Nextbox 1080: The Reckoning

[sclpls]

I really liked Leigh Alexander's piece on Gamasutra. This paragraph especially resonated with me:

 

 

My parents and their Boomer friends have those theoretical American homes, the kind with the spacious sofa and the dominant television altar, where they mainly watch on-demand recordings of cable shows. They don't want a game console. They don't want to talk to their television either. I've got friends who love immersive worlds and epic battles, sure. They have thousands of dollars in student debt and tiny, impermanent living spaces; their generation isn't exactly about to broadly become the next generation of home owners. We play games on consoles and we watch shows on television and we Skype and Tweet from laptops, netbooks, iPads, PCs. 

[Sno]

From a person with way too much time and money invested into his 360, have some random thoughts about the reveal -

- I'm okay with the name, my group of friends just immediately took to calling it the X1.

- I think the console itself looks really fucking ugly.

- The guide button no longer being centered on the pad weirds me out, the new d-pad looks like an honest-to-god real d-pad, the triggers look like garbage, and i'm glad that the battery bump is gone.

- 15 exclusive first-party games for the first year, 8 new IP's? Holy shit, that sounds promising.

- I love the shit out of Remedy, so i don't care that their trailer is awful, i want to play it.

- Halo TV show? You know what? I'm on board. Forward Unto Dawn already came off as good b-grade television sci-fi, if that can be taken to be at all indicative of what they'll do, it might be good fun.

- Virtually nobody gets anything out of car games as a showcase for visual fidelity, they've already been looking so amazing for so long.

- Hey, it's CoD with more textures.

The big ones -

Not always-online, but cd keys and account tethering.

^ So this one, it's good that always-online has been clarified as not happening, i feel it's a flagrantly anti-consumer mechanism for DRM. As for CD keys and account tethering, it's what Steam has been doing for years, and like Steam, Live is one of the only services i would trust to handle it in a transparent and inoffesive fashion. It's also a bit more of a trade-off, there will potentially be advantages in having your retail purchases tied into your account permanently.

No backwards compatibility

^ This is hot bullshit, and i would be way angrier about it if i hadn't heard about it ahead of time and had some time to mull it over. Ultimately, the conclusion i've personally arrived at is that BWC itself is not what matters, what matters is that Microsoft express real interest in continuing to support the 360's online ecosystem for the forseeable future. I wanted to see BWC happen because it would have been a fairly definitive statement on the matter.

I find solace in the fact that they surely must realize that, If at some point the 360's services and online library just go away, they'll have also lost the faith of their consumers. Nobody will want to buy into such an ephemeral product ecosystem. They built a different kind of console with the 360, and now they're going to have to deal with the realities of what that means long-term.

KINECT. ARGH!

^ I'm just about done with motion control, i hate it. I don't like the ambiguity and uncertainty in motion control, it is kind of antithetical to the kinds of games i want to play.

I mean, hey, you know what works? A goddamned switch. Now let's hook this switch up to a button, press it to complete a circuit. It's on and off, there's two reliable states There's no ambiguity there, you're as close to that machine as you possibly can be. That's awesome, that's beautiful. So why are we trying so hard to get away from that?

Instead, we have all these awful layers of obfuscation we're trying to build into our games. You're not jumping to make your guy in the game jump, you're jumping and hoping that the game can divine your intent and arrive at the desired conclusion.

So no, fuck that, i want to press a button and make a man jump. Motion control needs to go away, i'm done with it, it's bad for games.

[Zeusthecat]

From a person with way too much time and money invested into his 360, have some random thoughts about the reveal -

 

I can definitely relate to this. I think I have 49 games for my 360 and have actually had a really good time playing some great games and building a semi-respectable gamerscore from going after fun achievements. I really want to like this system.

 

But man, video games. I like video games. I want video games. I need video games. I eat video games. I sleep video games. I am video games.

 

"Don't ask what you should do for video games, but what video games should do for you" -Zeusthecat Michael Jackson

[Sno]

I can definitely relate to this. I think I have 49 games for my 360 and have actually had a really good time playing some great games and building a semi-respectable gamerscore from going after fun achievements. I really want to like this system.

Throw a 2 in front of that number and you're closer to where i am with the 360.

[Zeusthecat]

Throw a 2 in front of that number and you're closer to where i am with the 360.

 

Wow, you win. I'm not worthy. Holy shit. 

[Sno]

[elmuerte]

How big is the Xbox One?

 

OMG, it's larger than a book.

[Nappi]

I bet that patterned espresso cup heater top surface is going to collect a lot of dust and the console will look absolutely disgusting after one year despite your best efforts to keep it clean. Fail.

 

Seriously though, like many of you, I find it extremely hard to get excited about the next next-gen consoles at this point. I might eventually buy one if the price is right and if game collection and media center features are good enough, but I won't be queuing to get one at launch. 

[BigJKO]

It also doubles as a water cooler, so there's some value in there..

[Merus]

I'm expecting that very few of the announced features will work outside the US.

[Lu]

I'm expecting the same.

 

I might get one of those controllers for PC if that's supported and all that. Those new triggers look really comfy!

 

Throw a 2 in front of that number and you're closer to where i am with the 360.

Holy hell that's a lot o' video games!

[Roswell47]

I made a gif of Ryan Davis' highly appropriate reaction to J Allard (Note the accidental smooth loop).

[Roderick]

I'm expecting that very few of the announced features will work outside the US.

Yeah, I wonder if Microsoft or any of the other companies realize that when Europeans or anyone outside the US hear about 'tv' stuff, we just immediately blank out, because it won't be applicable to us anyway. It's such an America-centric thing, it has never panned out into anything outside the US, is my guess. I wonder how successful it must be for them to continue pouncing on this idea of delivering tv features with their console?

Which is just inherently strange to me anyway. Every single tv ever made has already been geared towards providing you with access to television broadcasts. I don't even understand why it should mean so much to anyone that there's a special new box to do what literally every tv already does. What the hell am I missing? What is it that is so special about Xbox or PSwhatever or Nintendo offering tv? From the get-go, it sounded like the lamest thing, but years after they're still hammering on this as if it's the ultimate expression of their hardware; or some luxurious, ne'er-before-seen service.

[Lu]

Huh.

 

Kotaku: If I’m playing a single player game, do I have to be online at least once per hour or something like that? Or can I go weeks and weeks?

Harrison: I believe it’s 24 hours.

Kotaku: I’d have to connect online once every day.

Harrison: Correct.

 

 

Which MS has responded to again and said it's a "potential scenario". This whole affair feels like pushing buttons, trying to figure out how far they can go before the consumer says "Fuck you".

[melmer]

2 vids that'll round everything up

 

 

 

You have to have kinect plugged in for xbone to work

[Nachimir]

I feel like this is the console for the cool kids and I'm just a fucking nerd in the corner.

 

Cool kids!

[toblix]

This is a pretty good interview. Apparently they realize that Europeans are skeptical of their TV/sports stuff, and are planning to offer similar contents/services over here. Whatever that means, I'm not sure – and never watching TV, I don't care – but they have thought about it, at least.

[SecretAsianMan]

I made a gif of Ryan Davis' highly appropriate reaction to J Allard (Note the accidental smooth loop).

 

I'm imagining Jake's explosion sound effects in the background.

[dibs]

It needed more Milo

[melmer]

 

[melmer]

The thing that annoyed me the most about the xbone event was that there were several people (Microsoft staff) in the audience whooing like their fucking lives depended on it

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Edit

Arse hats

[Roderick]

That's because it did
 

[Zeusthecat]

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2013/05/21/the-tech-spec-test-xbox-one-vs-playstation-4.aspx

 

I didn't see this on any of the other spec comparisons but according to GI only 5GB of RAM will be available for games. That seems like a lot of memory required for all of the other processes.

 

"Xbox One: 5/8ths games, 3/8ths other shit"

[melmer]

I'm pretty sure I read that in the rumours months ago, that it would be 8gigawatsits and 3 of them would be for background OS and kinect shit.

[melmer]

These polls ain't looking so good

http://uk.gamespot.com/twitter-battle/xbox-vs-ps4/

http://kotaku.com/what-did-you-think-of-the-xbox-one-reveal-509195085