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In terms of actual combat you are more zoomed out than up close and personal with your enemies. HP bars appear above you and all the NPCs you are fighting. Smashing buttons really work work in this game unless you are on the easiest difficulty. There are a lot of maylee combos to learn. Like square, square, square, circle. It's more similar to FFII or Tales of Arise in terms of selecting weapons or magic attacks than Eldin Ring. But it's a lot like Elden Ring where you will frequently encounter battles as exploring the world.

The game is Norse Mythology, but reviewers have been classifying the genre as JRPG. Not sure if that refers to the styling of fighting / RPG or the artwork style.
Thank you. I hate learning melee combos. And when they include the D pad, forget it. Everything else checks the boxes of what I like in a video game though.
 
Another thing to point out that I have read, is like Elden Ring, there are multiple different endings possible based on events of that occur during game play.
 
Is it playable on an Xbox One X? I’ve heard some things
I think the last gen consoles have generally been written off. My friend played it on xbox one (pre updates) and noted the performance issues, so I don’t know how much better One X would be. Maybe on par with Series S?
 
I think the last gen consoles have generally been written off. My friend played it on xbox one (pre updates) and noted the performance issues, so I don’t know how much better One X would be. Maybe on par with Series S?
Eh, maybe I’ll wait to play this one if/when I get a Series X. I have no issues playing any and every new game on my One X. I only bought it new in 2019 and it’s not obsolete just yet. But I do know there were some complaints how poorly it runs on the older gen systems. Most new games don’t have that issue but this one does
 
+1 for Game Pass. I have an S, and it's great.
so, I literally just ordered the Series S after many months of waffling on getting one. for a while it would change to me wanting a PS5 or the Series X, but I really do think the S just makes the most sense for me and will still be a huge upgrade from my Switch, and honestly I just dislike how big the PS5 and Series X are.

I'm super excited for it to arrive later this week!
 
so, I literally just ordered the Series S after many months of waffling on getting one. for a while it would change to me wanting a PS5 or the Series X, but I really do think the S just makes the most sense for me and will still be a huge upgrade from my Switch, and honestly I just dislike how big the PS5 and Series X are.

I'm super excited for it to arrive later this week!
I love mine. For the price, it’s great, especially with Game Pass. Playing BoTW on a 4K tv convinces me that the graphical power of the big consoles isn’t the be all and end all - I’m still having fun with the underpowered switch.

Pre-orders for the PS5 went up over here yesterday, and as much as I want one, I can’t justify paying $900AUD for one. Happy to wait until it drops in price and more exclusive games come out for it.
 
My favorite game of the year; Nobody Saves the World, just got a decent size expansion so im gonna take this time to recommend it! Really fun ARPG with very light rogue like elements with its dungeons. Incredibly addictive gameplay loop based around dungeon crawling and completing a ridiculous amount of mini quests that kept me up late at night saying "Ill just finish this one more quest to level up". Also the level up system is one of my favorites Ive ever played with, and allows you to be playing with new cool skills consistently and up until the very end of the game. And the customization options means you can find really cool playstyles with great synergy pretty easily! If you havent played it or heard of it, its on the Switch and its also on Gamepass so its easy to get your hands on
Ooh, I'll second this one! I finished the game a few weeks back, and I think I forgot to do my usual write up because I was speedrunning FF13 before it left Game Pass. Among my favorite games this year as well. Going a bit deeper, the mechanics revolve around switching between different forms ranging from typical fantasy tropes (dragon, necromancer, knight, etc.) to some that are a bit silly (egg, horse, rat). All forms are generally viable to some degree, and each has a unique moveset and buffs. You are also able to add certain abilities to each character from the various classes, so you can have 4 moves and a ton of customization. The game fully utilized this as well, as you need to level up each form to unlock more ability slots, new moves, and to unlock the other forms. You level up the forms by completing challenges, and many of those challenges have you combine the powers and buffs of the other forms with those native to the form you are using. For example, one quest may be to use the Horse's charge ability to poison enemies using the rat's poison buildup ability.

It's also worth pointing out this game is by the devs that made Guacamelee, so it's chock full of their style of humor. It also has a similar mechanic to the switching between worlds to be able to attack some enemies that Guaceamelee had. To fit the fantasy setting, these show up as wards. Enemies will take no damage until these are broken, and each move is tied to one of the 4 ward types. Some of the dungeons fully utilize this, and going in unprepared to break these wards will spell certain doom. Fortunately, the dungeons are static and will tell you what types of wards you will encounter, so you can plan ahead.

Overall, fun game with a good story that like everything else this year, has gotten sadly overlooked by Elden Ring.
 
Ok, so we've had the Xbox Series S for about a week now. Some questions:

  1. We installed 3 games (one of them we purchased (NBA2k) and the other two we downloaded from Game Pass) and the hard drive is already almost full (only 60 GB free). I guess I need to buy an external hard drive? Seems like my choices are:
    1. Expansion card
      1. expensive but you can play games right from it
    2. Game drive
      1. more affordable but you have to transfer games from the drive to the console in order to play
      2. I guess my main question is, how long does it take to transfer a game, is it a hassle, etc?
  2. My kids have been enjoying the local multiplayer modes on Star Wars Battlefront II but it is pretty glitchy and frequently crashes (no problems so far in story mode). Is this common, or isolated to this particular game/game mode? Can anything be done to stop the game from crashing?
  3. For games that you can play directly from the cloud, those are not the full versions, correct? We tried a couple of games that are supposed to be multi-player, but the cloud versions seemed to all be single player. Do I need to download the full version for multiplayer modes?
Thanks for teaching an old dog new tricks.
 
Ok, so we've had the Xbox Series S for about a week now. Some questions:

  1. We installed 3 games (one of them we purchased (NBA2k) and the other two we downloaded from Game Pass) and the hard drive is already almost full (only 60 GB free). I guess I need to buy an external hard drive? Seems like my choices are:
    1. Expansion card
      1. expensive but you can play games right from it
    2. Game drive
      1. more affordable but you have to transfer games from the drive to the console in order to play
      2. I guess my main question is, how long does it take to transfer a game, is it a hassle, etc?
  2. My kids have been enjoying the local multiplayer modes on Star Wars Battlefront II but it is pretty glitchy and frequently crashes (no problems so far in story mode). Is this common, or isolated to this particular game/game mode? Can anything be done to stop the game from crashing?
  3. For games that you can play directly from the cloud, those are not the full versions, correct? We tried a couple of games that are supposed to be multi-player, but the cloud versions seemed to all be single player. Do I need to download the full version for multiplayer modes?
Thanks for teaching an old dog new tricks.
I haven't even finished reading your post and I'm already quoting/responding since my Series S is scheduled to arrive tomorrow and I've been doing a bit of research on this since it's the console's biggest flaw... now, let me finish reading your post and see if I have any thoughts/advice..ha ha.

ok, yes. your assessment is correct. the official Seagate drives that plug into the expansion slot would allow you to play all games (Series S and backward) directly from that storage... but like you said, they're stupid expensive and unless they eventually drop in price I am planning to not go that route.

the alternative is that you could buy an external USB drive and transfer Series S games as needed. Apparently you can play backwards compatible games directly off the external, though with longer load times, but the speed needed for Series games requires they be internal or expansion card.

I don't play CoD Warzone, but many of my friends do and I'm planning to start playing with them, so I'm assuming that'll be taking up a HUGE chunk of my available 364 GB. as well as Forza, so I'm assuming I'll need extra memory pronto as well, but at the current prices I see myself getting a USB drive as I can't justify the Expansion Card prices

the multiplayer crashing and Cloud options I can't comment on at the moment, but as a soon-to-be owner I'm certainly curious about this stuff
 
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I haven't even finished reading your post and I'm already quoting/responding since my Series S is scheduled to arrive tomorrow and I've been doing a bit of research on this since it's the console's biggest flaw... now, let me finish reading your post and see if I have any thoughts/advice..ha ha.

ok, yes. your assessment is correct. the official Seagate drives that plug into the expansion slot would allow you to play all games (Series S and backward) directly from that storage... but like you said, they're stupid expensive and unless they eventually drop in price I am planning to not go that route.

the alternative is that you could buy an external USB drive and transfer Series S games as needed. Apparently you can play backwards compatible games directly off the external, though with longer load times, but the speed needed for Series games requires they be internal or expansion card.

I don't play CoD Warzone, but many of my friends do so I'm assuming that'll be taking up a HUGE chunk of my available 364 GB. as well as Forza, so I'm assuming I'll need extra memory pronto as well, but at the current prices I see myself getting a USB drive as I can't justify the Expansion Card prices

the multiplayer crashing and Cloud options I can't comment on at the moment, but as a soon-to-be owner I'm certainly curious about this stuff

Nailed it on the games that do not have visual upgrades for series s/x. Backwards compatible games along with a plethora of other games are still being released in this fashion, but obviously as time goes on that list will grow smaller. I use a basic external hard drive and it's the same one I've had since the Xbox One initially launched.

I'm running a series X so I cant speak to crashing issues but I have not run into that. I'm not a seasoned battlefront 2 player but would suspect it would have more to do with the game then the console but could be wrong.

Some games that are marked multiplayer are only online multiplayer, i've not attempted to stream any of those via the cloud, only single player games I may want to try/download so can't speak to that either unfortunately.

@Tillman Warzone will eat up your hard drive because they do not care. Last I knew Warzone alone was 92 GB.
 
How long does it take to transfer a game from the external drive to the console?
I only download games to my external that I can play directly off of it, i know the transfer rate is console dependent. google told me the below.

"From our testing above, we've concluded that the Xbox Series S will copy games from an external HDD at an average rate of 1GB per 15.20 seconds as compared to the Xbox Series X at 1GB per 11.21 seconds."

 
I only download games to my external that I can play directly off of it, i know the transfer rate is console dependent. google told me the below.

"From our testing above, we've concluded that the Xbox Series S will copy games from an external HDD at an average rate of 1GB per 15.20 seconds as compared to the Xbox Series X at 1GB per 11.21 seconds."

yeah, this seems to be in line with what I'd read/seen. the bigger the game the longer the time, but ultimately will take a few minutes versus the hours it takes to delete and re-download giant file sizes
 
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