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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."
The people who lose are the people who want to play old xbox games on their xbox 360. My understanding is that you need the hard drive (and an xbox live connection) to play older xbox games. Or has this fact changed in the past two weeks?
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
Reasons for a HD:
1) Downloadable content for games. Not just a little, as will fit on a memory card, but lots and lots of it. Especially important for any patches.
2) Downloadable media - game trailers and the like.
3) Backward compat. Because the original Xbox has a HD and did not abstract it away, all Xbox 1 games will require a HD to run at all.
4) Games CAN use it. They just won't require it. There are games that will release on or close to launch day that will make use of the HD to improve the game experience.
There is plenty of reason to get the HD, and it's more or less a necessity of you plan on playing over Live (a memory card will work, but the experience will be pretty piss-poor, I'd guess).
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Thank you.
Defending anything that Microsoft does is like banging your head against a brick wall. Personally, I'm very excited about the Xbox 360. I'm disappointed in a couple details - lack of required hard drive, higher than average premium package price, etc. Seriously though, get over it.
The biggest thing that Microsoft did wrong was to make a hard drive standard with the original Xbox. If they hadn't done that, the optional hard drive for the Xbox 360 would look like a blessing.
Unlike most of my sibling posters I get your point, and have banging my drum on it for awhile. Yes, developers used the HDDs as an easy way to precache data, but that's not using the HDD. Yes, you can save uberloads of games but that's also not what we mean. You can buy a big mem card for a PS2 and I've never had a loading issue on my Gamecube, *ever*. What those systems *don't* have, is a built in area of massive storage for downloadable content, or allow you to have an entire world saved as part of your game. The xbox could do that sort of thing, but never really did.
Point being, the XBox was innovative in that it was the first console to ever feature such a large, fast dedicated local storage. Possibilities abounded, yet no one did anything significant with it.
-- I have fans? Wow.
And that's why people are disappointed. One of the great things about a console is that you can assume people will have the same hardware, so you don't have to scale down to the lowest common denominator. If it works on the development machine, it'll work on everyone's machine, otherwise theirs is officially broken.
And if a hard drive, broadband connection, high-end nVidia card, quad-core processor (do I have that right?), and all of these are things you can count on most people having, you'll use all of them. Meaning we'd see a lot of very cool games using all of them. As it is now, this is worse than the original xbox -- it's just a high-end PS2. The only reason I'll ever buy one is if I can't borrow someone's for long enough to play through the Halo 3 campaign.
It looks like PC gaming wins here, with things like Half-Life 2 -- you pretty much need an Internet connection, and probably broadband, in order to play the game and keep up with all the patches, meaning all that, plus some decent minimum requirements, can be assumed by any modders. Which is why we see such awesome mods. Natural Selection, anyone?
So, PC gaming wins... maybe that's what they wanted?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Notice how he evades the question.
Faced with the suggestion that Microsoft might have let down developers by removing the guarantee of a hard drive in every box, Allard said: I dont know who weve let down. There isnt a game on 360 that you cant play without a hard drive, so I think thats a good thing for consumers.
Umm... Developers. That's the one you've let down. There are a LOT of games on the Xbox that you can't play without the hard drive. Any sort of disk precaching or large format storage is lost. Any guarantee of an easy save flow is lost. Any illusion of easy compatibility with PC's is lost. Custom soundtracks? Lost. Arbitrary save file size? Lost. Save anywhere? Lost. Guarantee of space for downloadable content? Lost. Player generation of content? Lost.
I'm not saying that the financial tradeoffs weren't worth axing the HDD for. But I am saying that the HDD was one of the two major things the Xbox had going for it.
The ______ Agenda
I seem to recall reading some M$ sales info on the XBoX a few years ago (I'm too lazt to find a link) that said if 10% of the user base gets a hardware add-on, that is consider a good margin for an add on. Unless your company also sells the addon then, it's not worth development cost to code for an addon. I thought these were the reasons they included a HD and Broadband in the XBoX, so they would be used by developers, and thus a reason XBoX was better than a PS2.
/. rss. If I can't do all that *and* have great games on 360, I'm happy where I'm at now.
I think they see XBoX as a failure, even though they said they expected a loss. They are now trying to not repeat themselves, but they don't know why XBoX failed. It failed because of the lack of games, not the platform. How sad is it when I mod my XBoX so I can BT any games I want and realize the 5 I bought are the only 5 I'm intereste in playing?
I love my XBoX, it runs mame, streams avi's, and mp3's, does karaoke, taps into my tivo, and lists the latest