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With this generation finally in its last lap looking back isn't it nuts how few games Microsoft had?
- Thread starter Bruceleeroy
- Start date
Look at the user name. His judgment about Xbox is about as credible as mine about Playstation.
I never got the opportunity to buy a Playstation though because Sony hasn't delivered any worthwile games so far. Maybe they will in the next generation.
I didn't keep my Xbox very long for this reason. The Forza Horizon games are great, but once I'd had my fill of Halo 5 and Gears I sold it.
This gen Microsoft has been quite poor with regards to exclusives, but I did enjoy this lot -
Forza Horizon 2/3/4
Forza Motorsport 5/6/7
Sunset Overdrive
Gears 4/5
Halo 5/MCC
Rare Replay
Ori
Killer Instinct
Cuphead
Dead Rising 3
Sony has won the exclusives battle this gen by a mile, but that xbone list has some great games that I have really enjoyed playing. All is not lost for Microsoft. Not by a long way imo.
(the Forza Horizon series has more than justified the xbone imo.)
Forza Horizon 2/3/4
Forza Motorsport 5/6/7
Sunset Overdrive
Gears 4/5
Halo 5/MCC
Rare Replay
Ori
Killer Instinct
Cuphead
Dead Rising 3
Sony has won the exclusives battle this gen by a mile, but that xbone list has some great games that I have really enjoyed playing. All is not lost for Microsoft. Not by a long way imo.
(the Forza Horizon series has more than justified the xbone imo.)
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nah, this doesn't seem remotely plausible.
Rare was pretty much the only first party dev working all out on Kinect, and TV attempt took money that probably wasn't going into game development. None of their other main studios - Playground, 343, Coalition, Mojang - was Kinect focused.
MS actually came out of the gate much stronger than the competition with respect to software, but the initial negativity around their offering (weaker, higher price) severely dampened whatever boost games like Titanfall could have provided. Quantum Break bombed, And then they ended up with a lot of canceled projects (Obsidian's Stormlands, Fable legends, Scalebound) that could have helped moved the needle. Gears 4 and Halo 5 didn't set the world alight and then Sony went on a roll with non-first party exclusives like Nier, Nioh, Hellblade etc before the heavy hitters showed up.
MS just didn't have enough studios to keep the games coming after they tapped out the Coalition, 343 et al in like 2016.
I was pleased by the Forza Horizon games (all three) and Ori. Sunset Overdrive was fun too.
Gears 4 completely dropped off my hands (I love 1-3 at the time, but, the formula started to tire for me) Gears 5 had a bit more to boost the interest, but still couldn't get around to fully enjoy it.
Didn't try Halo 5 as I lost interest in the Franchise after Reach (I played 4, and liked it to limited extents).
But all things considered, for me NONE of these games are competing with the higher profiles first party games from Nintendo and Sony and that's what hurts for now. But I am confident that Phil has been building up on correcting that with all their recent investments.
Gears 4 completely dropped off my hands (I love 1-3 at the time, but, the formula started to tire for me) Gears 5 had a bit more to boost the interest, but still couldn't get around to fully enjoy it.
Didn't try Halo 5 as I lost interest in the Franchise after Reach (I played 4, and liked it to limited extents).
But all things considered, for me NONE of these games are competing with the higher profiles first party games from Nintendo and Sony and that's what hurts for now. But I am confident that Phil has been building up on correcting that with all their recent investments.
For me Forza horizon 3/4 were the only worthwhile games from MS this gen. Like the quality of title coming from Sony and Nintendo are on another level it seems like Xbox games come and go with no one in the industry ( that I follow) stopping and caring that much. Nothing really captures me.
Ironically, the first two years of this gen (plus the entirely of the WiiU's existence) was a very explicit demonstration of how little exclusives matter in the console war.
Yes they had a really lackluster exclusive lineup. I usually get every console at some point during the console generation, but I skipped out on the Xbox One this gen because there just wasn't anything there (with a few minor exceptions). I'm also just not the audience for Halo / Gears / Forza. Hopefully the new generation will be better now that they've acquired some more studios.
Huh. I guess I just assumed it had been longer given their games were Microsoft exlcusive for years before then anyway.
A Tier are studios that consistently put out GOTY contenders. The best of the best. Naughty Dog and Nintendo EAD (or whatever they are called) would fit that description. Microsoft does not have a single studio like that.
Killer Instinct
Ryse (press destroyed it, people loved it, including myself)
Titanfall 1
Forza Motorsports 6
Forza Horizon 2
Forza Motorsport 7
Forza Horizon 3
Forza Horizon 4
Sunset Overdrive
Ori 1
Ori 2
Gears 4
Gears 5
Halo 5
Halo MCC (in current state it's finally awesome + Reach)
Quantum Break
Sea of Thieves
Cuphead
Those what I liked the most, and it wasn't bad at all.
The first 3 years of the console was still a mess tho.
Ryse (press destroyed it, people loved it, including myself)
Titanfall 1
Forza Motorsports 6
Forza Horizon 2
Forza Motorsport 7
Forza Horizon 3
Forza Horizon 4
Sunset Overdrive
Ori 1
Ori 2
Gears 4
Gears 5
Halo 5
Halo MCC (in current state it's finally awesome + Reach)
Quantum Break
Sea of Thieves
Cuphead
Those what I liked the most, and it wasn't bad at all.
The first 3 years of the console was still a mess tho.
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Yes, it's very likely. They owned too few studios to have a huge output and their focus was in the wrong place at the start of the generation. Now they have around 15 studios or something like that and they're trying to adopt the Netflix model to the games industry, realising in the process that that'll require a substantial and varied output of their own, since other big publishers will end up building their own subscription services and reserving their games for those.
So quite a lot have changed.
And that said even if I do consider this a poor generation from Microsoft, I still think there's a lot more that the three games OP mentions that's worth spending time on. Perhaps not all conquering all appealing, but games that are very much an acquired taste, which isn't necessarily as bad as it sounds at least from my perspective.
Someone at Microsoft had some really bad taste in games and it affected the whole generation, it's a miracle we got Ori.
This has been a problem since around 2010. Bungie walked away, T10 were churning out sequels and Epic had no interest in Gears after the third one. At that point they had no first party. In all honesty I still think we are two to three years away from seeing them resolve this issue.
Daily reminder that until 2015/16 (fuzzy on the dates) Xbox was a subdivision of windows devices and had a much more constrained budget than you would expect a console brand to have. It wasn't until the failure of Kinect 2.0 that the idea to make Xbox its own division in MS and promote Phil into the executive team that we have seen the chequebook come out and Xbox "unleashed" the series x is the first gen where we will see that happen.
an analogy I floated in another thread was if Sony decided to run PlayStation through the TV division and have the tv division decide the budgets and directions of games published by PlayStation
an analogy I floated in another thread was if Sony decided to run PlayStation through the TV division and have the tv division decide the budgets and directions of games published by PlayStation
MS owes their fan base a huge debt of gratitude for sticking with them this gen, similar to how Nintendo did after the Wii U.
Both companies seemed to have learned from those mistakes, and in Xbox case particularly, it looks like fans are really going to start reaping the rewards: series x looks pretty amazing, and Gamepass is already fantastic, but when all those MS exclusives start to surface it will become essential.
It's really not a good time to be a console warrior, I think all 3 are top of their game right now and you'd be a fool to miss out on a 2/3rds of the delicious gaming pie
Both companies seemed to have learned from those mistakes, and in Xbox case particularly, it looks like fans are really going to start reaping the rewards: series x looks pretty amazing, and Gamepass is already fantastic, but when all those MS exclusives start to surface it will become essential.
It's really not a good time to be a console warrior, I think all 3 are top of their game right now and you'd be a fool to miss out on a 2/3rds of the delicious gaming pie
I agree with you, with the PS4 I played Spiderman, Days Gone, SFV and GT-Sport more than anything else. Loved them.
The whole PS4 list of exclusives is impressive, but many of the games aren't really my cup of tea.
Yeah the end of the 360 was really rough too while the PS3 was killing it with software. I think that gets overlooked when everyone jumps to E3 presentations for why PS4 outsold XB1 from the start.
That's how I feel about Playstation. I feel like we've only got one third as many first-party releases from Sony as last gen.
May well be true about Xbox as well, but I've noticed it more on the Sony side. Perhaps because I didn't have a 360. And I think that's why I feel the PS4 has just been a slow burn. The cost of AAA may have grown too high.
I think Microsoft is going to be hitting their stride entering next-generation, with all their new studios starting to wrap up projects. I'm worried about Sony though.
May well be true about Xbox as well, but I've noticed it more on the Sony side. Perhaps because I didn't have a 360. And I think that's why I feel the PS4 has just been a slow burn. The cost of AAA may have grown too high.
I think Microsoft is going to be hitting their stride entering next-generation, with all their new studios starting to wrap up projects. I'm worried about Sony though.
I think what this gen has shown is that it takes a LOT of time and investment to build up a solid roster of first-party studios and content, particularly in this day and age when new titles take years of development.
Microsoft was already relying to a large extent on big third party titles towards the end of the 360's lifespan, and their insane "media centre/Kinect machine" strategy for the first part of the XBO's lifespan did further damage. It's taken them years to course correct, and it's only really now that MS have a really impressive roster of studios going into the next generation.
Sony had this happen to a smaller extent at the start of the PS3's lifespan, where they realised that they weren't going to get a deluge of third party exclusives "because it's Playstation", but even then they were in a better position at that point.
Microsoft was already relying to a large extent on big third party titles towards the end of the 360's lifespan, and their insane "media centre/Kinect machine" strategy for the first part of the XBO's lifespan did further damage. It's taken them years to course correct, and it's only really now that MS have a really impressive roster of studios going into the next generation.
Sony had this happen to a smaller extent at the start of the PS3's lifespan, where they realised that they weren't going to get a deluge of third party exclusives "because it's Playstation", but even then they were in a better position at that point.
Sea of Thieves certainly isn't a classic title at this point (although it's improved a ton), but thank god Rare is working on that now rather than a deluge of Wii Sports/Play clones for Kinect.
Obsidian is legendary in a way (at least some of the people working there), but we'll have to see how they do under MS and with a presumably larger budget.
They are improving. They've added studios, they've announced games, they've grown studios (added teams to Rare and Playground Games, growing studios like Undead Labs). It is quite safe to assume they will have a better first party output next gen.
OP
OP
Bro no way. I can't even keep up with Sony you have to be kidding. I've got Death Stranding just staring at me as I play MW. FFVII comes out tomorrow and then I have TLOU2 and Ghosts. What is even the next exclusive MS game? Halo?
Lordy that list is just depressing
That's because for PS and XB ecosystems exclusive first-party games are important but relatively secondary compared to the critical mass of big selling third-party games.
These are the top 20 best selling games in US for NSW, PS4 and XBO (which are also what push hardware sales):
I legitimately enjoyed only sunset overdrive (still a 7,5-8 game at best) from them during this gen, of course i played halo 5, ori, gears 4 and 5, quantum etc. but i only completed a couple of them and never really enjoyed my time with these games.
To think that i enjoyed far more condemned1 during x360 launch compared with all the xone games of this gen combined it's indeed a little sad.
i was hyped for fable and the one with bootleg nero and the dragons but they cancelled them...
I hope new fable, new halo and all the triple a rpg from their new studios can change the cards on the table for nextgen.
To think that i enjoyed far more condemned1 during x360 launch compared with all the xone games of this gen combined it's indeed a little sad.
i was hyped for fable and the one with bootleg nero and the dragons but they cancelled them...
I hope new fable, new halo and all the triple a rpg from their new studios can change the cards on the table for nextgen.
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Xbox first party just lacked a core identity this generation. There were good individual games, but it's hard to pin down what the first party mission statement was. Maybe "we build games with PC crossover appeal". Idk, that's the most common thread I can think of that is unique to Xbox.
I mean, people were already complaining that the 360 needed some variety as it was becoming the Gears, Forza, and Halo box and that list just shows that we were all wrong. The XBO is the real Gears, Forza, and Halo box.
OP
OP
Not for people that like those games. And a lot of those games are still getting new content pushed into them.
Looking at the most played list, it's mostly a Forza Horizon and Sea of Thieves box at the moment.
This thread won't be open for long, just look at some replies.
Lol. Their games win GOTY in its category, consistently get 90+ MC, are considered the best of the best in their genre. Your lack of awareness only highlights your bias.
Lol. Their games win GOTY in its category, consistently get 90+ MC, are considered the best of the best in their genre. Your lack of awareness only highlights your bias.
Microsoft definitely didn't make many games of interest to me this generation, and the Xbox One was also an easy skip, but I did enjoy the Ori games and Cuphead on PC. I love Microsoft's renewed focus on PC / Game Pass. I'm looking forward to playing Gears Tactics soon, the Gears setting is perfect for some Xcom-like gameplay. I'll stick to playing Microsoft games on PC. Hopefully Obsidian and InXile can put out some great high budget RPGs under Microsoft. (Grounded is definitely not what I want from Obsidian).
Gears 4 was much better than Gears 5 which I found to be severely boring and forgettable.
Edit: How could I forget? I absoluitely loved playing Quantum Break on Steam! I wish MS made more games like that.
Gears 4 was much better than Gears 5 which I found to be severely boring and forgettable.
Edit: How could I forget? I absoluitely loved playing Quantum Break on Steam! I wish MS made more games like that.
First of all I enjoyed the fuck out of Cuphead. Secondly I kind of agree with you but I feel Xbox had a decent amount of exclusives. However their franchises are just not doing as well as Sony and Nintendo from a consumer interest standpoint (outside of Forza and possibly Halo which we must remember Infinite will be cross gen) so their slate looked a little empty. Hopefully their new studios they have acquired put out some awesome shit, I think Hellblade 2 will be big for them and The Initiative has me excited.
Also to expand I think Gamepass helps them get people trying new IP which is not a luxury that Nintendo or Sony have right now.
Also to expand I think Gamepass helps them get people trying new IP which is not a luxury that Nintendo or Sony have right now.
It´s not like there is any competition left in the arcade racing genre. And i´m talking about overall GOTY.
XBO "esclusives" variety is undeniably weaker than 360 era, but they're all still memorable games.
Forza Horizon 4 is probably the best racing game ever made, so Gears 5 for TPS and Halo 5 for FPS (Multiplayer). Ori 1 and especially 2 are probably the best platformers to date.
Killer Instinct is directly there among the best fighters.
Sunset Overdrive, Quantum Break and even Ryse were not a big meta and sales success, but to me are truly special and memorable games.
I had a lot of fun this gen with Xbox One and those games, and everything changed in favor also for ALL multiplatform games when Xbox One X arrived 3 years ago, as they look and run at best for my LG OLED.
Considering how many studios MS acquired and the amount of investment they made for Series X, things may only improve from here on.