Wired Game|Life - Susan Arendt, December 07, 2007:
"Preserving the classics is all well and good, but at what price?"
Arendt reviews Xbox Originals on Xbox 360 and reveals many problems: glitchy emulation, buggy gameplay, a lack of Achievements and extra features, the $15 asking price for each old title, and the lack of current game selection.
Announced in 2020, Playground Games' open-world action RPG has seen sporadic updates and departures but still no release date.
I expect it to release by the time the next Xbox releases. Can that be 2026? Sure
You could say the same for any number of games that were stupidly announced during pre-production. Elder Scrolls 6 & Perfect Dark are current examples, Blade is another recent one and in the past Mass Effect Andromeda and Cyberpunk 2077 come to mind.
I don't think this game is in any trouble. For a start, Playground Games are one of the few under MS Studios that actually have a track record of delivering on time and with quality. We got a trailer last year and I'd fully expect there to be something more substantial at the next showcase in the summer.
No dramas here - just another victim of Microsoft's incompetence. They simply had to announce several games way too early because they had nothing else to talk about.
how are they a victim when they are clearly being given enough time? They haven't set any release date, haven't had to show any trailers, how is that being a victim? You even say yourself that you think it's not in trouble.
TESVI was mostly announced to stop people from asking. Like how they gave us a roadmap of first Starfield, then TES then Fallout. So people keep asking whether they'll do another one or not.
But Fable and Perfect Dark was defineately too early.
The same thing that happens to any project when you announce it far too early. Perfect Dark, Fable, The Elder Scrolls 6, Star Wars KOTOR Remake...you actually have to, I don't know, make the game?
I'm fairly confident this game will see the light of day, as Playground have released 5 Forza games of quality and on schedule. Think it was just revealed too early.
The only issue I see is that, as you mentioned, they have only done Forza games. An RPG is completely different requiring completely different facets.
Whole new different open world....not just tracks. Character designs and animations, dialogue, combat systems, quest systems, equipment and inventory managment....the list is very long and none of it falls under their previous experience.
Even with assistance from other studios I believe they are still far off from delivering a complete version of this game.
Remember the days of four-player couch co-op? The Wealth of Geeks team certainly does. This list brings us back to the golden years of the original Xbox with the best four-player games that were available.
Have you ever looked at a modern first-person shooter and wondered "How did we get here?" Wealth of Geeks performs a deep dive into the genre, including some of the most influential games, from the very first FPS from the cross-genre experiences that changed the game entirely.
Agreed, they could easily have added achievements at the 360 level, online would have been harder but achievements could have been done and would have added a nice quality to the games and replayability for those that all ready have em.
This could have been realy good idea if they would have enabled private chat and achievements for the Xbox originals. Otherwise I can just go buy the disc and maybe even find a used one cheaper and with more features than the downloaded content one. Unless you have a 120gb HDD and you want to use that space for something, I wouldnt even consider it.
As least not without opening up the game and rewriting the the game code. Achievements are part of game code and adding them to the code at this late date could have caused the game to crash in new and f'd up ways. And let's be honest the days for most of these games belong in the past.
My only complaint is that they improve their emulator, I have no qualms about the price but the game should run good for 1200 points
As many gamers have stated already, these prices are marked up at least 50% compared to buying them in a store or online. So at least a 50% markup and yet we received only the game with no option to trade/sell later on.
That is my problem with Xbox Live's arcade features, the lack of being able to resell our games. Or at least let us trade them if i have one game and a person has another. I imagine MS could have implemented something along the lines of allowing users to sell an arcade game or trade it for another. Just select the game, click trade/sell, select who you want to offer the game to and put in the price/game you want in return. The buyer can approve or deny the transaction. Should they approve, that game is queued up and downloaded, points deducted if it was a sale, and the seller is prompted next time to delete the game if they choose or leave it as a trial.