Edit: It turns out I am not perfect and have holes in my knowledge. Games that are wrongly categorized are shifted over to the other list, but with a strikethrough to indicate a change, to preserve my original thoughts.
Games, brands and series associated with XBOX, compared to other console brands. The lists doesn’t mean exclusives or best games. It’s more of, what you think of games, when you think of XBOX.
Core brands created by XBOX
- Halo
- Gears of War
- Fable
- Forza
Secondary brands created by XBOX
Age of Empires- Sea of Thieves
- Starfield
- Hellblade
- State of Decay
Purchased by XBOX
- Age of Empires
- Minecraft
- Call of Duty
- WoW
- Overwatch
- Diablo
- Fallout
- DOOM
- Killer Instinct
Console exclusives with XBOX
- Lost Odyssey
Associated with XBOX, but no longer exclusive
- Ninja Gaiden
- Titanfall
- Star Wars Knights of the Republic (KOTOR)
- Ori and the Blind Forest
I was thinking about XBOX and its future, and somehow I got tangled in history and what the brand recognition is. This is the end result of my thoughts.
When I think about games, I don’t think about Xbox at all.
That wasn’t the question. The question is: What games do you think, if you think about XBOX. How does it come that you don’t think about games, when thinking about XBOX? I mean its a console and brand making videogames. What are you thinking about?
Lost Odyssey as an exclusive, Dust: An Elysian Tail as an “ex-clusive”, and with some struggle Halo as a first party title.
When I think of Xbox it’s mostly the 360 (and before) stuff that come to mind. PGR, Halo, Forza, Fable, GoW and then all the great XBLA games.
I do own and play newer consoles but they kinda just sit in the “meh” part of my brain.
I thought about mentioning XBLA, such Bastion in example.
They always felt kind of weirdly similar to me, even the games that they just ended up buying. Hard to describe, but the games always felt rather ‘functional’, rather ‘game-y’. Kind of like what I think of as solid AA games, just scaled to AAA.
Like, I don’t know, Hellblade is about mental illness and kind of made up to be this cinematic experience, so it should be a massive exception to this, but then it’s wrapped in this hack’n’slash gameplay and has the name “Hellblade”, as if they were afraid it might flop, if it doesn’t promise your usual dose of generic/violent gameplay.
Hell, Minecraft feels like it got microsoftified, in that they just keep adding more and more stuff to it, with no clear direction. It’s just, oh, the community wants XYZ, let’s add XYZ.
I guess, maybe that’s part of it? They have a lot of money, so game studios just add all kinds of features rather than making hard decisions on what kind of game they want to be.
That’s obviously also very positive in many ways, but yeah, might ultimately lead to the sameyness…It’s just, oh, the community wants XYZ, let’s add XYZ.
Well, I wouldn’t say this is a bad thing. Unless you mean by they try to appeal to everyone, which results into appealing to no one. But the game is quiet popular, so I think in that front Microsoft did actually good job, seemingly. Online games like these with community building content lives and dies with their community engagement. And its also quiet modifiable, so I don’t have any problem with that. But I"m also not playing the game, so maybe my view doesn’t count much here.
Had to think about it for a moment, but I would say the fundamental problem with adding more content to Minecraft is this classic game design quote:
Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.
In early days of Minecraft, you would cut down a tree, then slap down 6 blocks of wood and that was your table. It looked fine, because everything was just blocks and the few available blocks all could be combined without it looking terrible.
Now you’ve got a magnitude more blocks and the player looking to ruin their fun will spend far too much time:
- Choosing colors to combine. It can’t just be wood, it’s gotta be jungle wood, to make it fit in with the orange color highlights.
- Choosing block shapes. Can’t just be a regular 1m³ block, it’s gotta be an upside-down stair. And a carpet on top as a table cloth.
- Farming those resources. You need to find a jungle and a sheep. And scissors to collect the wool. And then you need to craft those stairs and carpets.
- Placing blocks. An upside-down stair can’t just be slapped down. Instead, you need some scaffolding against which you can place it from the correct angle. Nope, not that angle. Gotta remove the stair and place it anew. And don’t forget to remove your scaffolding afterwards. And place back those blocks you had to remove to get to the correct angle.
There are folks that find it relaxing to mine for hours and to spend hours getting every detail perfect about their build. But even those folks presumably wouldn’t call it fun.
But of course, your community will still ask for ever more hyperspecific blocks to be added, so they can optimize the fun out even more. Because your community are not game designers.
I can’t talk about the specifics, as I have no experience. But wanted mention that the community changes over time too, gets older, old players leave, new come in, even the game developers change over time. I think in a game like Minecraft adding stuff is not the worst thing that can happen, because people can mod the games and host their own worlds and game rules. So its more like giving more tools in the hand.
You left out Blinx, Xbox’s answer to Sonic (also made by the same creator apparently) with time control shenanigans. A pretty fun 3D platformer with a sequel where you can play as the bad guys (the Tom Tom Gang).
You left out Blinx
Well, this is my personal list of what I think of. So yes, I am sure there are games you associate with the brand which I don’t think of. Now you mention it, I saw Blinx, but it never got the attention and brand connection in my experience. I really should try it out someday.
They’re emulatable on Xemu. I just replayed the second one and had an absolute blast playing it again.
In the sequel you can customize your own character, build your own teams, and equip them with different weapons and gear. It’s just a fun game.
Fusion Frenzy Viva Piñata Lost Odyssey
Age of Empires (1997) existed before the Xbox brand (2001) and was only published by MS before purchasing Ensemble.
Ah, I didn’t know that! I actually played AoE back then a little bit and always thought its a first party Microsoft game, created by Microsoft. So here is the information on Wikipedia, the only source of truth as we all know: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensemble_Studios Thanks. I’ll update the list to reflect that.
The only games that really come to mind for me when I think xbox are halo, gears of war, and ryse: son of rome… and to a lesser extent call of duty and fifa. I know fifa is not related to xbox in terms of ownership of the brand, but every single fifa player I have known has been an xbox owner
Ah right, Ryse: Son of Rome. It’s exclusive to XBOX, but I never think of this game. Never played it and didn’t saw lot of coverage too. I’m actually surprised that you associate FIFA so strongly with XBOX. I would have thought its an evenly spread out player base. Maybe its because you were mostly in XBOX related communities? It would be a natural bias.
Im not actually in any xbox related communities or anything like that :p either way it’s purely anecdotal experience of never having met someone who plays fifa on playstation, with it being xbox every time lol. Plus it fits into the general (again anecdotal) image I have of the typical xbox gamer, which probably works to reinforce that idea in my mind
Also yeah, ryse son of rome… I don’t think that game was ever that big? It probably stuck in my mind cause a gaming youtuber I watched at the time had a long series on it, and I remember being somewhat disappointed when I found out it’s an exclusive :3
Just by chance, might the YouTuber possibly be MrMatty? It would be a nice coincidence, but I heard about this game in a retro sense the first time (consciously) from him, as he liked this game a lot. The ratings for this game wasn’t also particularly good, so I mostly overlooked it for that reason probably.
It was not mr matty, though I do know of him :3
It was either theradbrad or tmartn2… though im leaning towards theradbrad as I watched him more back then (funnily enough I haven’t watched either in years lol)… also looking back at the playlist for the series for either it’s not as long as I remember it being haha
@thingsiplay Red Dead Redemption on the Xbox 360
How does it come that you associate this game so strongly with XBOX? It was available on Playstation too at launch, as far as I know.
@thingsiplay You probably know this, but the Xbox 360 was super popular in its heyday. Games like Red Dead or Batman Arkham Asylum and City didn’t have to be exclusive to Xbox to make them great on the system. I’ve never believed in exlusivities, just in the platform that’s right for you.
Also, the people I knew all had the 360.I was also a XBOX 360 kid, BTW. Sometimes if a game works better on one system, then you associate it with that system. Or based on marketing. I personally wasn’t into those two games (but played Arkham games later on PC), so it just came as a surprise to me.
