Nice GIF, hehe.
But seriously, even if you ignore the whole second hand market discussion, what exactly did the XboX One reveal tell us? Sports stuff, the ability to alt-tab, and
voice controls are the way of the future, since silly physical inputs like buttons are clearly dumb and have no purpose? From what I can tell the reveal wasn't really aimed at gamers. Who knows, maybe when E3 comes around they will somehow blow us away with something amazing, but as it stands right now I have no desire to get an XB1. Hell, I dodn't really have a desire to get the WiiU or PS4, but assuming that I were to pick one out of the three I would not choose the XB1, at least from what I have heard at this time.
As a multimedia center... yeah, I suppose it can do that, but PCs could already do that a long time ago. The point I'm trying to make is: why should we care about the XB1?
I suppose da_nang posted a list of features and stuff so I suppose I'll do my own little run-down of what I think about them.
My feature thoughts:
- Skype Integration
I don't really use Skype, in fact it seems to lack a bunch of the features I liked about IM's I used to use in the past, and it likes to glitch out on me a lot. Still, it seems to be the major IM service nowadays, so I guess it kinda makes sense to have it... but I also thoguht XboX already had their own little messaging service? I dunno. Also Skype does phone calls or something, but I never payed attention to that, perhaps that's a major feature I'm overlooking because I don't make phone calls.
- Live television
Television. *YAAAAAAAAWWWWNNNN*
- Kinect Sensor (1080p field of view, can detect your heartbeat)
I want to see something besides dancing games come from Kinect, and maybe they already have but I just don't keep up with current events...? My main gripe is them trying to pass it off as some kind of voice activated and gesture based remote control for your TV or console or whatever. Is it really that difficult to push buttons on a controller? I know that at one point in the conference they called watching TV 'challenging' and though it might not have been in context with this it still makes me sigh.
- Cloud Sync
Sounds good to me, I bet you need to have an Xbox Live account to have access to it... though I suppose maybe that's fine, paying to have them provide a service like that... but it's already free on my PC so... what?
- Snap Mode integration allowing for separate programs on your screen, Skype, a game, a movie, TV, etc.
Picture-in-picture, alt-tab. Next item
- Fantasy sports integration with use of Snap Mode.
Useful for people who don't have a phone, and as far as I know just about anyone who can afford consoles like these probably has a somewhat modern phone. Hell, I have an Android phone despite only having gotten one recently... I never use it.. but I have one.
- 500 Gb HDD Blu-Ray Drive
I havne't really used much space on my PS3's hard drive, but that was without having to have full game installations from a blu-ray disk (with some partial exceptions). I wonder how fast a 500Gb drive will fill up if you're able to have a pretty large library of XB1 games? I know people like the whole 'oh I'll just put the disk in the drive and play' thing that consoles have going for them today, but personally I like being able to have something on my hard drive so I don't have to go searching around for a disk, or even worrying about losing a disk or having it be damaged in some way. I think the only time I used the disk drive currently in my computer was when I was installing the OS.
- 8 Core CPU
Sounds good to me. Don't know any games that need it right now, but perhaps future games will take advantage of numerous cores with AI calculations or other processor intensive things.
- 8 Gb System
Fair enough. As far as I know you don't need huge excessive amounts of RAM unless you're into video editing or 3D modelling and stuff like that. Did someone say that 3gb is dedicated to the OS? Right now about 2.5 GB of my 8GB of RAM are being used as I type this post with Steam open, not sure when I'm running a game, but at least for now this seems pretty much fine to me.
- More than 300000 servers for Xbox Live (What was once 300)
Why? Cloud? I don't get it. Online activation stuff? Doubt it. *shrug*
- SmartGlass Integration
So it kinda uses your phone similar to how the WiiU uses the WiiPad thingy to integrate your phone with your XboX. Fair enough, could be neat, would be neaterer if there were gameplay implications that come with this somehow, and maybe a smart move on MS's part to try to say 'hey we can do touchscreen stuff too.' More likely it'll just be a remote control, rendering your Kinect voice commands and gestures even more useless. *headscratching*
- Game DVR allowing for recording, editing, and sharing footage.
From my understanding it's similar to the share button that Sony was trying to hype us up about. if you're the kind of person that likes to share stuff on the efbees and tweeters then sure. (By the way, doesn't that mean there's no more 'select' button on the new Dualshock controller? Guess people didn't see much use in it, though it was nice to have.)
- Online matchmaking while playing a different game or watching a movie.
Soooooooooooo.... in case matchmaking is taking 5 hours and you want to go watch a movie or play something completely different from what you wanted to play while waiting for a godawfully long queue? Other than that what porpoise is there? If a queue is that long people are more likely to use their phones or something to pass the time if they really wanna kill some time waiting for something, at least that's my understanding of some 'toilet break' mobile games.
- Running on Xbox Kernel
Surprise?
- Plans for more than 15 games in development at Microsoft Game Studios to release in the first year of Xbox One, eight of which are brand new franchises.
That's cool. Sssssssssssssooo..... what are they? Really, what are they? MS you have to give us something to go off of here. You can't say "Oh we've got something really cool that you're gonna shit your pants over and it's really exciting but we're not telling you haha fuck you guys." The only raisins I see them postponing telling us anything about those titles is because they wanted to reveal them at E3, which brings up the point I've heard some people say, "then why not wait for E3?" Well, in my eyes, this wasn't a video games console reveal, more of a media center reveal. Maybe at E3 we'll get a "proper" reveal including all those games and IP's and it'll be awesome. We'll have to wait and see.
- "Xbox One launching around the world "later this year"
Surprise?
- Only having to use a disc once in your Xbox One for it to install, then you won't have to put it in to play ever again. If you try to use it in another Xbox One, it'll require a fee.
I like being able to install games on my PC and playing them without fetching the disc each time, I believe I've already mentioned this. The whole second-hand market thing has been... fairly squashed as just a false rumor, but it still seems a bit odd to me and not all the details seem to be available yet, so... again, we'll have to see what they have for us.
- Not backwards compatibility with Xbox 360.
Not particularly surprised, I don't know how much effort goes into making things backwards-compatible but it might end up jacking the price of the system for things that not everyone may want. It would be cool to be able to plug something into your newbox (Shoebox? harr harr.) that makes it backwards compatible, but I don't know if that would be feasible either.
- Doesn't require internet connection (as rumors thought)
I have a stable internet connection so this doesn't affect me, however there's the whole 'not everybody lives in fiber optics internet land' plus the server-side of things, so... having to log in every 24 hours could be a problem for... quite a few people. It doesn't seem as bad as the always-on aspect but it's still a thing that's there and could be detrimental for those not in fiber-optics land (I.E. a lot of people.). Plus, what aboot bandwidth? Again it doesn't affect me, but there's people who have to deal with only being able to download X-amount of data every month. It would suck having to download a bunch of updates and then lololololol we can't authenticate you because you are not having any more internet this month. I don't know how that all works though because I've never experienced it.
Also, yes it's been posted, but I'm going to post it again here because it basically sums up what I feel about the reveal. To put it into perspective I enjoy playing games, not so much watching television. Funnily enough, I actually enjoy
watching people play games, which is why I like LP's and stuff, but television? *Yaaaawn* I just likes games, I dunno, just the way I am. For those that skipped the spoiler tag I mentioned this reveal wasn't a gaming console reveal, but a media center reveal. It is entirely possible for a 'real' reveal at E3, where the target audience is gamers and we won't feel so neglected. We'll see.
Also... Call of Duty: Ghosts? Sure, could be cool, but it's not an XboX One exclusive so there's no reason to get hyped about the console because of that game. As a side note, I find it funny how they think LOD and higher polygon count is a new and innovative thing.