All I can think about is Starfield.

Meh,

To be honest the reasonable part of the gears community accepted that the collection was just a rumour but people started to believe in it ofcourse when Phil mentioned 'we have a collection of games coming' and people took it literally, can't blame the community.

Also would make sense to have a gears collection coming soon and maybe even this year with the netflix movie and animation showing coming up and Gears 6 in 2025. Having something extra this year would have been great..

People can fly making the collection will not be well receieved after judgement, heck even the Gears of war retrospective book only has 2 pages about Judgement and one of the pages is just art...

On a side note but I found it weird that Halo infinite did not show up in the showcase but skipping the extended showcase seems awkward.  What's up with that?

I understand why people are disappointed in Avowed's art-style change given it was something different in the CG trailer but I trust Obsidian knows what they're doing, I trust Obsidian when they say they want to focus on their strengths and not chase after being an Elder Scrolls clone, I trust Carrie knows what she is doing with Avowed since it's in the same universe as Pillars, a universe she provided significant input in creating.

And lastly I don't mind the change because I don't mind the art-style, I don't mind a little wild colour, touch up the lighting a little though, I think that needs improving and we still have likely a whole year to improve the graphics and we've seen time and time again how big graphical updates developers can do in only a year but even then, look at the graphics in the 4k images and they aren't that bad.

But again I get the disappointment in people who expected something different art-style wise based on the CG trailer.

Also a lot of Pillars fans don't seem to mind, also I sorta expected it based on the description of Living Lands being a weird and vibrant place.

I don't want to use my Starfield controller until Starfield is out. 🥲

Yeah, I don't really mind it being colorful, that isn't an issue for me at all. It's more down to things like some of the enemy designs looking more cartoony than realistic, like the spider, the lizard people, the ogres, the zombies and skeletons, things like that all have a more cartoony look than a realistic look to my eyes. It kind of feels more like Borderlands/Wonderlands in terms of enemy design than the more Skyrim like aesthetic I was hoping for, if that makes sense. I get that they were precisely aiming for that though, they didn't want to be seen as just copying Skyrim, so they went a totally different direction in terms of art design in order to differentiate Avowed from Elder Scrolls. The only thing is, that CG reveal teaser seemed to indicate that they did want it to pretty much look like Skyrim with modern graphics, which is why a good many people found it odd that the game itself looked so different from the teaser reveal.

On top of that, the actual technical graphical prowess on display feels somewhat low, I mean Fable running on ForzaTech vs Avowed running on Unreal Engine 5 almost looks like there is a whole console generation between them, and even Starfield looks a good deal better in terms of graphics, which is saying something because Bethesda Game Studios also isn't known for high-end graphics relative to other AAA games that released the same year on their past games. I get that Obsidian has never really aimed for high end AAA visuals, but I think many people were hoping they would do so starting with Avowed since they were calling it AAA and had a big Microsoft budget to work with, and 2 Unreal Engine master studios in The Coalition and Ninja Theory who could help them to achieve loftier graphical goals in Unreal Engine than they had in the past.

I may not either lol. I'm playing my Switch to 100% games like Metroid Prime Remastered and Advance Wars 1+2 and Diablo IV but on MnK till Ratchet & Clank releases on PC, which I'm getting a Dualsense controller for anyway. I'll play Halo as well in the meantime but also on MnK.

With the way how similar both Playstation and Xbox are in terms of hardware this and previous gen and how quick technology is improving these days, I don't see Microsoft doing a 360 scenario again. Because it would mean they will be releasing a noticeably worse and outdated console to have an unclear advantage of 1 year head start on the market. 

Finally, Neon White. Wanted to play it for a long time.

From what I understand, the big issue for Microsoft in Japanese stores is that they have nothing to put on the shelves. There are no physical releases for Xbox games in Japan except for a very small amount of games. The best case scenario is that 2-3 of all Xbox games releasing each year are getting physical releases there. And I think there were years during Xbox One gen with no physical releases at all.

I wonder what the next Developer Direct will be.

January

• Towerborne
• Hellblade II
• Avowed

Lets see if they reveal anything else later in the year for 2024.

I personally hope for a FanFest towards the end of this year.

I'll be looking forward to your Starfield VGC review!