. But for gamers and not an armchair analysts, who honestly cares about that?

 

[Gavon West]

Schreier says the devs he's spoken to are happy with the deal.
IGN has an article with twitter reactions...and the Activision staff tweets sampled are unanimously optimistic.

I think I'll trust that over your claims that ABK devs were forced to make tweets from their personal accounts praising the deal

There are actual devs chiming in on Era about being excited for the deal. Yet, people are still claiming the devs are the exact opposite. Lol. Crazy....

 

[Gudji]

..

Starfield - 83 mc
Hi fi rush - 89
Forza - 85

80+
"Bad games" now

Fixed.

 

[thicc_girls_are_teh_best]

Industry leading games has to do something new and innovative. I think BOTW does take industry forward by giving you an alternative to Ubisoft / Witcher 3 clones.

Outside of that I don't see how other games are industry leading.

Outside of being well produced, polished experience what exactly new do they bring to the table?

No, industry-leading just means they are at the top of their respective field, and set some sort of new standards either for genre or industry, be it gameplay, graphics, production values, storytelling etc. or any mixture of those. At least, IMO.

So something like BOTW would definitely qualify, but so too would something like GOW 2018 (which was its generation's equivalent of Gears of War IMO, when both were already inspired by prior games released earlier in Gear's case, RE4). Another would be TLOU2 because whether you personally like the story or not, it told a mature story very few games manage to do as effectively, with those types of themes. And character animations are still top-of-class for a third-person game.

Comparatively Microsoft haven't been behind too many such games internally for pretty much a decade. I'd say maybe Cuphead and the Ori games, for 2D visuals and (in Cuphead's case) 2D hardcore boss-rush games. Sunset Overdrive may count as such a game, too, and I already said Flight Sim does (it's cream of the crop among flight simulators, tho it doesn't have a lot of competition). Problem for Microsoft is that they aren't really associated with most of those games I just mentioned; no one really thinks "Microsoft" when they talk about Cuphead or even Ori, and Sunset Overdrive was so niche that it doesn't have a lot of cultural mindshare anyway. If it does come up, nowadays it's associated with Insomniac and, by proxy, Sony.

But BOTW, TOTK etc.? Everyone knows that's Nintendo. TLOU2, GOW, HFW, Spiderman? Everyone knows that's Sony. Everyone knows Halo is Microsoft/Xbox but also most know Halo is effectively dead ATM. It's a brand association problem and that's a big reason why Microsoft have gone about making these 3P publisher acquisitions (even though that doesn't justify the mass consolidation whatsoever).

 

[Ozriel]

Now we're at a point where I worry about the viability of Forza Motorsport as a top tier AAA title. I can see it being relegated to AA status, a pure service title that gets content hand me downs from Forza Horizon.

Are you people actually competing to one-up each other with ridiculous takes? My word!

Microsoft's output has been anemic this generation and when they do release a big game, the public's reception has not even been as glowing as the Metacritic score would suggest.

And hence they've acquired more first party studios to fix the 'anaemic' part. You should be happy.
Steam user reviews can often be heavily colored by technical issues on PC. The Last of Us Part 1 has a 62% rating on Steam, for example, and that has nothing to do with the quality of the title itself.

People (*unpaid corporate shills) like Klobrille can make as many infographics as they like showing how much Microsoft owns - when the lineup is atomized and analysed, the quality of the output has been aggressively mediocre.

But we're yet to see the output from the bulk of that lineup. So the claim that the acquisitions have led to mediocre outcomes is extremely premature. You've also cherry picked out the games with very good metacritic and user reviews. So you've included Forza Motorsport, but craftily left out Forza Horizon 5. Included Redfall but left out Grounded and HiFi Rush.

You can say that quality doesn't matter to the market ie. the slop will still sell and make Microsoft money. But for gamers and not an armchair analysts, who honestly cares about that?

Strange contradiction. If Activision's games are selling well, it's to gamers who keep buying them. Not 'armchair analysts'. Sounds like they're giving gamers what they want, doesn't it?

 

[RaidenJTr7]

Fixed.

Sorry but i am playing starfield on PC
It's 86, nice try though

DF
"Starfield on PC is the best way to play".

 

[Closer]

Yet they have yet to release a good game in decades.

How about months?

 

[Gamer_By_Proxy]

What's mind boggling is people wanting a company with lots of mismanagement and zero creativity to control more developers.

 

[Evil Calvin]

It's funny that people are expecting a new Crash or Spyro.......they bough Rare 20 years ago and still no new Conker or Banjo games. So.....no....it aint happening, other than some remasters

 

[Evil Calvin]

...............all of those studios and we get 2-3 mediocre titles a year.

 

[CRAIG667]

MS has no games.
MS has too many games.

Yada yada.

 

[James Sawyer Ford]

Gameplay videos, in depth previews, metacritic/opencritic, and reading multiple critic reviews are all infinitely more useful metrics by which to gauge a game's quality than user reviews.

And I'm using those as well. Look on YouTube and search for Starfield videos and the vibe is far more negative/disappoint than it is positive. Seemingly, the ONLY YouTube outlets that appear to be majorly positive are the ones that have an Xbox dedicated or focused channel. The more "neutral" outlets are all overwhelmingly negative.

And certainly most were hyping this game up to be a 95+ metacritic game of the forever. It fell well short of that. It's not even deserving of being a GOTY candidate this year. The acquisition of Bethesda has been a complete disaster so far with Redfall and especially Starfield really failing to capture the gaming headspace like their previous titles. They have a huge uphill battle to turn around those studios.

 

[thicc_girls_are_teh_best]

Whatre you even talking about?? company just bought the biggest publisher on the block for $70 billion and my guy is literally talking like they just entered the games industry three weeks ago. WTF?

People have been pretending Microsoft are new to the games industry as a reason to justify the ABK acquisition, and we all know that isn't true. If you include PC gaming, MS have been in the industry since the early '80s.

Who can?

Who gives a crap about most of the Microsoft games when it comes to cultural mindshare? Very few people are big upping games like Flight Sim, Gears Tactics, As Dusk Falls (lol), RedFall (LOL), Age of Empires. Forza just launched and peak CCU on Steam was something like 3.5K, doesn't seem like a lot of people care about the game.

Microsoft's problem is, and has been for a long time, that very little of their games have big cultural mindshare and what few do, aren't even associated with them by the masses. Minecraft is big, but no one thinks of Microsoft when they talk about or play Minecraft. Microsoft's own brand image in entertainment is not a great one, they aren't seen as "cool" or "fun" the way Sony and Nintendo are.

They may have just bought COD but it'll be many years before the IP is strongly associated with MS, if ever. Same with games like Diablo 4 (which is effectively dead in its own right), Overwatch (same), Tony Hawk, even Crash Bandicoot and Spyro. Yes the Xbox sycophants will hype and cheer Phil Spencer's name (now) with those games and so will the AI bots that get made for astroturfing, but the vast majority of real people won't.

Clear proof that typing out long ass paragraphs doesn't mean you know much about the industry.
Describing COD and Candy Crush as 'dying franchises' is quite the take.

COD is creatively dying. It also won't have the selling power it did anymore once Sony withdraws marketing support. Candy Crush has seen declining revenue, and is also arguably creatively stagnant. Not that mobile games need to do much creatively to earn lots of money.

 

[Thirty7ven]

Schreier says the devs he's spoken to are happy with the deal.
IGN has an article with twitter reactions...and the Activision staff tweets sampled are unanimously optimistic.

I think I'll trust that over your claims that ABK devs were forced to make tweets from their personal accounts praising the deal

Of course they are optimistic, they look at Microsoft and see a big fat wallet with an history of underwhelming output and gamepass, which means the pressure to succeed has never been lower. Publicly pro union too?

Just what kind of talent do you think works at ABK? They haven't made anything ambitious in god knows how long, but now they don't even have to worry about game sales.

 

[Thirty7ven]

Strange contradiction. If Activision's games are selling well, it's to gamers who keep buying them. Not 'armchair analysts'. Sounds like they're giving gamers what they want, doesn't it?

You and others have gone full "look at the sales, it means this is what people want, it means it's quality" real hard all of a sudden. Wonder if you have the same perspective when it comes to other games and how do the goal posts move when it comes to hardware?

 

[James Sawyer Ford]

Psychonauts 2 + Grounded + Pentiment

 

[johnjohn]

People have been pretending Microsoft are new to the games industry as a reason to justify the ABK acquisition, and we all know that isn't true. If you include PC gaming, MS have been in the industry since the early '80s.



Who gives a crap about most of the Microsoft games when it comes to cultural mindshare? Very few people are big upping games like Flight Sim, Gears Tactics, As Dusk Falls (lol), RedFall (LOL), Age of Empires. Forza just launched and peak CCU on Steam was something like 3.5K, doesn't seem like a lot of people care about the game.

Microsoft's problem is, and has been for a long time, that very little of their games have big cultural mindshare and what few do, aren't even associated with them by the masses. Minecraft is big, but no one thinks of Microsoft when they talk about or play Minecraft. Microsoft's own brand image in entertainment is not a great one, they aren't seen as "cool" or "fun" the way Sony and Nintendo are.

They may have just bought COD but it'll be many years before the IP is strongly associated with MS, if ever. Same with games like Diablo 4 (which is effectively dead in its own right), Overwatch (same), Tony Hawk, even Crash Bandicoot and Spyro. Yes the Xbox sycophants will hype and cheer Phil Spencer's name (now) with those games and so will the AI bots that get made for astroturfing, but the vast majority of real people won't.



COD is creatively dying. It also won't have the selling power it did anymore once Sony withdraws marketing support. Candy Crush has seen declining revenue, and is also arguably creatively stagnant. Not that mobile games need to do much creatively to earn lots of money.

Do you ever feel embarrassed for posting this nonsense?

 

[Thirty7ven]

Psychonauts 2 + Grounded + Pentiment have more gameplay in their little finger than the cINEmatIC eXpeRIencE this forum seems to deem as success (which I'll never understand).

God I hope they don't chase that boring market for peoples that want white/yellow paintings to tell them where to jump/grab. Or nonstop talking to explain puzzles

It's so funny because Pentiment is a walking talking simulator, Psychonauts 2 is pretty much an easily accessible cinematic action(sorry "adventure") platformer.

It's like there's something wrong at the source. Hellblade 2 *busts a nut*

 

[Buggy Loop]

It's so funny because Pentiment is a walking talking simulator,

Oh yeah, a medieval storybook with good writing is the same as nonstop talking protagonist that explain to you brainlets what to do next. It's the same.

Psychonauts 2 is pretty much an easily accessible cinematic action(sorry "adventure") platformer.

Who ever saw Doublefine's Psychonauts as that description. The delusion is incredible.

It's like there's something wrong at the source.

What's puzzling is this forums' boner for big flashy visuals that take gamers for idiots. Is Microsoft's run perfect? Far from it. But acting like all their games amount to flops is like saying that everything outside of Taylor Swift in music is not worth my time, because clearly who is near her success?

These cinematic games are hooking the mainstream, which again, I find puzzling that this forum, which is niche by itself, is so hooked on it and defends it with their shiny armour.