They promoted it as such so yeah.

only Driveclub problems were network related and they got fixed

ReCore itself is broken

Sony did say it would be treated like a first party triple A. That all ended as soon is it got a horrible reception of course.

You're assuming Bethesda, or maybe the Scorpio, could deliver an open world game on the level of FO or ES.

I'd say it maybe can, if it maintained last gen graphics, and some of the details turned down.

But yeah, Bethesda could make that, because they half ass everything console, including XBox, so I don't see why they'd be the go-to mention for bragging about getting technical advice from a developer. Bethesda games are buggy and poorly optimized, regardless of platform. That doesn't make them good for saying what should go into a console, because that means they'd probably just prefer more power so they can simply half ass it even more. At best, it's worth asking them what they'd like from a console.

To put it in perspective, after quite a few updates, one could manage to get a stable always above 30fps 4K out of FO4 on PC with a 980ti card under ideal PC conditions. That comes in at 5.6TFlops. All good you say, Scorpio is 6TFlops. But the game varied so much in frame rate, and 30fps is where it was recommended it be played at by most analysis sites. But the funny thing is, mods out there do a better job than Bethesda ever tried to do with any of their products....including 4K, although they require a pretty hefty GPU to run well.

Stock FO4 runs better on some newer cards which are more powerful, but you aren't going to be getting impressive 4K gaming from Bethesda on consoles. It's just not in their history to even try.

I do agree that Howard is a great designer, I just question his expertise on advising for the design of a game console. Surely there are more qualified people out there which could be cited. This sounds like MS just trying to throw out a big name, and hoping people get excited.

"Rockstar Games’ co-founder and former VP of Development Jamie King said he envisions GTA 6 as a game that’s “maybe not quite as edgy or quite as funny” as its satirical predecessors."

oh yeah, totally internet grifters spreading rumors...

Contractual agreements are not the same as “gentlemen” agreements. If you think that they work with their distributors a month before production then their entire business model is trash. They work with companies like nvidia constantly for building the graphics cards they need. They work with companies that build motherboards years in advance. This is what proper business planning does.

They are not buying components on a whim like a consumer. So again, considering the ram isn’t a singular module and is integrated into the motherboard I highly doubt they wouldn’t have a final schematic that they are supposed to be building around.

If they are delaying production another 3 years then it’s obvious again this is an after though project and is just trying to be responsive to their bad execution they had the last 14 years.

It also isn’t far fetched to use their failure to produce first party titles the last 7 years including the highly anticipated games I mentioned all being cancelled. That they would continue to you know… lie

Yeah with FSR 5 they should be able to offer a much cheaper version of Helix.

Series S is what has killed Xbox Series so... Will they dare?

The factors are largely external. Covid and Russia-Ukraine war causing inflation led to the first price increase in 2022.

Then we get Trump's tariffs increasing hardware prices, AI boom causing a RAM crisis, war on Iran causing a worldwide fuel crisis which impacts the cost of everything.

Gaming doesn't exist in a vacuum. The last few years have been a shitshow and lot of it was definitely avoidable.

LucasRuinedChildhood,

For sure. No disagreement on the external factors doing a lot of this. Where I have to gently push back however is on two fronts:

1. The pandemic definitely caused some issues: asynchronous development was a big issue and really complicated timelines and affected game quality. At the same time, when it comes to price hikes, it's really difficult to know what was genuine necessity and what was taking consumers for a ride. The pandemic brought about "stag-flation" which was increasing prices and stagnant wages, which was a problem caused by supply chain constraints. There was also "Greed-flation", where companies that were slightly affected or had no issues took advantage of the situation and squeezed everyone citing supply chain issues when there were none.

2. It's definitely true that the tariffs, AI boom, and RAM crisis were all things enabled by tech broligarchs throwing money at this caricature of a world leader, one of them being Satya Nadella. I don't think Sony and Nintendo have contributed much to this problem if at all, but Microsoft's Nadella I feel was instrumental in causing every one of those issues. Microsoft as a company contributed to both candidates (though they gave Harris 4x as much if I recall), but Nadella was all in on letting AI run wild. He paid for unregulated AI, and got a war that's not a war (even though Trump called it that at least five times on television) that screwed up helium access. So for me, I feel that one of the players in the gaming industry is a key architect of these issues, and for that reason I struggle a bit to think of it as "external".