Hi all,
So MS are about to kick off their “A new generation revealed” event and I thought it, might be fun to cover events as they happen, like I did back with the nVidia CES event. So I"ll be making edits to this post as and when interesting stuff comes up.
From my personnel perspective, having owned an Xbox 360 this gen it’s MIcrosofts play to lose this time. The PS4 reveal was pretty good on many levels. However over the last few years and the recent rumours surrounding the next Xbox, I can,t help feeling MS have a long way to go to convince me to stick with them. Then again that’s true for both next gen consoles.
For me one of the big factors is how next gen consoles are going to retain my previous purchases. The thought of losing access to all the other I’ve bought over the last 7 years on Xbox is painful. That along with the cost of XBLive and it’s requirement for using pretty much any other services such as Netflix is. also a big negative.
These issues can be addressed the question is whether MS or Sony bother to. If they don’t then I may seriously consider going with a PC/Steam set up in the future.
…and so it begins, let’s hope they have something good to talk about and show.
…alas the live stream on Xbox is already stuttering ;(
So the opening video tells me I’m going to have a relationship with my TV! Um, ok 
NEW NAME it’s Called the XBOX ONE
Well I don’t think anyone saw that coming. Not sure about the design, it’s a bit ‘boxy’. Clean and sleek, but a bit dull.
INSTANT SWITCHING
Not bad, a means of switching between live TV, games, music, IE, almost instantly. Unsure how this will work worldwide or how you will input the tv into it or how to change to other devices like HDD recorders etc.
Not sure I like where this going, they’ve integrated Skype, which is cool, but from the get go, games are not the focused, their big play is the final take over of your living room. It might work, but only if they can truly replace all the devices I currently have connected.
It’s also very US centric at the moment, which is understandable, but it leaves questions as to how this will work in other territories. While this stuff is cool tech wise, it’s not that exciting … Yet.
GAMES FINALLY?
So 30 minutes in and nothing ground breaking, but finally getting onto the games.
Again I’m getting this horrible feeling that MS are positioning this as an aspiration device, full of fluff, but little substance. That’s not to say that so far I think it wouldn’t be cool to have one of these controlling your living room, but it’s not setting the world on fire. It’s all social and online centric, with little to nothing about gamers, who were the core market.
There is also an underlying hint towards cloud based gaming across the whole experience. Whilst this can be used to deliver new and interesting experiences, I can’t help feeling this is just going to be the publishers wet dream for a new level of ‘not DRM’ DRM.
EA
Unfortunately EA is up first with 4 sport games - does nothing for me ;(
Lol, the EA medley showing off how these new sport game will look on Xbox one left me cold, probably due to the fact that they looked no different to the adverts I’ve seen for these games in the past. Suggesting that in terms of graphics either there isn’t that much benefit or more likely they too frequently used this level of ‘rendered’ graphics in the adverts and it wasn’t representive to the actual games.
TURN 10
Next up is Forza, unfortunately I got bored of that by Forza 3 ;(
SOCIAL TV
So was that it really for games? 4 EA Sport games, Forza and some new IP. Disappointing if no more games show up, there hasn’t been anything remotely innovative shown, nothing about indie’s either.
Looks like they want to bring games to TV, merging them together. Oh dear Halo live action TV show. Sure it’s going to be great, but it’s got nothing to do with Xbox, other than its going to be a premium paid tv show on it. So it’s a more expensive MACHINIMA.
MORE SPORTS - NFL
ZZzzzzzzz
CALL OF DUTY
They are trying to big it up in the video, but honestly the quality level is what yours already seen on PC.
SUMMARY
Well that was disappointing, nothing innovative in terms of games, way too much focus on other media. No hard facts such as backwards comparability, second hand games, locking out, why the two different SKU’s, cost of xbox live, etc, actually there was zero substance here at all.
This makes a difficult situation! I’m tempted with the media capabilities ( depending on they transfer to non US territories) , but not for the games, where I think the PS4 did much better. Thing is I’m a one console guy, so I won’t buy both, if any.
Actually my decision has just be made easier, having watched some programming video’s on Vimeo yesterday I was pleased to discover they had an Xbox Vimeo app… Except it’s not available in the UK! This is pretty typical of the state of apps and media supply on the Xbox. Whilst I can understand in some regards these are issues with licences, I don’t understand it with Vimeo and it gives me little hope that in the UK we’ll see half the cool media stuff featured in this reveal make it.
Oh well at least we know what the box looks like.
.
