The PS5 and Xbox Series X/S thread

I wonder if MS will jump the gun on the next gen early. Game Pass finally seems to be starting to deliver the steady stream of new releases they promised all those years ago, but it's happened too late in the gen for them to make the ground up. A new console might put them back in the spotlight again, especially if it's more reasonably priced than Sony's ridiculous PS5 Pro.

I'm still happy with my Xbox, and have never really been tempted to jump ship to PS5 - 90% of what I play is available on both platforms anyway. But I'd like to see them pick a strategy and stick to it, and I hope that involves selling consoles and making games.

That's interesting. I was in CEX yesterday and wondered why the couple of Series X's they had were marked up at RRP.

I think the best hope for Sony is that they'll be kept in check by Steam/Steam portables and the upsurge in mobile gaming some regions have seen.

Seems like they are in stock some places (Argos) but they seem to have discontinued the All Access program. The links to it are all dead or not updated, lists several retailers who pages don't have the correct links etc.

All a bit odd.

Quite surprised this hasn't become a thing in the specialist press. Normally, those fuckers are all over that stuff. Probably too busy making up nonsense about Switch 2.

They have been leaking the Xbox Handheld Stuff this week.

I enjoyed that, especially the photoshopped Game Gear folks used to illustrate the story.

That would be a dream personally! The ones I saw all used mocked up green and black ROG Ally's. Which also looks good.

I have my Ally docked and working as a console/PC on the TV in the bedroom now as been getting that set up last week and played Yakuza 0 on it for about 4 hours yesterday, and feels like that could be a good angle for also marketing a handheld Xbox device with GamePass.

Just put XCloud on Switch 2. Job done.

I see that BDS have asked everyone to avoid Microsoft products. That's certainly enough to sway me from Xbox to PlayStation if I were buying one. Although who knows when/if I'll be buying either again.

Not sure this is the correct thread for this, but had the Xbox Handheld (which I get was just leaks at this stage) just looked like a regular Rog Ally and Ally X but with Xbox theme and branding, then I would have been really excited. However, the form factor of the one leaked is not a nice looking gadget. It looks well janky and like some odd JoyCon grip holder.

Another mad round of layoffs at Microsoft. Alongside all the job losses, Everwild (Rare) and the new Perfect Dark have been cancelled.

There’s a lot of negative opinion online about this, although these two feel like games from the mad days before Xbox got their act together. They’re Halo Infinite-era vapourware, made when big announcements at E3 were all the rage. Now that we’re getting an actually impressive flow of games on Game Pass, the cancellation of these two might just be the final farty tailwind of a bygone era.

Got to wonder if Rare are done for now though. The level of corporate mismanagement over the last ten years with all these acquisitions has been mad.

Losing Perfect Dark hurt, that teaser/conceptwhatever they showed looked a great direction to go in. Hopefully Rare find their feet. @_@

Phil Spencer should be fuckin' ashamed of himself. Prick.

I believe he's making his fucking exit as well soon, just burnt everything to the ground and left

MS really do have the ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, don't they? Finally, after years of promises, they're finally getting a steady stream of great games out, cloud gaming is coming together, and Game Pass is better than it's been for years… and now this.

Fundamentally I think it's that they're not a gaming company at heart and they see gaming as just a revenue stream. Someone high up has looked at the money they make from Call of Duty and decided that they don't need all this other stuff that doesn't make as much money. That's probably all there is to it. It was the same even back in the Xbox 360 era when they decided to turn their incredibly successful and beloved console into a Kinect machine because all the money was in the Wii. They're fundamentally hopeless at this stuff.

It's utter cultural vandalism stuff. Hacking their way through development teams with no regard for the history or skills that are being lost—or the impact of these kinds of cutbacks on the people left behind. Morale's got to be in short supply.

Gaming is a creative art form, and any studio (like any director or actor) is only as bankable as their recent work. Rare gave us Sea of Thieves 7 years ago. Unless you're Rockstar, dropping one great game every 7 years isn't a viable business model. Lots of brilliant legacy studios have churned out utter horseshit in recent years. Or vastly watered down versions of their marque titles.

Whether this is due to the waves of pressure to slap loot chests in or make every game a battle royale (or whatever the gaming flavour of the month is) I don't think many of these bigger, more illustrious, studios have a leg to stand on when it comes to complaining. Death Stranding 2 and Clair Obscur this year show what a dollop of vision/creativity and boundary pushing can deliver in the hands of smaller teams who are actually building interesting things.

And who can argue with someone higher up in MS realising that apart from handheld hardware (with the ROG partnership and maybe a future handheld Xbox) having a big power hungry box under the TV/monitor clearly isn't the future of gaming, apart from, possibly, PC die hards. MS are a software company, always have been. The Xbox is a slight hardware positive blip in a sea of mediocrity and missteps over decades.

And now they've killed Forza Motorsport!? What the hell is going on over there?

Microsoft have committed to investing something like $65 billion into the death cult of LLM infrastructure; that money needs to come from somewhere and Satya Nadella (may his toes never be un-stubbed) doesn't care where, so long as it's not his compensation package.

And now they've killed Forza Motorsport!? What the hell is going on over there?

Is it much of a draw these days? It's been churning out increasingly dull track racers for years while its main rival Gran Turismo goes from strength to strength. FM7 snuck out with hardly anyone even noticing, it seems.

Forza Horizon is continuing and that's where all the action is.

I'm kind of with Mr Party Hat I think. MS has been hanging on to stuff like Forza Motorsport, Halo, Perfect Dark and Gears of War for far longer than it really should have done. A clear-out of these ancient brands is overdue. I wish they hadn't done it in such a brutal way, though.

Microsoft have committed to investing something like $65 billion into the death cult of LLM infrastructure; that money needs to come from somewhere and Satya Nadella (may his toes never be un-stubbed) doesn't care where, so long as it's not his compensation package.

AI has largely done for music now, the current gen of generative AI music is largely indistinguishable from the real thing. As people have said, how long until Spotify simply replaces all the real artists with AI generated music you'll barely be able to tell the difference from? Why bother paying royalties. Film isn't far behind. Games not far behind that. In, what, 3 years or so, you will probably be able to generate a Gears or Forza at home. Maybe even sooner. Entire creative industries are going to be picked off, one by one, by tech bros who don't give two shits.

And sure, you can be a carpenter or electrician, but if you have total economic collapse who are you serving and how are they buying your services?

We are galactically fucked. It's UBI, live events/connection, rethinking capitalism and a completely new way of doing human civilization, or a massive war.

The LLM bubble is going to burst. It's unsustainable—everyone in the space is hemorrhaging cash in a desperate land grab but there's still no use case for it that people are willing to pay for at a price that covers its costs. Microsoft have had to force their own people to use LLMs because even the people making it know that it's useless horseshit.

Honestly I don't buy the "you'll be able to generate your own movies" hype either; there's absolutely no evidence to suggest that anyone knows how to get around the fact that LLMs don't have object permanence, are incapable of understanding context (or, in fact anything), and cannot have intent. They can just about cobble together a single shot that looks okay if you don't study it too hard.

I'd disagree with that. "still no use case for it that people are willing to pay for at a price that covers its costs"

It's absolutely transforming virtually every middle management, coding and procedural task. I pay the GPT fee because I can't afford not to now. If they crank it ten fold I'll still continue to pay it. It's going to wipe out entire professions. A lot of professions are entirely tractable LLM problems. The object permanence is completely solvable, and there are plenty of methods to do so. You can already see this happening in extended video content on social media (with repeating characters). Yes, its all prompt engineering and tech stacks, but I don't buy that the complexity of what it's trying to replicate is intractable. GPT 4.x's deep learning research capabilities are astounding. I have it triaging and finding cancer targets, prioritising them, assisting in molecular design and then analysing the results. I then do lab validation of a lot of its output. Years of work can be bypassed in an afternoon. And work that contains novel insights in new disease types, where no previously published literature exists. So it's not (just) stealing shit, it's reasoning (or giving the impression of reasoning) based on data and context. It can make mistakes, but there is an eerie progression in its capabilities, even in the last 3-6 months. We're firmly into the "what is human intelligence anyway?" question. Maybe it's just LLMs all the way down.

The market is overheated and overvalued yeah, but it's not a crypto bubble. This is like a rush to stake the claim to be the google of the next 30 years. Few winners, enormous rewards for those who make it, blasted wasteland for everyone else.

Terrifying.

Still, I'd like to see an AI paint a Space Marine.

They might not be able to paint minis but they can certainly colour stl files

I don't think the power or usefulness of AI is really up for debate. It's clearly miraculous how far it's advanced in such a short space of time.

However, it's very much still a tool. And if you're going to use it without oversight, you're going to look like a knob.

For example…

If you use AI for art you should be bullied off the internet

I don't think the power or usefulness of AI is really up for debate.

Strongly disagree. When you consider all the drawbacks, it's a black hole of moral, social and economic decay that can only make the world a worse place to exist.

Yes, but this morning it showed me what my cat would look like if he were a dog.

I don't think the power or usefulness of AI is really up for debate.

Strongly disagree. When you consider all the drawbacks, it's a black hole of moral, social and economic decay that can only make the world a worse place to exist.

Isn't that just the reaction to any new transformative technology? People thought everything from cars, to computers, to mobile phones would ruin the world. Nostalgia is hell of a drug - humans have always been awful. But freely available cat videos and modern medicine take the edge off. Nobody in this forum would last more than 15 minutes roaming free on the savannah trying to pick the right plant to eat and hoping to stave off death at 35 years old from a small cut. The world now is objectively a better place to live than it was 50, 100 and 1000 years ago. Every technical advance has drawbacks.

I don't agree that it's an advance, but at this point I doubt either of us is going to convince the other.

But it cannot crash and burn fast enough for my liking.

Can't think of any positive examples of AI being used in art recently, maybe the time I heard a game dev say its been used for land generation in a sense? Other than that I recall a lot of artists I follow on Twitter leaving because of it, there has been a long Voice Acting strike just finished over the fact that they didn't want their voices used with AI to imitate them without their consent.

The scary thing is how sometimes it's very hard to tell the difference from AI art and real art. Which is why I think when people are caught over it they should be dragged for it.

I think the problem is that we are at the beginning of a technology that could be transformative, but potentially in either a positive or a negative way, or most likely both. This could be the first step towards an Iain M Banks utopia where AI has created a post-scarcity world in which humans are free to persue whatever dreams they want to, and super-intelligent and utterly fair AIs run all the important stuff for us. Even if that is the path we luck onto though, we've probably got 500 years of utter pain and horror to get there.

The potential of AI to turbo-charge advances in medicine and science is undeniable. Cav has given some examples from his own personal experience. The speeding-up of menial tasks will open incredible possibilities. As another example, remember Elizabeth Holmes, who was jailed for fraud, for raising funds for a fictional machine that could diagnose any illness in minutes from a single drop of blood? That machine she imagined is almost possible now. In a few years it will exist. In ten years there will be one in every hospital.

However, the potentially catastrophic effects on the creative industries is equally undeniable. Every time a company makes a bit of AI art instead of paying an actual artist, the world gets a little bit worse. The fact that the AI art companies used existing artists' work to "train" their AI (as raw materials to steal from if they're honest) is an extra bitter pill. AI could obliterate every creative industry. Not because it is of comparable quality, but because it is cheap and easy shit for lazy people with terrible taste who don't care who they hurt.

Music is already done. There's a reason why a huge amount of "new" pop music sounds so formulaic and unimaginative. Much of the pop music we hear has been effectively written by AI for years now. Music is essentially a "solved" artform. There are only so many notes, and we know why certain combinations of notes, certain keys, chords, sequences elicit particular feelings. So there are now algorithms and programs to make pop songs. There are people who sit at laptops and churn them out and sell them on to the artists and producers. We can do it ourselves now - the programs are available to the masses, and they will even write you the lyrics. I've had a go on a program that allowed you to type "I want a country song about Mario Kart" and in five minutes it would spit out something largely complete. Utterly shit and soulless, but complete.

AI bros will steal from all kinds of artists and condemn us to an utterly uncreative world if left unchecked. I personally think AI should be banned from being used in any creative industry, and I don't care if that is impractical. I would rejoice if every AI art and music company was forced to pay every single artist they stole from in training their machines, leaving that side of the AI industry decimated and their CEOs destitute. Let them suffer the fate they are condemning artists to.

All this doesn't even touch on the problem of AI deep fakes. We can't trust an image, a video, or a voice recording anymore. AI videos could be used to frame people for anything. Even if it was later proved to be fake it would likely be too late to fix in this post-truth world. Conversely, anyone could get away with crimes by claiming that the evidence was AI. When video emerged of the Premier League referee David Coote talking about how much he hated Jurgen Klopp, many people said that he should just claim that the video was AI. I wonder if he could have got away with it if he had. A lot of people seem quite bad at recognising even quite obvious AI images. Some poor saps seem to believe that some kid in Africa has been making massive sculptures out of plastic bottles, or that Noah's Ark has been excavated on top of a mountain. Or perhaps the people who seem to believe this are all AI bots too. Perhaps all of you guys are. That would be embarrassing.

I think the issue is, people who believed the Sunday Sport or anything on Fox News were doing this in an era where the deep fakes weren't even that convincing. Politics has had a tenuous grasp on reality for decades now and we've been in a partial post truth era since politics began.

AI speeds this up, but I'm not sure this is as new a problem as people make it out to be. One of the interesting things I think will be how "truth" is established. It may be, through a shitstorm of AI that actually the largely distorted, mad views of your standard Farage types begin to implode under the weight of their own bullshit. If humans begin to scrabble for universal truths, who knows where the Overton window might actually end up.

I do see the issues. There's fuck all use if I can cure people of cancer and we live in an economic cold-fusion powered utopia but nearly all human creative artforms have been automated too. Felt is a spectacular painter, and I always felt anything requiring huge amounts of dexterity and craft might be safe for a long time, but AI accelerated robotics isn't far from ruining even non-digital creative areas now.

I think I'd like to remain positive, but you can't argue about the Drake equation paradox. Why don't we see a universe teeming with advanced life. Because they all hit the same filter, and fuck themselves up by discovering the generation of hilarious talking ape videos with AI.

Felt is a spectacular painter, and I always felt anything requiring huge amounts of dexterity and craft might be safe for a long time, but AI accelerated robotics isn't far from ruining even non-digital creative areas now.

First of all, thank you, that's very kind of you to say. I think it will be a while before mini-painting is automated, but it probably will be possible eventually with some form of robotics. It does effect my work a bit too, already, in that people assume that photos of minis are AI for some reason. There have been accusations of photos being touched-up with Photoshop for years, but recently I've seen someone very confidently proclaim that images of miniatures I've seen in the flesh (plastic?) were AI because the paintjob wasn't possible, as the artist had painted bags under the eyes. Also, earlier this year someone on Instagram was posting AI images of models in amongst their actual models they had painted, without flagging them as AI, presumably to bulk out their Instagram feed and satisfy the relentless hunger for new content that the algorithms create.

I recently grabbed an Xbox Series S for work and have had it at home whilst I set it up, and I am very impressed with is. Thought it might be cool to get my own to have on a different TV in the house so my kind isn't tying up the main one as much, and couldn't believe how expensive all of the Series S, Series X and all the variations of PS5 still are.

If they had found some way of getting the S to £200, I think they'd be able to have a massive push on shifting a decent amount of them.