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J. Allard Responds to Hard Drive Criticism
Edge Online is reporting on responses Xbox 360 platform chief J. Allard gave in response to questions regarding the hard drive on the Xbox 360. From the article: "I don't know who we've let down. There isn't a game on 360 that you can't play without a hard drive, so I think that's a good thing for consumers. We've made a commitment to broadening the audience, and while I think most of our energy here at X05 is about the hardcore, over time we're really setting the stage for making this a bigger category for everybody. So from the developer point of view you have the best tools and the commitment of the most well-resourced company in the world going worldwide with this product and saying that we want to grow the audience. So that seems like a win for developers - I'm not sure who's supposed to be disappointed."
Heh. He lies in that statement. Flat out.
/will/ require a harddrive to play.
Quote: "I don't know who we've let down. There isn't a game on 360 that you can't play without a hard drive, so I think that's a good thing for consumers."
I can name it right now: FFXI. It
Matthew Walker
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From the article:
"I'm not sure who's supposed to be disappointed." -- The unknowing customers you're screwing over by forcing developers to not take advantage of the hardrive for fear of screwing their customers over and the developers who can no longer use the HDD for caching, etc. etc. (listed later)
"Are there developers who are disappointed? Yeah, sure." -- Did he not just say he wasn't sure who was supposed to be disappointed?
"I was the biggest fan of the hard drive and its potential, but the problem is that we sold 22million Xbox consoles and 5million, maybe 10million just don't care about it." -- Maybe they didn't even know it was being used in games they were playing, used for caching, storing huge save games that would require an entire memory card, used for map updates, used for patches to the game itself, etc.
"We can either ask the gamer to pay for it, pay for it ourselves, or prove that there's enough value in it and have the gamer say 'I want to pay for it' - I think that's the right model." -- again just completely missing the point, it creates a situation where developers have to make a choice to support it or not, piss off the customers that don't have one or not, etc.
"A lot of people have said: 'This is really confusing - you have different configurations and blah, blah, blah', and I'm like: what consumer electronics business in the world has three manufacturers, three brands that each make one thing that doesn't change for seven years?" -- that should be pretty damn obvious, it's the consumer electronics business that YOU are in...
Source
Last but not least, after we were told that there was no ability to fly aircrafts in the game due to the DVD drive's inability to stream the environment fast enough in full 720p resolution. We asked Jacques Hennequet (Producer for Saint's Row), "If the Xbox 360 Hard Drive was standard across both SKU's, would flying aircrafts in the game have been a reality?", Jacques simply answered "Yes". While he completely understands why MS made the decision to not include a hard drive in the Core System, I think he felt somewhat disappointed, as it could have opened up much more possibilities within the gameplay for Volition's first Xbox 360 title.
Not making it standard is making features be cut from games. End of story. Why is this a big deal when the others don't have a HDD? The Xbox had one standard, so it's taking a step backwards. THAT is why people are complaining - you're removing a feature that was being used unconsciously, and causing developers to cut features that otherwise would have been included.
wow you're just flat at wrong, most x-box games did in fact make use of the hard drive. Perhaps just for faster save/load, perhaps just for caching, but those things resulted in significant performance increases and reduced load times.
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That's not how the APIs for Xbox 1 worked at all.
You had a variant of CreateFile(). Give it a drive letter in the path and that's where you read from. (D for the DVD, Z for the scratch partition assigned to your game, etc...)
Notice something? You have to manage this all yourself.
SquareEnix certainly seems to believe that FFXI will be on the Xbox 360.
After all, there is always the remote possibility they may have someone "on the inside" feeding them information.