AvowedandIndiana Jones and the Great Circle— both of which received new trailers at last week’sXboxDeveloper Direct — look (to paraphrase the great Charles Melton) like my cup of chamomile tea. I’m a big fan of the previous work from bothObsidian Entertainmentand MachineGames, and the studios' new titles for Xbox look like bigger budget versions of the excellent work they’ve done before.The Outer WorldsandWolfenstein 2were great, but now they’re playing withMicrosoftmoney.
Sadly, that leap in ambition and graphical fidelity will be lost on me with my current setup. I have a PC, but it’s a gaming laptop I bought in early 2020 and it can no longer keep up with shiny new triple-A games. I played a few hours ofStarfieldon it, and it ran fine in interior spaces, but the framerate instantly tanked when I walked off ship into the open air of a city. Avowed and Indiana Jones will almost certainly present the same problem.
The other option, playing on the Xbox One I purchased around the same time as the laptop, is a non-starter. It’s not impossible, theoretically. Though both games will likely beSeries X|Sexclusive, the magic of cloud gaming would make it possible to play on my old machine. But, the last time I tried that, withHi-Fi Rush, my wi-fi just couldn’t keep up. That’s a rhythm-heavy game, and so requires a lower level of latency, but Avowed and Indie are both action games and the experience would be hurt by lag there, too.
So, it looks like it may finally be the year: the year that Microsoft forces me to upgrade to its new generation of consoles. I didn’t think this moment would come for me so soon. As Xbox ramped up for the launch of the Series X|S, its focus was on continuity. The games it launched on Series X and S would also be playable on Xbox One — and on your phone for that matter — natively, through the cloud, or both. And, if you did decide to upgrade, that process would be painless. Your console would simply download the best version of the game you wanted for your hardware.
This was markedly different from Sony’s strategy. “We believe in generations,” Sony Interactive Entertainment’s CEO Jim Ryansaid back in 2020, drawing a sharp distinction between the gameplansPlayStationand Xbox were running. But, nearly four years later, the benefits of owning aPS5have largely been the same benefits I would get from owning an Xbox Series X. I can play the best versions of games that are, by and large, available elsewhere. In 2023, Sony mostly stopped making new games for the PS4, as exclusives likeSpider-Man 2andFinal Fantasy 16were only available on PS5. But, up until then, it was largely using the same playbook as Microsoft, but with less convenience for consumers.God of War RagnarokandHorizon Forbidden Westwere available both on PS4 and PS5, but cost more on PS5 and, for a while, your console would default to downloading the inferior version of PS5 games for some reason. Whenever a PS4 game got a PS5 upgrade, there were questions about what the upgrade path would be, whether it would cost money or be free. Microsoft answered all those questions at once with a strategy that let players play anywhere.
But now neither of the places I’ve been playing are cutting it any longer. As much as Microsoft has supported its previous generation of consoles, it’s increasingly clear that that support eventually has to end. PlayStation ripped the Band-Aid off with the release of the PS5-exclusiveDemon’s Soulsback in 2020, but Xbox is heading to the same destination all the same.
Now that Avowed and Indiana Jones are confirmed for this year they’ve instantly become my most anticipated games of 2024. As someone who isn’t really looking to drop between $220 and $500 on a new console, I’m not thrilled. I was under the illusion that I could make my current set-up work for a little longer. But it turns out that Microsoft believes in generations, too.
