thetenthdoctor

@liquidprince:

Eh, I hope you're right. We'll never know at this point.

I wasn't going to buy one before and I won't now either, but I WAS interested in seeing if they could shake up the stale console model for retail, trade in, pricing and coding. Now that you're still free to pass around games and trade them back in for $10, it's obvious console game prices are not going to drop, we won't see Steam-like sales and the coding will continue to be held back from innovation. Guess I'll be sticking with PC for another generation.

@mrfluke:

I have a PC that I do all my gaming on- the 360 has been a dust magnet for a year. Unfortunately no PC games really take advantage of server side workloads, since developers optimize their games for the lowest common denominator- consoles.

I was hoping a unified and online Xbox One would drive innovation in programming and lead to new coding techniques, but t looks like we're stuck with another 8 years of the same old code + more polygons. Woo hoo.

@bigjeffrey:

"Multiplayer", as in "an optional part of the game". Every game has a restriction on multiplayer, namely an Internet connection. The actual "game" (as in the SP campaign) has never once required a HDD on the 360.

My point was that there has never been an Xbox 360 game box on a shelf that says "The thing in this box straight up doesn't work unless you have an HDD". If MS had put a HDD in every box, developers would have optimized for it. Instead we got stuck with texture streaming and LoD jank that PC versions don't have, thanks to the split system specs.

@dexterkid:

Maybe, but at one point in time "motorized carriages" and "talking pictures" were the stuff of fantasy, too. We'll never get there if people keep turning their nose up at it because

A) They don't think it's possible

or

B) Doing so requires moving beyond the established comfort zone they're living in as far as how game purchasing and retail works.

Now that they've split the capability of the machine into two camps (connected vs not connected), developers will gravitate toward developing for the non-connected to maximize their potential profits. It's a business at the end if the day.

@bigjeffrey:

My point stands. The only games to leverage cloud computing will now be MMOs and online shooters. Developers of single player experiences now have to choose between a better game less people can buy or a slightly worse one that everyone can buy, and they'll choose the latter every single time.

Developers also had the "option" for the last 7 years to make a game that required a hard drive- show me one that did.

@schreiberty:

Of course multiplayer only games will still use it, but single player games? No way. Publishers aren't going to spend millions of dollars writing code that only part of the user base will enjoy, or make a game that runs choppy for half the user base. They'll do exactly like they did for Oblivion, Mass Effect, Skyrim, etc, and just program the game to run well on the lowest common denominator. Last gen that meant not using the HDD, this generation it means not using the cloud.

@dexterkid:

No I'm not. Read the below interview- even in single player, AI is offloaded to the cloud, giving them more CPU to use pushing triangles and effects. If the user base was all guaranteed to be connected, every game could have leveraged this to reduce local workload and achieve higher framerates. Now, not a single developer will bother incorporating the feature since they'll reduce potential sales or deliver a choppy product to people not willing to connect.

http://www.the-coli.com/arcadium/121848-good-explaination-power-cloud.html#.UcJA72S9Kc0

@schreiberty:

I disagree. We've had 7 years for a developer to release a 360 game that leverages HDD caching with a sticker on the box that says "requires 10gb HDD space", and not one has done it. Not a single game.

No publisher or developer is going to limit their potential sales by excluding a percentage of the market. It's a whole lot easier (and profitable) just to lock the game at 30fps and remove the cloud features, but be available to 100% of the user base.

The Respawn guys were very bullish about offloading physics and AI to the cloud to get smoother framerates and less control lag in Titanfall.

Key word "were"- you can be sure they're stripping that out right now, because no console game will ever ship that runs worse on certain people's systems.

Now that every console is not guaranteed to be connected, offloading work to cloud computers will not be used by developers, robbing us of potentially huge performance increases. Knowing that part of the user base is offline, no developer in their right mind is going to take advantage of that capability, forcing all the physics and AI to be calculated locally- that eats up clock cycles and results in lower framerates.

The same thing happened on the 360 when MS offered a unit without an HDD. Games like Oblivion and Skyrim suffered from texture streaming issues and pop-in because the developers couldn't count on a hard drive being there for caching, so the code was written assuming it WASN'T there. Any time you split the user base and remove standardization from the hardware, you remove the main advantage of a console- fixed specs and capabilities.

Any other thoughts on things we'll be missing out on now?