Xbox Live is Dead. But not for long

Lately, Xbox Live has been feeling quite dead in South Africa. Everyone is waiting for all the new releases to come out because we have slowly become a bit bored with all the usual offerings.

Talkxbox has posted up a list of what they think are going to be the next top 5 games that will be taking up all of our time on Xbox live once the holiday rush of games hit.

Now while I agree with most of them, there are one or two that I don’t see making the cut in the long run. When it comes to real Xbox live hits we are looking at what kind of games are on the way that will be taking over from the current kings of online play.

Nearly 2 years after its release Gears of War is still being played a ton, especially in South Africa. With COD4 and Halo 3 still enjoying a massive following at the top of the charts we really do have to ask ourselves if there will be anything coming out to replace these greats or will we just be falling back on the classics after a few months.

Talkxbox’s list and more after the jump.

So these are the 5 games listed on TalkXbox:

1. Lord of the Rings: Conquest
2. Left 4 Dead
3. Tom Clancy’s End War
4. Call of Duty 5: World at War
5. Gears of War 2

While I think that Gears of War 2 is going to be a sure fire hit, I am skeptical whether or not any of the other games are really going to have any real legs on Xbox Live.

Left 4 Dead looks like its going to be an absolute ton of fun as long as the netcode isn’t an issue. As you may or may not know Left 4 Dead uses the Source engine that was used for Team Fortress 2, which suffered from intense lag issues when it was released. All of that has now been patched but the netcode still doesn’t hold a candle to games like Call of Duty 4 and Battlefield: Bad Company in terms of South Africans like us being able to jump into international games or at the very least, handle a full local server without issues.

Lord of the Rings: Conquest is looking really interesting as well and should be quite a similar experience to the Star Wars: Battlefront games, just with a fantasy setting. If this game catches on it could be a great reason to keep renewing your Live subscription although I still don’t know whether it will be able to keep people interested for very long.

What I don’t agree with in this list is Tom Clancy’s End War. Even though it looks like the game has a lot of potential I still really don’t see any RTS games getting or keeping much of a large following on Xbox Live. That definitely is the domain of the PC and I think that it will be a fairly long time until it moves over to console, if ever.

That leaves us with COD: World at War. With COD4 still being such a huge powerhouse on Xbox Live I truly think that Treyarch should rather be focussing on Co-Op play and a good single player campaign because it doesn’t take long to realise that it will be quite an incredibly tough task to try and match or better the experience available in COD4.

I think this list does do a good job of summing up what games will be dominating in the next year as a whole bunch of releases that are on their way are going to be more focussed on single player and local play.

Do you think that any major game is missing from this list. This obviously doesn’t include all of the PS3’s upcoming releases that are going to be dominating on PSN. Motorstorm 2, Resistance 2 and Killzone 2 are looking mighty fine and should be keeping PS3 owners really busy for a good long while.

source: TalkXbox

Last Updated: August 25, 2008