The Big Bad Console Thread - Sway your Station with an Xboner !

I think what Szlia is saying is that no one at Nintendo is capable of coming up with new ideas, That Miyamoto is the only creative force behind their IP's and he did not properly cultivate a creative legacy.

I remember opening my NES Deluxe on Christmas morning and playing Mario and Duckhunt for days, hell i even spent days trying to get ROB the damn robot to play Gryromite. The problem is that gaming "grew up", and Nintendo hasn't. Im 37 years old, playing another Mario or DK platformer type game that just hasnt seemed to change much in 30 years just does not appeal to me at all. I can see that they are good games i guess, but i grew out of them. I would never fault anyone for loving their type of game, but my tastes have completely changed since 1986 or whenever the NES came out, Nintendo's hasn't.

I think the biggest anecdotal evidence of the severity of Nintendo's problems is judging the reactions of my 9 and 4 year olds. They had a Wii, but have zero interest in the Wii U. I tried to get the 9 year old interested in it, and he said zero ppl at school even talk about it, and just went back to playing Minecraft with his buddies on XBL... Gaming has changed, but Nintendo hasnt. (Actually think this is a larger problem with Japanese devs, seems all the ppl in charge there are ancient by western developer standards.

Big Phoenix_sl said:

What creativity? Nintendo is nothing but sequels over and over.

Click to expand...

True recently - but only a handful of years back they were inventing new titles frequently - N64 era was their third major system (or maybe even further down the line? I started with consoles late...) and was the source of a ton of innovative titles. Some of which while sharing a name were innovative besides their title.

Yes, since N64 they've done alot of rehashes - but that's 1 full system cycle and one year of WiiU - their history is quite creative as a whole but as stated Miyamoto as he's aged hasn't been nearly as innovative with catching up new ideas to keep up with tech.

Of course the sales of Wii U are bad, there weren't any meaningful games released in that Quarter. If you have actually played a game on it, you realize it's a great system (outside of the slowness of the UI, which has since been fixed) and the Gamepad is awesome and offers something no existing console can - playing Monster Hunter 3 and Earthbound on the gamepad while watching baseball/basketball games has been great. Personally I only bought it to play a Xenoblade sequel and the Twilight Princess sequel.

Their 2 major issues have been:

1) Not enough First party games coming out, often enough. Really since launch only Monster Hunter 3 and Pikmin 3 have been worthwhile for most gamers.

They freed up the launch window for 3rd Parties, because 3rd parties always complain they can't compete with Nintendo first party games in the same release window. But this was a terrible idea because most of the 3rd Party games during that launch window were just ports or re-hashes of the usual EA/Activision crap that had just released for PS3/X360 - those devs aren't going to develop something new for a 3rd console - especially when their efforts are already focused on developing games for PS4/X1.

Now all their First party games aren't ready in time to fill that gap, and some of the other long awaited 3rd party games like Rayman have been delayed. It was a huge mistake to launch without First party games ready to go.

It's even more crazy because the same mistake has been made countless times now. The PS3 didn't have jack for games for a year, and by the look of the launch lineup for the PS4/XB1, neither will they outside of 1 or 2 games.

Maybe they look at the 3DS and figure they can pull the same thing off again a year later. For 6 months starting in October, there will be at least 1 great game coming out every month for the Wii U - maybe longer depending on when they nail down dates for Mario Kart and Project X. It's risky, but at this point the only thing that is going to "save" the system is the games - in the end, even if it's a year late - Wii U is still the only console you can play new Zelda, Smash Bros, Mario Kart, and Monolith games. Nintendo has $5 billion USD in the bank and they make 100% profit off their games, so even if the Wii U is a Gamecube level failure, it won't force them out of the hardware business or stop them from releasing Wii U games.

2) Marketing - console name and recognition

There hasn't really been any, mostly because Nintendo has said they don't want to ramp it up until there are more actual games to play. There will probably be a marketing blitz starting in October when the games start hitting.

The biggest issue though with the marketing is that the majority of people probably think the Wii U is just the gamepad that is an add-on for the Wii. Bad choice of name, and the actual console itself isn't visually different enough from the Wii to make casual shoppers realize it's a new machine.

Carmack: Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are 'essentially the same'

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/1...y_the_same.php

In his annual keynote for QuakeCon, John Carmack wrote off the triple-A industry's obsession with high-end graphics, while also deeming the next-generation consoles Xbox One and PlayStation 4 "essentially the same." "I haven't done really rigorous benchmarking [but] they're very close and they're both very good," Carmack told QuakeCon attendees, also noting that Sony had "made huge strides" in the last generation, especially regarding tools for developers.

"It's almost amazing how close they are in capabilities, how common they are," Carmack continued. He described the public reaction to initial fears regarding Xbox One's proposed preowned games lockdown and always-on Kinect 2.0 as "a bit on the side of a witch hunt," and that posterity would look upon these technologies differently.

"The future is obvious right there, and it will be good for us in general," said Carmack, who also described technologies such as Google Glass, while being controversial today, would be a "net positive. A lot of these things are inevitable."

Overall, the Kinect drew perhaps the sharpest crack in the course of Carmack's keynote, in which he described the Microsoft peripheral as "sort of like a zero-button mouse with a lot of latency.""Kinect still has some fundamental limitations with the latency and framerate... It's fundamentally a poor interaction."

Carmack also expressed disappointment that because modern computer systems are so vast, there is no way to truly master a platform. "No one person has the entire capabilities of one of these modern platforms," he said, contrasting with older hardware the entire documentation for which could be contained in a manual. Instead, the "crystal jewel of perfection" of modern platforms was handled by specialists for every facet. It might have a bit of something to do with why, even as the industry reaches for photorealism with its graphics, innovation is harder to come by.

"Priorities are out of whack," Carmack said. He posed a scenario where a developer could take five minutes of in-game play, and pass it through top-of-the-line offline rendering. Would play experience improve? "Not by much."

QuakeCon runs this weekend in Dallas, Texas. Two Twitch.tv livestreams have been set up to cover both matches and panels. You can view the entire schedule or learn more about the event here.

This could turn it around for MS?

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/08/...-one-gpu-boost

From the article_sl said:

Following recent rumors about changes to Xbox One hardware, Microsoft confirmed today that the clock speed of Xbox One has been increased. Speaking on Major Nelson's podcast, Xbox One chief product officer Marc Whitten explained that as the system approaches launch, Microsoft has made a few changes to finalize internal specs.

"This is the time when we've gone from the theory of how the hardware works - what we think the yield is going to look like, what is the thermal envelope, how do things come together - to actually having it in our hands," Whitten explained. "That's the time when you really start tweaking the knobs. Either your theory was dead on or you were too conservative or you were a little too aggressive. And an example of that is we've tweaked up the clock speed on our GPU, from 800 MHz to 853 MHz. Just an example of how you really start landing the program as you get closer to launch."

Whitten also confirmed that Xbox One's graphics driver has been changed, explaining, "This is the time where developers have the final dev kits in their hands and are really working closely with us on how things have come together. Since E3, an example is we've dropped in what we internally call our 'mono driver.' It's our graphics driver that really is 100% optimized for the Xbox One hardware."

"It's a super exciting time," Whitten said. "This is the time when you've gone from all of these specs and all of these arguments over the last several years to having the product, and really starting to try it internally. We're running our internal beta and using it at home and starting to see the product really come together."


Whitten also discussed Microsoft's recent changes to indie publishing, reiterating that more details will be coming at Gamescom in Germany (likely during Microsoft's Xbox One showcase on August 20th).

"The team is working really hard," Whitten concluded. "The team is so passionate about shipping a great product so that people have a great experience come this fall. We're just very, very focused on continuing to use the beta, take feedback, really refine the experience, work with our content partners. Every day it's about 'how do we make Xbox One better today?'"

Xbox One is currently scheduled to launch in November for $499 / ?429 / ?499 / AU$599. The console is still available for pre-order, though Day One editions are currently sold out at most retailers.

Click to expand...

PS4's GPU still has 50% more Compute Units anddoublethe ROPS and is rated at about 1.84 tflops + has quite a few customizations to make it better. All that does is push the Xbone's GPU up to 1.3 tflops and it's still a much worse GPU all around.

Any news is good news...

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/a...-xbox-one.aspx

internal hardware beta 3 months before launch seems a bit bizarre especially if they are tweaking clock rates so late (heat). By comparison, xbox 360 was announced april 2005, launch date set on Sept 2005, launched nov 22nd 2005. Mass production began in August 2005, but they launched only with 300k units in NA and sold around 2.5m by the end of the first 3 months worldwide.

spronk_sl said:

internal hardware beta 3 months before launch seems a bit bizarre especially if they are tweaking clock rates so late (heat).

Click to expand...

Yup. I would anticipate very high failure rates.

Well, considering the previous systems fail rate that they apparently greenlighted before how is them pressing their luck in such regards surprising? I was reading an article that said 41% of people that own a 360 had at least one RROD - and they managed that while having the best selling system, so clearly wasn't a huge consumer concern last time around. (Note: Saying consumers in general - the fail rate was why I said screw 360 anymore personally - besides physical damage from a cat, no real fails on PS3's and had them nearly 4x the time now running two for the wife and I (8 years between both) versus 2 years total for my two 360's before each went kaput - and every instance was a brand new unit for all 4 units in my example)

Eurogamer did a nice write up on what Microsoft plans on doing to avoid the RRoD.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/di...cool-and-quiet

With the xbone's big ass 140mm coolingfan heatsink I doubt a 53 megahertz oc on the gpu is going to lead to mass rrods =P.

Regardless, I'm still gonna wait until i see some side by side reviews of cross platform games (cod& battlefield) before i slap down any cash for one system or the other.

Isn't the worry this time that their hardware will just straight up fail, not overheating issues?

RROD was due to overheating. I just thought with the yield problems the story this time around is plain ol failure or the hardware just never worked in the first place.

Laedrun_sl said:

With the xbone's big ass 140mm coolingfan heatsink I doubt a 53 megahertz oc on the gpu is going to lead to mass rrods =P.

Regardless, I'm still gonna wait until i see some side by side reviews of cross platform games (cod& battlefield) before i slap down any cash for one system or the other.

Click to expand...

I've seen OC create bluescreens on PCs without overheating, I'd be leery on jumping on overheating being the only potential foil to cause a "failure" of some sort without RRODing. If you keep having games lock up or crash on you because of a voltage drought or whatever else the end experience is the same as a RROD that's a full on failure.

Killzone:sf tech document about lighting models /moan

http://www.guerrilla-games.com/prese...hadow_Fall.pdf