Microsoft needs help from Sony

Xbox is currently suffering a major service outage, days after PlayStation was hit with a similar issue. Services such as booting up digital games, logging into your account, and browsing the Xbox Store are said to be affected. The service was first reported last night, July 26, at 11:10 p.m. ET.  As of publishing, Xbox is still working to resolve the issue, according to the Xbox status page, which was last updated at 2:48 p.m. ET.  Four features are affected across Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Xbox 360, and backwards compatibility. We've listed them below along with the official descriptions of their issues. Account & Profile: You may not be able to sign-in to your Xbox profile, may be disconnected while signed in, or have other related problems. Features that require sign-in like most games, apps and social activity won't be available. Store & Subscriptions: You might not see a game you're looking for in the Store right now. Games & Gaming: You may have problems playing your digital games right now. Apps & Mobile: You may have problems launching apps. These outages may not affect everyone equally; to test the outage for this story, I logged into my Xbox account on my Series X and booted up several games, both owned and downloaded from Game Pass, without problem. Still, this situation is worth keeping an eye on if you’re planning to jump into your Xbox over the next couple of hours. View the full article

What if Earth were no longer a place humanity could call home because of its own brazen actions? In Forever Skies, that’s the world you’ll step into. It’s a first-person sci-fi survival crafting game set hundreds of years after an ecological catastrophe transformed our planet beyond recognition. Toxic clouds blanket Earth’s surface, so to move around, you’ll need to build, customize, and pilot a high-tech airship that will become your everything – your mobile base, workshop, and ultimate survival lifeline. Built Together with Our Community We’re incredibly excited to finally bring Forever Skies to the XBOX community after years of development. Since the early days of our PC Early Access, the game has been shaped by player feedback. Throughout development, we’ve worked closely with our community, listening to suggestions, refining core systems, and expanding the game with features inspired directly by our players. Even after our 1.0 launch in April 2025, we knew we wanted to keep supporting the game. So, while preparing Forever Skies for XBOX, we continued listening to players and developing new content. That’s why our biggest update yet, The Final Echoes, launches exactly alongside the XBOX release. From day one, XBOX Series X|S players will experience the most complete and expanded version of the game. And The Final Echoes introduces some major new features, including a new power management system for your airship and a reworked damage system that changes how you maintain and protect your flying base. We’ve also added more than 30 new side quests that uncover more of the world’s story, along with new enemies and combat encounters, new sprawling landmark locations, and greater environmental variety across our three biomes to make exploration even more rewarding. On top of that, we’ve introduced deep custom difficulty settings, allowing players to tailor the experience to their preferred playstyle. All of these additions—and more—are the result of another year of collaboration with our community, helping us create the best version of Forever Skies yet. Now, since a lot of you will be taking flight with us for the first time, we wanted to take some time to six useful tips and tricks we’ve seen are worth highlighting as not everyone is aware of this when playing our game for the first time. 1. Find and Follow Side Quests Side quests reward you with all kinds of useful things, from lore that reveals how life on Earth unfolded during humanity’s downfall to unique decorations for your airship and valuable resources. Most importantly, though, some side quests also reward you with powerful devices and technology that you might not find anywhere else. So, if you want to kit out your airship with the best tools and tech to help you thrive, keep an eye out for these side missions and do them. Don’t ignore them or just leave them till the end. 2. Deactivate Explored Location Beacons Once you’re up in the skies exploring, you’ll notice that many locations are marked by flashing beacons at their highest point. After you’ve landed and scavenged a location, make it a habit to remove the battery powering the beacon on the location. This deactivates it, making it much easier to tell at a glance which locations you’ve already explored and stripped of resources. 3. Make Duplicate Devices Early Can you get by with just one water filter, engine, or fabricator? Sure, but only just. If you really want to thrive, don’t be afraid to build duplicate devices early. Having multiple resource-producing machines running at once makes life much easier and helps your production ramp up much faster. This is especially true when playing in co-op, where there are more mouths to feed and more hands to keep busy. Your airship is meant to grow over time, so don’t be afraid to fill those empty rooms. 4. Capture Lighting to Take Advantage of the Surplus Status One of the biggest overhauls added by our Final Echoes Update is our new electricity system. With it, you’ll now need to build up airships ability to generate power to meet your electricity consumption, and thus let you keep your devices on and functioning. If your power consumption exceeds your power generation by too much, your devices will start to take damage. But then there is also the flip side of this, known as Surplus Status. This isn’t just about building more and more generators. All that will do is keep you in Stable Status. Surplus Status requires you to upgrade your generators to be able to capture and harness lightning strikes encountered during violent storms. By overloading your grids with raw lighting energy, you’ll unlock significant efficiency perks for your airship. Crafting stations work faster, resource-producing systems become more productive, and even your airship gains additional flight speed with a built-in boost mode. 5. Be Smart in Combat You’re a scientist sent to explore and study Earth, not an elite soldier. You’ll face plenty of threats from the planet’s evolved flora and fauna, but success comes from preparation rather than brute force. Look for openings, make good use of electrical mines, experiment with different ammo types, and don’t forget about stat boosters. Combat is all about finesse, so resist the urge to “Leeroy Jenkins” your way through every encounter. 6. Embrace Custom Difficulty (It Won’t Turn off Achievements) Survival game haters will tell us they really don’t enjoy managing hunger and thirst, while survival game masochists will tell you there’s never enough starvation and dehydration for their liking. To try and finally satisfy everyone’s various demands for balance changes, we’ve implemented a new custom difficulty setting. Now you can tweak how quickly your hunger, thirst, oxygen, and energy deplete, or even turn any of them off entirely if you want. You can remove the need for resources in order to build and craft. Choose what you lose when you die, whether it’s during normal gameplay or after blindly falling off your airship. You can also adjust combat by deciding how much health enemies have, how much damage they deal, and how frequently they spawn. Extra hint: if you’ve got a phobia of bugs, we’ve also got you covered. You can turn those giant mantis baddies into floating torso dudes in the accessibility settings. You can change any of these settings at any point in the game. And yes, as the title says, using custom difficulty will not disable your achievements. So set the game up exactly how you want to play and adjust as you go, enjoy! Your Journey Begins Today Forever Skies is available now on XBOX Series X|S and you can play solo or in coop with up to four people online. The game also supports XBOX Play Anywhere so your progress carries across XBOX Series X/S, Windows PC, and XBOX-supported gaming handhelds. Thanks for reading, and we hope to see many of you in the skies alongside our amazing and dedicated community. Forever Skies Far From Home ☆☆☆☆☆ 12 ★★★★★ $34.99 Get it now Forever Skies is a first-person post-apocalyptic survival game. Play it solo or in coop and return to Earth, ravaged by an ecological disaster. Build, fly, upgrade and customize your high-tech airship. Craft tools, and scavenge resources to survive. Face dangers on the surface and hunt for viruses to cure a mysterious illness. Build and Control Your Airship Build, maintain and extensively customize a high-tech airship. This will be your home, workshop, laboratory and more while flying above the surface of a ruined Earth. Manage your airship and gather resources to improve and make it uniquely yours. Scavenge Ruined Skies Gather food, materials and resources from the ruins of civilization to survive. Use science to upgrade your tools, airship and technology to thrive in this hostile environment as you try fulfil your mission of finding viral pathogens to cure a mysterious illness ailing the last remaining humans stranded in orbit. Descend Below the Dust Descend below the toxic dust blanketing Earth to discover a strange new world, as the planet's surface has changed in our absence. Face evolved fauna and flora and hunt for viral pathogens, rare resources and valuable research to further your mission Single Player and Online Co-op Explore and fulfil your mission on ruined Earth in single player or play with friends using online co-op for up to 4 players. The post Six Useful Tips to Survive and Thrive Above the Toxic Clouds in Forever Skies appeared first on XBOX Wire. View the full article