The Microsoft Keynote In Depth

The Microsoft Keynote address today was a ra-ra session, trying to get people excited about the future of games (the Microsoft way). Which, of course, is not to say that it wasn't interesting. For the word straight from the mount, the sound and video is available on the Xbox site. Many sites have their impressions of the keynote, including Joystiq, GamesIndustry.biz, and Gamemethod. Read on if you'd like my thoughts on Microsoft's vision of the future. The thrust of Allard's talk was the future of gaming as seen through Microsoft's eyes, a vision he referred to as "The HD Living Room". In this future living room, High Def video and audio would combine with immersive connectivity and individualization to produce a new experience for gamers. This experience, he argued, would drawn in new gamers to the fold as the marketplace ages. Someday we would be looking at the first game to sell 20 million units.

Microsoft, of course, is going to usher in this new age. Take what you will from that part of the message, but his overall vision was compelling. Micropayments in the 2.0 version of Xbox live will allow for content sellable to end-users for very small amounts, seamlessly executed from the users end and not even a consideration on the designer's end. Essentially, all the designer would have to do is decide what assets were available for sale and what price as the the Live 2.0 system handles the rest.

Microsoft's role as a developer's aid behind the scenes seemed to be his secondary talking point. XNA Studio was mentioned again, and Allard discussed a future point where design teams are much larger and completely integrated across the globe. The most barbed commentary came when he was discussing the Xbox Next system, and how the system's design was intended to be as easy to develop on as possible while still being powerful and balanced. He referred to a "Science Fair Approach" to console design where these were not the objectives, probably referring to Nintendo's Revolution system.

The crunchy parts of the talk included details about the next Live system, where players will have online "gamer cards", personalized baseball cards showing their stats and accomplishments while playing Live games. The ability to customize the music experience for every Xbox game was mentioned (ala Burnout 3 and some other titles), as was a ubiquitous and standardized user interface for all games that use the Live service. In many ways it sounds as if Live 2.0 will be taking many cues from Bungie's work on Halo 2. The extendable XML and RSS technology used in the game was mentioned during a video presentation in the talk.

The thinly veiled slam against Nintendo was the low point of the talk, which overall kept to an upbeat and high minded ideal. Ignoring the part where Microsoft is the backbone of game development for a moment, their ideas have definite merit. As a MMOG player in particular, the discussion of a need for commonality in UI choices seemed on target. His pithy statement "Bruce Lee, not Brute Force" seems a laudable goal for design choices, and a future where gaming is as ubiquitous and as popular as movies or television is certainly not one I would be sad to see.

While selling us on his vision, Allard managed to do a little bit of pure selling as well. But really, who can blame him? Microsoft Game Studios is in an excellent position right now, the next Xbox console is due out this year, and they have announced an intention as a company to specifically support game development from a developer's perspective. If there's anything that the folks in Redmond are talented at it's combining high minded ideas with marketing, and the Wednesday Keynote was very effective in combined both.

Update: 03/10 17:29 GMT by Z :Added back in the paragraph I managed to delete.

Comments

Free HDTV???

[pio!pio!]

So if Zonk wrote up this commentary about they keynote...did he/she win one of the 1000 HDTV's they surprised everyone with???