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New Xbox Info

611 views 26 replies 15 participants last post by  DarkWolf 
#1 ·
Next Xbox Details Revealed!

March 9, 2005, San Francisco, Calif.—Today at the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC), Microsoft® announced the first details about its next-generation Xbox® video game system. Hardware, software, and services are being fused to power enhanced gaming and entertainment experiences.

Microsoft Corporate Vice President and Chief XNA™ Architect J Allard further outlined the company’s vision for the future of entertainment, citing the emergence of an “HD Era” in video games, fueled by consumer demand for experiences that are always connected, always personalized, and always in high-definition.

“In the HD Era, the platform is bigger than the processor,” Allard said. “New technology and emerging consumer forces will come together to enable the rock stars of game development to shake up the old establishment and redefine entertainment as we know it.”

Building on 10 years of innovation with the DirectX® API, the Microsoft Windows® and Xbox platforms will enable ground-breaking game experiences in the HD Era. To show what this will mean for gamers, Allard shared the first details about the Next-Generation Xbox Guide. Persistent across all games and media experiences, the Guide is an entertainment gateway that instantly connects players to games, friends, and digital media.

Features of the Next-Generation Xbox Guide include:

Gamer Cards: These cards will give gamers a quick look at key Xbox Live™ information. They will help players instantly connect with people that have similar skills, interests, and lifestyles.
Marketplace: Browse-able by game, genre, and a number of other ways, the Marketplace will provide a one-stop shop for consumers to acquire episodic content, new game levels, maps, weapons, vehicles, skins, and community-created content.
Micro Transactions: Breaking down barriers of small-ticket online commerce, micro-transactions will allow developers and the gaming community to charge as little as they like for content they create and publish on the Marketplace. Imagine players slapping down $.99 to buy a one-of-a-kind, fully tricked-out racing car to be the envy of all their buddies.
Custom Playlists: This feature eliminates the need for developers to support custom music in games. The guide instantly connects players to their music, so they can listen to their own tracks while playing all their favorite next-generation Xbox games.
Typifying the HD Era gaming experience, the Next-Generation Xbox Guide requires hardware designed with software in mind. System-level features of the Guide, such as custom playlists, the Xbox Live Friends list, and voice chat, are enabled at the chip level, liberating developers to focus on creating games, not developing for technical certification requirements.

To support consumer demands for the HD Era, the next-generation Xbox is designed around key principles that let developers maximize real performance, using concepts they are already familiar with. The next-generation Xbox hardware design principles include the following:

A well-balanced system that will deliver more than a teraflop of targeted computing performance.
A multicore processor architecture, co-developed with IBM Corp., that provides developer “headroom” and flexibility.
A custom-designed graphics processor, co-developed with ATI Technologies Inc., designed for HD Era games and entertainment applications.
In addition, familiar software technologies (such as DirectX, PIX, XACT, and the recently announced XNA Studio) and an integrated team-based development environment tailored for game production complement the new hardware. The goal is to help game developers unlock increasingly powerful and complex silicon.

The HD Era gaming platform will strike an elegant balance of hardware, software, and services to power the new experiences that consumers demand. Gaming and entertainment features, such as the Next-Generation Xbox Guide, represent a shift toward more immersive and integrated consumer experiences. This shift will be further illustrated by:

A significant leap to high-definition graphics, in which character movements and expressions are intensely vibrant and nearly indiscernible from real life,
Multichannel, positional audio fidelity so clear and precise that players will be able to hear the faintest enemy footsteps sneaking up behind them,
Richer online communications, and
An abundance of on-demand game console content.
 
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#4 ·
Nintendo followed up with news of their own saying the next Nintendo console (codenamed Revolution), will be able to connect to wireless networks. Sounds like both companies are waiting until the Electronic Enterntainment Expo in May to give out the details.
 
#6 ·
The hdd is pretty pointless if you still have to have a memory card to take your game saves to someone else's xbox. PS2 seemed to do alright without a hdd for most of it's life. Even to the point that the new revised ps2 has no hdd again. Gamecube is doing as well as xbox in america, and better overseas... no hdd.

Their big selling point was "you can copy games to the hdd, and play from there, creating almost no load time" ... but then they go and stick in an 8gig drive... effectively limiting it to mild cd ripping use for using your own music in games, and a fast memory card. You have to modify it, and therefore void your warranty, to put in a larger hdd, to be able to actually experience the promise of playing games from the hdd. No one in their right mind is going to spend an hour or so copying a game off to the hdd, only to delete it a few hours later when they want to play something else, so they can have room to copy it to the hdd. But you put a 120+ gig drive in there, and room for a number of games that you can switch between at your leisure... that's pretty sweet.
 
#7 ·
DarkWolf said:
The hdd is pretty pointless if you still have to have a memory card to take your game saves to someone else's xbox. PS2 seemed to do alright without a hdd for most of it's life. Even to the point that the new revised ps2 has no hdd again. Gamecube is doing as well as xbox in america, and better overseas... no hdd.

Their big selling point was "you can copy games to the hdd, and play from there, creating almost no load time" ... but then they go and stick in an 8gig drive... effectively limiting it to mild cd ripping use for using your own music in games, and a fast memory card. You have to modify it, and therefore void your warranty, to put in a larger hdd, to be able to actually experience the promise of playing games from the hdd. No one in their right mind is going to spend an hour or so copying a game off to the hdd, only to delete it a few hours later when they want to play something else, so they can have room to copy it to the hdd. But you put a 120+ gig drive in there, and room for a number of games that you can switch between at your leisure... that's pretty sweet.
you do realize that it takes like 5-8 minutes to copy an entire game onto the hard drive, right? you said something like it taking an hour or something... that is very unrealistic. and yes, 8 gigs is way too small, which is why i think they should put an 80 gig or 120gig in the next one. if they did that, it would be leet.
 
#8 ·
Have you ever actually copied a dvd before? 5-8 minutes would be a blessing. Unless the xbox's dvd is somehow faster than the 16x dvd readers (which I highly doubt, considering it's the same type of ide dvd rom you can go to best buy and pick up off the shelf).

30 minutes to 1 hour is the average copy time for dvd's, depending on whether it's 4.5 or 9 gigs. I've seen enough xbox rips to know that most are 4.5 gigs, and some have to be stripped of features (like fmv's) to squeeze them into 4.5 gigs.
 
#13 ·
I don't ever remember Microsoft making "you can copy games to the hard drive" a selling point. And for me having a hard drive was very convenient for game saves. If you're the kinda person that doesn't give a shit about transferring saves to another xbox it's great. I hadn't owned a single memory card for my xbox until I bought Action Replay which happened to come with one.

And as far as console sales compared to Xbox and PS2, Gamecube is NOT doing "well." For some reason they think they can just head the opposite direction and completely ignore online gaming and still be big competitors. Of course they have a few good games, but as far as I know, Gamecube is the least wanted system....Mostly because people associate Nintendo with kiddie games and they completely ignore the online gaming revolution.
 
#14 ·
Revolution? Please. Online console gaming is a novelty at this stage. Very few games are really taking advantage of the medium. The next gen consoles is when we'll see the "revolution" start taking off, as all the consoles will be online capable. Totally different story on PC, where developers have really embraced online gaming.

Check the sales for Gamecube, they're only slightly behind Xbox here in the states, and well ahead of Xbox overseas. PS2 is by and far ahead of both.

Gamecube may still be seen as "kiddie" by people who waste their money on whatever game gets the most hype prior to it's release. But by people who actually enjoy playing a good game, Gamecube has a lot to offer. I have all three systems, and I prefer my Gamecube over the other two. I got a PS2 for Final Fantasy, and Gran Turismo. I've picked up a couple other games, but by and large I can either get the same games on Gamecube, or the PS2 exclusives just aren't that interesting to warrant a purchase. XBox only cost me $30 so I figure one of these days I'll mod it and have some fun with that... but I haven't turned that system on in 6 months.
 
#15 ·
I never said that I hated Gamecube. I have all three systems as well, and I don't really give a shit if games are "kiddie". I'm just saying thats what most people think. Hell...the last gamecube game I played was Paper Mario 2....I'll definitely be getting the new Zelda. However if there is a game that is available on all consoles or PS2 and Xbox, you can bet that I get it for Xbox before anything else.

But how can you compare online console gaming when gamecube doesn't even have online? Online gaming is really starting to take off on Xbox. I mean they reached 1 million users on Live faster than even AOL. I guess you kinda have to be one of the people addicted to it to understand it. It's really not some shitty subpar online gaming experience, and of course computers will always be dubbed better cause everything will always be upgradable and customizable.
 
#17 ·
I never suggested you hated Gamecube. But I do contend that console gaming online does not come close to being what it could be. It's not that PC's are customizable... if anything, that takes away from PC gaming, as developers always have to produce for the lowest common denominator. Right now, console online gaming is largely deathmatch style gameplay. It's hard to get that wrong. MMOG's (wether rpg or some other genre) are virtually non-existant, save for FFXI and Everquest Online Adventures. Strategy games online are virtually non-existant. Flight Sim's/Aerial Combat Sims? No. FPS's and a small selection of sports/racing games is about the extent of console online gaming.

Personally I think Nintendo was smart for producing the network adapter for people that really wanted it, but not spending any funds on developing an online network for Gamecube. Sony went the same route. Why? Because they both knew that the majority of the console market, developers and players, aren't going to embrace online gaming due to the vast majority of housholds still being on dial-up, and thus unable to play games online, even if they wanted to. The majority of households are still on dial-up, but more and more people are switching to broadband, which is why the next gen consoles are all going to be ready for online gaming. The market is becoming viable. Microsoft kind of jumped the gun in anticipating that everyone would embrace online gaming in droves, just because they built an ethernet port on their box. Hell, it even took them nearly 2 years after it's launch to finally get Live going, and they were supposedly at launch going to be all about online gaming. Maybe time will prove that Microsoft, although they jumped the gun, they did greatly help make online console gaming a reality.

I'll go for the Gamecube version of a game, over the PS2 version because load times are much faster, and graphics tend to look better unless it was developed for PS2 first (lowest common denominator, ie: least powerful system), and simply ported to Gamecube and Xbox, at which point it looks the same on either system. And I won't get the Xbox version, simply because I hate the contoller design.
 
#19 ·
I hated the first Xbox controller design, but I love the new "S" design. PS2 used to be my favorite, but now it feels kinda cheap and the analog sticks don't move as nicely. I guess I just love the Xbox controller because its kinda like a nice mixture based mostly off the Dreamcast controller. Oh poooor Dreamcast.
 
#20 ·
DarkWolf said:
Have you ever actually copied a dvd before? 5-8 minutes would be a blessing. Unless the xbox's dvd is somehow faster than the 16x dvd readers (which I highly doubt, considering it's the same type of ide dvd rom you can go to best buy and pick up off the shelf).

30 minutes to 1 hour is the average copy time for dvd's, depending on whether it's 4.5 or 9 gigs. I've seen enough xbox rips to know that most are 4.5 gigs, and some have to be stripped of features (like fmv's) to squeeze them into 4.5 gigs.
hmm
my 16x DVD player tranfers 22meg per second.... which is 1.32 gig per minute... shouldnt take mroe then a 8-10 min to move over a 8.7 gig game at 16x.
 
#23 ·
I think im just going to wait for the new xbox cuz of the HD shit it is going to come with or get a modded xbox right now and pwn you halo2 nerds.
 
#24 ·
White_lightning said:
hmm
my 16x DVD player tranfers 22meg per second.... which is 1.32 gig per minute... shouldnt take mroe then a 8-10 min to move over a 8.7 gig game at 16x.
That's a great theory. In practice a 16x dvd player will rip around 5 - 8x. So already you're at half speed, at best. Next, you factor in that the Xbox DVD player isn't 16x. I know they started with 4x, but not sure if they've upgraded to 8x since launch. Wouldn't surprise me if they're still running 4x drives though.

capngizmo said:
you cant beat XBOX live, it's the only way to game.See you online
Uh huh. I guess you're right, if all you ever want to play are FPS's, and a sparse selection of racing/sports games.
 
#25 ·
DarkWolf said:
The hdd is pretty pointless if you still have to have a memory card to take your game saves to someone else's xbox. PS2 seemed to do alright without a hdd for most of it's life. Even to the point that the new revised ps2 has no hdd again. Gamecube is doing as well as xbox in america, and better overseas... no hdd.
Hdd pointless? I love the hdd feature. I don't own a memory card as I don't save games to other people xboxes. The best part about having a hdd is you don't have to buy additional equipment like memory cards to store games.
 
#26 ·
DarkWolf said:
Uh huh. I guess you're right, if all you ever want to play are FPS's, and a sparse selection of racing/sports games.
i agree with that i got XBL abck when i used to play UT and Mech Assault all day everyday but once i grew out of thoes i just canceld my subscription, i bought Sega GT online for it and it totaly sucked balls as did PG2 because for some reason people cant just race without having to intentionaly spin everyone all the time. XBL is a total waste of money and time unless you love Halo 2 or one of the other FPS games
 
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