Xbox Game Pass on PS5

Here are some things Xbox should do in 2022. Should we be worried about Spartacus, the Sony version of Game Pass? And speaking of Game Pass, here are some titles that are leaving the service this year that you absolutely have to play. Let's discuss. Now, it was previously reported that a next-gen version of Cyberpunk 2077 was expected to be coming out sometime in the first quarter of 2022. Now, of course, you can play Cyberpunk on the Xbox Series consoles, on PS5s, but it wasn't optimized for them, and there's been a whole ton of bugs and glitches, as we all know. When the game first came out, it was the most hyped game ever. We were all so excited to see what CD Projekt Red was going to be doing after they just finished The Witcher 3, and then they squandered it all by releasing a game that was riddled with bugs, glitches, and even engaged in some controversial practices like blocking reviewers from playing certain versions of the game. It was a wild time. Good for the memes, but pretty wild. Now, the next-gen version was supposed to come out a little bit earlier, but we can assume that it was delayed because the developers were just furiously working to improve other aspects of the game. Now, this next-gen version of the game is reportedly coming out alongside the new patch, Patch 1.5, and that is significant because the last patch that came out, and that was five months ago, was Patch 1.3. They're skipping over 1.4 entirely, leading people to believe that this is going to be a major patch. It's going to be the biggest, by far, the game has ever released, and people are overall pretty excited for it. Now, we don't really know what's going to be in this new patch, but people have been data mining some code, and they have some ideas on what it could be. One of these theories is that the game is going to relaunch, soft relaunch, under the title Cyberpunk 2077 Samurai Edition, and there's going to be new guns, new gigs, a barbershop, a garage, maybe even a new combat zone called Pacifica, where these two factions are constantly at war with each other. Now, because people don't really know too much about the patch, this has led some fans to literally reach out to the team and ask for themselves, hey, are some of these features like the garage, new guns, barbershop, are they coming in this new patch? What can we expect? And the quest director for Cyberpunk, he shut it down a little bit. He went on and he said, Cyberpunk 2077 Samurai Edition? I hope you know that this is an absolute rumor, and nothing is confirmed from that rumor. I just don't want you guys to be, like, disappointed and expect something else, you know, because you've been hearing sometimes made-up things. Now, that's thrown some people off a little bit, because from this data mining, they've confirmed the presence of new weapons and things like that, so for them to dismiss everything outright is a little bit puzzling. You know, they could just be playing coy, they don't want to give away, you know, all of their cards at once, they want to continue to build hype, but with the way that Cyberpunk has been in the past, I think people are bracing themselves for a little bit of disappointment. I also don't know the full context of this quote, so, you know, he could be, you know, clearly being sarcastic, and I just didn't get that from the article that I was reading. Either way, whatever is in this patch, I'm looking forward to the next-gen version of Cyberpunk. I definitely want to get into it, but what I really want more than anything is the next-gen update for The Witcher 3. That's what I'm waiting for. Now, I think that we can all agree that Xbox finished 2021 pretty strong, right, compared especially to when they launched the Xbox Series X and S, and they didn't launch Halo alongside with it. It was kind of a sluggish start, but I really think they picked up steam, especially at the end of 2021, when they launched, you know, Forza Horizon 5, they made some really awesome Game Pass additions, they made some awesome additions to the backwards compatibility library. Overall, I feel like it was pretty strong, and of course, we didn't even mention Halo Infinite, which... I think people are sick of me talking about Halo Infinite, it's like all that I talk about now, and every time I try to play a new game, I'm just like, you know what, I think I'm just gonna hop into some ranked matches, maybe some quick play, I don't know. But no matter how strong of a year 2021 might have been for Xbox, it sold pretty well, there were some good things to be excited about, there's still some work to be done, right, and to this end, Jez Corden over at Windows Central held a poll on his Twitter account, asking his followers, hey, what are some things that you would like to see improved for Xbox going forward in 2022? Now, there wasn't a single one issue that really dominated the responses, but there were some pretty noticeable standouts, so one was game DVR and streaming problems, and this is really more or less referring to capturing screenshots, recordings in-game, and then sharing them on other platforms, and I first became kind of annoyed with the DVR on Xbox when Forza Horizon 5 came out. I really wanted to capture some really awesome screenshots and footage so I could share on the channel, it was a little bit off, but you know, Forza Horizon 5, beautiful game, beautiful graphics, it looked really awesome with the HDR especially, and then when you tried to take a screenshot of it in-game, something was off with like the HDR capturing, it just did not look nearly as good in the picture as it did in-game, the colors were all out of whack, and it just wasn't as sharp, it wasn't as clean. Sharing what you capture in a game can be pretty annoying as well, if you capture on internal storage, it uploads directly to your Xbox Live account, and through the app, you can download and save the content that you recorded or the screenshots that you took, you can save it to your device, and then you can share it to other platforms, but if you wanted to do anything from your external storage, and you need external storage especially because you can only record like one minute long clips on your internal storage, so if you want anything longer than that, you gotta have an external drive, but it's kind of a pain that, you know, to capture a clip in-game on your external drive, and then you constantly have to be doing this dance of like unplugging it from your Xbox and to your computer, and then saving it on your computer, and then you're able to share it, you can upload your clips and your screenshots to one drive, but that never works for me, I've tried multiple times and it just doesn't work. Luckily, an executive recently has come out and said that in 2022, improving DVR on the Xbox is a priority for Microsoft, hopefully that, you know, we see some improvements relatively soon. Another big issue turned out to be Japanese game studios. Now, this has always been a problem with Xbox, they just don't have the clout in Japan that the other video game companies have. Really, the only publisher or company based out of Japan that seems to like Xbox is Sega. They have a lot of their titles playable on Game Pass, like the Yakuza franchise, and they're also apparently working on a Super Game together, a Super Game Initiative, whatever that means, but other companies, not so much. Final Fantasy apparently is going to be only on PlayStation going forward, and games like Persona 5, they just totally blew off Xbox, they don't care about Xbox at all, and you can't even play Genshin Impact on Xbox, which I think is so weird. Now, Microsoft recently said that their Series consoles, the Series X and the Series S especially, are doing super well in Japan, hopefully that leads to some, you know, better relationship with these Japanese companies, but they do have a lot of ground to make up when you compare it to, you know, Sony and especially Nintendo's presence in Japan. Now, here's what I want to see. Phil Spencer has said in the past he wants to give, you know, the Xbox community, gamers, the ability to play their games when they want and where they want, when he's referring to, you know, cloud gaming and remote play and putting games on the PC. To that end, I want them to clean up Xbox cloud gaming. It's just, it's a cool idea, I'm behind it, I'm for it, but it's just super inconsistent, super up and down. I know it's in beta, but still, they have a long way to go in order to make that a real pillar of the Xbox ecosystem. Now, I have had some good experience on remote play, I've gotten some good hours in via remote play on Forza Horizon 5 and Octopath Traveler as well, but other games, if you try them with remote play, it's just like unplayable. I tried it with Halo Infinite and that was just, I couldn't do it. I, with the input lag and the game lag, I couldn't even get like one or two kills, my team was probably so mad at me. That goes double for cloud gaming, sometimes it works really well, but other times it doesn't. With Halo Infinite, it's like unplayable, back for blood, shooters especially, it's super, super hard and super, super inconsistent. I understand that it's still in beta, I get it, but if you look on over at Google Stadia, I've played Destiny 2 and Hitman with little to no issues, especially compared to xCloud, and that's something that if they want to really push the service that they're gonna have to clean up. I don't know how they do it over at Google, but I can't imagine that it's not hard for a company like Microsoft to figure it out themselves. Also, if we're going with this philosophy of like, let's skip the player's options, when to play, how to play, stop with the forced crossplay between Xbox consoles and PC. I'm sorry, forcing it is just not the right thing to do. You should give players options. For me, I want to play, sometimes, with my friends who play on PC, but other people don't want to do that, so just give them the option, we know that it's possible. I also want them to tighten up some quality of life features, like Quick Resume, awesome feature, I really enjoy it. When it works, right? It doesn't always work. For example, when I tried to launch Halo Infinite from Quick Resume, I don't know what's going on, but it doesn't work, it doesn't connect to me back to Xbox Live if I'm playing multiplayer, it's so weird. Other games like Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, Scarlet Nexus, if you try to launch them from Quick Resume, at least in my experience, it's just a black screen, literally, it just doesn't work. When it works, it's beautiful, when it doesn't, I'm like, eh, that's a little disappointing, right? I also want to know more about these first-party games. You know, I think that Xbox really has the potential to make up some ground compared to Sony when it comes to these big tentpole titles. They did a good job with that with Forza and Halo Infinite at the end of last year, but we still need to see more from the studios that Xbox has acquired. Redfall is coming in the summer this year, and then Starfield, but beyond that, it's like, we really don't know. We haven't even seen gameplay footage for Starfield yet. I'm super hyped about it, I'm excited about it, but it's like, ugh, guys, this game is 10 months away from release and we still haven't seen any action from it? What's going on? And that's not even including games like, we don't know anything about Fable, the Fable reboot coming, we don't know anything about the Perfect Dark remake, we don't know anything about State of Decay 3, we don't know anything about Avowed, I want to see gameplay from Avowed. I want to know more about these games that they're working on. There's a lot to be excited about, sure, but it's hard to continue to be excited, continue to be hyped, when you don't know anything about them. When you look over at PlayStation's side, they have a good idea of what to expect in the future when it comes to their games, right? I'd also like to see continued support for the first-party games that they've put out already. I hope that there's going to be a lot more coming on Halo Infinite's front, especially with how the campaign ending, there's a lot that they can get into, and I really hope that they keep listening to the community when it comes to multiplayer stuff. They've done a pretty good job of adjusting the experience to the battle pass, and adding in dedicated playlists and things like that, but there's still more work to be done. For example, I don't think there's any excuse for a big team battle to be in the state that it's in right now, especially when it worked during beta. It's a pain to get through the queues, first of all. They have a lot of connectivity issues, I can't connect to the dedicated server, players are constantly dropping out. I played a big team battle the other day where half of my team dropped out before the game even started, so we were just getting destroyed, we were getting wrecked. And I was like, you know, at least this is going to be over pretty soon. We were playing Stronghold, so I was like, this is going to go by super quick. But then it didn't, because when they tried to cap the last point, they couldn't do it. It didn't allow anyone from either team to cap that last point to end the game. So what we ended up doing was just waiting around for like 12-13 minutes, and the only reason why I did it was because I had a challenge saying just complete one big team battle match. So I stuck around, but it was super annoying. And like I said, no excuse for things to be happening like that on your major flagship game for Xbox. Now at this point, the majority of the gaming community knows about Spartacus, which is apparently Sony's answer to Game Pass. We know that Spartacus is more or less just going to be a combination of PS Plus and PS Now. It's going to come in three tiers. Now the first tier is more or less just going to be PS Plus. You get to play games online, and you get free games every month. You know, a couple of free games, depending on what they feel like throwing at you. The second tier is going to be where you see that Game Pass element. You get PS Plus, and you get a catalog of games that you can play. Now the third option is the most intriguing for sure, because you get all the benefits of the past two, and also all the backwards compatibility stuff that they're going to be throwing on. And you're going to be able to stream games much like you can on Xbox Cloud Gaming. Now this was simultaneously surprising and not. You know, it's not surprising in the way that a direct competitor of Xbox was going to come out with an Xbox Game Pass-like service. But Sony, it seemed for at least a long time that they were like anti-Game Pass. Their fans especially were anti-Game Pass, especially from what I saw on Twitter. They'd say things like, oh, Game Pass, I could never. I prefer to own my games outright. I could never subscribe to a lowly service like Xbox Game Pass, like a broke boy. I could pay $70 for my games, no problem. Now when news of this first broke, I thought it was cool. I thought it was a good idea, but people were quick to point out that they had no mention of adding games day one to the service, meaning that when a game launches everywhere else, it comes to Game Pass, or Spartacus in this case, the same day. Now in a recent interview, Phil Spencer kind of seems like he's anticipating at some point that Sony will do just that, add games day one to the service. He says, I talk about it as an inevitability. So for us, we should continue to innovate, continue to compete, because the things that we're doing might be advantages that we have in the market today. I personally feel that it's a bit naive to think that Sony wouldn't add games day one to the service. We already see them doing things that Xbox has been praised for doing for the past few months. They're introducing this new subscription service. They are adding games to PC, like God of War, and they're suddenly interested in backwards compatibility. All things that we were saying, hey, good job, Xbox, for focusing on those things. So why wouldn't they also take it a step further and add games, certain games, to the service day one? Now, I don't know if they're going to do that ever with their first-party games, but that would be huge, right? If they decided to put God of War Ragnarok day one on the service, that would be pretty big, of course, and if that ended up being the case, it would make the margin of error for Xbox pretty slim. Because if Sony makes a service that is comparable to Game Pass, or maybe a little bit better than Game Pass, how does Xbox respond, right? How do they continue to innovate? How do they continue to compete for our loyalty and our money? Because at the end of the day, it's a business, right? And we should expect, if Sony's going to come out with this, hey, what are you going to do for me to prevent me from going and being a Sony customer, a PlayStation customer, Spartacus customer, you know what I'm saying? Now, I still think Game Pass is awesome. I still love my Xbox, but we shall see. We'll see how they handle this, you know, once we know more details about Spartacus and we see it in action. Anyway, guys, that's all the news I have for today. If you're tuning in for the first time, my name is Ray. All these comments on YouTube, they're kind of getting hard to manage, especially the more I upload, so I'd greatly appreciate it if you went on over to Twitter and followed me at StayXboxReady. That is hands down the best way to get in touch with me. People have also been reaching out to me on Xbox, to my gamertag, and I really appreciate that. Also, I'm doing a giveaway. I'm giving away an Xbox Series X. I know I've been teasing it for a while. I have the console. I just got to figure out some of the other stuff with the legal stuff, the link, the instructions on how to participate and things like that, but it's coming. Anyway, guys, thanks so much again for tuning in and we'll see you in the next video.