Thanks Austin and Heather for a fascinating listen!
Your discussion was reminiscent of one I had with my girlfriend a couple of weeks back.
I have a weekly ritual with her every Sunday where we spend a few hours playing a co-op game. Typically over the last few months we've played Destiny together. She's a principled libertarian and firmly resents all forms of authoritarianism (... especially those that validate themselves as being for the 'greater good'). So with that in mind I pitched the Division to her with a little trepidation.
"hey babe - so how about we try the Division?"
"sure - what's that?"
"erm, it's sort of like Destiny, but in New York, after a viral apocalypse, and instead of aliens you fight desperate civilians, waste management workers, escaped prison inmates... and erm also mercenaries"
"why are we fighting them and not helping them? Are we the bad guys?"
....
...
..
"erm... yeahh.... I think we probably are. We're government agents killing people to restore... erm... control(?)... so that we can erm... kill more people (?)"
@extintor: If your excited just play QB ! Jeff did the same to Drive Club and it SUCKED, all the crap slung its way. DC wasn't amazing but, no way was it a 2/5.
I'm not invested to the point of 'excitement' for the game to be good or bad. I must say that if anything though, this review makes me want to play the game more given that almost all the other reviews online are either average or good. I kind of want to see where Jeff is coming from in his outlier assessment of the game.
EDIT: Not that it says anything about the veracity of the review (it doesn't) but Jeff's review is a metacritic outlier at the moment. hmm
My understanding of 2/5 is "the game functions mostly as it should, but is a game that the reviewer also thought was bad". So Jeff thought Quantum Break was bad is probably the main take away from a 2/5 review.
Jeff's views on his experiences with games don't usually match up with mine exactly but they aren't usually polar opposites either.
Maybe it won't make a significant difference but I think I'll also wait to see what shakes out of the PC reviews also as the footage I've seen of the XONE version didn't exactly leave a striking impression visually.
I'm in the wait and see camp, but the cost of entry here is within the realms of consumer acceptability. I would have to buy a PS4 and I already own a high end PC so there's that additional cost to consider though.
This announcement could be part of a phased strategy leading up to a joined up announcement which could potentially be really quite interesting... emphasis on *could* be and I'm healthily skeptical as to whether that's actually what will happen.
Phil Spencer does seem to have been generally overseeing a brand course correction since he took over. Now the ship isn't sinking any more it'll be interesting to see what the next play is and how the next few months pan out.
This is awful news for the company and all those who work there. Lionhead have produced some decent stuff over the years. I hope that Microsoft and Xbox really are as committed to finding these people jobs as they say in their statement.
I can kind of understand the decision, as it relates to Legends though.
On the strength of the weak game experience they had as a playable thing at EGX... and on the absolute bomber that was Evolve, it is clear that there's almost no appetite for this kind of a title.
@extintor: What do you expect from an XB1.5, how much would it cost? To get 1080/60 gaming you would need to spend $800 on PC, a $300 graphic's card won't net you a stable 60fps on console high for Fallout 4 & Witcher 3. The best you could hope for is $500 XB1.5 1080/40 which would be pointless as most games on console are locked 30fps, you'd be spending $500 to have less frame drops and tearing. As develops get better with the hardware this'll happen less and less as time goes on anyway, the visual and performance difference between Ghosts/Battlefield 4 and BLOPS3/Battlefront is quite stark.
I don't expect anything definitively yet because the plan hasn't really been outlined in anything but the broadest of strokes conceptually.
Perhaps Xbox One (point two) will be a re-design that makes it structurally more receptive to future modular upgrades than the current base model? Perhaps modular upgrades would be possible on a GPU/RAM/CPU level if that was the case? If they went that route it would still be a more standardized and closed system to develop for than a PC because each 'upgrade' would be to a microsoft standard rather than multiple options as is the case with PC upgrades.
I think that there's something fundamentally sane about the idea of creating a platform that can incrementally change in a way that is controlled by the manufacturer.
PCs aren't just used for gaming and the big problem with developing for PC is the issue of configuration variety. Let's say that the core of the Xbox stays the same, but there are two or three incremental upgrades which offer improved performance or graphical options. All titles still come out on all versions. Those that pay more get to play the titles to the highest spec (as is the case with PC gaming). The only concern I'd have with such a plan would be an absence of manufacturer competition and the high prices that would likely bring.
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