Topic: Official Push Square Xbox Thread

I’m about to beat Indiana Jones. I absolutely loved the game. With that said, I’m kind of bummed out because two achievements are bugged for me, stopping me from getting all 1000/1000 points. I hope there will be patches in the future to remedy this.

Okay, so Indiana Jones is indeed very good.

The first major area where you're just plopped in to work out things for yourself is really nicely crafted, and I think I found a total of 3 different ways to clear one "main gate"

There's a lot of fascists to navigate in this area which adds a little tension with the lack of autosave until you reach a certain point. But after I solved the first mystery

It was clear that doing this sidequest had moved me past the gated area for the main quest (route 1)

I then decided to go back through the gate

as there was still facsits to take out and items to find, and it was here where I found route 3, which in essence was

And this route could have meant avoiding nearly every guard for that area completely, if that's more your style.

Very pleasing options. But my preference will always be to find as much as I can possibly find first time, taking my time and taking out everyone in an area where possible, and then have a good nosey round for any extra routes and collectibles that I might have missed before moving on.

I know i've probably still missed some things, too, as it seems like there will be all kinds of secrets, but I got a few skills, comics, chests of cash, and even noticed a lock box with no glow or icon, so I simply smacked it with a hammer and Voila, more goodies.

I like when devs make games this way. Options are fun, experimenting is fun, even when it's just little basic things like this, it adds something.

Side quests are actually quite long 😁 Instead of getting the camera with the money I already had hoarded, I decided to do one random side quest, as it seemed like a good way to "find the money" as it initially suggested, pretending I didn't already have it. The qiest I picked at random was freeing someone from a locked room, in essence. But I've been exploring for ages, knocking out all kinds of fascists, and now it's sending me on further adventures to dig sites and the like. Classic Indy.

One man and his plunger vs Facism

The combat in Indiana Jones is just brilliant. It's a bit tough at first but once you get upgrades, such as dealing more damage with your fists and using your whip to disarm foes, then you'll become an unstoppable beast. Yesterday, I infiltrated a camp and took out like 15 guys in a few minutes using nothing but my fists and whip. I disarmed the enemies with my whip, picked up their weapons and took them out, and when they were too many I used my fists, which knocked them out after a couple of punches. It was absolutely spectacular.

It's also nice that there are guns in this game even though they're not that common but there's at least variety to the combat.

I thought Indiana Jones was a short game 😅

I played one side quest (sewers) one part of a main quest (tomb) and did some boxing afterwards and that was maybe 3 hours of entertainment right there. Taking photos and finding journals to unlock more story beats via internal dialogue and reading, with the exploring and collecting nicely woven in to what I was already doing.

Some of the conversations in Italian are pretty funny too, so it makes it worth going slow, taking it all in and having a listen/read to what is going on around you

It's quite a tactile game, so it would benefit from some proper haptics 😉

Bravo, Machine Games. I always liked the look of Wolfenstein, have seen friends play it, but I think this is my first actual MG game I've played properly myself.

@Ravix I think I've played it for over 25 hours now and I'm still not close to the end. It is indeed a long game and it can be even longer if you try to do everything.

The level design and gameplay loop are just so expertly interwoven. You explore huge levels with lots of things to collect and pictures to take in order to get adventure points, which you can use to upgrade Indy's abilities. It just meshes together so well. You're constantly rewarded for exploring and on top of this, exploration is so immersive in this game. The environments are so detailed and the places you explore are so fascinating. It's like I'm actually there and exploring them myself. I can definitely understand why the developer went for a first-person perspective, it just makes everything so much more immersive.

I just bought Assassin’s Creed Syndicate (the complete edition; DLC and all) for five dollars. I’ve heard great things about this game, and since it received a 60 FPS boost recently, I decided to try it out.

I'm at about 30+ hours of Indiana Jones now. I honestly don't know how it could take any less time than that, unless your following a guide and skipping cutscenes or quests. I'm not even doing a 100% run, and I'm not bothered about getting collectibles unless they just happen to be where I'm exploring at that moment, which is quite often the case anyway. So no game time is being wasted doing any purely collecting quests, it is all Adventures, Fieldwork and mysteries, which themselves all tie in to the main story of the game.

Superior game design. I'm guessing one or two more sessions and I'll have wrapped the story, depending on how big the mysteries and Fieldworks I've got left turn out to be.

If two thumbs up was a review score, it'd suffice 👍👍

@Ravix Yeah, if you play the game naturally, you can easily get 25-40 hours out of it. It really is a fantastic game, and I like how a lot of fieldwork and mysteries are stumbled upon naturally. Everything feels organic. With that said, near the tail end of the game I was using the fast travel system quite a bit, and I was also going balls to the wall melee against enemies since there aren’t any repercussions. There is a ton of backtracking and it’s not entirely respectful of your time, particularly in Egypt, but it’s still amazing experience.

With the rumours of more first-party Xbox games coming to PS5, it got me contemplating on how Microsoft got to this point. I feel like Phil Spencer/the Xbox team made two fatal mistakes. The first one being that they shouldn't have added first-party titles day one on Game Pass. Because of this, the games miss out on a lot of sales. Looking at the competition, such as Sony with PS+ and EA with EA Play, they wait at least a year before adding new releases to their service. Even other companies, such as Disney, let their movies be shown in cinema first before having them added to their service. This model seems more sensible. Microsoft can't really go back on this decision, which is why they decided to release their games on other platforms now.

The second mistake being that they bought Activision/Blizzard for a hefty sum, which has made the Xbox team seemingly lose their autonomy as decisions are no longer being made by them anymore. This is the impression I've gotten throughout the past year as Phil Spencer and the team have been very quiet since the acquisition went through. Instead, we're hearing more about Xbox from Satya Nadella. It's like because Microsoft invested a lot of money into acquiring ActiBlizz and Game Pass is not showing enough growth, the bigwigs want to take more control in order for this division to gain as much revenue as possible so that they can show that their investments were good. I honestly believe that Spencer and the rest of the Xbox team don't want to release first-party titles on other platforms but their hands are tied now after the ActiBlizz acquisition.

I think that both of these mistakes tie in with each other as well. If they didn't release their first-party titles day one on Game Pass, then maybe they wouldn't need to release their games on other platforms as they would've gained more revenue from the sales on their own platform before adding the games on Game Pass a year or so later. Not to mention that more people would've bought an Xbox and thus their brand would've grown.

The only reasons why you would buy an Xbox is because it's more affordable than a PC and it has Game Pass, which PS5 doesn't. So if you want to play games like Indiana Jones day one in the most affordable way, then Xbox is the way to go. But I don't think most people mind waiting some time for the games to come over to PS5 and have them go down in price instead of buying an Xbox. So really, there won't be much of a reason to buy an Xbox henceforth, which is a shame as I feel like Microsoft had something good going for them for a while there. Unless the next Xbox offers something different than the competition, I think I'm going to stick with Nintendo's and PlayStation's next consoles in the future.

@LtSarge I think their problem is always the same. They try to buy their way to success. Fail. And then try again.

If they had spent the years since their inception developing more varied titles than Halo, Forza, Gears (all which appeal to and thus share a very similar male American user base) then maybe they wouldn't have to keep trying to buy publishers to grow their catalogue.

Whatever people say about Sony, they don't really buy just buy a studio and simply keep ploughing on, they find talent early and develop it by working closely with them, when they have proven themselves they usually get acquired and/or trusted with massive projects which take risks that SIE can then publish

In the live service era, it's started a bit sketchy. But before then it has led to games and franchises that have supported SIE for years.

Xbox are not risk takers, they don't develop talent. They are simply number crunchers and service pushers. Which is what Sony should definitely avoid in the coming years, by the way.

I do think Xbox tried to change this, but then splashing the cash to buy publishers kind of sets that back again and leads to a slightly naff way of doing it. Like they have Obsidian under their control, which is one of those things that should pay off in the future and they could have put a big focus on their talent. But then right after they bought Zenimax 🤦‍♂️ it's just too much. And yes, Machine Games have hit gold from the Zenimax buyout, but then they have to release their game on PS5 anyway.

It's hard to get behind them when it's just spend so much and hope one pays off, rather than focus on a few and make sure the real talent gets the support it needs.

@Kraven Man I can not understand how so many have had time to beat Indiana Jones already.. Its like of the internet have it done by now. I got the impression that it is a quite big game. Yet it seem to have taken most people like less then a week or something to beat it..

@Ravix I wholeheartedly agree. Just looking at the past few years, they've delivered so many underwhelming experiences such as Redfall, Forza Motorsport, Starfield, Hellblade II and so on. Then they succeeded with one game: Indiana Jones. Microsoft definitely bit off more than they can chew.

At first I thought it was convenient that they bought so many studios as that would mean more games on Game Pass. But then they shut down Tango Gameworks, one of their most creative studios, and I lost all confidence in them. I seriously hope they stop acquiring more studios, because at this point I feel like either more studios are going to get shut down or the talent is just going to leave over time.

Microsoft should just focus on the studios they have now and nurture them so that at least we can get good games from them. I'm curious to see how Avowed is going to be received next month. Either it'll just be a Skyrim clone or something more original that'll help boost Obsidian's status.

@LtSarage May I ask if you are ”new” to Xbox? Or have you been on the platform for a long time? Hm I thought that you was mostly on playstation before:)

@oliverp I've been playing on Xbox since 2010 during the 360 days. I actually started playing on Xbox before PlayStation. You're right though that I mostly play on PlayStation nowadays.

@LtSarge if Fable doesn't come out this year and they move to having even more games come to PS (the ones I bought an Xbox thinking I'd eventually need it to play them) then it might be time to bin my series X already 😅

It went from "the future is bright" with the summer showcase to "the future is publishing on PS" a few months later 🙈

My xbox gaming has amounted to a grand total of Indiana Jones and half of Starfield. Anything else I've played on it just happened to be on game pass/Ea Play at the time.

Buying Bethesda/Zeni, a massive publisher arm, and then deciding to not publish those games much beyond Game Pass and cut the console sales reach of the games by well over half also seems like sheer lunacy. And it has hurt their smaller studios, who also weren't able to sell the games on PS at the time they were getting hype on Game Pass. I genuinely don't know how Phil managed to do it, and how they haven't thrown him under the bus yet. The suits clearly hate the gambles he made. And it hasn't really helped the average gamer, either.

And I've always said a dev like Bethesda need game sales as they can't just fund The Elder Scrolls 6 out of thin air. They need to actually budget for it, and they probably won't have as big an allowance now than they would have had if Starfield had launched on PS5 as well. Despite it not quite being the game people wanted, it would have still sold millions upon millions on PS 🤦‍♂️

@LtSarge iirc post-ps4/early 9th gen you went pretty much all in on Xbox/Gamepass too right?

@Ravix Sorry to hear that you bought an Xbox for that reason. I'm still keeping mine to use as a Game Pass machine (still nice to play day one releases for under €20) and to play older games. But yeah, it's really sucks that Microsoft went this route.

I mean, Microsoft could've just continued having those games release on other systems but with the key difference being that they would've also been added to Game Pass over time. They really didn't think that one through.

@colonelkilgore Yup, that's right. Back in 2020, I thought I'd do fine with just subscribing to Game Pass and playing next-gen games on my Xbox One through cloud streaming, which sounded fantastic on paper. Why buy the next console when you can just keep playing new games on the one you already own? But then I tried out cloud streaming on Xbox and it sucked. So I decided to get a Series X in 2022 I believe because it was cheaper than PS5 and I could play day one games on Game Pass. But I barely used my Series X for the remainder of the year lol. That was the year games like God of War: Ragnarok came out so I ended up playing more on my PS4 thanks to those titles being cross-gen. And that's when I realised that PlayStation was my preferred platform and I bought a PS5 back in 2023.

If I could go back now, I would've just bought a PS5 instead of a Series X. I bet on the wrong horse this generation.

@LtSarge to be fair, Microsoft’s Xbox/gamepass consumer-friendly sales pitch was a strong one (given their predicament)… and I’m surprised more people didn’t make the same bet that you did.

Ultimately though… Phil explained it himself during that kindafunny interview, that they lost heavily during the 8th gen when gamers were building their digital libraries and profiles and it was always gonna be an uphill task. And while people do generally have short memories, the constant mantra of wait til next e3/i’m more excited about what we didn’t show, which almost always went unfulfilled… eventually worked against Xbox by way of the boy who cried wolf.

They were in such a strong position early to mid 360… and then they just stopped delivering games. That stretch from 2010-2024 was a veritable drought and that is why the most important generation was lost as Phil put it. Shame too, as if they had the emphasis on games back then, that they seem to have now it all would’ve probably been very different.

@LtSarge I'm not really bothered about it, I just find it funny that when they finally convinced me after years that there would finally be enough Xbox games coming out I'd at least be interested in, that they changed their whole business so they'd most likely come to PS anyway 😂

I've still got great value out of it, but I do also kind of question the value compared to the health of the games industry, and I'd rather support developers, and only use subs as a supplement to games I'm buying.

But if they want to give out their games day one for peanuts, that's up to them. Hopefully PS sales are enough to keep their studios afloat. But it wasn't the case for Tango, unfortunately.