I’m not sure Microsoft did this generation of consoles any favours by launching the Series S.
The Series S specs exceed all the listed minimum specs on the BG3 Steam page for PC. How is the Series S holding anything back when they apparently support their game on shittier PCs?
The problem is that they have couch coop play. They struggle making it work with Series S. From what I understand, they cannot just make a separate version without coop just for Series S. All game features in Series X must also be available on Series S. I guess that’s a limitation imposed by Microsoft.
With PC you don’t have that limitation. If your computer can’t do couch coop then too bad for you. Minimum specs probably doesn’t account for coop.
I’m not sure why they don’t remove couch coop completely from the Xbox versions. Probably because they think it’s removing too much of their vision of the game.
So because 5 people on the face of the planet don’t want to use the internet like modern humans the rest of us have to suffer? When was the last time anyone actually used couch coop? It was Halo 2 for me.
It’s an “if you build it they will come” issue. People stopped with couch parties because no games supported it anymore. When I’ve done it, most games in question had the option for internet play but it just wasn’t as social.
A lot of people would love to have more split screen co-op (or Vs) games.
Its stupid that if I have a friend round I cant play a multiplayer game with them.
I have an X not an S, but my wife and I will absolutely be using couch co-op when this comes out.
Me, with a mate a week ago on Resident Evil 5.
Probably because MS wants feature parity for both consoles. Like the minimum PC spec most likely runs split screen like dog shit. But MS will not accept that for the Series S
It may be due to Microsoft demanding certain minimum configurations: at the very least minimum resolution and minimum frame rate. On PC you can always go down to 240p and/or live with 10fps in very high density scenes. Microsoft can (and will) just say “no” if they try that on the Xbox S
I understand that but surely the articles should be “developers lie about minimum specs on PC” surely. I believe the concept of a lower priced and accessible console should be encouraged. If that means developers have to try a little harder to support people who buy a cheaper console then so be it.
I guess that’s debatable, depends on how you define what “it runs” means. PC gamers with dated hardware may be fine with playing on 1080p, while on the Xbox Microsoft might veto if it doesn’t run on 1440p and 30fps. Of course weaker hardware won’t run everything faster hardware can, you can’t just sprinkle infinite magic optimization dust on a game, there are simply limits what’s possible with weaker hardware, and once you’ve reached them you can’t just shout “enhance” like in CSI Miami.
So MS enforcing a level of quality is a good thing then. The alternative is 12 fps at 720p.
Not in my opinion: if you read the article, it clearly says that Microsoft enforcing a level of quality for dated hardware leads to devs abolishing features that the hardware series S hardware won’t be able to support. They also can’t decide to not support the S unless they abandon the Xbox series X as well. It leads to lower quality games for everyone, not just series S owners.
I have a feeling all of these complaints about supporting the Series S will disappear once the Switch successor releases and devs have a new console with weaker specs to complain about
But devs already have the Switch which has weaker specs.
Yes but most devs leave it out since publishers originally let them. Activision recently said ignoring the switch was a mistake so I doubt publishers will be making the same mistake again when we have a new switch
With how little power the switch 2 likely will still have, developers will still ignore it.
Yeah, I imagine it won’t be much stronger than the Steam Deck, and I’m dubious that that will serve 4-player splitscreen 60fps.
There’s a kind of upper limit we’re hitting with tech in regards to what can be delivered conveniently in a handheld format with a reasonable battery life. It might even explain why the Xbox S|X and PS5 are quite a bit bigger than predecessors.
For those interested, a certain analytics company claimed on vague terms that certain markets sell more Series S than X consoles.
So that suggests, if Microsoft had never released that lower-power console, they’d be selling fewer of the pair this generation.
Ultimately, this issue seems specific to the devs’ wish for a 60fps 4-player split screen mode, something that certainly does seem computationally expensive even if resolution is lowered.
I don’t think it suggests that at all. I think people just saw their options, and went for the cheaper one. If there was no cheaper option, they would’ve just bought the X.
Well, there is a decent chance they would have gone for the PS5 instead.