The Tuesday letters page is frustrated with the low-key reveal of Gears Of War: Reloaded, as one reader feels The Last Of Us season 2 has been a disappointment.
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The final straw
So we’ve had Forza Horizon, now we’ve got Gears Of War… clearly it’s only a matter of time until Halo appears on PlayStation 5 as well. It was never really in doubt but now it’s pretty much guaranteed. I think it’s obvious that the rumoured Halo: Combat Evolved remake is going to be the moment. I don’t think there’s been a date on it, but it’s got to be something like one or two years out.
At that point any pretence of the Xbox being a rival to PlayStation will be over. Xbox consoles might continue to exist, as a novelty for hardcore fans, but it’s obvious Microsoft already sees them as irrelevant.
I haven’t owned an Xbox console since the Xbox 360 but I have very fond memories of that and so I do see all of this as a shame. Like another reader said, the plan for Microsoft now seems to just tread water for a few years, until streaming is viable for every game.
Even if the quality isn’t perfect, I’m sure most people won’t care – the general public always prefer convenience over quality. And then that will be the end of physical games and consoles and any idea of owning a game yourself. It’s not a future I look forward to.
Aims
Publishers anonymous
So, Microsoft and Sony are in direct competition again, eh? Except this time it’s to see who can have the most boring game reveal possible. I get that Microsoft don’t really want to go multiformat, but they already are. The decision has been made and they need to own it.
What made this worse is that isn’t just a PlayStation 5 release, like Forza Horizon 5, this is a brand new remaster of an important game, that’s also on Xbox and PC. And yet they still hide it away and refused to make a trailer for it.
Are they going to be like this with everything? Is any game that is also on PlayStation 5 going to get the secret marketing treatment and hidden away on some blog somewhere? C’mon, Microsoft. Bite the bullet and admit to yourself and the world that you’re now a third party publisher.
The Bishop
Continued absence
So Microsoft announce a new game and it’s a remaster of an old Xbox 360 title and it still isn’t on Nintendo Switch 2? We all knew Phil Spencer is full of it, but I thought they’d at least do some minor releases, so they can pretend they made an effort, but nada.
Maybe they’re saving it up for a big Switch 2 exclusive Banjo-Threeie annoucement, but does anyone really think that’s going to happen? I think the more obvious guess is that what’s currently happening will continue to happen, i.e. absolutely nothing. Oh well, I’m sure Nintendo will be able to live without them.
Cranston
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Marketing headache
I am never going to believe a Half-Life 3 game is really happening until I’m actually playing it with my own hands. I’d like to believe the latest reports, but I have a very hard time imagining how Valve is going to promote this.
Is it going to be on consoles, where most people don’t even know what Half-Life is? Even on PC it feels like it should have had an official remake of the first two. And yet a major plot change happened in the VR game, which almost nobody has played? The thing is a mess.
I know Steam is a thing of its own, and PC gamers will probably just buy it for the memes, but in my opinion they waited too long, for no obvious reason, and the amount of people that remember anything about the plot of the originals got to be tiny by now.
Focus
Big incident
Is anyone else not really enjoying the second season of The Last Of Us? It’s very well made and all that but for me it’s not hitting like the game did. The ‘big incident’ near the beginning of the story didn’t seem nearly as shocking as in the game and the last couple of episodes have been kind of dull.
I’m not interested in any of these faction squabbles, and I don’t really remember if they were in the game or not. Either it’s a new bit and it’s boring or it was in the game but not interesting enough for me to remember.
I thought the first season improved some things in the game, but then the original wasn’t nearly as well made as the second. The second season isn’t a disgrace or anything, far from it, but it does seems inferior and kind of pointless at the moment.
St1nger
Do it again
I really don’t understand what’s going to happen when all big name games cost £80 or more. I guess there’s two main options? Either people pay it, at least for the big games like Call Of Duty and EA Sports FC (which is all publishers care about it), or it’s a complete failure and… what happens then?
It’s hard to imagine publishers admitting a mistake and putting the prices back and even if they did, they’d probably take something away and claim they had to in order to make the price cut possible.
The best bit of news in a while is how Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is doing, with a weird, successful double-A game on a reasonable budget. But the big companies like Activision, EA, and Ubisoft don’t want to make that sort of game. They don’t want to make a fair profit on a medium budget game, because no matter how well it does it won’t be as much as Call Of Duty.
All these companies want is the biggest possible payout, they’re not set up to make a small profit on a low-priced game, it’s all or nothing. Maybe they all have to go before any sanity can return. EA and Ubisoft are already looking vulnerable so it might be closer than you’d think.
I’m not saying that’s what I want to happen, but I don’t see how anything else positive can change otherwise. If we can have a few more indie hits like Clair Obscur, that proves that wasn’t a fluke, I think that would be a much healthier future for gaming.
Lennox
Lost Souls
Do you think that there’s any chance of a new Dark Souls? I know Elden Ring is pretty much the same thing, but I much prefer the smaller game worlds of Dark Souls to an open world, and I’d like it if they could make both at the same time.
I’d also be interested to know if they’d ever make a Metroidvania. Their games are kind of in that area, but I think it’d be cool if they tried to go full-on, with more puzzles. People always say they’d be perfect for Castlevania, but there’s no reason they can’t just make an unofficial one.
Dako
GC: It’s very, very unlikely that From will work on a new one, since they own the Elden Ring licence but not Dark Souls. Bandai Namco could make one, with a different developer, but there’s been no hint they will.
Not only on Xbox
Gears Of War is officially a mainstay on PlayStation. I’ll say it to get it out of the way. We have gotten Gears Of War on PlayStation 5 before GTA 6. Since the first ever instalment in 2006, it was an exclusive to Xbox 360 and so was the second and third titles. To say that the franchise has drifted away from carrying that reverence to becoming another multiplatform release, in the same vein as Forza, is quite the understatement.
Xbox never lived up to the exclusivity that PlayStation offered and, this week, announcing a flagship franchise releasing on the rival’s system is proof of that. I’ll just say what we’re all thinking: the Xbox One was the catalyst for this downfall. It never matched the PlayStation 4. The titles were disappointing (looking at you Halo 5) and Quantum Break was forgettable and bland.
Avowed is a poor man’s Skyrim and Hellblade 2 has disappointed, excellent graphics though. So, the Xbox Series X is also a catastrophic letdown. By 2027, when the next console is set to release, exactly why would anyone even fork out $80 to play and slog their way through a mediocre title, that will evidently release on PlayStation 5?
Because the sales charts are failing and the only viable reason to even continue entertaining Xbox’s generically middling continuation of abstract failure is their Game Pass subscription service? I will still play Fable, because I’m keeping my hopes mildly high for the revival, but is it fair for me to assume even that could fail miserably?
Shahzaib Sadiq
Inbox also-rans
That whole story with Genki is so odd. I’ve bought their stuff before, they’re a known brand, why did they throw it all away by taunting Nintendo like this? What did they think was going to happen? What did they think they were going to gain? Other than, you know, a lawsuit.
Korbie
I would’ve bet that Borderlands 4 was going to be a flop, given how late it is and the terrible movie, but looking at how many likes the trailer and everything is getting it looks like it’ll be another hit. Hollywood synergy in action!
Gadfly
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