Xbox 360 Version of Champions Online Being Held Back By MS

Tomorrow marks the launch of Cryptic Studios' new superhero MMO, Champions Online. It was developed for the PC and the Xbox 360, but the console version will be much delayed, according to Cryptic CCO Jack Emmert, because Microsoft is holding things up. "Microsoft's a big company, and they have to work out all the various issues related to MMOs. It just takes time for the big beast known as Microsoft to get moving. I really have no explanation other than that, because it's as baffling to developers as it is to everyone else," he said during an interview with VG247. The game itself is apparently finished, but Emmert isn't sure it'll even go live for the 360 by the end of this year. Square Enix developers made similar comments earlier this month regarding Final Fantasy XIV, which will be available first on the PS3 largely because it's taking a long time to work out how the game will interact with Xbox Live.

Comments

Obviously not a coder

[HannethCom]

I agree DirectX was an amazing accomplishment. I can't think of any other API where you would allocate buffer and you had to constantly check to make sure that the pointer to that buffer hadn't been magically lost. Oh, I loved the sound API from version 5-8, and it was always going to be fixed "In the next version."

*Start Rant*

Actually that's not true, the Winsock API used to be so buggy you used to have to do error checking on operations which on any other OS there is no possibility of them failing. (I hear things are better now)

Also, if DirectX is such an amazing accomplishment, how come they had to make a version specifically for the XBox that is only partially compatible with the PC version? Why are they having to come out with a new version of the API every 6 months to 1 year? DirectX 9, 9a, 9b, 9c, 9d, 9e, 10, 10.1, 11

Why, if it's so amazing are so many companies switching to OpenAL for their audio?

Why did so many companies continue to develop for Glide when DirectX worked on all graphics cards?

The truth is that DirectX started out as a piece of garbage, and is slowly getting better and better. Microsoft was given the chance to work together to come up with a graphics standard that would be flexible and would be properly designed. It was called Fahrenheit. Microsoft was originally going to be a big force behind this, but did not allocate the needed resources, instead ramming DirectX 7 down our throats.

Microsoft does not want a good API. Look at the number of versions of DirectX there have been. Look at .Net. Microsoft isn't interested in making good APIs, they are interested in making good enough APIs and using their marketing power to ram it down developer's throats. After all, if they came out with a great version of lets say DirectX, what would be the point in developers upgrading their version of Visual Studio?

I most recently ran into this when looking into the contacts system in Vista. Here it was, this brand new system to centralize all our contact information in Windows. A new API that is only about 1.5 years old. No longer supported. No links to the new API, if there is one. I can't even figure out if Windows Contacts are just in Windows 7 for "backward compatibility", or if its meant to be be used.