XBox One reveal

[Newmansan 30]

I'm intrigued frankly by the thing. The responsiveness of it looks cool, I like the natural langue stuff of being able to talk to your xbox and tell it to do stuff. The Controller isn't a huge redesign, and I'm happy about that. Being able to snap apps and skype while gaming is pretty dang cool. I like seeing multitasking being a big part of the One. I also like ht etv overlay stuff.

 

I'm mildly worried about the implications of having an potentially always on microphone and webcam in my living room, and I don't like registering games to a particular user account. I'm also kinda bummed about the lack of backwards compatibility too. Looks like requiring a game to be online isn't a requirement, but the option is there on a per game basis. I hope that part flops. I'm also surprised that it doesn't appear that MS is making multiplayer a silver tier part of XBL and making gold tier more like PSPlus.

 

From a pure hardware standpoint I'm pretty excited, but this surely won't be a day one purchase till I see how all those caveats play out. If reactivating a game on a different account is cheap, some cheap backwards compatibility solution comes out, and I can get over the creep factor of having my xbox always watching me, I may pick it up before too long though.

 

 

What do you guys think about the reveal?

[Nicereddy 109]

The current-gen Kinect "watches" you if it's plugged in, I believe it's in the ToS.

 

Personally I'd much prefer the PS4 over the next Xbox. The only thing I'd use it for other than gaming is Netflix, which the PS4 can do just fine. Personally I can't justify the 5$+ per month for Xbox Live (to just access services I already pay for!) and I don't understand how anyone really can. Maybe it's just because I hate Microsoft, but this really didn't impress. I've never used the Kinect my brother insisted we get, so I find that a useless reason to jack up the price of the thing. I think I'll stay away from consoles this generation unless something big changes.

[Garrett 214]

The Kinect doesn't have to talk to anywhere for its standby watching/listening functionality, it's done locally much like Windows' speech recognition (which can similarly be set to an always listening mode).

 

Registering games was expected and inevitable. This solves publishers jealousy of the used games market and has some added benefits for players (losing the disc doesn't equal losing the game). It's not yet clear how this will work without an internet connection.

 

As for the online requirement I wouldn't be too concerned about that; a very large percentage of 360 owners don't have Gold, so any game that artificially requires it for single player would probably see worse sales. The console already has inherent piracy/second-hand blocking so there's currently little benefit to implementing an online requirement as a form of DRM.

[Newmansan 30]

On second thought, I'll just save the money and pick up a GTX 780 instead. :)

[Jeth Calark 12]

I'll get one eventually and probably several years down the road, and I'll do so for only one reason: to play the next Halo game.

 

But then again, I might pass. Painful as it was, I eventually divorced myself from the prospect of playing Halo multiplayer (which I love, but paying $60 a year for the multiplayer of just one game at a time is too much). I'm mostly in it now to keep up with the story, so I may just kindly ask a friend for usage of their console.

[Miser 7]

I'm not too enthused by the next gen consoles coming out later this year but I do like some of the concepts they are bringing to the table. The always-online and heavy digital push from Microsoft was a good step in my opinion but they are pushing it on a user-base that isn't ready for that. With modifications it would have been a nice system similar to how Steam is setup. The redesigned Xbox control sure looks nice and I'm surprised they were able to change up the mostly solid 360 control.