Slashdot Mirror
Xbox Live Feature Upgrades Include Online Storage?
Flamingcheeze writes "According to a Reuters article: 'Microsoft Corp. is planning a number of new features for its Xbox Live online gaming service this year, including... something called 'title-managed online storage,' a way for game players to store and share data via Microsoft's network.' The piece goes on to note, without directly drawing a link: 'speculation within the industry that Microsoft may not include a hard drive in the next version of the Xbox console, in favor of network-based storage that would reduce the console's physical size and cost', as recently discussed on Slashdot Games." The article also mentions possible "indications... that Xbox Live would eventually allow players to leave each other brief voice messages", and a story at GameSpot has further, albeit brief details on this 'Tsunami' upgrade.
This would make an already great service better. I still dont like the idea of the next one not having a HD though. Not everyone lives in a boradband area, maybe they will put a dual adapter in the next one, like Sony. Not that online gaming has been that sucessful for Sony. I think it wont hurt things to even offer ISP service, give them something to do with all those MSN nodes out there.
With the current dismal speeds of broadband in the US and antiquated pricing structures for mass bandwidth on the backbones I doubt even MicroSoft could pressure the DSL and Cable providers to provide more robust links to homes. Players no doubt would rather save to their systems than wait a few minutes of their playtime watching a counter tick away while uploading the data and for their friends to download the data.
Even on 768k DSL it takes up to 5 minutes or longer in some cases to download necessary game patches to even allow online play on XboxLive. Until the broadband speeds pony up to the challenge I think the next Xbox and even the PS3 will be hard pressed to provide the stated functionality sought by gamer for online gaming.
I would hope the intention would be to finally integrate MSN Messenger functionality into Xbox live allowing users to communicate seamlessly between the desktop environment (via MSN Messenger's VoIP capabilities) and Xbox Live. Voicemail would be kind of nice too I suppose.
Most game developers, and a host of non-game developers, have been thinking about better communication integration for quite sometime now. The utility of communication services is directly proportionate with the number of users. Subsequently, it makes a lot of sense to try to increase your user base. Similar efforts have been made in Valve's Steam, and if you want a far older example look at how wireless text messaging systems have evolved -- communicating between wireless phones, landline phones, and desktop computers may not be ubiquitous, but it's certain availible.
Well yeah, and then you can't do stuff like the KOTOR saves, really. The ability to have big save games is a really nice feature, and games like KOTOR or Fable (or even Halo in-mission saves) would be very difficult to do with a memory card, even assuming it is four times bigger than current cards (which was the jump last gen IIRC, so 2 meg -> 8 meg -> 64 meg). Sure, you can do some clever optimizing to allieviate part of the problem, but game saves are only going to get bigger.
Non-obtrusive autosaves are also a nice feature that I assume isn't being done on other consoles without hard disks (since poorly programmed multiplatform titles like Tony Hawk feature long pauses for saving, something you really don't find in the better Xbox games).
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
NOOOOO!!!!
Seriously though, you can run Linux on the gamecube. Why is running linux so important on a console anyway?
Mod me as troll, but consoles are for games.