I feel like Microsoft tried to outsmart itself despite all the money they have for the barest minimum market research.
What huge AAA open-world shooter has succeeded in the last few years? Honestly? Doesn't matter if it's made by great dev teams, experienced as hell in what they were doing. Dude, if
id can't make a compelling open-world shooter work, with their goddamned shooting mechanics and the help of the team that made Mad Max... what did this team think they were going to add to the formula? Nostalgia from Halo 1? Yay Warthog?
Because that literally looks like what all of this game was hinging on - people having nostalgia for OG Halo, from the box art to the gameplay level we've seen... this
cannot be it. This simply can't be their launch philosophy here.
The industry has proven, quite handily, that the era of the 'open world just because' is fukking over. Everything AAA that has been great the last few years has either been a tightly-designed experience that, if not semi-linear, at least kept the player focus to a certain area at a time... or, it was an open-world that did not rely on first-person shooting mechanics.
Why? Because trying to design an open-world to account for long-distance engagement is a functional waste of resources. Either the world has to be stunted and look terrible to account for long-range sniping and the necessity of prioritizing draw distance rendering over damn near anything else... or they stretch their budget thin trying to give a breadth of content without a hint of depth.
The age of the open-world is wrapping up, at least in the way we knew of it. Sony might manage to pull off some interesting stuff, but that's literally just by leveraging the SSD and actually designing a bunch of smaller areas independently, but using the decreased/lack-of load times to basically stitch what would have been a few separate areas together without requiring a zone. But running three miles in first person carrying an AR just to spend a few minutes mowing down dudes... there's a reason that flops. Because late-game, when you've gotten strong enough, that few minutes decreases to <2min, and then you're playing a walking simulator.
Xbox gonna have to depend heavily on Oblivion and them to save this in a couple years, game-wise. If they aren't ready to drop Avowed around when FF7R2 comes out, then... bruh.
They were dumb as hell making the Series S anymore. If you're going to go full-Netflix with your games, then go all-in on an upfront charge for the hardware and hell, give away 3 months of gamepass free with the purchase. Go heavy with the first year of game launches being on gamepass, and then push your first big exclusive AAA game to 4 months post-release. People will renew the gamepass sub and many won't cancel it even if they stop playing the console, and you don't have to make your devs develop a game for the S with the possibility to upscale it on the X. It's a fukking idiotic business model.
, drop facts, and keep it movin'.
looking. That shyt is embarassing.
How, Sway?
