Well, what do you guys think of the announcement?
Goes without saying, I’m frustrated having not heard a thing about Crimson Dragon. I was at least expecting some sort of montage of games coming to the console, but all we got were the yearly EA updates, and little else.
I’m assuming we now have to wait another month or so to see if more is revealed at E3.
Everything else about the announcement was underwhelming. The console looks hideous, as does the controller, little about the technology explained, what devs thought of the console, or whom are supporting it, almost no gameplay footage.
Not only that, the announcement looks as it it were created specifically for American audiences. How many people in the rest of the world care for NFL?
I wasn’t expecting much tbh, but I was expecting more than this.
It was really disappointing. A lot of focus on TV and multitasking and not so much on the actual games. What little gameplay we got to see wasn’t anything special. Used games will apparently not run without paying a fee first. The console itself seem to be even larger than the original Xbox and the design is really bland. Some of the attendees noted that the exaggerated cheers from the crowd were coming from Microsoft employees and not the gaming press. I wasn’t too amazed by the PS4 conference either but in comparison it was a lot better.
Guess we’ll have to wait for E3 to see Crimson Dragon, they said they’ve got a bunch of exclusives that still haven’t been revealed.
While it does not require a constant Internet connection, you may have to connect to the Internet once per day in order to play single player games:
kotaku.com/xbox-one-does-require … -509164109
Disappointing, if true, although it sounds like MS haven’t made up their mind. If true, it could be bad for players. Suppose you haven’t used the console for a couple of days, but your Internet connection goes down when you’re about to play a game. You wouldn’t be able to play the game at all.
The console itself is not asthetically pleasing, but that isn’t the end of the world. Hopefully the new controller will be comfortable; it looks similar to the Xbox 360 controller at least.
Not worried about Crimson Dragon; I expect we’ll see it at E3.
Not a great reveal. All buzz words and little to show for it. Granted, I don’t think it has much bearing on how the platform will evolve. If they eventually bring the games and content people will go for it whether they hate the pre-release PR or not. Those 15 first year exclusives could hide some gems like the Rockstar game could be (or not).
The console looks ugly and the new controller seems like they just looked for an excuse to make it incompatible with past controllers. Programmable feedback triggers, come on.
They also seem to be focusing too much on the US market alone, I wonder how many of those TV features they focused so much on will be applicable elsewhere.
And they continue the timed exclusive DLC for multiplatform games stuff I don’t care about. If they have 15 great exclusives they better show some at E3 instead of things like COD.
The system specs, though not thorough don’t sound too impressive. The CPU should be powerful enough but there’s next to nothing known about the GPU and the ram is conventional DDR3 (with unknown video ram) and not too much (when 3 of the 8GB are reserved for OS, it sounds like it almost runs something like Windows 8 Metro on top of the gaming operating system and another operating system that syncs them or something, three in one, weird). On the one hand I’m glad it’s more conventional as it should mean the PC doesn’t get the shaft with multi platform developers utilizing architecture specific methods and releasing unoptimised badly performing ports (like they might have done if it also utilized a unified GDDR3 memory setup) but on the other hand it might not be too powerful.
Best news I heard was that they improved the controller’s d-pad.
Yes, that is meant back-handedly.
Correcting my last post’s guess apparently according to the internet it too uses a shared system/vram architecture. While shared ram can be good in theory I’m not sure what to think of that when they use DDR3 instead of faster ram that graphics cards normally use (PS4 uses that with its GDDR3 so it’s fast enough for vram ram and faster than normal system ram as it sees fit with the benefits of it being shared on top). Slow ram can affect anything from loading times to texture resolution to particle engines, physics, AI, entity systems… We’ll see how they’ve dealt with that.
The PS4 uses GDDR5 which is faster than the DDR3 in the Xbox One. Microsoft tries to mitigate that by including 32MB of extremely fast EDRAM as a buffer. Theoretically it should be similar in performance to the PS4 but not as easy to program for. The biggest benefit is that the power draw of the Xbox memory will be less. I think developers will prefer the PS4 implementation though. The systems are virtually identical except for the PS4 has more GPU shaders. The PS4 is the stronger system, but I think what developers are going to do is develop for the lowest common denominator which will be the Xbox specs so cross platform games will perform identically across both. PS4 exclusives probably will look a little bit better, but not really that much better.
I will tell you that I am a 360 owner now, but I will not be purchasing this Xbox One. The always on is still there. It doesn’t matter for me if it is 2 hours or 24 hours, I don’t want the hassle of having to depend on my internet to play my games. I rarely do online games on the 360. I don’t stream movies or TV through my Xbox. I rarely purchase arcade games. I do occasionally purchase used games though mostly new games when prices are reduced. I will not support a company that basically sells me a license that I don’t have ownership control of. I want to be able to sell a game if I don’t like it. I want to be able to buy a used game when it is something that I want to play through but don’t particularly have to have it and would not have purchased it new, Bioshock comes to mind for me. I thought the game was okay and a fun play through, but I would not have purchased it new. The cost of the system is also prohibitive. $500 for a system is way to close to what I could pay for a semi decent gaming PC that has more functions than this console. $300 dollars with a required 2 year contract is laughable. I will not lock myself into a contract to be able to play my game system. If I do buy a console this generation, it is looking to be a PS4.
Pardon my language, but f*** DRM filled hardware. Microsoft was never on my love list, they are definitely now on my shit list. I hope to god Valve gets serious about porting everything to Linux so I can get away from this company completely.
A small amount of fast eSRAM can’t 100% mitigate the primary amount of ram being slow. Otherwise why wouldn’t Sony do the same to lower their costs by using slower, cheaper, more common ram and complimenting it with a sliver of expensive eSRAM instead of GDDR5 (the 3s were a typo on my part)? Shit, why wouldn’t PC graphics cards be doing the same? That would surely bring costs way down. DDR3 is really cheap these days.
And I dunno what you mean about multiplatform games performing the same despite the PS4 being more powerful. It’s true that developers will likely develop for the lowest common denominator but that doesn’t mean the extra power of another system can’t go to better performance (over better graphics beyond a few tweaks here and there). Just like we see in PC versions of multiplatform games. Frame rates, image quality, physics implementations, shader effects, and so on, anything that doesn’t require redoing content (beyond higher resolution textures since those are often created in even higher resolution then get downsized for each platform). Perhaps for an extremely polished, stylized and optimized game the differences will be negligible but imagine a game that struggles to perform well either because of what it attempts to do or because of the developer’s inability, lack of budget/time, etc. The system that gets closer to acceptable/smooth/solid performance would surely be noticeable and preferable. To what extent differences between the two systems are possible remains to be seen of course, it’s far too early to tell. But with their architecture being so similar this time it’s likely most games will eventually show better on the more powerful system rather than depend on what platform the developer focused on to take advantage of its particular quirks.
As for used games and DRM and the like, I believe it remains to be seen what the PS4 ends up doing. I’m pretty sure Sony has gone on record saying it’s up to the publishers and what not, publishers will of course love the Xbox One route and enforce it where possible. So I don’t think anyone can celebrate about that before everything is clarified.
I’ll probably stick with the PC and maybe a 3DS or Vita for my home this generation. Hopefully we don’t see a paradigm shift in architecture that makes me need a whole new PC before the generation’s end. Like if they start pushing unified memory to PC we’ll probably need all new motherboards or systems on a chip with both CPU and GPU and unified RAM on top which would be bad, restricting choice and upgrading flexibility. Hopefully I can make it through the generation with just a GPU upgrade instead.
This video sums up the presentation nicely:
Xbox One Reveal 2013 Highlights
So apparently they’ve talked about how with the power of cloud computing they can take advantage of way more resources. Personally I’m skeptical, I don’t see how it can be applicable to most game experiences people enjoy these days. There’s apparently some turn based phone game that uses cloud processing to render out space battles and show the outcome of your turn’s actions in fancy FMV graphics but personally even in such a scenario I’d prefer to see lower quality real time graphics that run on the actual system and allow me to control the camera and rewind/pause/play at the same time etc. With the delay that comes with needing to take data from a server I’d only really see it viable for some MMORPG played OnLive style that already requires delayed response times by its nature. Other than that just using the servers for the usual data tracking, matchmaking, various backends and social connectivity a la Sim City and so on, that any game does. For sports games you could do things like cloud render AI matches while you play yours and show picture in picture, negligible presentation based things. But maybe they’ve figured out something to surprise us with. We’ll see at E3 as surely they must have at least one big game to showcase this amazing cloud power they bank so much on. I’ll remain very skeptical until that.
Connection required every 24 hours to play single player games confirmed:
gamespot.com/news/microsoft- … ne-6409419
That’s some bs about participating retailers and publisher opt in for used games.
Might as well not claim to offer it at all for much of the world.
Microsoft are a few decades too early to force everyone online. Not everyone has an internet connection. I don’t see why players should be forced online when playing a single player game. It really makes no sense. I assume that this is to stop piracy but it will only succeed in scaring genuine customers away.
Oh well. It looks like a waste of money to me.
Mostly to stop (or regulate in a way that brings profit to publishers, not just retailers) used games I’d think. After all, PS3 stopped piracy without any kind of online requirement scheme (actually I forget if it got fully cracked in the end but if it did it was mostly because of mistakes like those device keys they posted to the public rather than a system flaw).