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Xbox needs Narrative driven exclusive games

KaKaRi

Member
First of all, i am currently invested in the PlayStation platform, but at the same time rooting for Xbox to step up with Next Gen (competition will benefit all of us).
I like Phil Spencer direction and their approach on making Xbox a platform that is accessible for everyone no matter where you are playing (current gen, next gen, pc, game pass, xcloud etc.)

So to my point...
I believe Xbox is very strong on the shooter side, but lacks narrative driven games in the likes of Horizon, God of war, uncharted, Last of Us etc.
My hope is they will surprise us with these types of first party IPs and tease them sooner than later to get us hyped up for the future.

Bonus: while you are at it, buy WB games unit and get some (timed) exclusives out of that
 
I like the world and story of halo and gears but your right they havn't had a third person narrative games. I hope they have some and I think they will. At the same time I hope sony has more rpgs because xbox is about to do really well in that area.
 
If they do they would hopefully do something with a spin on them so that it's not just more of what Sony does. I think MS are actually in a great position to meld narrative-driven storytelling with multiplayer game design in a potentially really innovative way, as they have the obvious multi-player dev talent there and now new talent with a strong focus on narrative games like Ninja Theory and Double Fine.

Though also like Mister Wolf Mister Wolf said they already do have Halo which has an incredibly strong amount of lore to it. The last two games (particularly Halo 5) maybe didn't do the best in exploring that lore, though. Something hopefully Infinite rectifies.
 

DJTHEGREY

Member
I do think ReCore would've been a good start had it had a good story.

D4 was interesting to me.... Shame they gave up on it.

On The RPG side I wish they would've continued and expanded on Lost Odysee or even Blue Dragon.

However I dont think the Xbox community really appreciate those games like many in the PlayStation Community probably would've.

Ryse got soooo much hate dispite being a pretty solid launch game and still looks pretty good today.

Xbox just needs to find games that make it stand out more outside of Forza and Halo.... Not that those are bad games. They don't exactly need to be story driven but it would be nice if they had a few that were.
 

Hobbygaming

has been asked to post in 'Grounded' mode.
Bullshit.

They could have a LOTR epic style Single player cinematic and you aren’t budging.

So much fake.
I bought my Xbox One because I wanted to play Ryse at launch.

Better story driven games than on PS5 would be the only way Xbox could win me over and become my favorite
 

jakinov

Member
Xbox needs anything that gets people talking about it. Most people probably don't care about playing a game for the story. They probably wonder if the game is "good" or play what they know/is-popular. If average person wants a good story, they probably go watch a movie or TV show. I believe the games you mention that have gotten good sales from hype/popularity derived from the press, social media, youtube, forums like reddit, word of mouth and google. You type best PS4 game in google you get those games, you watch streamers and they are probably playing these games, twitter talking about them, youtube talking about them, reddit talking about them, and marketing shoving them in your face. You look at other games that sell well or get played a lot and you can see the same patterns but they aren't all story driven games. We don't have strong evidence that the bulk of these people who bought these games bought them because they wanted a mediocre story and wasn't because everyone was saying how good and pretty it was and posting memes/clips of the games every day and letting everyone know that they just bought or are playing it. A diverse amount of games have the potential for mass appeal is fine. But I don't think specifically they need more story-heavy games.
 

Roberts

Member
Ryse (it was merely OK) and Quantum Break (it was great) did that and were not exactly successes, so MS changed their focus to other kind of games.
 
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Kagey K

Banned
It's more than enough that one company focuses on cinematic story driven games, we don't need more.
Could you imagine if everyone went that homogenous way. All games are the same except settings and enemies.

The thing is most of Xbox games can be played solo if you choose, or they can be played co-op or multiplayer.

The last thing MS should do is give up their community spirit to make games like TLoU.
 

Graciaus

Member
They need their exclusives to actually be good. Getting rid of 343 and the coalition and restarting Halo/Gears would be a start.
 

Paracelsus

Member
Could you imagine if everyone went that homogenous way. All games are the same except settings and enemies.

The thing is most of Xbox games can be played solo if you choose, or they can be played co-op or multiplayer.

The last thing MS should do is give up their community spirit to make games like TLoU.

The irony is that Uncharted was clearly meant to be Sony's answer to Gears of War and never as a clone of Tomb Raider.
The double irony is that TR was actually rebooted to be a cinematic experience like Uncharted.
 

Yoboman

Member
For all the complainers in here. Mass Effect, KOTOR, Bioshock (when it was exclusive), Alan Wake, Fable. All once top tier exclusive "narrative" games.

Even Gears and Halo once fit into this, Gears and Halo were way more cinematic than anything Sony had before Uncharted 2.

The more the better as far as I'm concerned.
 
The world and story of Halo is larger than any of the games you listed.

I wouldn't call the story of the Halo series it's strong suit at all tbh. I've always felt the Halo story to be bland science fiction. it really just felt like a straightforward fps shooter with amazing gameplay. The visual aesthetic always turned me off, to clean, to perfect and master chief has always felt like such a lifeless hero to me.
 
Xbox is the most EA/Ubi/Activision like of all the console developers. They may have a few narrative driven games but I feel their focus is going to be mostly on online focused BS. They are going to screw it up. Would love to be proven otherwise.
“They don’t make the single player games I froth over, therefore whatever they do is them screwing up”

Lost count of the threads I’ve seen across multiple forums with this same terrible premise. If you like Sony’s games, cool. Go play them on a PS. Making Xbox into PS is the dumbest idea almost always predicated on PS fans hating anything multiplayer/online.
 

hyperbertha

Member
“They don’t make the single player games I froth over, therefore whatever they do is them screwing up”

Lost count of the threads I’ve seen across multiple forums with this same terrible premise. If you like Sony’s games, cool. Go play them on a PS. Making Xbox into PS is the dumbest idea almost always predicated on PS fans hating anything multiplayer/online.
Single player has nothing to do with sony and there are companies that make single player games that are better than sony's. I was talking about the online garbage that publishers like EA and ubisoft gravitate to. Have no faith in MS making decent games over the long term.
 
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Online shooters will always be a thing and story driven games will to. Humans strive to tell stories and games are able to tell explore them in such creative ways. They've gone through a maturing process and the evolution of graphics facilitated that, but the future is extremely bright for games in the storytelling medium.
 
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Mr.ODST

Member
For all the complainers in here. Mass Effect, KOTOR, Bioshock (when it was exclusive), Alan Wake, Fable. All once top tier exclusive "narrative" games.

Even Gears and Halo once fit into this, Gears and Halo were way more cinematic than anything Sony had before Uncharted 2.

The more the better as far as I'm concerned.

Im hoping Halo returns to this, replaying all the campaigns and everything up until 5 story and campaign wise was excellent, even Halo Wars campaign was a step in the right direction.

JRPG's literally ar the reason I buy a Playstation so I'm hoping Xbox gets more.
 
They perhaps need the odd one, but it shouldn’t be their focus. And if they do it they should still stick with 60fps. The Sony games might be graphically impressive but the gameplay suffers because of it.
 

Castef

Banned
First of all, i am currently invested in the PlayStation platform, but at the same time rooting for Xbox to step up with Next Gen (competition will benefit all of us).
I like Phil Spencer direction and their approach on making Xbox a platform that is accessible for everyone no matter where you are playing (current gen, next gen, pc, game pass, xcloud etc.)

Basically EVERY single important Sony first party game is a third-person narrative driven game.

I don't want Microsoft to copy that.

To each one its own, better have two different lineups.
 

ZehDon

Gold Member
I’d prefer more “gameplay” in my games. If the best games as a whole can hope for is mo cap sessions and pretentious narratives, then this industry is fucking doomed.
 

Hudo

Member
Xbox needs to do its own type of exclusives same way Nintendo has their own type of exclusives. Its much more healthy for each system to have their own unique type of exclusives games.
This. Microsoft should be doing their thing and not try to walk the same path as Sony.

And they should continue to push PC games as well like they're currently doing with Age of Empires and Flight Simulator.
 
I do wish there were more narrative, single player focused games on the XBOX as well, but I feel that Microsoft rarely give those types of games a chance. Sunset Overdrive, Quantum Break, Ashen(?), State of Decay 2, Recore to name a few to my knowledge didn’t perform as good as Microsoft wanted, so they decided to focus more on multiplayer games. Noticed how so many games like those rarely receive sequels. I don’t think Microsoft has to replicate Sony’s games, but I think a balance of single player and multiplayer could work for them.

I feel the primary issue is, seems like most of the Xbox demographic do not particularly care for linear, single player narrative games and Microsoft sees that, therefore they felt like it was a waste investing into those types of games. Hopefully that will change in the future, but imho the XBox demographic is probably the main why Microsoft don’t invest into more of those single player games like Sony. It’s basically similar to the Japanese games situation on the Xbox. They see more money in the GAAS, shooters, online and multiplayer games.
 
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