Microsoft Xbox news and discussion thread

This is where you can deliberate anything relating to videogames - past, present and future
Post Reply
User avatar
ratsoalbion
Admin
Posts: 7918
Joined: August 28th, 2012, 9:41 am
Location: Brighton, England
Contact:

Re: Xbox One

Post by ratsoalbion »

That could be accent related?

All seems a bit crazy though. Sheer bloody mindedness re: Kinect.
User avatar
chase210
Member
Posts: 1075
Joined: June 3rd, 2013, 11:22 am

Re: Xbox One

Post by chase210 »

I'd love to know what market research makes microsoft think every console needs to come with kinect, specially now its no longer a required add on.
User avatar
Scrustle
Member
Posts: 2426
Joined: November 18th, 2012, 6:02 pm

Re: Xbox One

Post by Scrustle »

That makes sense actually. I've heard so many stories of Kinect being completely unable to understand various dialects from around the UK. Seems entirely likely that there could be the same problem with Swiss accents.
chase210 wrote:I'd love to know what market research makes microsoft think every console needs to come with kinect, specially now its no longer a required add on.
It's not really that MS think that the Kinect is necessary, whether the console functions with it plugged in or not. It's about making sure if you own an XB1, they can be sure you also own a Kinect. That means they can push Kinect features as much as they can, because they think that's what makes their console distinct and desirable. The "market research" that they've done to convince themselves of this is that so far the Kinect has actually sold pretty well.
User avatar
DomsBeard
Member
Posts: 3689
Joined: September 2nd, 2012, 5:03 pm
Location: Doms Chin

Re: Xbox One

Post by DomsBeard »

If they announce one without Kinect the same price as PS4 then I've got a tough choice to make. I'm not getting either at launch I'll let everyone else be gunniea pigs whilst I'm enjoying GTA5 and Battlefield 4 on my 360 ;)
User avatar
AndyKurosaki
Member
Posts: 968
Joined: September 2nd, 2012, 10:43 pm
Location: Scunthorpe, UK

Re: Xbox One

Post by AndyKurosaki »

Even if that did happen, I'd still stick with my Day One PS4. I've lost a lot of respect for Microsoft, they've made some bloody idiotic decisions, then completely backtracked when they realised they'd pissed a lot of their userbase right off.
It's definitely the console i'll leave for a couple of years to get cheaper, PS4 will be more than enough,still got a lengthy list of PS3 titles on my Boomerang list as well.
User avatar
NokkonWud
Moderator
Posts: 1308
Joined: August 27th, 2012, 11:58 pm
Location: North Yorkshire, UK
Contact:

Re: Xbox One

Post by NokkonWud »

The fact Xbox One comes with Kinect is what draws me to it. I want a different experience, not just the exact same experience we have no with extra horse-power, so if everyone has Kinect with their system then there's surely more inclination to implement it in interesting ways. A few games did a good job with an extremely limited Kinect already (Forza Motorsport 4, Ghost Recon: Future Soldier.)

I'm still a little disappointed MS backtracked over some interesting ideas, but understand it. It is interesting to see that MS seemingly won't be forgiven, yet Sony get a free pass for basic security flaws, losing Names, Addresses and more, because they started renting you a supply of games every month. Weird one that.

If they actually release SKU's in it then all we're left with is a console that's not really doing anything new to what we've had this generation, just with more power.
User avatar
ratsoalbion
Admin
Posts: 7918
Joined: August 28th, 2012, 9:41 am
Location: Brighton, England
Contact:

Re: Xbox One

Post by ratsoalbion »

I don't think there's any conspiracy or arbitrary favouritism here, Karl.

A lot of people will come round to Xbox One eventually, just as it took them a while (and a lot of pseudo-bribery) to forgive and forget Sony's misdeeds.
Gamers love to get worked up about stuff, but eventually the desire to play the games that 'must' be played usually wins out.

Also people are tribal by nature so a lot of people feel more comfortable disregarding the flaws of one and making it their favourite, with the rivals becoming the bad guy.

Then there's the fact that people want to make themselves feel better about the fact that they don't want to or can't afford both machines plus a load of games and peripherals.

I know you know all this but what I'm saying is that there are a number of of mitigating circumstances here.

Right now MS are looking quite silly, but I don't care. I knew they were a money-grabbing megacorp in 2002 when I bought my first Xbox, and they're no different now.

But shit, if I haven't had a ridiculous amount of fun playing on their consoles over the past 11 years!
:)
User avatar
Scrustle
Member
Posts: 2426
Joined: November 18th, 2012, 6:02 pm

Re: Xbox One

Post by Scrustle »

Yeah a lot of this fanboy flaming is quite basic psychology actually. It's just the "ingroup/outgroup" mentality. It does a lot to describe so much stuff like this.

And even though I agree with a lot of the criticisms of the console, and have made a lot myself, I still feel totally fine getting one on launch. As much bullshit there is surrounding the thing, I don't really care as long as I get to play Forza the way I want. They say you should be loyal to quality, not a brand, and that's what I'm loyal to. I don't care whose name is on the box as long as I get to play the games I want on it.

I still acknowledge everything that's wrong with this whole mess and understand that people are turned away by that stuff, and I hope it really does come back to bite MS in the end too. But when it comes down to it, I just want to play the games I like. I don't care about this other stuff if it doesn't actually affect me. The XB1 is expensive, but after that initial cost (which I am able to afford) it's just on to playing the new shiny games. That's all I really care about. The DRM nonsense did threaten that, but with that gone I don't have any problem jumping in. I also like that a few of the minor lingering problems that remained after the DRM u-turn have been fixed, but they were never really deal breakers for me anyway.

In the end we all know that it always comes down to the games. People can argue endlessly about all this other stuff, but it's always how good the games are that really dictate how much worth a system has. For me the XB1 already has a system seller, so it's a no-brainer at this point.

But I acknowledge if we take specific games out of the equation, the PS4 is quite obviously the superior machine. It doesn't have all of this messy confused crap with DRM etc., it's more powerful, and it's cheaper. It also has a bigger emphasis on games. I'll certainly get one at some point, but at the moment they don't have any exclusives that really draw my attention. No system sellers. And a lot of what made the PS4 apparently better for games now isn't so much of a difference over the XB1 now either. It has self publishing too now, and it's region free and all that jazz. And despite what the spec sheets for the consoles say, the general word from developers seems to be that the actual power difference between the two systems is insignificant, and they're both easy to develop for. And although the PS4 is a lot cheaper than the XB1, it's not exactly "cheap" either. They're both very expensive pieces of equipment. The PS4 is hardly a "bargain".
User avatar
Beck
Member
Posts: 653
Joined: September 4th, 2012, 3:50 pm

Re: Xbox One

Post by Beck »

I don't think we can make a decision on the consoles being a bargain, at least not yet. I'm really interested to see how much the consoles cost to manufacturer in comparison to the retail price. I get the feeling Sony are prepared to take the hit and make a heavy loss at the start. More so than Microsoft are.

Sony look to be trying their hardest to avoid starting off as they did with the ps3. I wouldn't be surprised if xbone is left with a bloody nose when the Christmas sales are released. The buzz between my friends and family is definitely for the ps4. Out of the ten of us, 6 have preordered a ps4. 2 a xbone and 2 undecided. currently, 4 of us have had both consoles, 1 a ps3 and 5 360.

I'm still interested in the xbone but I can't justify the cost or time requirements for a second console. I had both 360 and ps3 this generation and they went through turns of not being turned on for huge periods of time.
User avatar
Scrustle
Member
Posts: 2426
Joined: November 18th, 2012, 6:02 pm

Re: Xbox One

Post by Scrustle »

Well, when I'm talking about the price I'm not talking about how much they are to manufacture vs. how much they are sold for, but just the latter on its own. While the PS4 is significantly cheaper than the XB1, £350 is hardly peanuts. It's still a relatively large sum of money. You can buy a 42" Plasma TV for that.

Also let's not forget that when you look at the price of older consoles and adjust them for inflation, in comparison, both consoles are actually pretty reasonably priced retrospectively.
User avatar
JaySevenZero
Admin
Posts: 2643
Joined: August 27th, 2012, 4:28 pm
Location: Liverpool, Europe, Earth
Contact:

Re: Xbox One

Post by JaySevenZero »

NokkonWud wrote:It is interesting to see that MS seemingly won't be forgiven, yet Sony get a free pass for basic security flaws, losing Names, Addresses and more, because they started renting you a supply of games every month. Weird one that.
Don't give me that crap that Microsoft being a secure system! Despite all the kerfuffle with Sony's breach I never had anywhere near the same level of trouble that I had with MS, with someone mysteriously trying to purchase almost £70 worth of points through my account and only through the suspicion of my bank that the transaction never went through. There was a problem with their system, they just did a better job of keeping it under wraps.
User avatar
Electric Crocosaurus
Member
Posts: 333
Joined: May 17th, 2013, 1:41 pm
Location: West Midlands, UK
Contact:

Re: Xbox One

Post by Electric Crocosaurus »

DomsBeard wrote:If they announce one without Kinect the same price as PS4 then I've got a tough choice to make. I'm not getting either at launch I'll let everyone else be gunniea pigs whilst I'm enjoying GTA5 and Battlefield 4 on my 360 ;)
Just my approach entirely, though I'm going to pick up a PS3 around Christmas and start working my way through all those lovely PS Plus games I've been building up (I currently subscribe for my Vita). Plus the likes of the Last of Us, Ni No Kuno, GT6... should do me nicely for a while 8-)
User avatar
Flabyo
Member
Posts: 3576
Joined: August 8th, 2013, 8:46 am
Location: Guildford

Re: Xbox One

Post by Flabyo »

The accents in Switzerland are very distinct though (especially the dialect of French they speak in the South West around Geneva), could easily cause it a problem.

I get the impression that Sony's strategy is going to cause more annoyance here though. MS are going to be able to get decent stock into those territories they're aiming for at launch. Sony are going for everywhere at once, and we're almost certainly going to see stock shortages.
User avatar
mikeleddy83
Member
Posts: 1432
Joined: September 2nd, 2012, 5:32 pm
Location: Oxford
Contact:

Re: Xbox One

Post by mikeleddy83 »

Starting to get a tiny bit jealous of Titanfall from this side of the fence after a consistent second showing at EA's presser just now.

Looks like the Xbox One is starting pick up steam with the FIFA pack in (great trailer for the ignite version of that too) and the new ID@ initiative looks like another step in the right direction.

To abruptly cut myself off on the positive angle, do many companies ever use negative and then positive spin so frequently to stretch out their news coverage elsewhere? Even eurogamer despite its frequent negative articles on the xbox one seems to push a story almost every day as a headline inadvertently advertising the thing, it's quite a funny one to watch and as shallow as I am I'm quite glad they shed the shit a while back as I'm slowly reversing my own doubts on the system (cheeky extra positive there from me, sorry!).
User avatar
Sinclair Gregstrum
Member
Posts: 921
Joined: April 4th, 2013, 4:09 pm
Location: Dore, Sheffield
Contact:

Re: Xbox One

Post by Sinclair Gregstrum »

Why oh why can't they release this white edition at launch: http://www.computerandvideogames.com/vi ... de=article
I'd definitely shoot for that over the black....

Jumping back a wee while to something Nokkon said a couple of weeks back (I've just been catching up and reading through the thread!), I must say I agree with the point about Kinect 2.0 actually drawing me to Xbox One, rather than it being a black mark against the console as it is for many.

The original Kinect didn't live up to the hype, fact, but the word on the new model is generally very positive from those that have tried it, a trusted friend of mine included. I must say I don't quite understand the hostility towards something that looks like one of the few real game changers of the next generation.

I also believe Microsoft are right to stick to their guns and sell every system bundled with Kinect (a very unpopular view I know!). It means they and developers can truly embrace and explore it's possibilities with a guarantee that every X1 owner can use them, justifying the time and expense on development of features that utilise it. The minute you sell the system without it, Kinect dies and the advancements for gaming and the wider entertainment market go with it. If it dies eventually of natural causes, fine, but I'd like to see this avenue fully explored with this new, better hardware before it gets killed by prejudgement and cynicism after just one iteration.....

If Microsoft were bundling the crappy old Kinect with Xbox One, I could see where peoples protests are coming from. It largely sucked. But this is a new piece of kit that has huge potential, and I for one as a gamer hungry for innovation am really looking forward to it!

Anyone else with me???
User avatar
PlexShaw
Member
Posts: 183
Joined: September 2nd, 2012, 12:31 pm
Location: London, UK

Re: Xbox One

Post by PlexShaw »

As someone who has been using the 360 Kinect a heck of a lot recently (mainly for exercise purposes), the Xbox One Kinect is one of the main draws of the system as far as I'm concerned and is swaying me towards it as my main console.

However, to admit such a thing in public is akin to saying that you think every game from Platinum Games is unplayable shite (which I also think).

As such, I just keep my mouth shut and get on with playing what I want, regardless of the general community consensus. ;)

For the record, I'm also getting a PS4.
kappisun

Re: Xbox One

Post by kappisun »

[quote="mikeleddy83"]Starting to get a tiny bit jealous of Titanfall from this side of the fence after a consistent second showing at EA's presser just now.

If it sells shedloads it won't stay exclusive for long. Cash cows will go multi platform
User avatar
NokkonWud
Moderator
Posts: 1308
Joined: August 27th, 2012, 11:58 pm
Location: North Yorkshire, UK
Contact:

Re: Xbox One

Post by NokkonWud »

This could be massively important for Xbox One: Massive Virtual Textures for Games: Direct3D Tiled Resources

A layman's terms description courtesy of AlexGlass on the IGN Boards.
Click here for thread link which includes pictures.

So how does it work in layman's terms? Typically in a video game whenever a textured object is displayed, like a 1080p brick texture of a road, the entire texture is compressed and stored entirely in RAM and takes up its respective size of RAM. Textures are the biggest RAM consumers by a large margin compared to everything else stored in RAM.

With partial resident textures, or tiled resources, or as Microsoft likes to call it, the texture is split up into smaller tiles allowing you to load only the tiles necessary to be displayed at a particular detail level. So for our stretched road, it's not really necessary to display all the detail you need at 1 foot away, for the portion of the road that might be 50 feet away from the player's camera.

In the presentation, Mars is textured using two textures: A 1GB diffuse map and a 2GB normal map for a total of 3GBs of textures.

Using tiled textures they were able to texture the same scene using only 16Mb of RAM.

While texture tiling has been done in software before, it had certain limitations. By moving it to hardware the limitations were removed. Without going into all the technical details, in short, the benefits of removing these limitations are so impressive that it allows developers to store texture data sizes that previously took up 3GB of RAM in only 16Mb of RAM! Not only does it offer a drastic reduction in size, but it can also allow more detailed worlds than before since now developers have a lot more texture storage available.

In addition to textures, and presumably the reason Microsoft prefers to call this partial resident resources, is because this technique can also be applied to other areas such as shadows through shadow mapping. It's demonstrated in the video at 22:40.

Middleware developer Graphine Software also got on stage and demonstrated their middleware software Granite for streaming tiled textures which has been integrated in Divinity Dragon Commander by Lariat. The video they demo-ed at the conference can be found here on their website.

For the X1 this is particularly important since using this technique the 32Mb of eSRAM can theoretically be capable of storing up to 6GB worth of tiled textures. Couple the eSRAM's ultra fast bandwidth of reportedly 192GB/s with tiled texture streaming middleware tools like Granite, and the eSRAM just became orders of magnitute more important for your next gen gaming. Between software developments such as this and the implications of the data move engines with LZ encode/decode compression capabilities on making cloud gaming practical on common broadband connections, Microsoft's design choice of going with embedded eSRAM for the Xbox One is beginning to make a lot more sense. Pretty amazing.
User avatar
RoboticMonk3y
Member
Posts: 844
Joined: September 2nd, 2012, 3:25 pm
Location: Bristol

Re: Xbox One

Post by RoboticMonk3y »

you can play tetris on a gameboy...
Graphics aren't the be-all and end all.

I've pretty much disregarded any talk of graphical specs and capabilities from sony or microsoft for this very reason.
Confimation Bias and all that ;)
User avatar
ratsoalbion
Admin
Posts: 7918
Joined: August 28th, 2012, 9:41 am
Location: Brighton, England
Contact:

Re: Xbox One

Post by ratsoalbion »

All that technical stuff is just white noise to me. Saying that, I will go for the nicer looking of multiple versions if there's a choice, but personally I hope that there will be as little difference as possible between PS4/XO versions of multiformat games!

Of course if what Karl's posted above could mean that XO games will look better than they might have done then that's cool too.
Post Reply