Entertainment
Games Inbox: PC gaming taking over from consoles, Animal Crossing for free, and Dragon Age: Dreadwolf-GameCentral-Entertainment – Metro
The Tuesday letters page is optimistic about the upcoming Xbox Partner Showcase, as one reader is attracted by Helldivers 2’s friendliness.
Is the PC taking over? (pic: Razer)
The Tuesday letters page is optimistic about the upcoming Xbox Partner Showcase, as one reader is attracted by Helldivers 2’s friendliness.
To join in with the discussions yourself email gamecentral@metro.co.uk
Turning point
Given these Steam records that keep getting broken, with the number of people playing every day, I get the feeling that the recent news about Xbox going multiformat is only going to encourage more and more people to get a PC instead of a console.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not necessarily advocating it, since it can be a pain to maintain, the community is obnoxious, and the PC ports from console games are often poor, but the positives are beginning to outweigh the negatives. Apart from Nintendo and a few other Japanese developers almost everything is on PC. It is the one format future already, no matter what else Xbox and PlayStation do.
The graphics are better, if you can afford them, and the mod support can often be a literal game-changer. I think in an ideal world I’d probably still prefer to use a console, but that’s just nostalgia talking. PCs are cheaper in terms of both hardware and software and with the PS5 Pro out this year they need updating less.
I think this year will be a turning point for a number of reasons, not least pushing a massive new number of people towards PCs and away from consoles. Not something I would’ve predicted a year ago and yet here we are.
Iceman
Showcase battle
Interesting that Xbox is doing its third showcase of the year now. I do vaguely remember them saying they were going to people more informed so… good. Although I suspect that half the reason is that they know Sony aren’t doing it and so they’re pushing the idea that they’re the ones to be constantly updating fans. And that’s great. Proof that competition is important, even with relatively trivial things.
I do wonder if they can put on as good a show as Nintendo’s partner showcase though. Weirdly, Nintendo are still best of these things, to the point where I can’t think of one of their Directs that was a complete waste of time in terms of what was announced.
I hope whatever happens with Xbox though that we begin to flesh out the release schedules a bit for the second half of the year, because it is still looking very bleak there even for multiformat games.
Winston
Fighting with friends
I like the idea that Helldivers 2 is the ‘friendly’ online shooter and I like the attitude of this developer too. That may be what pushes me over the line into actually getting the game.
Personally I’ve always preferred co-op to competitive online, as I don’t feel you can really sit back and relax when you’re fighting your friends, but this sounds like a blast with the friendly fire gimmick and everything.
I also like the idea that they’re previewing new vehicles and weapons by the developers turning up out of the blue and using them. Only thing that puts me off is that the setting is just a straight rip-off of Starship Troopers except not with any real satire as far as I can see.
Loblanq
Email your comments to: gamecentral@metro.co.uk
Ratings gamble
Even more ridiculous than receiving an 18 rating, Balatro has actually been removed from the Switch eShop because of gambling concerns!
Who is actually in charge of these decisions, because they clearly haven’t played the game if they think it’s about gambling!?
When you consider all those lootbox filled games that are still listed, and not rated 18, these decisions become even more ridiculous.
drlowdon
Additional costs
I hear the Star Wars strategy from EA is actually still going through, which is welcome but surprising. I wonder why the only thing they cancelled is the Mandalorian game? I’m assuming the strategy game would be lower budget but a Mando game would sell much more.
Maybe it’s just the cost involved but I wonder if there’s an additional licence involved? So EA has the basic Star Wars one but they have to pay more if they want to base it on The Mandalorian or Obi-Wan or whatever?
I doubt we’ll find out unless there’s another hack or something but Disney may be pricing themselves out of the market. If EA can afford to pay their prices then I’m not sure who else can. Even Microsoft seems to be on a savings drive lately.
Freddy
Tom Nook’s final form
Curious to know what people will do if Nintendo do indeed release a new Animal Crossing at launch for the Switch 2… and it’s a free-to-play, microtransactions filled gacha game? For that game it wouldn’t be a stretch at all and it would mean constant support with new content and not just an early death after a couple of years.
Nintendo have a reputation for not being into cash grabs but that’s not really true. They’ll grab cash with the best of them, they’re just usually more cautious about when and where they do it. And because the game itself is always quality they usually get away with it too, even if some of the Wii games were really pushing it.
I’m tempted to say I have no problem with it, as long as you can still do a reasonable amount each day. If not paying for anything means only being able to play constructively for an hour or two, and maybe missing out on a few special items, I’m okay with that.
On the other hand, if they make it a normal paid-for game I will be genuinely impressed that they didn’t give into temptation. I think Nintendo could probably be making a lot more money than they currently are if they gave in to some of the trends at the moment. We’ll see how their feel when they have to be making even more expensive games and think about moving up to £70 a game themselves…
Lensor
Bad timing
I’m really worried what’s going to happen to BioWare if Dragon Age: Dreadwolf doesn’t do well. That game has been in development so long that Baldur’s Gate 3 has been and gone and I really double that Dreadwolf is going to stand up to that sort of quality.
Maybe it won’t matter, given Inquisition did okay despite not being as good as Skyrim, but it seems like BioWare has a nasty habit of releasing their games just after something similar but better came out. A bit like the Horizon games always coming out at the same time as a big open world Japanese game.
Wiffle
More Trending
All of this has happened before, all of this will happen again
Tech specs are in no way poor at predicting capabilities.
They’re unlikely to give the full picture without all the details though, e.g. the extra GPU cores on Xbox Series X generally will give you extra performance that can equate up to 30% extra that the extra cores suggest possible. However, that’s only in specific circumstances, and it doesn’t take into account other factors such as being CPU bound, available bandwidth, data compression hardware, and software available on PlayStation 5, etc., etc.
Digital Foundry did a piece on this and took the information available to identify the relevant Nvidia Tegra chip. It’s almost an exact fit in terms of number of cores, etc.
It will have to be downclocked to make suitable for a mobile device. It may be a custom chip, but unlikely given Nintendo didn’t bother before.
It could have more advanced upscaling capabilities, but by all accounts, it’s similar in capabilities to an Nvidia RTX 2050.
Naturally, having its own customer development software and being able to optimise heavily for the hardware on consoles, should give it greater performance.
This sits nicely with the idea it is somewhere around the Xbox Series S in terms of performance.
Kiran
GC: We disagree. Also, whatever tech demo is shown before release will feature a quality of graphics never seen in actual games. Plus, whatever gimmicks are used in the tech demo style game released at launch, to show off the controller (e.g. 1-2-Switch and Astro’s Playroom) will rarely, if ever, be used again. It’s the same for every console from every manufacturer.
Inbox also-rans
What is it with indie games and terrible names? I have tried and failed to spell Balatro correctly twice now. Why didn’t they just call it Joker?
Nasher
If the Switch 2 really is as powerful as the Xbox Series S I will be super impressed. I’m not really expecting but I would love to see what a souped up Zelda could look like on a system that powerful.
Toxey
Email your comments to: gamecentral@metro.co.uk
The small print
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