Community Chronicle: 26/07/15

I’m not usually one to follow the Tour de France, but found myself watching the penultimate stage yesterday afternoon and quite enthralled by the battle to win not just the stage, but the whole race.

Of course, Chris Froome held the time advantage throughout, and it would have taken something exceptional for him and Team Sky to lose, but it was a fascinating and quite tense battle. Now it’s just the relatively processional stage in Paris and they can claim another victory.

Though we knew it was coming eventually, it was still a surprise to see Square Enix confirm this week that Rise of the Tomb Raider will be out on PC and PS4 in 2016, with a one year exclusivity period on console.

It’s been a particularly contentious deal. Duke said he hoped Square were happy with their “dirty Microsoft money,” and JR. said he’s “Still not buying this on any platform out of principle,” and that he “Hated the way MS and SE handled the reveal. Talk about screwing over your loyal PS fanbase, a-holes.”

Stefhutch20 questioned what the point of all of this was, asking “Are PS4 owners really going to buy an Xbox One just to play Rise of the Tomb Raider one year early?”

Though not a direct response, Avenger saw this deal in a much grander sense:

I think people overestimate what MS are doing with exclusivity. I don’t think it’s so much the case of grabbing PS4 players attention as it is building up an ensemble of games to entice newcomers. Tomb Raider is good, but it’s a drop in the ocean, a pixel towards a bigger picture of content that MS are delivering. I can’t see this announcement hurting sales much at all, unless there was a raft of PS4 players who were going to buy an XB1 for the one game.

It will remain to be seen how well the game sells and what effect it has for Microsoft and the Xbox One. What’s almost certain is the the vast majority of people simply don’t care about these kinds of background machinations, and it’s their reaction which will really come to define Microsoft’s willingness to make similar deals.

Elsewhere in Microsoft’s domain, the impending release of Windows 10 meant that they opened up the floodgates to all their preview users for Xbox One to Windows streaming.

There’s bound to be plenty of people eager to try it out, and Avenger wrote, “If the streaming is good quality, then this is pretty damn awesome when combined with a compatible tablet. Easily a replacement solution for my Vita if I end up selling it. In fact, I could probably just use the laptop with a W10 upgrade.”

Ron_mcphatty also said, “Very clever, considering the decent pricing of a lot of Windows tablets (I’ve got a Linx 8, and it’s cracking!) maybe we can hope for more remote play competition and support.”

Of course, the main sticking point for some people will always be that they have to use an Xbox One. JustTaylorNow wrote, “I hate the Xbox menu, it takes ages just for me to work out how to start my game. If they can fix that, will be happy,” and got a sea of tips and advice for his troubles.

Finally, a particularly bloody poster for Metal Gear Solid V was shown off this week, as Konami step it up a gear ahead of the game’s launch in September.

Turning to ron_mcphatty once again, he wrote, “Ooooh, that poster is grim! I hope there’s more hype to come – positive hype with teasers and dark images, not corporate squabbles. The end of the saga is nearly here!”

However, Kennykazey was more critical:

Though the lighting would have deterred real world golfers, the witching hour held no demons for R1MJAW, as he collected his platinum trophy for Rory McIlroy’s PGA Tour. He also put a shift in with Forrest and Pixel_nme with some Borderlands 2 co-op and Dying Light (with the addition of bezerka), with Pixel also finding time to polish off the platinum for Rocket League.

DividSmythe, meanwhile, tucked into his back catalogue to get the platinum for Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus, as well as nabbing the platinum for LBP3 before swanning off to Paris for the Tour de France finale.

That’s all for a rather quiet week on the achievements side of things, with lots of people slowly but surely plugging away at the likes of The Witcher 3 and Batman: Arkham Knight…

There’s no trophy leaderboard for you this week, but I leave you on this page with the usual submission form.