In Perspective - Xbox one

What you've heard

It didn't show any games. It will require an always on internet connection (again). It doesn't let you share games with your friends. It won’t play used games unless you pay money for a code. You won’t be able to use its basic functions unless you use motion controls. No more family membership discounts. You can’t play it in the dark. It’s going to cost $700. It’s the prime suspect in the Jimmy Hoffa disappearance. Think of a bad thing - that thing applies to the Xbox One.

Except

Pretty much every “story” that ran this week about the Xbox One was either confirmed false already or baseless speculation based on what Microsoft didn't explicitly state in the press conference. They never mentioned that it wouldn't require the blood of a newborn to turn on, so let's run a story with the headline “will you need to sacrifice a baby to turn your Xbox on?” As we haven’t seemed to learn the lesson that any news article where the headline is a question can be answered with "no", wild rumors are being picked up and repeated at every level.

Here’s what we do know; it will not require an internet connection to play single player games. That WAS said in the after-show, but it didn't stop media outlets from saying it wasn’t mentioned in the conference itself so it must be the worst case. We also know the Xbox needs to “check in” with the server from time to time and that if it doesn't some features will be turned off, but we don’t know what these features are or what the time to time number is. More on that when we get to used games.

We know every game needs to be installed on the hard drive, but Microsoft has said this will NOT prevent you from taking games to a friend’s house and playing them there. A cloud service will allow you to access all your games from that Xbox. This seems to strongly imply that yes, the system is going to need to be online to install a game to the hard drive and play it for the first time; that's an online activation, so without an internet connection you won’t be able to install games. Except that it doesn’t. Microsoft has required an online activation for all its products from a time before most people knew what dial up is. This is why they have phone centers that allow you to do the activation offline. If the Xbox requires this type of step, I can’t see any reason they wouldn’t allow activation by phone.

We know the system can play used games. We know there is going to be a check to make sure the same game isn’t installed on two systems. This is where the rumour starts that the system needs to check in to ensure your games are not being shared or it will shut them off. I have two comments here; first, we have no info other than Microsoft saying they are going to tell us later. Any numbers, like once a day, are completely made up. Second; that’s completely reasonable! Look, I hate DRM, but only if it’s unreasonable. Making me input long keys (and keep a physical copy around if I want to reinstall), always on DRM, making me give me personal information to activate ... that’s what I’m opposed to. I’m absolutely not opposed to people makings sure I’m not stealing their product if they can do it in a way that doesn’t bother me! A periodic check fits this bill, provided it’s in the area of 24 hours, or on start up.

We know it’s not going to require you to use motion controls. They said the reason they didn’t change the controller at all was because some people just like using a simple controller and that will always be an option.

We know the price will be “at or below the previous generation”. Using creative accounting, that gives them up to around a $500 price tag; that seems reasonable based on the hardware I’ve seen.

We know it’s going to have a ton of games. MS Studios is building 7 to 14 exclusives alone for year 1, and pretty much every game coming out in Q4 that is cross platform is on the Xbox One and PS4. By contrast, the Xbox 360 launched with 14 games total.

So what’s the deal

There are a lot of arguments for old news. TV and newspapers had something that the internet can’t; investment. You had to take the time to buy the paper or turn on the show, meaning you tried to get as much out of that investment as possible. If you didn’t like the content, you would find something else. Nowadays all we do is scan headlines while reading the aggregate server and the game has changed. There is no such thing as a good article, just a good headline that might generate a click, and most of what people know is going off the headline alone. It’s no surprise that after an announcement like this the media is all over every possible negative, even if it’s not really all that possible. Outrage and controversy drives clicks, and no one is holding you accountable when you get it wrong.

Should be Playing - King’s Bounty

As gamers go, I have a dark and dirty secret, something I need to keep hidden when around the rest of the gaming world for fear I may be misunderstood and shunned. And although I live with this every single day, rare are the times it’s worth it to admit to anyone this horrible truth. I do so now only because of my commitment to providing historical context when I write about a game; so out with it. I liked the Sega Genesis more than the Super Nintendo. I’m not saying there was anything wrong with the Super Nintendo, the most holy of gaming holies, but only that Sega’s system had of a lot more support for J-RPG and mature games, which I’ve always been most interested in. I hold Shining Force, Sword of Vermilion and Phantasy Star 2 in much higher esteem than Mario or even Ogre Battle, and although I owned both (and plenty of games for each) it’s always the Genesis I spent long nights as a child grinding away with. And one of my fondest memories comes from the marathon sessions trying to beat King’s Bounty.

In King’s Bounty you are the commander of an army, which you build by buying units from lairs or strongholds, and then use the armies to do battle on a small hex field. You have powers and spells that you can use as the commander to turn the tide, and from time to time the units you are facing have their own commander with the same abilities. You are limited in how big your army is by both what is available to be bought and your resources to buy them. If this sounds familiar it’s because one of the most popular gaming series of the last 10 years, Heroes of Might and Magic, is nothing more than a shameless rip off of this system with some (horrible) 4x game play added. But not really; in fact Heroes of Might and Magic and King’s Bounty were both made by Jon Van Caneghem at New World Computing who were using the “Might and Magic” name to boost appeal and sales, as both King’s Bounty and Might and Magic were owned by 3DO. Unifying them under a single brand just made sense. That is until 3DO was shut down and sold the rights to Might and Magic to Ubisoft, leaving King’s Bounty an orphaned IP that got picked up in 2008 by Katauri Interactive, who released King’s Bounty: The Legend.

King’s Bounty focuses on the RPG aspects of army management, which skills to learn and what items to equip, like a traditional turn based RPG. Without the 4x elements of Heroes, combat is far more tactical with strong risk vs. rewards elements built in. Where the obvious solution in Heroes is to send in overwhelming numbers to deal with every situation, in King’s Bounty you need to weigh the price of new troops with the gains that can come from better items or more skills, and the benefits of using a minimal army supplemented by your own skills with the risk of failure. Unit selection is also far more organic; without the need to “build” your troops you can hire a much wider variety of monsters and create a much more varied set of teams. All in all the game creates a fantastic mix of RPG, turn based combat, and strategy that any fan of games like Shining Force or Fire Emblem is going to love.

Should be Playing - Alpha Protocol

Video games, like movies and music before them, have a very odd way of demanding originality and rewarding familiarity. The masses cry for new and interesting projects, condemn sell outs, praise anyone willing to break from the mold, and then make Call of Duty 9 (or Black-Ops 2) the most successful media event of all time, earning $500 million in the first 24 hours of its release (or about twice what the Avengers, the highest grossing movie of all time, earned in its first weekend). Making the situation worse, while movies had big names like Roger Ebert to remind us of the overall value of experiments and unsuccessful films, video games have MetaCritic and the internet. We universally slam anything that doesn’t meet our expectations while simultaneously criticizing games for not trying new things.

Alpha Protocol suffered this unfortunate fate. With Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2 under their belt, Obsidian Entertainment set out to produce two games that they promised would surprise and break from the norm. It wasn’t long before the first project was leaked, a more personal and story driven take on the Fallout universe in the way of Fallout: New Vegas, while the second project known only as an “espionage RPG” didn’t gain much hype until release. It took the stealth game play we were used to from Metal Gear and Splinter Cell and instead focused on the espionage element; conversation, gaining intelligence, and forging relationships between maps was the refined focus, while the maps themselves were the filler. The game pulled off a fantastic (if not a bit convoluted) story that spanned the globe and made you feel critically important to the way things played out. The game featured a bi-polar relationship system with your handler (which you chose before each mission based on who you trust) where both positive and negative relationships have advantages and disadvantages. Have a handler who likes you? Perhaps they won’t tell you about the weapon hidden in the heavily guarded room out of fear you might die. Have a handler who hates you? Maybe you can make them angry and get more information out of them than they wanted to give. Beyond that, as the voice in your head the handler has a dramatic effect on the mood. On one mission, one handler provides you information on how to disable enemies and sneak around without killing them while another plays “Flight of the Valkyrie” over your head set while highlighting weapons. It doesn’t just change the map, it changes who you are.

The game had its flaws. It was a 3rd person shooter that didn’t play or feel like one. Combat was extremely clunky and unforgiving by design, with a little extra clunky added by poor implementation. The game had strong RPG elements while giving you the illusion you can play it the way you want; you can’t. If you build a stealth and conversation oriented character you might as well have a pea shooter even though you would expect the gun on your back to work like it would in other shooters. The game rests in its own genre and that is both its appeal and its greatest flaw. It was rejected by the masses looking for the same experience they got out of other stealth action games and by the masses looking for a 3rd person RPG like Skyrim or Fallout. It’s only people who could look at it for what it is; something fresh, new, and different, that seemed to come to its defence. Still, with a Metacritic rating of 72 and a price on Steam of $5, I can’t recommend this game enough to people who want to feel like a spy without feeling like a unstoppable agent of death.

In Perspective The PlayStation 4

The PlayStation 4

What you've heard

NEXT GEN BITCHES! The PlayStation 4 is here and it raises the bar on gaming for everyone. We’re going to see performance beyond our wildest dreams and graphics that are going to make movie CGI look like claymation. More importantly, it’s going to make the current gen system and the Wii U obsolete as its massive processing power processes circles around them. This is the gen revolution baby, and the future is NOW! Well I mean the future is holiday 2013, not NOW now, but you get what I’m saying ...

Except...

This is going to be a little tech heavy, but the PS4 doesn’t really have a lot going on under the hood. As a rule when a presentation has more buzz words in it than specs it’s a bad sign, and we didn’t even get to see what type of RAM the PS4 had until after the conference. And while the 8GB of GDDR5 RAM is easily the most impressive feature of the new system, it’s not enough to take away from the shortcomings. Let’s start with the CPU, which is an AMD APU with 8 cores. This isn’t a custom chip, it’s based on the Jaguar architecture that’s been around for over 2 years, so it’s not going to break any new ground for AMD. In fact the eight cores based on AMD’s Jaguar architecture are unlikely to be as fast as AMD’s current high end chips based on the Piledriver architecture, which lag significantly behind the i5 and i7 offerings from Intel. This is because the Jaguar isn’t even a desktop architecture; it was intended for use in low power devices like laptops. On the bright side, heat generation shouldn’t be a problem, which means they’ll likely turn up the clock speed a little.

The choice of a slower, 8 core system is Sony’s biggest miss this generation. Like the cell processing of the PS3, notoriously hated by developers for being difficult to work with, Sony is once again putting the onus on the game designers to use extreme hyper threading to take advantage of the 8 core set up. This could be devastating if Microsoft goes with a faster chip in their upcoming system. The Wii U has 3 processing cores which means if MS sticks to 2 or 4 cores in the new Xbox, developers will continue to do what they do today; write code for the the Wii U and Xbox and never bother to optimize it to take advantage of the PS3’s cell processing. This undermines any benefit Sony gained by going with a x86 processor this time around, a baffling move that is going to have a huge backlash in the community. For anyone who doesn't follow Sony, they are a bit nuts when it comes to pirating. They tried to lock up someone who hacked the PS3 and invented the DRM rootkit, and the community responded by taking down PlayStation network and all Sony owned MMOs for 63 days. Now the PS4 will release with a chip so fully understood that it almost guarantees a day one hack.

The GPU is what’s really going to make or break the PS4, and the numbers here are less than encouraging. The 1.84 TFLOPS promised at the conference is an impressive number, but not even close to what I would expect from a custom rig. By contrast a 7970 can push 4.3 TFLOPS in the much less friendly PC architecture. It doesn't get any better when you break down the details; Sony said the GPU would support 18 composite units, a useless figure without also telling us what architecture it’s going to be based on, but that in itself tells a story. If this was a new generation of chip, they would have been showing that off. So it’s safe to assume this means the same 64 stream processors, 4 texture units, and 1 render unit per composite of the current line of AMD chips, given us a total of 1152 stream processors, 72 texture, and 18 ROPs. This puts it more in line with the 7800 series, and although the numbers don't align perfectly with anything currently on the market, its closest match for architecture and Tflops is the 7850. Amazon has them for around $200. This is bad news for 4k gaming. Sony has said the system officially supports it, but based on these numbers ... I don’t see how. Frame rates on the 7850 running even 2560 x 1600 are generally horrendous.

So what’s the deal?
The PS4 is a much better system than the PS3, and for a lot of people that’s all that matters. When you look at the numbers above, it’s clear the PS4 doesn’t even hold a candle to a custom PC, but $1000-plus gaming rigs are simply out of the picture for a lot of gamers. So we have a system that’s better than what they currently have and better then what they could get for the money elsewhere. The media is focusing on that while ignoring the simple fact that it’s just not enough. When the PS3 and Xbox came out they weren’t mid ranged PCs at a decent price - they were better than any PC money could buy. Developers saw this, and took advantage of the new options open to them. They created games that couldn’t be played anywhere else, and even the hardcore PC enthusiast was given the choice; buy a gaming system or miss out on the best games. This time around, most games shown as “next gen” are being released on the current gen systems as well, and it’s only going to be a few years until you can buy a PC in the $500 range that outperforms the PS4. Without a gimmick the PS4 doesn’t do a lot for the average gamer that they can’t do with current gen tech, and when it comes to gimmicks, MS and Nintendo have always have Sony beat.

Sony's stock took a hit after the announcement and Nintendo's went up, and for good reason. For 2 years Nintendo has been saying "next gen" isn't even a thing, and the next irritation of systems will need to focus on social connection, player experience, and what they can do outside of gaming. They then released a disappointingly under-powered system that did just that. Sony on the other hand spent 2 years telling us how the only thing that will matter in next gen is pushing the envelope in teams of power and performance. Then they released a disappointingly under-powered system that focused on social connection, player experience, and what it can do outside of gaming.

In Perspective - Microsoft's New x-box

What you've heard 

Another victory for the internet! An e-mail went out today from the higher ups in Microsoft to the low downs that detailed how Microsoft’s vision for the next Xbox includes players being able to do “everything they would expect to do”, including playing single player games, while the system is not connected to the internet. We did it! After weeks of watching the reaction to the news, Microsoft has made the changes to the system we are asking for! They know that without the support of the internet, the system will fail.

Except

What changes? It seems everyone is using this e-mail to prove that changes were made based off the following logic: it’s never a company’s policy to just e-mail something saying “everything is still like we said it was” so this is clearly an e-mail communicating an update or change. The problem with that logic is that it’s

· wrong
· flawed
· stupid

Companies that are in the media spotlight send out “on course” reminders all the time when the media picks up a story that isn’t true (or is true but not public yet). They need to; since they generally communicate nothing to the lower level employees, many will take what they hear in the media as gospel and go on repeating it to people, who assume they are more informed because they work for the company. It’s the circle of bullshit; the media misinforms “experts” who repeat the misinformation to other media outlets who misinform other experts.

Not telling low level employees anything about anything is the policy that you really should be looking at here. Anyone who worked at McDonalds can tell you that you find out about the price change or the new sandwich the day it goes live and there is never an e-mail to prepare the masses for the high level change they have no say in. Microsoft has no reason to tell anyone outside of the design team anything about the new Xbox, and this e-mail isn’t a clarification - it’s the first any of these employees have heard about it. It was only sent to counter the negative press they are getting based on wrong information.

Another good question is why would they lie? If this really was a reaction to customer feedback, why hide it in an e-mail saying it’s always been the intention? Why not use this to showcase how “in touch” with the internet you are, and say “we love our customer so much, we are changing this to benefit them!”. There is no negative in that; I’m surprised they didn’t do it even if it isn’t true.

Still not convinced? Consider this. The Xbox press conference is in less than 20 days, and the system has been in development for (best guess) 5 to 8 years. Do you really think they were able to make low level software (and likely hardware) changes to the system to showcase offline features in less than a month? Do you think they are willing to go to that press conference with anything other than a build they have tested, retested, and mega-tested to ensure it is perfect? Hell, the footage we are going to see was likely pre-recorded long before the "always on" issue hit the internet.

So what’s the deal?

Operation Rainfall was an online petition that brought 3 extremely popular and successful JRPGs to the West and is heralded as one of the biggest victories of the internet gaming community. It’s a classic underdog story and a fantastic example of people coming together to get things done, and it's also completely made up. In an interview, the publisher of “XenoBlade”, the first game in Operation Rainfall said he had no idea what Operation Rainfall was, and the lead designer admitted he only heard of the Operation after the localization began and it was never mentioned in the decision to bring the game to the West. This was mirrored with the two other Operation Rainfall games, with developers and publishers alike saying it was great to hear they had such a dedicated fan base, but the decisions to port that games were made at high level and had nothing to do with anything other than lines on a graph. Yet the very same websites that did the interviews that confirmed Operation Rainfall had nothing to do with the release of these games ran stories about the role the fan based played in getting them published.

We all love a underdog story, especially one that makes us feel empowered and important. That’s what happened with Operation Rainfall and it’s what happened with the Xbox. The internet is taking credit for changing the mind of a multi-billion dollar behemoth and we are eating it up because we want it to be true. But everyone knows you can’t listen to the internet. Big business tried with "Serenity" and again with "Scott Pilgrim" and learned its lesson. Design things for the masses and try to sell them to the internet, but don’t ever design things for the internet and try and sell them to the masses. The masses aren’t interested, and the internet isn't going to pay for them when you’re finished. The internet is the home of the vocal minority, and the vocal minority is never your key demographic.

Should be Playing - Dragon Age Origins

BioWare was, at one time, the most important name in nerd gaming. It was them and the now defunct (and then refunct via Kickstarter) Black Isles Studio that were responsible from turning all your table top fantasies into something you could play on a computer screen. The Gold Box D&D games from the early 90s had shown us the possibility, taking pre-written stories like Pool of Radiance and The Dark Queen and making serviceable games out of them, but it wasn’t until 1998 that BioWare showed us something completely new. They released a game focused not on game play but instead on story. You were not playing something that had already been written, but instead forged a path for yourself in a game world that reacted, albeit in a limited way, to the choices you made for the character you were playing. Gamers everywhere started to understand that this was the table top drug that video games could not deliver, and “Baldur’s Gate” became one of the best selling games of the decade. BioWare's next games; Baldur’s Gate 2, Neverwinter Nights, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic were enigmas in the industry. Gameplay was not evolving, instead the games focused on more and more ways to make the player matter. BioWare wanted to make games that told stories, and in every possible way put you the player at the center. This was a fantastic thing back in the time when people wanted more from a video game than flashy graphics and a few one liners, but by 2003 the simple minded FPS was dominating and people were no longer interested in turn based experiences no matter how fantastic the story. BioWare had lost the ability to make games that people were willing to play. It took 5 years, but they reacted on two fronts, first making a FPS that was driven by story (Mass Effect in 2007) and then by releasing an epic, old school RPG with a next gen coat of paint as Dragon’s Age in 2009.

Dragon Age is a refinement in storytelling. It forgoes the idea of good and evil and instead forces players to examine the context of their actions within the game world they are a part of, creating a moral dilemma that almost always boils down to picking what you think the lesser of two evils is. Do you forgive the power hungry order summoning daemons, or kill hundreds of innocents to keep them down? The game does everything it can to prevent you from simply choosing to be the “good guy” or the “bad guy” at the start and mindlessly doing what fits that paradigm. This system is one of the primary inspirations for Raven LARP, where I’m always trying to present a game world where doing the right thing is incompatible with doing the good thing. Complementing this is an incredible cast of voice actors and a diverse cast of characters, each with their own back story, plot quest, and unique romance options with the PC (regardless of gender; any character that is a romance option transcends the concept of gender preference).

Game play is a throwback to an era before everything needed to appeal to a mass market. Combat is slow, difficult, and at times uninteresting, but these are sacrifices made in the name of the complexity and polish like you would find in table top systems. There are dozens of puzzles you might miss if you are not paying attention, and you could reach the end of the game with hours of content unexplored without even knowing you looked anything over. It feels like and plays like the games you grew up with, while looking like the games of today.

To anyone who wants to remember what games were like before the big 3 publishers started pushing for mass appeal clones every year, I can’t recommend going back to Dragon Age enough. It’s a bittersweet reminder of how much the industry has changed, and in my option, how much we as gamers have lost.