Tag: windows

E3 2017: Thoughts on Microsoft

Posted on - by Ian Ferguson

The first of the Big Three are here with their presser. This one is an interesting one as they have a new console to showcase.

XBOX ONE X

Project Scorpio has an official name: Xbox One X… WHAT!? That a terrible name. This is about as confusing as the Wii U’s name. The system is still boasting its 6 TeraFLOPS (Floating Point Operations Per Second) and 12GB of GDDR5 RAM. The system is to have a minimum of a 1TB hard drive for storage and the system is smaller than the currently available Xbox One S (see how confusing this can be). It will be the first console to come with a type of liquid cooling in the form of a vapor chamber, very similar to the Surface Pro that Microsoft also sells. It’s priced at 499.99USD and will be available on November 7th this year. Overall this system is going to be a hard sell with the confusion it will cause with average consumer who don’t know the difference between the S and the X models. Another concern is whether or not older games will run at higher frame rates instead of just high resolutions. I’m certain that this system will have the ability to run games at 4K, but highly doubt many developers will do that as more and more games become resource intensive. I believe that using Supersampling anti-aliasing for games running on 1080p displays is a giant waste of system resources as the game is still rendering the game at a higher resolution just shrunk down. You could easily give us the option to run games at high frame rates while sacrificing resolution, but you won’t give us that will you.

FORZA MOTORSPORT 7

I, like a lot of people, have forgotten where exactly we are with the Forza games. There are two sets of them and there seems to be one release every year now. I no doubt believe these are good games, but maybe slowing down on these releases would be more beneficial, but you know, Microsoft is hurting for exclusives these days. The game is to feature the latest Porsche 911, and this is such a big deal that they had it on stage before the big national car show which I don’t even know what the name of it is. There was eSports. 😡 Two actual racers demoed the game which is alright. The words immersive and dynamic were used in some capacity along with epic and grand. It’s a racing sim.

METRO: EXODUS

A bit of surprise with this one. There isn’t much in terms of details for the latest game in the Metro series, but it sure does look nice. Even if it was very scripted.

ASSASSIN’S CREED: ORIGINS

It was nice to see Ubisoft take a year to get their act together with this series after the disaster that was Unity. The latest game in the franchise is set to take place in Egypt at the creation of the creed. You play as a sort of “sheriff” that goes around killing certain targets like any of the other games. This game features an eagle friend that lets you survey the landscape and spot enemies and landmarks before entering a potentially dangerous area. There is also a leveling up system which may or may not turn people away from the game, and a loot system that featured Legendary equipment which could mean: Microtransactions. The demo also featured frame drops. Let’s just let that sink in.

PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS

If you already have it on Steam, no reason to bother.

DEEP ROCK GALACTIC

From the studio behind Goat Simulator is a game like Minecraft but in space and with just the mining and killing.

STATE OF DECAY 2

Based on what they showed us, you can already play this game. It’s called State of Decay.

THE DARWIN PROJECT

You already have Battlegrounds. Why do you need another battle royal game with eSports.

MINECRAFT

Of course this was going to show up. The biggest update to this was cross-platform play for every version of the game. There is also a Hires Graphics Pack coming soon. Because the last thing I needed was better graphics for Minecraft.

DRAGON BALL FIGHTERZ

Best looking game of the show. By Arc System Works with the same guys behind Guilty Gear Xrd. 3v3 battles. Did I mention the game looks beautiful.

BLACK DESERT ONLINE

Another blasted port.

THE LAST NIGHT

A pixel art cyberpunk game that is likely an adventure game. Looks great.

Oh and Zoe Quinn ? (she’s not involve, but wants to invoke a “witch hunt” on the lead dev).

THE ARTFUL ESCAPE

A nerdy looking dude with a guitar going on an adventure. Sounds like me. “Coming when it’s damn ready.”

CODE VEIN

Weeb Souls the Anime.

SEA OF THIEVES

A co-op pirate game that looks like a lot of fun. You get board other player ships the old fasion way or by blasting yourself out of a cannon. You can look for treasure in sunken ships or in caves. There are also Legendary treasures…microtransactions…………….

TACOMA

Walking Simulator 2: The Reckoning

SUPER LUCKY’S TALE

Cause no one bought an Oculus Rift to play a 3RD PERSON PLATFORMER.

CUPHEAD

Finally, September 29th. Microsoft Exclusive. DAMMIT!!!!! It’s going to be on the Windows Store.
CORRECTION: It will be on Steam.

CRACKDOWN 3

Terry Crews and explosions. That is all.

Addendum Joke: Old Spice the Video Game

ASHEN

Not to be confused with YouTuber and star of Ashens and the Quest for the Gamechild, Stuart Ashen aka Ashens.

LIFE IS STRANGE: BEFORE THE STORM

Hello Fellow Kids: The Prequel starring the worst character from the last one.

MIDDLE-EARTH: SHADOW OF WAR

One of the best Lord of Rings games in recent memories has a sequel that looks to improve on the Nemesis system with more involved stories like not actually killing an orc only to have them come back to seek revenge. You can actually recruit orcs to help take over strongholds as you wage war through Mordor. This might lead to large-scale battles, but not much was said about it during the presentation. If you liked the last game, keep a close eye on this one.

ORI AND THE WILL OF THE WISPS

Should be renamed to Ori and the Infinite Sadness. I haven’t even played the first game and this made me sad. Also, Gareth Coker provided live music for the trailer.

ORIGINAL XBOX BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY

They said they want to better preserve their game library by adding this feature to all Xbox Ones. This shouldn’t be a problem as both the Xbox One and Original Xbox have x86 processors and run on modified versions of Windows. It will be launching later this year.

ANTHEM

Well, we now know where all the budget for the facial animation went. This is Bioware’s latest game that seems awfully a lot like Destiny. Which in turn could be a good or bad thing. You get to put on an Exosuit and fly around different parts of a planet with your friends. Looks interesting but after Mass Effect 3, Andromeda and even Destiny, it going to take a lot of convincing.

OTHER TOMFOOLERY

  • Audience sounded like it was filled with the same people from the Xbox One’s reveal in 2013.
  • One guy accidentally referred to the system as the Xbone.
  • Phil Spencer pretending like he’s embarrassed with the cheering going on.
  • Scalebound is still cancelled.
  • Less talking and more games. Wow, that’s a first.
  • Xbox One X does not come with Kinect 3.0.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Overall, it was a pretty good showing of games. It was mostly no nonsense. Good Job.

Gears 4’s June Update Shows How Much Contempt Microsoft Has Towards Its Customers

Posted on - by Ian Ferguson

Back in October 2016, the beginning of a new Trilogy of Gears games started with a time skip of 25 year and starring the son of Marcus, JD Fenix. The Story Campaign was pretty good, but still needed some more to help flesh it out more as a complete story instead of a stepping stone. It was far more of an appetizer than a full meal. The Versus Multiplayer on the other hand had been mostly… underwhelming. With issues with gun balancing and tuning and a vacant PC playerbase, it isn’t something to even bother with. The Horde mode on the other hand has been really fun… with your friends (and just your friends). The added features of proper classes and being able to place fortification anywhere on the map makes for some good fun. The problem with it was playing with random people who just do waves 1 through 20 to complete as many bounties as possible. That means if you’re looking to do all 50 on Insane, you’re screwed. The issues people had was a lack of a 1 to 20 variation, a map voting system, or punishment for quitting in Horde. For the most part, Horde was fun to play even with the kinks it had.

The keyword here is ‘was’. The recent June 2017 update for the game made the obvious changes to Versus and gun tuning (which no one seems to be satisfied with after nearly 8 months of updates, can’t blame them). The biggest part of this update was additions to Horde in the form of Skills for the existing classes. If you want my opinions on them here it is: most of them are not very useful as the original skills are generaly better. I can’t find a reason why you would need use most of these skill. Cloak? A well placed grenade, Boomshot, or Dropshot will still kill you regardless of if you have this equipped and you have to be in cover just for it to activate and a decoy does a very good job of drawing away fire anyway. Berserk? No Heavy is going to willingly take damage to the point of near death just to get extra damage. The risk/reward ratio just isn’t profitable enough. Other skills like Dodge are great for Scouts because they can run out with a less likely chance of getting downed or killed with the extra defense. The Engineer’s Flow skill is a nice addition to give players a better chance of surviving a round of repairs. Believe me, trying to repair everything in 30 seconds is impossible. This just makes it that less frustrating.

The main reason for writing this article is the changes they made to turrets and Hammer of Dawn Strikes. They though it was a great idea to severely up the price of turrets by 33 to 100 percent (increasing by each level) and decreased its damage output, effectively making the one thing that actually gets you through all 50 waves, completely useless. The Hammer of Dawn Strike now costs more power to use which some people might believe it will prevent people from exploiting its destructibility potential. Maybe if the skills for each class were more powerful or you made the classes have passive skills that didn’t require a slot this would make more sense. Why would you change a non-versus gametype in such a capacity that playing a 1 through 50 will take nearly 4 hours instead of a little over 2? I know. Microtransactions!

The biggest reason for these changes is not because they want you to “diversify your approach” to Horde. Instead, they nerfed the turret and increased the cost to slow down your progress. This in turn will make your credits per hour rate get hampered immensely. They want to break your will until you start spending your real money for a chance to get more skill cards to upgrade. Not only that, they introduced a special Horde Booster pack that comes with 10 cards instead of 5 and costs $2.99. Okay. I’ll just save up some cred… oh, wait. I can’t use credits to get these. You can only get them with real money. That’s a scumbag move there Microsoft and the Coalition. Is the reason you added more skills to Horde is because you wanted to give players more options and a 6th level, or was it the fact that players were maxing out their classes leaving them no reason to buy more Horde Packs? It looks more like the later.

I said I was done with this game after I saw just how dickish Microsoft and the Coalition were for making these changes because of how greedy they were, but a glimmer of light showed up on the Gears of War Subreddit. A way to show that if these devs and publishers are going to play dirty, we should play just as dirty. If this isn’t reverted back by the beginning of July, they can take their 100+ Gigabyte game and shove it.

Xbox Live on Windows 10 Sucks!

Posted on - by Ian Ferguson

After several months since the release of Gears of War 4 on Xbox One and PC, the Xbox Live App for PC is still an unmitigated mess. Even after using the various troubleshooting pages on their official websites, the Xbox App continues to have its functionality crippled after every update for the app or the operating system itself. It seems as if both the app and OS are developed by two teams that lack a particular skill set that is needed: communication.

Every time there is a major update with Gears of War 4, the Xbox App has an issue of the Teredo adapter not working or the server connection being block by an imaginary program or outward force. It’s almost as if Microsoft doesn’t know how things like TCP/IP or server connectivity works. Steam is able to do this with no problem. No ports to open or external software needed to play. It just works. All you need is your PC, a network connection, and the internet. With Xbox Live this is not the cause. The are so many factors like software adapters, firewall policies, and antivirus software that will completely ruin your experience because you can’t talk with your​ Xbox counterparts.

I know some of these issues can pop up on Steam, but they’re so few and far between it isn’t really a giant widespread issue. If Microsoft would ditch their current setup for something like Steam or even Battle.net, things would be better. No more having to enable and disable things I never knew even existed in this OS or edit and restart Group Policies. I’m tired of fixing a problem Microsoft should have fixed over a year ago with at least the Anniversary Update. Sod off, Microsoft.

Addendum: While writing this, I updated my main PC to the Creators Update. It seems they might have fixed it or people who hadn’t updated to the latest version of Windows 10 were being blocked from server connectivity on Xbox Live (Wow, seriously). This doesn’t absolve them of this problem as it’s likely to rear its ugly head again after the next round of updates.