The Gamers Arms

Now available of xbox pc live thingy if you have such a thing.

arqueturus wrote: ↑

Sat Dec 28, 2019 3:52 pm

Now available of xbox pc live thingy if you have such a thing.

Not yet, but hoping to do so sometime next month, will be good to play this and Outer Worlds.

£1 for 3 months of Game Pass Ultimate.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/p/xbox- ... verviewtab

Offer expires January 6th I believe.

Question for the group, I've just got the £3 three months of Xbox Live Gold so my eldest can play Minecraft online with her friend on our Xbox One S. Does that mean I can use the same thing on my PC to play the games there?

I guess ultimately it's the difference of a few quid if the answer is no, but still. Would be good to know.

Xbox Live is not Gamepass, they're separate services.

For PC access you'll need Gamepass Ultimate (or a separate Gamepass PC sub, which is £4 a month at the moment), which is the subscription MM referred to. You'll need to use the same Microsoft account on both the console and PC.

The text on the link up there sounds like I can upgrade the Live service to the Gamepass Ultimate service for £1, if I'm reading that correctly. Does that mean if I do that it can do both things on Xbone and PC (ie online multiplayer on xbox and gamepass games on PC)?

Just trying to ascertain if I can achieve both through a single package rather than sign up for two subs...

If you can upgrade to Gamepass Ultimate that's all you would need. Its everything rolled into one. Gold for Xbox and both PC and Xbox Game Pass services.

The "see all plans" button at this link should give you more info i I think...

https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/xbox-game-pass#join

Cool cheers, will try to sort that out over the next few days

Soooo... it turns out what I actually signed up for the other day was Gamepass Ultimate on that £1/3 months deal

Just take me off to the home now, it's for the best. Nurse!

The only thing that will top it off now is if you actually had already bought Phoenix Point all along and forgot.

I wouldn't put it past me!

Well, I've put a fair bit of time into this and I've had to park it. The mid game is horribly broken.

If you play well, crush the Pandorans in the early game, the way that evolve badly starts to stack against you. They get HP boosts and Armour Boosts until they become horrific bullet sponges. The way to counter this has been to use game imbalanced exploits such as multiclassing Sinpers and Heavies to use a particular ability. Except a recent patch has tweaked out some of these imbalances but not removed the need for them.

So, the mid game battles are not impossible but become a huge grind time sink and then boredom sets in. Some of the suggested solutions are to skip salvage missions and just sit in base training. That's right, to beat the game, you have to not play the game or not well. This is not a difficulty thing either, I'm playing on Normal and this 'scaling' happens at the same rate on all difficulties.

It's a huge shame as I much prefer the combat and Geoscape mechanics to the modern X-Com's. I'd like to see a mix to the evolution rate of enemies, even just a better mix of health and armour to the way it works at the moment.

If you've got this on Games Pass then give it a go - otherwise I would consider holding off buying this until it matures more (I'm praying it does as I want to play it).

Oh one final word, it's a has a fucking atrocious UI, they should really be ashamed to release something so bad in this day and age.

I've played maybe an hour, completing the tutorial involving the first few missions.

And I'm not sure if I like it. Compared to how slick XCOM2 is it feels like I'm playing a budget title. I may put some more time into it (though Arqueturus' post above puts me off somewhat), but definitely not something I'm feeling the pull to play more of.

I've put a bit more time into it, 5 or 6 hours maybe, up the point of recruiting about a dozen soldiers to my team, have covered most of Asia and Russia on the Geoscape, and it's... ok, I guess?

Almost everything feels a bit uninspired, from the lack of music, the small, cookie-cutter tactical maps, bare-bones enemy variation, lack of customisation, lack of equipment descriptions (you'll get a new gun type, but aside from the raw numbers you have no idea what it will do until you use it), horrid UI, basic base building... if you've played XCOM 2 then everything here feels so inferior in comparison.

Well, not everything. There are three things I like in Phoenix Point that XCOM could learn from:

- the AP system where you can move, shoot, move or do whatever you want to until you've used up all your points
- the Geoscape, it's fun scanning areas and then finding all the points of interest that do different things
- the free aiming system, so you can tell soldiers exactly where to aim and try to disable specific parts of enemies, like maiming the arm they shoot will to nullify their threat etc.

Everything else is kind of bleh. And after reading how the mid to late game plays out I think I'm just going to leave it there. Which is a massive disappointment as I had high hopes for this.