Gate kept demos are a travesty. AKA I almost ate Tony Hawk's Burrito

Well if you've been following the fourthline train, which i highly recommend you do, you would have seen me waffle back and forth between getting Tony Hawk 1 + 2. After offloading my PS4 Pro and Last of Us 2 I had enough store credit make my dreams come true. I paid my pre-order in full.

One would think that pre-ordering nearly 2-weeks after the digital pre-order suckers paid in full would grant me access to a game coming out in less than a week. That perceived bonus was not top of mind and i didnt think about until last night when I saw some ign articles about the game. Well clearly my receipt would hav a code on it. Maybe the demo unlocks in the 24 hours before launch. Nope. Well maybe it's on the xbox store. Nope. I almost dined on Tony Hawk's spicy chipotle burrito a couple of weeks, just for a taste of the game.

I highly suspect that the demo will pop up a couple of months from now but it's enraging (outraging).

In other new gamepass has a pre-order for dragon quest on the store as if the game was avaiable right now. I thought that maybe it was only on gamepass with the pre-order date being when you could purchase it. I'm not saying that's the ony reason i signed up for it, but yeah. Either way things are just getting real crappy in the videogame space. I think my inverted self is telling me play old games or games you've already beaten. Nothing but a poop show lies ahead.. ahead.

Yeah it would be crazy to distribute a demo with a fast food chain. What's that? Oh, it's how the original PS1 demo was released? Oh.

But yeah it does suck they didn't make it generally available. It's solid, so it would probably have a pretty great return for them.

And for the dragon quest pre-order, no idea what you're on about. I searched for "dragon quest pre order" and there's a bunch of results: EB Games, squeenix themselves, an ign article explaining where to get it on each platform. Plus, if it were in GamePass, why would you need to preorder?

I can't check the Xbox One version of the GamePass store, but it's very clear on PC and their site that it's not out till December 3rd. Pre-order didn't gain a new definition by it's usage in the Gamepass store. Seems like you just didn't understand that Gamepass is a service and store so you assumed if it's there it's playable.

As for the Tony Hawk demo, you can still gain access to it according to a blog post about the demo on Activision's site. This was literally the first link when I searched "tony hawk pre order demo".

https://blog.activision.com/tony-hawk/2020-08/THPS-Demo-Everything-You-Need-to-Know

Very unhelpful. The xbox app has the option to install dragon quest. I think it's a little insidious that the icon is even on the menu with every other game. Does netflix have movies that arent out yet in the same sub-menus as a movie you can watch? Don't think so. Well they might. It's intentionally deceptive and honestly isn't that big a deal but they knew what they were doing. Is it outside the realm of possibility that a game premiers as playable on gamepass before it's available for purchase like Apple Arcade does. A pre-order for a game that comes out in December with an install now button is some underhanded stuff. A coming soon banner would have been nice.

I'm sure your link is special and what not but it probably involves buying the game digitally or snacking on some dude's burrito. Which misses the point of this thread.

Yeah, their handling of the demo seems weird to me. I could make some guesses as to why they handled it the way they did, but the game is out in less than 48 hours now, so maybe it doesn't matter. Most games aren't getting any sort of demo these days, so it's not like there was much of an expectation here.

I don't see the problem with Dragon Quest. It's going to be on Game Pass, it's also available to pre-order if you don't want to go the Game Pass route. The only odd thing here is that it's available to pre-install like three months early, but I'm failing to see whatever the deception is.

Wait, is dragon quest not already out on xbox? Thought it was and that was people realizing it is a port of the switch version?

And yeah. I'll agree MS could do with better distinction of preload and install. But the preload tends to be deceptively small (think CK3 was like one gig?) and if you try to launch it it tells you it was a preload. It isn't great but I don't really see a problem? Would definitely have issues if my preload of flight sim was the full game but for just a small meaningless subset it feels like an excuse to prepare the client to autodownload on release.

I've not yet seen a game on PC Gamepass be playable ahead of release for purchase. It also says Pre-Install on PC gamepass so unless Xbox decided to go with different verbiage for the Xbox One store, it's still clear that the game is not actually available to play because of the Available on date. Considering the the PC and web versions are nearly identical, i'd be surprised if the Xbox One page was so radically different to just say Install. It's dumb, but not some ruse to get one over on you. Netflix does, on occasion, use the very top spot on the site to show something that is out soon as well as for things that are actually out.

The point of the link is that if you'd taken the time to do the leg work and find out whether you actually get the demo based on where you pre-order. You could have spared yourself this issue, and that blog post exists to facilitate that.

@goboard: yeah the onus is on me for everything. Maybe I should figure out ps5 backwards compatibility, price, and which version gets me Officer Dick... Dick. I’m not jumping through hoops For anything period.

Just because you aren’t aware doesn’t mean it’s not possible. Are the yakuza games available on disc? Is nier automata? Yes they’re digital but we are one board meeting away from Gamepass being Tony hawk preorder demo levels of gatekeeping. I just mentioned dragon quest as a comparable aside. I swear these boards don’t move without me because you guys don’t post anything other snark in the threads.

I can't imagine Activision know how to be confident about a Tony Hawk title nowadays. Tying the demo to a preorder (and then seeing how the demo's quality effects said pre-order numbers) might've actually been a smart move.

If knowing what you actually get when you put money down for something is too much work for you then I don't know what else to tell you.

I think it’s deeply frustrating that Xbox often populates new on game pass with preorders and it’s not often immediately clear that’s the case.

But it’s also only like... one more step deep to clarify this.

@fourthline: What research do I have to do? The DQXI page on both web and app clearly states that the options are pre-order and pre-install, with its released date entailed. You were just too lazy to click on the link, causing you to complain about nothing.

It is true that on some screens you can get a big list of games that do not clearly indicate that they are available or pre-order.

But again just..just click on it.

I know a lot of ppl avoid Walmart but fyi, you can pre-order and get Tony Hawk for $34

@liquiddragon: But does every single store page make it clear that it won't instantaneously appear next to you once you click the link, go through a few pages that do, and make the purchase?

Also, nice deal

Wasteland 3 was listed on Gamepass forever and I was confused when I initially saw it so I hit install, which suspiciously took like 30 seconds at most, and then when I tried to boot it up it said "This game isn't available yet" and provided a link to the store so I could see when it would be so I'm REALLY not understanding what you're on about with that. At most, as another poster said, it's just kind of stupid to have the list of new Gamepass games populated with games you can't play right now but...none of this is remotely difficult to figure out or insidious in any capacity. I suspect it is an effort on Xbox's part to keep opinions on Gamepass positive, by saying "Look at all these great games out, and also, you can preload THESE great games as well because they're coming in the future!" It also doubles as probably incentive to keep people on the service.

I don't actually even know what the pre-install option is supposed to do because for at least a couple different games I have done so.. it downloads some small thing and then does not even do anything when the game is released I've had to manually start the full download myself.

@efesell: Interesting. You on PC or Xbox? I know Wasteland 3 automatically downloaded on my Xbox for me, but that's the only one I've tried this with and I haven't used PC Gamepass at all because my PC is back in the US. The whole concept seems like it would be fine if they maybe just organized things slightly better? Like, maybe just a second tab for Gamepass games not released yet? But that doesn't really change the silliness of it all if it doesn't consistently just download the entire game when ti becomes available?

@efesell: It may have just bugged out for you. For example - I have a 98% failure rate with remote installation to my XB1X when using the Game Pass phone app. I have tried various solutions posted by both the Microsoft Support pages (which are awful and generally unhelpful) and tips other players have mentioned worked for them to no avail. The one thing I did not try because it is physically impossible for me is to have the XB1X power chord plugged directly into the wall socket and not into a power strip or go between of some kind. I have a a TV, computer, two consoles, two monitors yatta yatta.. I don't have the luxury of having my XBOX taking up an entire socket. The scant few times that remote installation or queuing such as pre-loads have ever worked for me is when my XBOX is turned on, and I'm sitting directly in front of it and it's in the Download Queue window - then sometimes it will actually go through.

@efesell: In the case of flight sim I think it downloaded the base client (locked by phone home) so that you could download a hundred gigs of world and plane data whenever. Didn't notice needing to update or do anything to go from preload to launch but I also held off on launching until near the end of last month

For CK3 I have no idea what they downloaded but I did have to manually "update" to get the rest of the game on launch. I suspect there is a flag I can set in some options menu to automate that

But yeah. There is a reason I tend to put a functional windows store at "between EGS and Steam"

So, this game is very good, in the same way that the originals were very good. It's a *lot* tougher than I remember. Probably from a few years (THPS1-3) of practicing on a semi-regular basis I got halfway decent, but that's gone now. I'm bailing all the time. But that's why these games are so beloved, I think - there's a very high skill ceiling and it's very rewarding when you master it.

It's really impressive that they pulled this off on the PS1. The controls were and are very fluid. When I think of PS1 games I generally think of RPGs or games with otherwise *very* stiff controls like Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, MGS - games from a time when 3D was new and devs and gamers alike had no idea how to approach it. In terms of fluidity of movement in 3D worlds, Nintendo was usually light years ahead. These games were the exception. The levels are also impressively large - much bigger than I remember.