Nobody expects MS to have a TLOU2 up their sleeves. But remember I’ve bought an X and an S today and don’t have a PS5 on order. You’re not talking to someone trying to be negative. So much of what MS have done is great. But Jez’s point is that they’ve not shown those big big exclusive games for a long time - arguably all gen. Gears 4/5 - perhaps - FH3/4 AMAZING games that look stunning and probably have been the most promise out of MS. But if you look beyond that - Halo 5 whilst I loved the MP the campaign was a disappointment to many and nobody can say that game technically comes close to the sort of stuff Sony have managed to build.
Sony are reeling out these large, incredibly polished hugely impressive looking games - frankly many of them aren’t for me (though HZD is amazing). But they capture attention. Xbox as Jez and others are saying need to do that and the fact they’ve nothing at launch doesn’t help. But if we get to mid 2021 and people are yet again saying ‘wait a couple of years’ then you have to start looking at what is going on. Why does such a large studio group struggle to match the Sony output. What decisions are being made. In 2021 a short 8-10 hour AAA game that was as beautiful and polished as R&C would be absolutely a step forward - or even something akin to Miles Morales. They don’t and won’t have a blockbuster 30 hour complete game, but where is the beautiful fillers even? Or just anything? I’m hoping for something like the next Wolfenstein game will help pad things out in that regard, but they do need to have more in 2021 than Halo Infinite and lets not kid ourselves any other way.
I agree with you on most parts. Honestly what feels baffling to me is 343’s ineptitude regarding Halo Infinite. Covid is not an excuse for a game that has been in development for so long. MS had all of their eggs in this basket and 343 failed to deliver.
However, I don’t agree with Sony’s hypothetical 2021 lineup. They expect to release GoW next year with nothing but a teaser shown so far? I don’t buy it.
The recent output from the MS first parties (Wasteland 3, Gears Tactics) make me hopeful that things will change as we get more into this gen. But for now, it’s an absolute fair criticism that the game lineup is lackluster.
If they can get Starfield and Wolfenstein out next year and the former is Skyrim or even Oblivion/Fallout 4 good and the latter is at least as good as New Colossus if not Old Blood and New Order, Xbox wins 2021 handily for me. Without it and Wolfenstein though, it’s shaping up to be a good year, better than many other Xbox years, but a far cry from Sony’s.
Sony went literally years w/o announcing anything new from their 1P studios. They were 100% holding everything back for next gen and have been for a long time now. Those titles came out late current gen just because they were too far into development when Sony cut things off wrt new announcements. They have enough teams for for the first time ever they can have a great 1P year 1. Beyond year 1 though, I think ppl will be really shocked with what MS can trot out thereafter and it will outpace Sony’s 1P quite easily.
I’d add that Halo and Starfield (if it is 2021) are bigger than any of the games Sony has for year 1 anyhow. And lots of other great stuff is coming in year 1 too. Ppl act like it’s a literal vacuum with no games at all or something. FlightSim is likely, Grounded full release is likely, Forza is likely, Everwild is likely, Psychonauts 2 is coming too. Not to mention anything possibly coming from other Bethesda studios.
Anyhow, my view on rating consoles is that they should be understood as platforms and not just a single machine, also that they should be about establishing the likely potential of the platform. Launch games being able to showcase next gen doesn’t make them good games. The utility there should be reflecting where the platform is at realizing its potential. Showcase games give it a boost in regards to demonstrating conclusively that some of these news features/capabilities are real and tangible and can be expected. OTOH, especially given COVID, the absence of showcase titles shouldn’t be a deal breaker necessarily, especially given the context of where the specs are for the machines wrt competition and the fact that the same reviewers feel PS5 is showcasing tech better. That tells me that very obviously XSX can be expected to deliver similarly tangible showcase demonstrations at some point. It also is kinda annoying that these reviews went up so early, since some of them are now outdated and incorrect. Like Jeff Grubb’s XSS review, which said no XSS games were smaller than their XSX counterparts or that no XSS titles have RT. Both of which are abjectly false even for day 1 titles.
I also feel like reviewers are missing the bigger picture a bit. When they refer to showcase games, they really and very precisely mean graphical showcases. This is gonna color the premise of how reviewers evaluate all these new machines because it totally misses a lot of other stuff, especially on Xbox’s end of things where the new feature set is more about ecosystem accessibility than anything else. The fact I can grab a game on Game Pass basically for nothing and play it seamlessly across XSS/XSX/PC/mobile and in most cases even current gen X1 is a big deal.
My point here is that there ARE tons of XSX showcase games in the sense of showcasing the core features, they just aren’t there specifically for the graphics showcase scenario. It just feels like if ya have 5 key next gen features to the broader platform that reviewers are treating the graphics bullet point as the only one that matters much. If ya lack it, then ‘no showcase games’ but if ya hit that you can ignore other shortcomings.
I don’t know what else to tell you, I gave some examples/reasons in the posts above and you continue to ignore them. Big polished AAA games with amazing visuals take time (and I am sure you know that very well given the examples that you used to make your point) especially for new and/or smaller studios that are growing all the time and are creating something from scratch so unless MS moneyhats some big 3rd party games (which is a shitty practice and money not spent well IMO) we won’t see many exclusive AAA games in 2021. The earlier all of us realize that this will (most likely) be the case next year the better.