Fair point - makes my comment dumb-sounding but not technically wrong - you are going to have better ping to an Azure datacenter than you did to all the individual peers in your game of Halo 2.

Maybe I’m just too used to MTX, but that...doesn’t sound that bad to me? It’s not P2W, and it’s an attempt to convert the most dedicated players into paying customers fairly late in the game (you’re suggesting that you get to play up until the endgame before they start pushing MTX on you? That sounds pretty good to…

Favor the target results in netcode with identical complexity, so I don’t think it’s that. Unless you’re suggesting that they should vary who is favored dynamically based on a combination of network and game conditions (which I agree with, but I’d call that particularly good netcode, not call the inverse bad netcode).

It’s not about speed, it’s about latency, and Halo runs in far more servers today than it did in the Halo 2 days. Azure has an enormous footprint. Even if you have the same internet speed you had 15 years ago, you should have lower ping in Halo Infinite due to this alone.

Basically, if a player’s ping rating isn’t exactly fantastic, they can still get killed despite hiding behind cover, a phenomenon 343 detailed with a series of screenshots snapped on the Recharge map

It will go up one day because everything must go up one day. But if it was something that was happing within “two years max”, I don’t know why Phil Spencer would have made this comment.

Created by peripheral company Thanko, it was even designed so you can wear glasses comfortably.

Well bear in mind that this season has 4 months to go. They’re in a tough spot where if the battle pass progresses too quickly, people feel like there’s nothing to do for most of the season, but if it goes too slow it feels frustrating. I’m not sure that it’s there yet, but they certainly seem to be trying to make it…

Yea, fair point, I hadn’t thought about it that way. Honestly I wonder if not having to finish the game actually helps with the enjoyment of some of these massive open world games. I love Horizon Zero Dawn - never finished it. I enjoyed Assassins Creed Odyssey - never finished it. The Witcher 3 is my favorite game,…

Destiny 2 takes it too far to the other extreme in my opinion (full disclosure: I play a ton of it, I’m part of the problem), so it maintains a loyal but smaller group of players who spend a TON of time with the game. It’s not going to top concurrent player counts (especially on Xbox - I think it is much more popular…

Anecdotes are useless. Aggregations of anecdotes are useful. I’m not talking about what individual streamers you happen to have watched might have thought. I’m not talking about what any one reviewer thought. I’m talking about the overall discrepancy between average critic and average player rating. We know that…

Turns out that attempting to respect your player’s time happens to make for a non-chart-topping game. I don’t think we should be praising the 4 games above it for being so all-encompassing of people’s limited gaming hours.

If it’s not even on the podium of Xbox’s most-played games, what first-party game could possibly crack it?

The internet would be an even more exhausting place than it already is if nobody could make a clearly opinion-based comment without explicitly prefacing it as such. Yes, this is just my opinion. We’re talking about reviews for a video game here, every thing said is of course subjective - I didn’t think that needed to…

That is not at all the point I was trying to make. This is not meant to be an anti-vax comment (yes, get vaccinated), it is meant to point out that Portugal’s numbers are not better than the US, and in fact they are worse. Please don’t put words in my mouth, as I was very careful to make sure that all I was doing was…

Yea, I think this PSA comes with the implicit caveat “if you’re going to play it right now”. You’ll likely save more money, either through discounts or a used copy, if you wait and buy it right when you’re planning on playing it.

Gotta say, I’m very disappointed in Sony for the way this is handled. Kudos, I guess, for correcting course and offering the free upgrade after getting caught trying to have their cake and eat it too (conveniently confusing wording to give the impression that upgrades would be free when trying to sell consoles, but…

It does feel more common there, but that’s partly because Microsoft is more direct about labeling games that are “Xbox Series” titles - minor changes specific for that generation of consoles, even as simple as unlocking the frame rate, can get your game the X|S badge. But as far as I’ve been able to tell, there is no…

And while game critics have had some mixed things to say about Dying Light 2, it seems to have mostly won over Steam players

For sure - if this actually happened I’d still be very concerned about that exact problem. But I guess my point is I can totally buy it for the purposes of a fictional story.