The Next-Gen Odd Couple

1up.com is running a lengthy piece talking to Microsoft VP J. Allard and Sony Computers of America President Kaz Hirai about what exactly the 'next generation' of consoles are about. The article is informative and varied, with talk about Xbox Live, the launch of the Xbox and PSX, and what past efforts from Sony and Microsoft will mean as the newest front in the console war heats up. From the article: "OPM: What are the benefits of being first to market, much like the Dreamcast was? What are the pitfalls? JA: Good question. I'd say one of the pitfalls from a competitive point of view is that you don't know what the other guys are doing, and to be frank, the guys over at Sony have been very good at not telling anyone what they're doing. It's tough to tell where they're going with the PS3. The other tough thing is that you're under the microscope [when you're first]. [Sony] shows two movies and a product that you can't touch behind a piece of glass, and that's what you get to write about on them."

Comments

"Next Gen" is a buzzword

[91degrees]

There hasn't been a proper next generation since the Sega Saturn. Everything else has just been an incremental improvement in graphics and storage. The XBox 360 has all these fantastic specs on paper, but in practice, you'll see the same games, with the same sound, the same online capabilities and the same premise but with a few more polygons and a higher resolution. All very nice, I'm sure, but hardly a revolution in gaming.

Re:"Next Gen" is a buzzword

[jcnnghm]

Incremental improvements in graphics and storage, or steps toward immersion. I have a 360, and thus far I am pretty impressed.

Take Call of Duty. Just looking at it, at first glance, it doesn't seem a whole lot better (Toshiba 27" standard def set circa 2003) than say Brothers in Arms on the original Xbox. Then when you actually play it, it has something most other WWII games lack, a sense of immersion. The particle effects really help with this. The battlefield is chaotic, grenades and bullets kick up snow, dirt, mud, and the smoke grenades are wonderful. The friendly NPC's talk, constantly. Sometimes everything else is just so loud, you can't really make out what they are saying. The surround sound is used to great effect to bring you onto the battlefield. It feels like a battle, not a group of polygons shooting at some other polygons.

There are also tons of characters on screen. I remember a Medal of Honor for the Xbox, the opening was a very well done and immersive D-Day invasion, with stuff going on all around you. Hardly any enemies, and only lasted a minute or two. Call of Duty feels like that all the way through, except while the enviroment is active with particle effects and explosions, there are also 15-30 enemies in front of you, and a bunch of Allies fighting beside you. In most WWII games it has inevitably felt like you were one man taking on the entire German army. Call of Duty has you pinned as a member of a unit.

A friend of mine came over after I got my 360 to check it out. We've been playing games together since the NES. Fired up Call of Duty, he took the first level. The vehicle he was in was attacked, he looks, and over the hill in front of him comes, I'd say 35 or so enemies, in formation. His response, holy shit, it's the whole German army. Throws a grenade, then attempts to shoot all of them with his rifle. He's dead a few seconds later. Eventually he realized he should throw a smoke grenade, then retreat to where the rest of the friendlies are and fight from cover. In short, a hell of a lot more immersive than the last generation.

This generation should be about parallel processing are way toward immersion. Hopefully some developer will come along and realize that graphically, this generation should be an incremental upgrade (whatever you can do with that fancy new GPU). The focus should be on using these multi-core processors to up the ante in physics and AI processing, and adding a bunch of characters to the screen. GTA isn't much of a city with 4 cars and 6 people on the streets. Multiply both of those numbers by 20-40 and we may start to have something truly next generation.

Re:"Next Gen" is a buzzword

[jp10558]

I think (could be entirely wrong) that there is an equal number of casual gamers at who consoles are often pushed as the gaming solution (vs a gaming PC) who aren't at all interested in Online play - especially if it costs extra or worse is an ongoing monthly fee.

Let's just say I'm not about to pay $10+ a month for MMORPGs on my PC, I certainly don't want to pay $50+ a year to MS for the priviledge to pay some other company $10+ a month to do the same. And I'm certainly not going to pay $10+ a month so I can play "for free" on weekends under Silver.

I just think there is some over hype about how many people enjoy MMORPG style playing, and how many people want to pay to play(beyond the net connection) FPS games online when they can do so free with PS2(and presumably PS3) or on their PC.

Re:"Next Gen" is a buzzword

[IdleTime]

However the way microsoft integrates online gaming (xbox live) is very well done, and personally i think is where gaming is going. Now they just need good games.

I think this is not correct. On-line gaming is HUGE for you hardcore gamers, but on and off gamers like me don't have the skill or time necessary to get a good online experience. What fun is it to enter an online session just to be killed 5 seconds after you entered? Not much...

I personally prefer to play games with friends in real life. We all have about the same skill level and we can drink and interact in ways you can't online. Ofcourse, if you are a hardcore gamer, you probably don't have too many real life friends since you spend most of your free time online playing games.

Until I can enter online games and only play with people on or about the same skill level as I have, online gaming to me is worthless and just a HUGE waste of money.

If I could go online with my friends and then have a session with only us in it, that would be interesting.

I wanted to pick up an XBOX 360 just to see what the hype is alll about, but i have no interest in buying on Ebay and so far i haven't found a place where I can go and pick up one, so I'm going to drop XBOX 360 alltogether, no matter how good it is due to the fact it's nearly impossible to go to a store and buy one. Horrible, horrible marketing MS, SONY - are you listening? I'll pick up a PS3 with games and stuff as soon as it is available for pickup in stores.

revolution in gaming

[walshy007]

it seems to me the general public don't want anything new and interesting in gaming, all we see is rehashes of old genres, which while tried and true, bring very little new to the table the nintendo revolution on the otherhand could bring a lot new to the table, if they play their cards right. Although I fear, no matter what happens, sony and microsoft teenagers may never get rid of the anti-nintendo stigma that has been around for quite some time.

Re:revolution in gaming

[garcia]

Although I fear, no matter what happens, sony and microsoft teenagers may never get rid of the anti-nintendo stigma that has been around for quite some time.

Being a "Sony Adult" and watching the random offerings of Nintendo over recent years, I can't find a single shred of evidence that will make me believe that I should move away from the PS3 for the Revolution.

Everyone says, "well it looks like the Revolution could do interesting things" but based on MY experience and knowledge it's going to be a whole slew of cartoonish and childlike gaming all over again. Some people like those games, and that's fine, but I'm more interested in REAL REVOLUTION. Something I have not seen before. Sadly, that's nearly impossible to accomplish.

So let's dump the karma whoring Revolution++ rhetoric and instead wait until we see what the Revolution offers after it's been on the market for a year.

Re:revolution in gaming

[CastrTroy]

Yeah PS really messes with my brain. Where is the Circle button again? what about triangle and X? Which button do I press is right. Maybe they think this way because they are used to PS, where they really do have no idea which button they are supposed to press at the menus.

Re:revolution in gaming

[mejesster]

Why aren't we applying that same standard to the PS3 or the 360? I swear, rationality goes out the window when consoles are the topic.

Personally, I intend to buy none of the "next gen" consoles until their first price drop, giving my wallet a breath of air and a chance for the consoles and developers to prove themselves. At this point, it's kind of ridiculous how fanboyish people are about consoles that aren't available.

Re:revolution in gaming

[BlizzyMadden]

Yeah, I bought into the load time aguement for awhile too. Funny, because to circumvent to cramped space on catridges some games started to compress music and what not and it would have to be decompressed when different music and levels would load. What did this lead to--load time! Wipeout 64 was a good example of this. When I finally gave up and bought a Playstation I did notice load time with games, but it wasn't that bad. And when the games had better music and more levels then the N64 counterparts (anyone remember MK Trilogy?) and where on average half the price--come on, how can you defend catridges?

Re:revolution in gaming

[CastrTroy]

Why does cartoon = childish? Southpark is a cartoon, but I wouldn't want my kids watching it. Just because they don't try to make the games look like real life, doesn't mean they are childish. It just means they are going for a different effect. If they wanted them to look real, then they would. Truth is, games that look too real end up immersing you less because you stop using your imagination. Maybe if you have no imagination, then it doesn't matter. Just because mario doesn't have a gun, doesn't mean he's childish. Does violence=adult? what exactly defines and adult game, and what make nintendo's games non adult?

Just make good gaming rigs

[Quiet_Desperation]

Stop trying to make them an all in one box that will do everything from play games to media center to feeding the cat. All in one boxes teh suxxor, as the young 'uns say today, not to mention a single point of failure and all that jazz.

Duh!

[Bullfish]

The next gen consoles are about getting the console gamer to the on-line money trough through a drm locked down metered revenue stream.

Really, a lot of the ooo's and ah's with the consoles have more to do with their on-line abilities, supposedly better graphics (jury is in lockdown) and such that PC gamers have used for ages. The difference is that they can get the console gamers (which outnumber PC gamers) to fork over a lot more in on-line fees than PC players will tolerate. Plus, a lot of console gamers don't even know where to begin when it comes to modding their consoles to bypass their schemes.

The PC also has more options when it comes to free gaming on-line. A lot suck, but a lot are very good. Yes, the graphics on the new consoles will be better once the developers get the hang of programming for them, but gameplay is another matter.

Frankly, the new consoles have a bigger upside for the manufacturer's as a vehicle for metered gaming than they do for the gamer in terms of better games.

Sick of this next-gen bull

[mikapc]

I haven't noticed anything revolutionary with this new xbox 360. If anything you might call it evolutionary with enhanced graphics but aside from that the games don't appear to be any different from the long line of games that preceded them.

Power vs. Innovation?

[mausmalone]

If I've said it once, I've said it a hundred times ... it all depends on what you do with the hardware.

Guessing by your wording, you know what I'm talking about when I talk about the Revolution controller. Just how radically different it is from the current paradigm ensures that there will be great changes in gameplay coming from the Revolution. This is something that I'm looking forward to.

But does the X-Box 360's lack of "innovative" (i.e. trend-bucking) hardware necessarily mean that it won't lead to innovative gameplay that wasn't previously possible? Think about how powerful that CPU is. What kinds of things could be done with physics on it? What could you do with AI? Look at the large (for a console) ammount of memory. How large can levels get? How could you ever fill all that up? Look at the powerful GPU. What can you draw now that you couldn't before? Are there game concepts that people were looking at before that were simply impossible because previous consoles couldn't draw the output?

So, while the hardware is nothing earth-shaking or radically different, it opens up possibilities to developers that simply weren't available on the original X-Box. We just have to hope that (a) developers take advantage of the hardware in that way, and (b) we gamers actually buy the innovative games to support the trend.

Re:Power vs. Innovation?

[CastrTroy]

AI and physics isn't really a limitation of the processor, its a limitation of the developers. It takes a lot of research to get convincing AI and physics, and most developers aren't spending (wasting) their time on that. Most of them spend their time on graphics, because they think, if it doesn't look good, people won't buy it. There's no reason why we couldn't have had advanced AI on the last generation, but developers aren't interested in providing this.

Yeah! J Allard! Woo!

[wild_berry]

"We can't wait to get people's feedback"

Like the class-action suit about your overheating power bricks? :P

These words from Allard, repeated throughout this gutsy interview, are the proof that the limited availability is more about public beta testing than production shortages, the hype machine or any thing else.

(Also: Allard was on form with his 'I'm so excited I could *POP*' attitude.)

It doesn't mater who is first, really

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

PS2 was first and dominated that last gen market, but then, Sony had taken over the market with the PSOne long before MS decides to enter the fray.

Its about games, pure and simple. Xbox failed simply because there were not enough exclusive titles, and not any gaming franchises established to help drive console sales. I never bought an Xbox because I could get the same titles for my PS2. What few exclusive titles for the Xbox, like Halo, eventually made it to PC.

Micosoft is setting up the XBox360 for the same fall. The problem know is that many "new" Xbox360 games will also see Xbox and PS2 versions. Not just are there no exclusive titles, but these titles are not even respecting console generations, being downgraded to sell on previous generation consoles.

Again, why would I buy an Xbox360 when, for the time being, many of the popular titles will be released for the PS2 as well.

I am a gamer that prefers gameplay over style and graphics. If a game is fun to play and entertaining for a long time, I could care less if the 3D graphics are not cinematic quality. I won't pay $400 to play a $40 game I could get for a system I already own.

If MS thinks that by getting there first is going to make the Xbox360 shine, then they will loose once again to gain market share. Without exclusive titles, and allowing game developers to release games for other platforms AND older generations, Microsoft is doing nothing to spur sales of Xbox360 hardware.

Sony has a number of platform specific titles that don't exist on any other platform, and I am sure when the PS3 is released, they won't be releasing the same games for the PS2. This is still why the PS3 will outsell the Xbox360, because MS inisist on whoring themselves and their game developers to anyone willing to buy a license, rather then forcing stronger commitments from game developers for exclusive titles.