Microsoft's Tray And Play Unveiled

Gamespot has a look at Microsoft's upcoming plans for PC gaming. In addition to a definite gaming perspective for the Longhorn OS and a commitment to the XNA studios package, they have word that someday we may be loading PC games much like console games. From the article: "Tray and Play is exactly what it sounds like - dropping a game disc into an optical drive and loading it up immediately, rather than having to install it to a hard drive. True to form, the game itself cut straight to a start-up screen in less than a minute (including the game's own built-in load time)."

Comments

LiveCD?

[Pascal Sartoretti]

Dropping a game disc into an optical drive and loading it up immediately, rather than having to install it to a hard drive

As I understand, Microsoft is going to release games on a Knoppix LiveCD?

Inevitable

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd been wondering how long this would take...

Although many people have said, over the last couple of years, that Microsoft intends to kill off the PC as a gaming platform, in the hopes of transporting users over to its own X-Box, I've never believed that this is true. Windows' status as the "gaming OS" is almost certainly a factor in keeping it installed on any number of home PCs. However, there's no denying that PC gaming has had a difficult time of late (although perhaps not so difficult in the second half of 2004, when it finally got some big exclusive releases) and it desperately needs to be more competative with the console market. With keyboard and mouse support in games likely to be more common in the next console generation, this is more urgent than ever.

Now, I used to be a die-hard PC gamer. I've been gaming on the PC since the days when buying a new game meant an hour tweaking config.sys, autoexec.bat and playing with memmaker just to get the right memory configuration for the damned thing to run. When I finally overcame my long-standing aversion to consoles a couple of years ago and bought a PS2, I was amazed by how much simpler and lower-hassle the whole process is on a console. Even today, playing a PC game involves checking that your system meets the specification, sitting through an install process which could take anywhere from a couple of minutes through to half an hour, depending on the game and your system, determining the settings which will give you the best balance between appearance and performance and then quite often searching for patches to fix the bug that makes the game crash every 5 minutes on your hardware configuration. That this puts people off is hardly a surprise.

Microsoft's move here is, at least, a first step towards remedying this situation.

Lame

[Dachannien]

Half the point of cracks (the legal half) is so you don't *need* to go rooting around for the CD just so you can play a game. Besides, if I'd wanted a console game system, I'd have bought one.

what a goddamn bad idea

[SmallFurryCreature]

A PC is not a console. There is a reason PC gamers spend several times the amount console gamers do on hardware. It is not just penis extensions. We believe that in exchange for the much higher hardware costs we get much a different type of games that we enjoy more.

So why exactly is it such a bad idea? First off most PC games still come on CD because more people have a CD player then a DVD player. Going to DVD only games would be easier but so far no game company wants to take the risk of upsetting the non-dvd owners.

Second is do you really trust microsoft to choose the most optimal installation place for your games? Not everyone of us have just one partition.

Third you can say goodbay to editing your game files if they are on a read only media. Many PC games have a happy modding community that is unique to PC gaming. But this works only if you can modify the game files.

Fourth many people who buy their games in the shop still use no-cd fixes because it allows them to play the game they want without first searching for the CD. I am even worse as my gaming PC is a monster wich makes a lot of noise so I put it in another room two doors away. Going back to the days of searching through a stack of CD's before I can play is not a step forward.

Fifth is that no matter how much more advanced DVD players become they will always be lagging behind the speed of a HD.

Sixth wich problem does it really solve? People who think installing a game is to nerdie won't be using a PC for gaming in the first place.

But most important this is microsoft trying to be smart. I love the "Close Combat" series of games but it was a microsoft game and so unlike every other game of that era it required me to manaually set the color depth from 32 to 16 to play the game. Yes a microsoft game was not able to use directx to simply do that for me. If MS wants to make games easier then they should start with their own games. MS flight simulator playing from a readonly media? It would ruin the game.

Perhaps MS should do a test to see how many windows users have got the autoplay feature they added turned off.

Re:what a goddamn bad idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to respond to a few of these points...

First, I don't buy for a minute that more people have CD drives than DVD drives. It's been pretty much impossible to buy a new PC for the last couple of years from any of the off-the-rack vendors without it coming with a DVD drive. The transition from CD to DVD for PC games has taken far too long already and I wish the publishers who haven't already would just hurry up and make the link. If you haven't got a DVD drive, chances are you've custom built your system. In which case, you're perfectly capable of putting in a sub-$50 DVD drive yourself.

Second, If the installations are only going to be a couple of megs at most for save-games, I don't honestly see that it matters where the install goes.

Third, nobody's stopping other publishers from releasing their games under the old system if they want to. If id decide they want to make Doom 4 moddable, they can do so.

Fourth, there's some slight validity to the point about having to look for the disk to play the game. However, with the latest forms of copy-protection, it seems as though the days of CD emulation for playing games may be running out anyway (yes, I know there are work-arounds for all the current systems, but I don't see this lasting). Besides, I somehow manage to get by with my stacks of console games, all of which need the disk in the drive.

Fifth, whether the DVD drive is slower than the HDD isn't necessarily relevant. If it can run the game with "acceptable" loading times and no stuttering in-game, nobody with any sense of perspective is actually going to care.

Sixth, I suspect it's intended to make PC gaming more attractive to people who don't necessarily go in for the whole "l33ter than thou - my system is the one-true-way to play games" mentality, but who have expectations regarding ease of use and lack of hassle.

Finally, I don't think that condemning every move Microsoft makes on the basis of a problem you had with one of their own (now obsolete) games is really a particularly strong basis on which to argue. Just to reinforce a point I made above, this is not going to do ANYTHING to stop you playing "different types of games you enjoy more" on the PC.

Re:Yes!

[crashmstr]

Can have, perhaps. Do have, certainly not - I've never seen a patch, not even for games that are blatantly as buggy as hell. And I've CERTAINLY never seen a mod.

Um, Ninja Gaiden? Mech Assault maps and gametypes? Unreal Champion maps and gametypes? Knights of the Old Republic with the downloadable Yavin IV space station? I'd say those count as having mods.

And there are certainly patches for Live functionality. Ever see the message "XBox Live must update..." or something like that? (Microsoft does apparently frown on patches that do not relate to Live and for anything that does not add to gameplay)

Of course, if you do not have XBox Live, you will probably not see any of this. :)