Yeah, or at the very least, with the next generation, I could easily see myself slipping from day one buyer to wait and see. I bought early on Wii-U because they seemed to have a bunch of developers and publishers supporting it, and they also seemed to be moving away from the motion control crap of the Wii era and obviously I got burned on what turned out to basically be a pre-Switch.
Now that Switch has been killing it, I’m still not buying in. I’m still going to wait and see. They’ve had what, a little over a year of strong momentum? That’s awesome. But I also really liked the first year or two of Xbox One offerings and the last few years have been decidedly less to my liking.
When the next generation comes around, at least right now, I’m more than likely going to look at the Xbox brand and hold on to my money, which hasn’t happened before.
But like you said, they seem to focus on a few mega releases and honestly? I’m really not that in to any of them. I loved the first Halo, liked the second one a little, and that was pretty much it for me on that series. I liked the first Gears, but didn’t feel overly compelled to play the second one. I played Forza 5 and couldn’t really get in to it. I liked Horizon 2 a lot and bought Horizon 3, but didn’t play it much.
These aren’t bad games, mind you. Not by any means. But they’re also not games that really hold my attention much anymore either. I’m not a big shooter fan, and racing games tend to be a “one or two per generation” thing for me, unless it offers something different like Blur or if it’s a kart racer, that’s obviously different than Horison. So with their tentpole franchises, I kinda feel like I’ve had those experiences already.
This is kind of compounded by the fact that the games they’ve made in genres that I really enjoy, such as platformers, RPGs, fighting games, flying games, mech games… Well, I’ll just say that the Xbox exclusive graveyard is substantial and it’s largely filled with titles that had two or less entries.
Part of the reason why I bought an Xbox One was hope that I’d see another Lost Odyssey, another Kameo, or Blue Dragon, or Crimson Skies, or Fable, or Alan Wake, or MechAssault, or Banjo or Conker or Blood Wake or any number of titles that brought me in to the Xbox echosystem to begin with.
Sure, I like Xbox live, I like the controllers they make and I like their UI far more than anything Sony’s ever done, plus the backward compatibility is awesome. But I’m here for the games first, second and third. So while they got off to a great start with Killer Instinct, Dead Rising 3, Sunset Ovedrive, Ori and what not in the first few years, I was happy. I was actually glad I didn’t have a PS4 because all it seemed to have that interested me was Bloodborne. Sony was the one touting their indies while MS was putting out exclusives that I actually wanted to play.
Obviously the script has flipped since then and it’s been that way for quite a while now. So yeah, E3 2018. I’ve already seen that Crackdown 3 has been delayed in to 2019, which makes me wonder if it’ll even show up at E3 this year. That was probably the biggest AAA level game that I was kind of interested in.
Man, I don’t know. I really hope they come through, because the narrative that MS has no first party games is seemingly all over the place right now, and if they can’t reverse that trend in a big way this year, it could be disastrous for them long term.