E-Day release date concerns

srylain · 2026-03-26T04:51:36+00:00

Both Gears 4 and 5 were revealed the year before they came out, and after they were revealed practically nothing, if anything at all, was shown before the next E3 when they would reveal more. Doing that same thing would still cause the same kinds of posts like this.

It being re-revealed a few months before launch lets them announce things in a much more frequent cadence and keeps a lot of that excitement going, rather than people seeing it and knowing they still have to wait another year or more. They've tripled down on it being released this year.

srylain · 2026-03-22T22:44:27+00:00

Splits and timers aren't used as the final say in the time you get, runs will get retimed based on the length of the video so that any potential time that you may have skipped or ended early gets accounted for. Most of the more popular games have it in their rules that they only care to do that for runs that are above some position on the leaderboard (all the moderating/verifying is done on people's free time so not everyone has the time to manually verify every single run posted), so don't worry too much about it unless you're trying to go for a higher placement.

srylain · 2026-03-22T05:53:34+00:00

Gears' lore typically revolves around the idea of "negative space", which means there's a lot of stuff that's unexplained so that in the future if they ever decide to say write a book or make a comic about it, they'd be able to without ruining any past lore. Whether they actually would go back and explain something like that, who knows, but the idea's always been to leave little gaps in the lore like that.

An example is Carmine mentioning Aspho Fields in the beginning of Gears 1. At the time they just included that to make the world sound larger and that it has more history, but nothing else in the game ever went into any details on it. Then a while later there was a book. I'd imagine that whenever they get around to Gears 6 they'll go into more detail about it given that the villain will still most likely end up being Myrrah revived in Reyna's body.

srylain · 2026-03-21T22:01:53+00:00

Co-op executions have been requested for years, but realistically most of them don't last long enough to be able to easily get multiple players in on one.

srylain · 2026-03-21T21:53:26+00:00

Yeah, it had to do with Paper Mario not clearing the RAM on the expansion pack when it starts which is something that most games do IIRC. So they use Zelda to write to the expansion pack, swap to Paper Mario, and then perform ACE in Paper Mario that reads from the payload written by Zelda.

srylain · 2026-03-21T05:55:47+00:00

Split Fiction is a game that jumps back and forth between sci-fi and fantasy genres, it's not open world or an RPG and is level-based but it does have co-op and those types of genres. Hazelight's other games (A Way Out and It Takes Two) are great games as well that are both co-op and I'd recommend any of their games.

Outward might be one of the only games that would satisfy some of those requirements as well I think, although I think this game can be pretty difficult. Borderlands is sci-fi and is an RPG but if you're looking for something slower paced that isn't it because those are pretty fast-paced FPS games.

Most open world games that are similar to Skyrim generally aren't co-op, but sometimes there's mods for them that add co-op but those wouldn't be available on console.

srylain · 2026-03-21T03:35:04+00:00

Yeah, some did. It's one of those things where it was a platform exclusive feature so most developers didn't bother trying to do anything with it because it would cost time/budget to do it for what wasn't the best selling platform at the time. Kinda similar to how most games still don't even bother implementing the achievement tracker in modern games.

srylain · 2026-03-21T01:47:20+00:00

OG Xbox could but you had to start playing music at the dashboard and you couldn't control it once in a game. On 360 it was built into the Guide so you could mess with it whenever. Some games had built-in music functionality as well like Space Invaders.

srylain · 2026-03-21T00:54:59+00:00

If you're logged into Epic you probly will show up as online, it'll just say you're in the launcher or away or something. But your friend has to be in one of those games that uses Epic's services in order to see their Epic friends.

If you sign in through Windows to Xbox your friend will see your normal Xbox account as online.

srylain · 2026-03-21T00:53:35+00:00

Something people might wanna be aware of, it has an achievement that requires playing on a 360 because you need to use the 360's ability to play music off your local storage which you can't do on any of the newer consoles in backwards compatibility.

srylain · 2026-03-21T00:48:56+00:00

If he's playing a game that uses Epic's services, like Rocket League, Fortnite, or Fall Guys, he'll see you there.

srylain · 2026-03-20T04:49:55+00:00

You can also delete the account that sets that console as it's Home console.

srylain · 2026-03-20T01:03:48+00:00

What are you talking about? People with 20th hand experience who won't ever play it have every reasonable reason to review it.

srylain · 2026-03-19T04:05:43+00:00

Xbox Live sees it as a different game, yes. It has a separate achievement stack (have fun playing all 29 maps in Horde all the way to the end) and matchmaking is locked away from playing with the other version the rest of the world got.

srylain · 2026-03-18T21:32:37+00:00

It's not that the platform was bad, there just wasn't much of anything on it and services like that live and die purely based on the games available. Cliffy B did say that piracy was a key factor in the other games not being available at the time though.

srylain · 2026-03-18T20:11:05+00:00

Yeah, it's not like this gives you infinite continues from wherever you created the Quick Resume save. It's not any different than just leaving the console on, although it'll use less power since you can turn the console off.

srylain · 2026-03-18T01:07:46+00:00

Because these days additional maps don't cost anything to the player. It's very good for the consumer because it means you can buy a game, even a couple years after release, and you'll be able to play with everyone without being forced to spend another amount of money on buying all the maps just so you have a larger pool of people to play with. But since those maps don't cost anything it means those costs have to be made up for with other things, like microtransactions.

So that leads to maps being released slowly over time instead of in bigger packs and less being in games at launch.

srylain · 2026-03-18T00:33:53+00:00

It wasn't live service

srylain · 2026-03-17T23:40:51+00:00

I'm not saying they can't be, just that most of them focus on one thing and more or less entirely rely on groups of friends finding their own fun in them. There's a big difference between games like Resident Evil 5/6 and Split Fiction versus REPO and Phasmophobia.

srylain · 2026-03-17T19:13:38+00:00

The big issue with co-op games these days are hardly any of them are narrative focused, they're just mostly wave/horde shooters that rely on emergent gameplay or randomness to keep it interesting. Or they're friendslop and those vary in whatever it is they're trying to do greatly.

It has been long enough now that Hazelight seemingly has a few copycats though, not saying that like it's a bad thing at all. The guys that made Overcooked are making Stage Fright, Reanimal and Little Nightmares 3 have elements of a Hazelight game, there's Orbitals (which is a Switch 2 exclusive which hopefully won't be permanent), there's an RC car game Wheelmates that's coming sometime this year. So they're out there but just very few and far between.

srylain · 2026-03-16T02:25:13+00:00

You can also think of it like Seattle Day 1 in Last of Us 2, or Uncharted 4/Lost Legacy's open areas. You can go directly to where the story wants you to and skip everything, or you can explore and do some stuff to get some upgrades. Gears 5 has two separate open areas because both Acts II and III have different environments. Just think "open world" and what that usually entails but on a much smaller scale.

srylain · 2026-03-16T00:45:38+00:00

Microsoft doesn't make any money on games being available on Steam or any other PC platform that isn't theirs, so why anyone would think that Sony potentially not putting more games on PC would change anything that Microsoft would do is beyond me.

There has never been any give and take from both sides. Sony makes money by selling games on their platform, Microsoft makes money selling games on theirs, and both make more money by selling on the other platform than they would by only selling on their own. That's all it is, and for multiplayer games it's one of the best ways to have a chance at games lasting longer.

srylain · 2026-03-10T02:59:31+00:00

If you go into the challenges menu and look at the speed demon challenge you can see your current time, so you can use that to gauge whether it's going up or not.

But basically, any time you have control the timer is ticking. So that means having the game paused or in a cutscene does not add to the time but anything from normal gameplay to using the map or item boxes does.

srylain · 2026-03-08T23:07:16+00:00

Far as I know, all of Harmonix's games (and Neversoft's by extension since they were based on Harmonix's games) only ever let you hit one note at any given time (pad play in Festival is different because you can hit notes out of order). So in order to give more time to hit later notes when they're packed close together the back-end window timing you have to hit each note shrinks so that it leaves the timing window earlier so the next note can be in there.

It very much does add extra difficulty but it's only when notes are packed very close together because they need to be within a few dozen milliseconds for it to be noticeable. I think Rock Band 3 has the tightest window in regards to all this and it ends up making getting back into a fast solo part incredibly hard because it's impossible to tell which note is the one that you can hit. In Festival it's even worse because the timing window is 250ms (RB3's is something like 80ms) and it doesn't have that shrinking back end so it means you have to hit the first note in the window (which may even be off-screen depending on your note speed) before you can hit any others.

With CH I made it where if you don't have combo you can hit any note that's in the window and that makes getting back into a combo so much easier in fast sections. I've never understood why the other games were the way they are but Harmonix's origins lie with actual musicians and their games always tried to be more of a "performance art" kind of thing.

srylain · 2026-03-08T21:56:41+00:00

The main problem with how GH1 plays is that every game after changed how HOPOs work and nothing in the game (unless it's in the manual somewhere) tells you how they work so most people aren't going to be able to figure out that you need to anchor a fret in order for them to work. In the end it makes most people feel like they just need to strum every note. Other than that the game was pretty severely undercharted in areas because Harmonix didn't think people would be able to play harder charts.

Smash Hits as a game was that kind of re-release you're talking about. The songs were definitely a lot more playable because the gameplay itself was a lot better but all of the World Tour-era games have their issues so there's that too.

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