Racing games, once you are good at them, fit this bill. I can win online races while watching YouTube videos in Forza Horizon.
But I’d say Farming Simulator is my favorite game to play while listening to podcasts or watching YouTube videos on the side. It’s got enough going on to keep you engaged but you aren’t doing any actions that are time critical or require deep focus.
I don’t think it was a factor at all, they are both very very close in terms of CPU power (the series S is the same CPU run 200mhz slower), which MS did so any game could easily be run on both by just dropping some graphical fidelity and calling it a day. The fact that they didn’t even try to have some kind of unlocked or 40fps performance mode on the X suggests they are very CPU bound, and the PC system requirements reflect this too, requiring at least a 6 core CPU. I think a lot of gamers with 4 core CPUS are going to be screaming about how the game is “unoptimized” when the reality is just that there’s a lot of stuff going on, and yes, 4 core CPUs are starting to become practically vintage at this point.
Gamers always want to have their cake and eat it too, if you expect games to always get bigger and better then expect to need a bigger and better computer to match.
I think it’s likely the right call to lock it to 30 on Xbox though maybe a 40fps mode would have been possible like Ratchet and Clank had on PS5, it’s a bigger difference in responsiveness than you’d think. (33% faster!)
I also think not including SSR was probably smart, it can look really good at certain angles or stills but the effect is never quite coherent when you are actually playing the game due to occlusion and disocclusion. The dynamic cube maps will give a more grounded and sensible look to larger reflective surfaces even if you are technically sacrificing higher quality reflections.
None of the moves they made are a huge surprise to me, Bethesda as a rule generally tries to prioritize immersive and self consistent visuals over absolute fidelity. You can get used to 30fps, it’s hard to feel immersed when the frame rate is bouncing up and down.
Hopefully he has a good successor lined up. There’s definitely people out there with that quality first mindset. Quality costs a lot, a poor product costs you everything. That’s been beaten into my head my whole life by my father who is a recovered MBA goon with decades of experience watching the ebb and flow of many businesses in his little corner of the world (tools and fasteners).
It’s a less mature platform with less features
That’s why I like it. It’s literally has every feature I used or wanted on reddit already.
The only thing they showed as a quest there was collecting bear asses from generic dialog with a scientist so that’s not a great sign. I can live with bugginess but if the content isn’t compelling why am I playing? if the content is compelling enough I’ll deal with a lot of bugs.
*included but yes.
Like at least find out if the planets are any good first and not just 2000 procedurally generated flavors of bear asses to collect.
Hopefully there’s a whole RPG game in there and those are just side stuff to muck around and get some loot.
There was an announcement trailer? I tune all of it out until there’s a release date, I didn’t know a single thing about starfield until today. Looks rad, hopefully it delivers.
I feel like if you tried to train an LLM on spoken conversational English the output would just be “yeah um yeah um yeah um”
But on a more serious note spoken English is very different than written.
Either way you can find validated sources of human written text it just won’t be as easy.