I watched the reveal of Microsoft's next-generation gaming console now officially named "Xbox One" hoping that Microsoft will make me and the potential new console buyers convinced to buy this new console. But hearing that console name alone already leaves a negative impression. Why call it "One" you say? Maybe it's because this is an all-in-one console... well whatever, it should have been called "720" or "Next" which both makes more sense. And, uhh the intro of the reveal doesn't leave a gaming impression, it's more like a new cellphone reveal.
Like the previous first version consoles released, Xbox One is a huge console, then add an even bigger-than-the-old-one Kinect 2, you will have a even more bulky console set-up. With all that bulkiness, Xbox One is a powerful console, but still falls short from PC when it comes to performance.
Kinect 2 is going to be a great peripheral if it will work well. Games that uses the Kinect on Xbox 360 are mostly dancing games and some non-dancing games doesn't work well. I only hope that this Kinect 2 will work even better because the developers now have the experience to innovate the game using the peripheral. Oh yeah you can use this to control the console without using a controller by using voice/gesture commands.
So what does Xbox One do? Well it's for gaming of course but with "new" features like surfing the net, listening to music, watching movies and TV, yes you read it right, TV, for television. It seems like Microsoft want to make a set-top TV box like the one Apple made... and why would they do that when we already have cable, or YouTube to watch some shows or clips? Well Xbox One's features gets worse from here.
Let's talk about the gaming side of the console. Obviously, you can play games on it but you have to mandatory install the game, after installing the game, you can play that game without using the game disc. While this is a great feature, but did they consider that the 500GB hard drive space that One have will get full eventually with all that digital downloads that the user will install in it, yes they have cloud storage but it's not enough. Ok, now that you don't need the disc to play the game, the first thing we'll think up next is to share the game to our friends right? Sorry, that won't happen because Microsoft have a 2nd hand user rule and wants your friend to pay in order to play the game that you shared to him/her. This is a major "WTF" to gamers.
On the plus side is that Xbox One will have 15 exclusive games. The console is not always online but it requires to be online once in every 24 hours for background patches and upgrades (I'll say that this is to monitor the user's actions if he/she did something to the console like hacking it)
Now back to the reveal impression, all they discussed here are about all TV, Halo TV series, and sports and less on gaming. It lacks tech demos or actual Xbox One gameplay demonstration, all they shown here are trailers and work-in-progress preview of some games from EA and Call of Duty: Ghosts, this leaves the entire Xbox fanbase and even me (not an Xbox fan) disappointed. Oh yeah, Kinect 2 do some creepy stuff according to some people, they say that Kinect 2 watches your every move.
The reveal was disappointing, I hope Microsoft to bounce back at E3. But if these issues are still present in that big black box in E3, this marks the end for Microsoft in gaming department.
Here's a short funny version of Xbox One reveal
No comments:
Post a Comment