Devs are paying to have their game on GP? So they don't receive sales money from it and even pay for it to be there? Sources please.

@ the discussion over Halo.. I find it strange to justify that they had to cancel the beta due to covid while at the same time being sure they will be able to upgrade the game visuals to be really impressive in a very short amount of time.

I only caught bits of it so I'm probably not a great judge but 8/10. I think the line up of titles they showed were unique and I think that means a lot for a console launch. Plus they had some old stand-bys like Halo and Fable. I'd say it was good but I can't judge it on the presentation.

Tbh Microsoft, Phil Spencer and co have been hyping this to the moon. One hour should have been enough to showcase what Xbox has to offer next generation and we didn't really see that. Heck, we didn't anything running on the Series X from first party. You don't hype a console on teasers. At the same time you don't show your flagship game running on a PC at the state its in, in a few months from launch.

Microsoft should have showed more of Medium and CrossFire X. Those look good, and clearly are further down in development and more ready to be presented. They didn't learn anything from their criticisms from their first event. CGI trailers and teasers doesn't mean anything other than its going to be a while away until it see's the light of day.

The game announcements were actually good, there just wasn't enough to show what exactly you were getting with the Series X. Other than most of the big hitters are coming to Gamepass.

They have another event next month but honestly its first impressions that really count on console reveals and they kinda blew it, twice.

Well most of the complaints stem from lighting and enemy character textures. Also grass/foliage.

There will be a ray tracing patch, that unfortunately won’t make it till after launch. I’m not expecting a night and day graphical changes but at least enemy textures and grass isn’t an impossible task to at least touch up. 

The main problem is character faces, lighting, pop-in. Lighting and pop-in shouldn't be a length process to fix, ray-tracing will hopefully take care of the former.

Most people are focussed on that one particular gameplay image rather than this scene from the trailer, but I'd argue this is worse. That infamous image is a single close-up frame from gameplay. This is a tailored cutscene with the character being the only thing rendered. This looks like something that would have been shown at the Xbox One/PS4 launches to show off the new machines capabilities. It looks like a tech demo from 2012/2013.

I don't know why they'd choose to show this so close-up, it doesn't look good. Halo has enough time to fix most graphical issues, though it's never going to be a next-gen showcase.

Edit: Though looking at the footage at 4k/60 that scene from the image is a bit better, some details were lost in stream. However it's still not good, if someone told me it was footage from a base xbox one (at 1080p anyway) I'd believe them, and that's a problem.

Standard Phil Spencer, they say they hear but nothing changes for like 5 years then it finally got corrected and they say, see we heard.

If it would be just that then we wouldn't have so many feeling the game looks current gen, also if it was just that then it shoud already be simple to correct before receiving harsh criticism.

Ya I say the dev just has a bad track record with deadlines and time management. Shame, but if anything this lit one hell of a fire under their asses. 

Sure under their 10 year plan to support this game it can end the gen being the best looker ever, but since we still have releases, metacritic and MS need of starting well the gen it would be good that they can polish and improve the graphics a lot. And if they are getting help from several other MS studios there is a good chance.