STARSAND XBOX SERIES

Take Halo Infinite, for instance, a game that had an impressive launch, but failed to capitalize on it due to its lackluster post-launch support. Obviously, we cannot discount the fact that delays due to COVID played a massive role here, but the feeling of being disappointed in Xbox was hard to shake that year.Īnd there were some other major goofs to speak of as well. 2021 was a great year for the console, thanks to the likes of Forza Horizon 5, Psychonauts 2, and Halo Infinite, so to follow up on it with virtually no major first party releases in 2022 was a shockingly bad move. Take 2022, for instance, which was a year where Xbox should have struck the iron while it was hot. Sadly, however, that comes with some major caveats, because on this front, Microsoft has also made some pretty serious errors.

STARSAND XBOX SERIES

Meanwhile, more recently, we’ve also seen the likes of Starfield, an excellent, sprawling, highly addictive space RPG, and Forza Motorsport, which may not have set the world on fire the way some of its predecessors have done in past years, but does still deliver an authentic and obsessively detailed racing sim experience.Ĭertainly, compared to what Microsoft’s first party output has traditionally been like, the early years of Xbox Series X/S have shown tangible signs of improvement.

At launch, Halo Infinite was an undeniably enjoyable experience, and one that felt like a significant step up over Halo 5, while smaller releases like Hi-Fi Rush and Pentiment have also drawn a great deal of praise from the masses, and rightly so. There’s Forza Horizon 5, which is probably one of the best racing games we’ve ever played, while Double Fine has also released Psychonauts 2, a spectacular game that somehow turned out to be well worth the long, long wait (though it’s multiplatform, of course). Since its launch in late 2020, the Xbox Series X/S has seen a number of significant first party releases that have, by and large, delivered on expectations. Whether or not it’s done that as well as it was expected to is something we’ll get to in a bit, but there’s no doubting that it’s done that much better than it did for most of the Xbox One generation, if not all of it. What about Microsoft’s first party offerings though? The company has spent the last half decade radically improving its portfolio of first party properties and studios, and expectations have naturally been high on it to deliver a steady stream of well-made first party content. Though it has missed out on the odd major release to exclusivity deals ( Final Fantasy 16 perhaps being the most notable of those), Microsoft’s current-gen hardware has still added some incredible games to its library in its first three years, including the likes of Elden Ring, Dead Space, Resident Evil 4, Alan Wake 2, Street Fighter 6, Rogue Legacy 2, and many others (and Baldur’s Gate 3 will soon be arriving as well).īut of course, Xbox consoles have never really been lacking on the multiplatform front. For starters, the Xbox Series X/S has also seen a steady stream of excellent multiplatform titles in its first three years. Let’s start with the positives first, because there’s plenty of stuff to be pleased about.

At the same time, however, there’s no doubting that things still haven’t gone as well as they perhaps should have. To say that there was immense pressure on the Xbox Series X and S duo to succeed would be an understatement- so how exactly has the current console generation gone for Microsoft so far? It’s fair to say that the beginning has certainly been a much better one than what the Xbox One had to endure. Any ground that it may have made up on PlayStation was almost instantly lost, and though things certainly improved for Xbox as the generation progressed – especially with the introduction of Game Pass in 2017 – the damage that was done in its first couple of years was so severe that it simply became impossible for it to do anything resembling keeping pace with the PS4. The Xbox One generation wasn’t a great one for Microsoft.

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