How do you guys feel about no true next gen exclusives? Matt Booty says all MS games will release on XO for the next 2 years.
Console war fanboy logic: "PlayStation is gonna have true next gen games!"
Business logic: "We wanna sell as much first party software possible"
The main difference between this gen and the next will be rendering resolution, load times, and maybe performance. Like, those technical things or issues will be the big ones addressed.
Scope, scale, game design innovation, every game developer on the planet has had to play around with their own ambition versus budget constraints and time constraints. More RAM won't alter that significantly, a stronger GPU won't alter that significantly, an SSD won't alter that significantly.
The better question is, has Microsoft acquired enough talent to make good games outright. Nintendo developed Breath of the Wild for two pieces of hardware that are quite weaker than a base Xbone or PS4. But design decisions make that game something special.
Microsoft does have a taller hill to climb when it comes to ball swinging because of this, but it doesn't have negative connotation in reality for good games.
Like, if Sony unveils Killzone 5, a Resistance Fall of Man reboot, a fart sniff of God of War 2, an Infamous sequel, and Demon Souls Remake, and they're all PS5 exclusive....
Most of that is true if the CPU's of the Xbox One and PS4 weren't complete shit and they are. The Jaguar CPU when it came out was just awful this gen has been fairly limited by these shit CPU's.
The Zen CPU's on the other hand are what you want in a console but if you need your game to run on Xbox One/X you can't utilize all the cores.
Engines like UE4 are also moving towards "more cores = better". When devs make cross platform games they have to aim at the lowest spec (Xbox One) and move up from there.
In other words, they can only do what they're doing with the Xbox One X, which is to flick on a few more graphics options. Better CPU's allow for more complex AI's, expanded interactivity of game worlds and much more.
Part of the reason why early next gen games like Destiny and AC Unity ran so poorly was because developers expected better CPU performance across the board.
If they would do Xbox One versions of specific releases such as the new HALO that would make sense. But if there's not a single Xbox Series X exclusive for the first two years and it's all cross platform they're putting severe limits on next gen.
CONTROL for example is mostly a CPU limited game and the Xbox One and PS4 can't keep up (and neither can the Pro and X in certain scenes). A decent 5 - 8 year old Intel CPU is fine with that level of debris flying around. The Jaguar was shit when it launched.
The good thing about the Jaguars being shit is that you can port complex Xbox One and PS4 games like Witcher 3 to Nintendo Switch without having to worry about CPU requirements.
The second good thing is that on PC you don't have to upgrade your CPU for another generation and @1440p you can keep rocking the i7 4790k for another 5 years
The Xbox One > Xbox One X was already akin to only allow devs to port NES games to the SNES.
Now we're talking about a GameCube > Xbox One X type of gap between Xbox One and Xbox Series X.