I think I've just been irreversibly damaged by Path of Exile's fast gameplay, D4's combat felt pretty tedious to me in comparison. Or maybe I've just had the wrong builds so far. I've been meaning to give it another shot but there have been so many other good games recently so I guess it'll have to wait.

I know there’s a mentality out there that a Diablo game is a failure unless it’s the only game you ever want to play for the rest of your life, (which, btw, I don’t even feel that about Diablo 2), but it’s ok to take breaks and play different games and come back to a game when it’s updated.

Yeah I don't get that either. I have to skip leagues (seasons) in Path of Exile both because I wouldn't have enough time to play other games if I didn't and also because I tend to play it so much that I get tired of it and need a break afterwards.

What do you like about it? I'm genuinely curious. I'm happy you're enjoying it, I wish I could too, but somehow it just bores me.

I definitely agree that you shouldn't (just) measure a game's value by playtime. I prefer a shorter game that's an interesting and exciting experience all the way through over one that is longer, but feels drawn out.

That's a good point, but I feel like there are reasonable solutions for that like a disclaimer when buying the game digitally. For the physical version they could either put a sticker on it or just delay the physical version only. I also think that people who are informed enough to know about specific features like that are more likely to hear about this discourse.

The S was just a bad idea from the get go.

Yeah for sure. I agree that pushing the One X as the cheaper/entry level version would have been much better. Even for much longer than 1-2 years. People wouldn't get as mad if they gradually started to phase it out and stopped releasing the high profile games on it after a few years while still supporting it somewhat. Even the feature parity thing wouldn't have been that much of an issue if they'd just clearly communicated an expiry date beforehand.

They COULD blame it on the S, but, again, Microsoft won’t allow it.

I don't get how blaming the S for a delayed feature would be different than blaming the S for a delayed game, which is what they're doing right now.

But I definitely agree that this is bad for Microsoft and they should do something about it. Not sure whether dropping the S would be the right call but they definitely need to reconsider the feature parity requirement policy.

Can't they blame it on the S either way?

And "just being the ganked version" in this case would mean not having a single feature that the vast majority of players likely wouldn't even have used in the first place. Yes, it's not good, but the choice here is between either locking your players out of that one non-essential feature or locking them out of the entire game. And the second option is, to me, very obviously much worse.

And it's also not like it would be the "bad" version forever. They can just patch it in when they get it to work. And let players decide for themselves whether they want to get the game now without split screen or wait.

True, but I feel like not releasing the game at all is even worse. The consensus seems to be that PS5 already has better exclusives and now you can't even play one of this year's best third party games on Xbox.

I also thought they might have such a requirement but I was unable to find a source that confirms (or even mentions) it. Definitely still possible though.

As far as I can tell the article only talks about a feature parity requirement between the Xbox Series S and Series X versions. And that could be met by just dropping the feature from both versions.

What I don't understand is why they don't just release both Xbox versions without split screen and then try to patch it in later. That way they'd satisfy the feature parity requirement (as I understand it) and people could at least play the game. I love that they're still doing split screen despite it seemingly having fallen out of favour these days, but it's hardly an essential feature.

There isn't really a "second one". Overwatch 2 was just a patch with essentially two major changes. They changed the monetisation, making the game free-to-play and introducing the battle pass. An especially unpopular part of that is that new heroes now have to be bought with real money or unlocked through the battle pass. The other big change is the move from 6v6 to 5v5, which was controversial. There are definitely some positives, like getting rid of the "double shield meta", which did make the game more fun. But there's also more pressure and focus on the single tank.

The game is free and if you bought OW1 you still have all your stuff (cosmetics and all the non-OW2 heroes), so if you're curious you can just check it out. Personally I'm still enjoying the game but there's also a lot of valid criticism.