Starfield

Credit: Microsoft

Between Gears of War: Reloaded hitting PlayStation early last week and Microsoft fleshing out the evermore hardware-agnostic future of its gaming platform with October’s promising ROG Ally handheld variant, it sure is a strange time to be an Xbox fan.

Reloaded is very solid, by the way, regardless of where you play it, and it’s a stark reminder that once upon a time, Xbox was a rather respected destination for top-tier exclusives. Maybe that was at its peak during the 360 era, but even beyond, there were undeniable reasons to own an Xbox.

I do still think they make commendable first-party video efforts—South of Midnight was, at the very least, unique and interesting—but times have changed. Perfect Dark getting cancelled still burns, though, and I’m getting impatient about Spyro 4. God knows what’s happening with Fable, but I am looking forward to it, if it still exists.

I do think it’s great that many of these Xbox cornerstones that were previously locked into the extreme green ecosystem, including gems like Forza Horizon 5, can now be enjoyed elsewhere. I’m sure Halo isn’t far behind.

I understand the inherent benefits of exclusives for brand identity and driving consumers to a bespoke box and storefront, of course, and putting exclusives on competitors’ hardware leeches some of the specialness away.

But at this point, I’m of the mind that exclusives are downright silly and long-outdated. Access to games should be unrestricted, I believe, and the raw quality can ultimately do the talking. Compete on those grounds and not by way of arbitrary gatekeeping. Binding excellent games like Gears of War to a single platform feels ridiculous and so very mid-2000s, so as weird as it has felt to play Gears on my PS5 Pro, the liberation is undeniable.

That said, there’s no ignoring that Xbox is done with such walled-garden malarky and quickly moving away from the console war entirely. It’s inching into something much less definable, and a few good bits of recent news highlight this observation.

Part 1

The first piece of good news is that Xbox Cloud Gaming isn’t restricted to Game Pass Ultimate-tier subscribers anymore. Now Core and Standard subscribers can partake, which means they can stream games from the cloud to any number of devices, including smartphones, smart TVs, tablets, laptops and whatever can open a web browser, really.

What’s cool is you can stream select games you outright own, as well as supported subscription titles, and this totally opens up all kinds of cool cloud-gaming possibilities. I actually recently played through the original Gears of War 2 via Xbox Cloud Gaming on both my PC and my Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7, and the experience was surprisingly smooth and enjoyable.

XCG maxes out at 1080p and 60fps, so the fidelity can’t compare to playing on local hardware, but the latency wasn’t bad at all, and I never once got disconnected or booted from a session. I do tend to get more lag on Xbox’s servers than Nvidia’s GeForce Now service, so your mileage may vary, but the convenience of not having to install anything before playing a game is pretty rad, as is the freedom to play select games on a myriad of devices.

Part 2

The second piece of good news is that Microsoft has recently updated its services to include cross-device play history. This essentially means it’s easier than ever to stop playing a game on, say, your Xbox Series X, and then seamlessly pick up where you left off on your PC, or even the upcoming ROG Xbox Ally. Or, let’s be real, your smart fridge, probably.

Everything will sync across devices so that your recently played games will show up no matter what piece of technology you’re gaming on. It seems small, but having your Xbox play history consistently extend to all devices is a nice quality-of-life update, I think. Of course, cloud saves have always been syncing across devices, but this is a solid addition.

At the end of the day, it’s giving Xbox a more Switch-like flavor, and that will be even more apparent once the new ROG Ally handheld launches in October. But as Xbox becomes more of a service than a console in the coming months and years, none of this will seem novel at all, I’m sure.

Halo on Switch has to be coming at some point, and what a wild day that will be. If only Nintendo would start putting Mario Kart World on PlayStation and Xbox, we’d achieve true gaming harmony, which I’m sure will positively never happen, seeing as Nintendo continues to sell boatloads of Switch and Switch 2’s.