Episode Details

It's been a week. The big Xbox 'Reset' is in full swing, but after all the layoffs and studio changes, we're still not really sure on what the plan actually is. Let's discuss what's going on in The DayOne Show Episode 322!

This week, we're joined by the lovely Sam Tolbert, who's starting to feel like a part of the furniture around here! Before we dig into the big topics, we spend some time talking about the games we've been enjoying this week.
Jon has been having a wonderful time sailing around the Caribbean in Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Resynced, and after 30+ hours with Ubisoft's remade classic, piracy and the open sea remains as addictive and engaging as ever. Jesse took some time to cover new Game Pass addition Ascend to Zero, a new bullet-heaven survivors like game with a pretty unique twist where you can pause time itself.

Both Sam and Jesse have been playing Doom The Dark Ages: Revelations, a new campaign-sized DLC for the latest Doom game from id Software. It is unabashedly excellent, and it hurts to see what id Software went through this week considering they've made something so genuinely fantastic.
Oh yeah - that's right. In spite of how great games are, and how many great games there are, this week saw the next great big 'Xbox Reset' kick-in. 3200 roles are being eliminated, with multiple studios affected. Obsidian are working on Fallout, id Software are moving forward after the cuts, and we've yet to see what else is going to happen. Xbox bid goodbye to Undead Labs and Ninja Theory, who will have new owners, and Compulsion Games and Double Fine, who are returning to independence. We also await with a decent amount of uncertainty to see what happens with Arkane Lyon, who are also being moved on from Xbox, and are going through a consultation process.

Suffice it to say, this week has been all kinds of awful, and rather than give everyone another blow-by-blow of all the headlines, we thought we would take a different approach with things.

We wanted to zoom out and ask the big questions - after all of this turmoil, it's not yet clear to us what Xbox actually want to achieve? Is it truly bringing consoles back into focus? Are they really willing to make that enormous financial investment - and loss - to sell Xbox console again? There's a huge number of unknowns, and we dive