-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
I think Microsoft might surprise a bunch of people
- Thread starter DocSeuss
- Start date
ChosenPredator
Banned
Honestly I've seen some really insane stuff from people who dislike Microsoft in these latest threads it's mind boggling.
They must try very hard after Sony.
:lol
Like I said somewhere else in the thread, I basically see red when it comes to Uncharted. I absolutely believe Uncharted is the worst thing to happen to video gaming this generation. It's definitely worse than Call of Duty.
Agent Icebeezy
Welcome beautful toddler, Madison Elizabeth, to the horde!
I wonder about this stuff too. I spend over two grand a year easy on games, so I, by definition am a hardcore gamer. I have a Kinect, I've had great experiences with it. I'm all for things that gives me enjoyment, whatever this may be in gaming.
Baconsammy
Banned
So now we're re-writing history? Cool. I'm going to make me an astronaut.
Well they did open that new media studio down in California. If it's to better produce stuff like 1vs100, I'm in for it. Not sure how many people played it, but it was incredibly fun and it got people to use the console at a scheduled time.
Uncharted only negatively impacted the way single player games are designed, while Call of Duty did it for both SP and MP. COD is the bigger culprit.
polyh3dron
Banned
Microsoft will have a fuckload of child actor kinect 2 demos that will be 10x as embarrassing as the Media Molecule demo.
Calling it now.
Calling it now.
It's a heavily story driven game but the core gameplay is a lot of fun and usually works well with the game. I don't like a lot of QTE either but yeah that was seeing red
Also about GoW 3 being immature...well maybe I guess...but it's not really enough to put me off when you said it yourself the graphics and gameplay are great.
Read the reviews for fucks sake.
I think this one sums it up and explains your hate
"Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. It looks amazing, plays like a dream and the voice-acting/story-telling will hook you in right from the off. PS3 officially has it's a killer-app and a million tears are shed by 360 fanboys." -GamesRadar
Some of Uncharted 2's level designs were pretty amazing. Uncharted as a game was great, the influence it had on the industry wasn't.
Baconsammy
Banned
Are you sure Microsoft will put the effort into making themselves look as stupid as Media Molecule did to pull that off? That's a lot of work.
You keep telling yourself that, all ultrabooks coming out right now have touchscreens and we are getting a few full Windows 8 tablets too.
Not when Kinect is the biggest selling point.
-Pyromaniac-
Member
are you new to microsoft conferences? They don't think "we have to avoid this", they think "we have to beat that".
I'm not sure quoting an immature review with bad spelling is helping you to prove him wrong.
Baconsammy
Banned
Kinect is as big a selling point for the new Xbox as the cameras included in *EVERY SINGLE* PS4 box are.
Haha yeah, that is true. But they'll use children so that it's not just stupid, but also creepy.
Warm Machine
Member
Still don't know where people are getting this Kinect crap from.
Yes Kinect will be upgraded just like the PS4 has dual eyetoys or whatever. This is for UI and task based flexibility not for control focus.
Here is the top 20 Xbox games from two weeks ago. Look at all of those dedicated Kinect games:
Call of Duty: Black Ops II
Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition
EA Sports FIFA Soccer 13
Halo 4
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
NBA 2K13
Call of Duty: Black Ops
Skyrim
Battlefield 3
GTA IV
Madden NFL 13
Modern Warfare 2
Gears of War 3
Borderlands 2
EA SPORTS NHL 13
Assassins Creed III
Far Cry 3
Halo: Reach
Dead Space 3
Forza Motorsport 4
A grand total of 0 of them are Kinect centric. So why would MS ignore their userbase and their established gaming and spending habits and focus on Kinect? If people wanted Kinect and loved Kinect surely that would be represented in this chart. Even looking at the XBLA charts the only Kinect based game on there is Fruit Ninja in 15th place!
Is MS going for an entertainment centric console that includes music, movies, tv, and apps? Yes. Why? Because everything is going that way. PS4 is the same just that they are currently not playing that card because that card has money in it only for the service providers and is taken for granted. When an iphone or Ouya can rock Netflix it is hardly a bulletpoint.
Yes Kinect will be upgraded just like the PS4 has dual eyetoys or whatever. This is for UI and task based flexibility not for control focus.
Here is the top 20 Xbox games from two weeks ago. Look at all of those dedicated Kinect games:
Call of Duty: Black Ops II
Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition
EA Sports FIFA Soccer 13
Halo 4
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
NBA 2K13
Call of Duty: Black Ops
Skyrim
Battlefield 3
GTA IV
Madden NFL 13
Modern Warfare 2
Gears of War 3
Borderlands 2
EA SPORTS NHL 13
Assassins Creed III
Far Cry 3
Halo: Reach
Dead Space 3
Forza Motorsport 4
A grand total of 0 of them are Kinect centric. So why would MS ignore their userbase and their established gaming and spending habits and focus on Kinect? If people wanted Kinect and loved Kinect surely that would be represented in this chart. Even looking at the XBLA charts the only Kinect based game on there is Fruit Ninja in 15th place!
Is MS going for an entertainment centric console that includes music, movies, tv, and apps? Yes. Why? Because everything is going that way. PS4 is the same just that they are currently not playing that card because that card has money in it only for the service providers and is taken for granted. When an iphone or Ouya can rock Netflix it is hardly a bulletpoint.
ezekielpacman
Member
I see logic in the recession theory, but the problem is I don't think we are remotely out of the woods, so I would indeed be surprised.
No need to re-write what has already been written by MS. It's clear as day their abandonment of gamers after Kinect came out and abandonment of everyone with the early demise of Xbox 1.
Just stop; you are making too much sense.
Hmm...i see.
So Sony is in a better financial position to make last minute hardware changes than Microsoft?
Christ.
re-writing history is exactly what you're doing.
They dumped the Xbox cold due to cost thanks to a shit contract tying them to NVidia.
Both Xbox and 360 started their gens with new IPs and slowly progressed to sequels and 3rd party reliance.
So what history ACTUALLY shows is that Durango will have plenty of new games to begin with.
lol; unbelievable.
The focused on Kinect 1st party titles when it came out because if they didn't it would've died out the gates(Move), no 3rd party was going to take the risk of developing for it unless there was a market to sell to.
It's not just the Windows division. Microsoft even made some really strange decisions with Windows Phone 8. As for Windows 8, though, I'd consider there to be two main missteps:
1) Microsoft should've made a new OS and branded it differently, basically making it what Windows RT was. The new Windows run-time will never run as well as it's supposed to with the freaking desktop running inside of it, so it was kinda stupid for Windows 8 to turn out the way it did. I like Windows 8, but I can understand why people dislike it. Microsoft just hasn't been honest about its motivations in making Windows 8 the way it did, and that's causing people to use Windows 8 incorrectly by installing Start menu replacements, completely ignoring the new run-time.
2) Windows 8 attempts to mimic Windows Phone 8, yet fails on so many levels because the integration just isn't there. I didn't care about the lack of apps on the Windows Phone marketplace whenever I was using Windows Phone 7, because the fucking People Hub was so amazing that I didn't really have much need for Facebook, Twitter and other things as separate apps. If Windows 8 took that a step further and actually allowed developers to more closely integrate their services into the OS, rather than relying on separate apps, then I think it would've gone over so much better.
What does it have to do with anything. They won't design new custom chips in 10 months.
I think people really underestimate that Microsoft is a multifaceted, mostly successful corporate entity. They also forget that NeoGAF is a fraction of the gaming community. Sometimes it may seem like, to us, that Microsoft has no idea what it's doing; but I would assure you that they have teams of highly qualified individuals doing market research that say otherwise.
Even if they come out and talk about the Kinect for the entire event, which they wont, Microsoft isn't 'dead in the water.' I'm sure they will have a lot of interesting things in store, as Playstation will as well. This is a good time to be into gaming. Let us not forget that the most exciting surprises are the ones we cannot anticipate.
Even if they come out and talk about the Kinect for the entire event, which they wont, Microsoft isn't 'dead in the water.' I'm sure they will have a lot of interesting things in store, as Playstation will as well. This is a good time to be into gaming. Let us not forget that the most exciting surprises are the ones we cannot anticipate.
Penguins&PolarBears
Member
But Kinect is the most impressive thing that Xbox does today.
We all expect violent games with more polygons and better textures and there's no doubt we'll get that with Xbox. Things that you expect don't impress enough. You know what I think would impress the most people would be effective home automation and natural language voice control of not just your Xbox but every connected device in your living room (tv, dvd player, roku, TiVo, cable box). Why not make the Xbox control a PS4 too (assuming they actually put an IR port this time). Making the Xbox the always on device that controls your whole living room in a natural accessible way I think would really excite people; not just gamers but all people. I also think creating some unification with Windows would be a big deal for developers.
Things that would excite gamers? Games that use the Kinect to make NPC characters more intelligent and realistic. Virtual characters that can see you and react to you when you don't expect it. Games that use the Kinect to make your digital persona more personal. These are the things that will wow normal people, things that we haven't seen done well in video games before. What's the feature that Sony showed for PS4 that's going to play well on the Today Show? The scene where the Killzone guy walks up to an innocent victim on the floor and blows her brains out while someone is trying to administer aid or the creepy old man's face that looks like bad movie CG from ages ago?
We're at a point where the core consumers don't want game design to progress in a meaningful way. They lambaste innovation and risky flourishes as gimmicks and harp about imperfections in tech that are the natural path of evolution. All these consumers do is pigeon hole the industry, an industry which is starting to suffocate. Goodbye THQ who will be next? The number of publishers continues to consolidate every generation. They need to stifle the second hand market just to afford to continue making their generic big budget sequels.
Meanwhile mainstream consumers lose their shit over Skylanders because at least it's trying to do something different. Activision, Ubisoft, they get it, they'll survive. Core gamers will laugh off all of their "stupid gimmicks" but the gimmicks sometimes stick and then you have Guitar Hero or Just Dance. The best efforts I've seen to keep video games out of the basement and attic.
cartoon_soldier
Member
Because statements from MS have made it seem that way. They could obviously prove me wrong.
MS needs to realize that it was gaming that helped the 360 achieve what it has, the Kinect launch came when the console was at a sweet price point and was already favored for gaming in the US. When people want to buy a console they are still going to look for gaming, not which console allows me to use voice commands better.
Windows RT was created so they could make a ARM version which at the time was the only way to make a cheaper tablet that had even close to decent battery life.
We don't even know what chips they are making now.
I think you missed the point.
Sony was RUMOURED to have 2GB, which was then rumoured to be changed to 4GB upon leaked Durango specs.
That is now reported to have changed to 8GB at the last minute.
So who is to say that MS won't go 16 for example?
Kazuma Kiryu
Member
well, if those are the only games that sony released, i don't know what the hell i've been playing.
so basically with this post what you're saying is "i think microsoft games are the best, so that's why i wrote a small essay about how i believe microsoft will surprise people in the OP". seriously, how can anyone even take any of your points seriously when you're saying stuff like "sony games are objectively worse, my tastes line up with metacritic"?
Baconsammy
Banned
Well then say that. You said they abandoned both at the 70 percent mark. That's not true. They abandoned the Xbox at the 100 percent mark. For a console that you claim got abandoned this time around, they sure do have a lot of huge selling games during that time period that I can't play on my PS3 or Wii/U. If that's abandonment, then abandon me all you want.
Warm Machine
Member
Microsoft has so much data about what a given player does with their Xbox that they can comb through it and get any answer they need to about player habits that will be 100% accurate. If services like Raptr can tell you what game you have played for how long and what achievements you have gotten, MS can get way more.
Hell, Live Prescence alone can tell them how you you stayed in a hub world of a given game. If you got all the weapons, fought which bosses, and where it seemed you had trouble. They know how old you are, where you live, what you like, all because of the signup infor and the games you play.
Along side this, the sales numbers prove who is buying what, and what has staying power. Nothing in the data that is obvious tells anyone that Kinect is the future of games and game control.
Alright, so, I generally like linear, story-driven, single-player games. Max Payne and Max Payne 2, for instance, are some of the best games ever, in my opinion. Alan Wake's another one as well (I'm mostly picking them because they're third-person shooters and compare best with Uncharted). Uncharted has some great set pieces and memorable moments, but rarely are these things organic. They're almost entirely canned--a result of spectacle (the GDC talk from a former ND developer that prioritizes "attention" over "immersion" explains why).
Thing is, if we jump into Remedy's games, we see that they have a diverse set of weaponry, not just in type, but in the way they affect the player's navigation of the space. In Uncharted 2, considered the best game in the series, we're rarely given any spaces where this is an option. Most of the time, we move from point A to point B, and as players, our ability to strategize and control that space is kept to a minimum.
In Alan Wake, I use my flashlight to keep specific enemies at bay, I prioritize targets, I have to intelligently choose which weapons to use at any given time to take out these enemies, and I'm constantly having to consider my space, because of the unique mixes of melee/range/poltergeist/bear traps/etc that alter the way I play. Once you get past the feeling of "oh, you have to flashlight before you can shoot" and get into "oh, the flashlight is a powerful tool that I can intelligently use to control combat," the genius of Alan Wake's design begins to unfold.
In Uncharted 2, this combat is almost entirely limited to "hide behind cover, pick any gun (doesn't matter what, aside from range), and shoot." It's all about shooting galleries. Max Payne 3 was like this a lot as well, which was a big part of its problem--Rockstar's never been good at shooter design, though.
At least in Gears of War, the quintessential cover-based shooter, there were still many ways to control the space (brilliant weapon variety and enemy variety chief among them), and players were given health that was generous enough to allow them to spend time out from behind cover.
The Last of Us interests me because the game is basically made or broken based on AI, both the girl's and the enemy's, in part because there's a big stealth component to it, based on the footage I've seen. Naughty Dog won't be able to get away with the X-ray vision that was so prevalent in Uncharted 2, and the lack of ammo means that players can't just hide behind a wall and keep shooting. Those crutches are gone. It could be Naughty Dog's first good, even great, game this generation.
I'm actually not that happy with Microsoft, and haven't been for a while. I'm just expecting them to do something a bit different from what most people are presuming they will do, based on previous habits. The small essay took all of about five or ten minutes, so it's not like I spend hours slaving over something to prove some loving point.
Sony games are objectively worse, both from basic game design standpoints, and from the scores they receive. I mentioned my opinions lining up with metacritic mostly because I know there are idiots out there who have a propensity towards claiming that it's just because reviewers are bought off by Microsoft moneyhatting, and poor Sony is noble and doesn't buy people off, which is why their scores are entirely, 100% accurate. Nah. Microsoft just has a habit of picking up some of the best developers out there (Bungie, Epic, Turn 10, 343, Remedy, etc are all made up of some of the best devs in the industry, even before they were employed by Microsoft). Sony tends to release games that are mostly 7/10 range, and wouldn't do nearly as well if they were multiplatform titles.
That's a fantastic post!
Why would they do that? They had their design goals which I assume they met, they should design Xbox around their vision of gaming and would want the device to do, not around beating Sony in spec wars.
the only truly reasonable opinion in the last 24 hours,
Clear as day, huh?
They still had every multiplat, some console exclusives (mainly niche PC stuff), a constant stream of quality XBLA stuff and their admittedly less-than-the-main-competitor first party games since the Kinect launched.
You are severely exaggerating.
they certainly has something up their sleeve and whatever that is they're confident enough to not react to the ps4 unveiling like crazy people.
i think that's what they're strategy is, lure the hardcore at the start this gen by releasing new ip's and revisit old ones then by the end of the gen, go for the casual crowd.
i think that's what they're strategy is, lure the hardcore at the start this gen by releasing new ip's and revisit old ones then by the end of the gen, go for the casual crowd.
Not much that I know of. What the hell does that have to do with anything?
EDIT:
Scenario A
They release with a less powerful machine (in line with rumors) but at a considerably cheaper price than Sony and announce a first year line up along the lines of Fallout 4 (timed exclusive), GTA 5 (timed next gen exclusive), new Crackdown, new Alan Wake, new racing game, a couple of new shooters, new platformer/Nuts & Bolts, 4 or 5 other new exclusive games and/or IPs and I think that they'll do very well against the PS4.
Scenario B
If they do one or more of the following:
1. They are basically the same price as the PS4 .
2. They have an equal or less impressive 1st year line up compared to the PS4.
3. They move too far away from a gaming focus and try to do the jack of all trades/all encompassing entertainment hub thing.
Then I think they are going to struggle.
That's Derrick01 for you.
I think it's obvious by now that MS ditched the concept of controller-less gaming. But people on GAF are not too perceptive of those things.
So did my PC. Or does that still not count because it doesn't fit the narrative?
I don't consider it a success. It was horrible machine that was dying non stop on people. Loud, ugly, rrod. But people bought into hype train and got one. Slim 360 is different story. I'll give it to MS there.
it has to do with microsoft's ability to launch successful products. most of the original 360 team is gone.