But what do they offer that is different?

Last week, I took a look at the top PS4 features.  Now it’s time to take a look at the Top Xbox One Features.

• Controller: Impulse triggers – 4 motors inside the Xbox One controller allow developers to give feedback to your fingertips like never before.  Each motor can be programmed to respond in different ways depending on the feedback of what is happening in game.  Example: Racing  - Driving over various terrain will give corresponding feedback to the controller.  Driving over gravel will vibrate differently than driving over grass or asphalt.  FPS games would let you ‘feel’ different weapons.  If you empty the chamber, it will feel differently than when you are shooting a high powered rifle. And shooting a rifle will feel unique compared with firing a rocket launcher for example.  Each motor is controlled separately, which allows developers to cue movement in only the parts of the controller they wish to use.

• Smart Match Matchmaking:  This system allows players to search for multiplayer matches across Xbox Live. Players can search for matches based on skill, age, languages, DLC etc.

• Reputation System Revamped:  Smart matchmaking will filter the good players from the bad players.  Anytime players are reported, or muted by fellow players – Xbox is evaluating their interactions.  A player who is regularly misbehaving – or who is commonly reported or muted will lose reputation points and will be thrown in multiplayer matches with players who play similarly

• Cloud Power: The cloud is going to offer Microsoft a number of different features.  Developers can push out updates and new achievements with no delay.  Games can be updated in real-time (Example: Sports games that use real player stats could be updated as games are played in real life.)  Forza has shown that the Xbox AI can learn and adapt to human behavior. Microsoft is also giving all developers and publishers access to these servers at a very low rate.  That most games should be on dedicated servers. (See Xbox One vs PS4 Cloud)

• Devkit: Every Xbox One will also double as a developer kit.  This will give indies an opportunity to work with Xbox One, Windows 8, Kinect, the cloud, as well as apps.

• Kinect 2.0:

1) All new voice algorithms allow for natural voice communications.  Example: “Show me movies with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.”.  If you take advantage of the HDMI in with your TV box, you can also turn on your TV and control the volume with the sound of your voice without ever picking up the remote.2) Motion capture upgraded from original Kinect.  The Kinect 2.0 can see in the dark, and can be used while you are on the couch.  It can now track facial gestures, finger movements, weight balance, and more.

 VGN: Video Games and News

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Sources:

Destructoid Xbox One Preview 

VGN: Video Games and News

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Sources:
PS4 feeds into Xbox One
Playing PS4 through Xbox One won’t be a great experience
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Since Kinect must be plugged in for the Xbox One to function, what happens if your Kinect breaks? Like if it falls off the top of your TV onto a hardwood floor or something? Will the console cease to function?

WHITTEN: Xbox One is designed to work with Kinect plugged in. It makes gaming better in many ways — from the ability to say “Xbox On” and get right to your personalized homescreen, to the ability to control your TV through voice, Smartglass and more. Kinect allows you to search for your content, instantly move between games and your personalized dash and more with just your voice. Kinect helps you pick up and play by automatically knowing which controller you have in your hands. No more need to interrupt your friends game or navigate through multiple UI screens to sign in and tell the system which controller you are holding. It will even bind the controller to the console if its currently unbound — no searching for special buttons! Of course — these are just a few of the system wide benefits of having Kinect. Games use Kinect in a variety of amazing ways from adding voice to control your squad mates to adding lean and other simple controls beyond the controller to full immersive gameplay. That said, like online, the console will still function if Kinect isn’t plugged in, although you won’t be able to use any feature or experience that explicitly uses the sensor.

Source: IGN: http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/08/05/ask-microsoft-anything-about-xbox-one

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You need to have very precise control over what’s going on, and trying to do something like that with motion control input does not make sense–not if you want to keep the same kind of formula of the game as we [have] now. You’d need to build a different kind of shooter.

“But there are other places where it will make sense, and we are going to use it for other things in the game, but we haven’t announced exactly what,” ~ Videogamer

So if Battlefield 4 won’t be using Kinect for motion controls, what could be some possible uses?

Voice Controls:

Voice Commands would be the first obvious response I believe that makes sense. In Campaign, you could easily give out commands to your a.i. or request aid. Telling your team to form up or flank opponents.  To go silent or with brute force. There are a lot of different potential scenarios with voice. For multiplayer, I could envision the commander saying “UAV Scan” and he preps a torpedo missile.

All of these would be entertaining and would add a level of immersion to the game without sacrificing any elements as well.  But the question remains for me.  What  keeps this same sort of system from being used on PS4 with the headset microphone?  Voice commands in games are nothing new, but the latest technology is certainly welcome because the next generation will be a lot more capable of being precise and fast.

Heartbeat Sensor:

We know that Kinect can read your heartbeat. What if Kinect could read your pulse while you are playing the game. And what if the gun swayed depending on how fast your adrenaline was pumping.  (Remember, this is just for fun and pure speculation at this point until DICE confirms what it will do)

Gestures:

Soldiers mouths move with yours to accurately portray you talking into your Kinect or mic – Also would be capable on PS4.

What do you think Kinect will be used for?

VGN – VideoGamesandNews.com

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In this video, I cover some ideas as to how this technology could change the way we interact with games. Imagine playing a game that doesn’t have a Easy / Medium/ Hard difficulty. What if the difficulty was customized to you – because the game could recognize when you’re stressing out and reached your stress peak. What if a horror game could learn what elements in the game are scaring you – and learn which ones are just annoying.  There are a number of different implementations that are plausible.

Do you think Kinect 2.0 could revolutionize gaming?

Sources:

Forza Motorsport 5 Drivatar

Gamasutra: Can Xbox One Kinect Read your Mind?

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But is it?

If Sony and Microsoft both have cloud technology – why is Microsoft making such a big deal about theirs?

Since at least 2009, Microsoft has been pouring billions of dollars into building their cloud infrastructure. They’ve been throwing up data centers up left and right and taking aim at Amazon who currently is #1 as far as cloud providers. Just in the year 2011 – Microsoft spent $8.6 Billion in research and development on the cloud.  And they aren’t planning on slowing down anytime soon. Earlier this month, Microsoft reported that they will be opening 25 new data centers in 2013 in multiple locations around the globe. They also just announced coverage for Japan, China, and Austraila. And a few hours ago, they announced a $700 million investment into their datacenter in Iowa to increase their ability with the cloud.

Why does this matter to gamer’s?

Because Xbox Live will be running from Microsoft’s Azure Cloud platform. And it will also be powering the games.

Here is an excerpt from a Wired Article

Perhaps most intriguing, however, is that Xbox One gives game developers the ability to access Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform. That leads to a few obvious and immediate applications; stable, dedicated servers for every multiplayer game rather than the notoriously fragile practice of hosting matches on one participant’s console.

Does this mean that every single game will features dedicated servers?? REALLY??

So I reached out to the author of the Wired article, Peter Rubin and asked him how this would work. Do developers have to rent out the servers? Do they just have access to them etc. Here is his reply.

“Microsoft is subsidizing cloud utility for developers—essentially, it will cost developers nothing to build on/access the Azure platform. So while I don’t believe it’s mandatory for a title to offer dedicated servers, there wouldn’t be any investment on the dev side to do so, which means…  Yup, dedicated servers for everything. (Certainly for marquee MP experiences like BF3/4, COD, Titanfall, Destiny, etc). This is a huge part of why “persistent online world” was such a buzzphrase at E3 this year.”

There have also been a few interesting comments from the team behind Titanfall, EA’s Respawn. Here are some excerpts from an article that an Engineer wrote titled, “Let’s talk about the Xbox Live Cloud”

Okay, so player-hosted servers have a lot of downsides. So why do so many games use them? They have one really big upside – it doesn’t cost money to run the servers! Running hundreds of thousands of servers can be extremely expensive. EXTREMELY expensive. Like “oh my god we can’t afford that” expensive. So your player experience gets compromised to save (large amounts of) money.

But it costs a LOT of money.

This is something I have worked on for years now, since coming to Respawn. A developer like Respawn doesn’t have the kind of weight to get a huge price cut from places like Amazon or Rackspace. And we don’t have the manpower to manage literally hundreds-of-thousands of servers ourselves. We want to focus on making awesome games, not on becoming giant worldwide server hosting providers. The more time I can spend on making our actual game better, the more our players benefit.

I personally talked to both Microsoft and Sony and explained that we need to find a way to have potentially hundreds-of-thousands of dedicated servers at a price point that you can’t get right now. Microsoft realized that player-hosted servers are actually holding back online gaming and that this is something that they could help solve, and ran full-speed with this idea.

The Xbox group came back to us with a way for us to run all of these Titanfall dedicated servers and that lets us push games with more server CPU and higher bandwidth, which lets us have a bigger world, more physics, lots of AI, and potentially a lot more than that!

What is the Cloud?

Amazon has a cloud that powers websites. Sony has a cloud that streams game video so you can play a game that you don’t have on your machine. Now Xbox Live has a cloud that somehow powers games. Cloud doesn’t seem to actually mean anything anymore, or it has so many meanings that it’s useless as a marketing word.

Let me explain this simply: when companies talk about their cloud, all they are saying is that they have a huge amount of servers ready to run whatever you need them to run. That’s all.

So what is this Xbox Live Cloud stuff then?

Microsoft has a cloud service called Azure (it’s a real thing – you can go on their website right now and pay for servers and use them to run whatever you want). Microsoft realized that they could use that technology to solve our problem.

So they built this powerful system to let us create all sorts of tasks that they will run for us, and it can scale up and down automatically as players come and go. We can upload new programs for them to run and they handle the deployment for us. And they’ll host our game servers for other platforms, too! Titanfall uses the Xbox Live Cloud to run dedicated servers for PC, Xbox One, and Xbox 360.

But it’s not just for dedicated servers – Microsoft thought about our problem in a bigger way. Developers aren’t going to just want dedicated servers – they’ll have all kinds of features that need a server to do some kind of work to make games better. Look at Forza 5, which studies your driving style in order to create custom AI that behaves like you do. That’s totally different from what Titanfall uses it for, and it’s really cool! So it’s not accurate to say that the Xbox Live Cloud is simply a system for running dedicated servers – it can do a lot more than that.

How is this different from other dedicated servers?

With the Xbox Live Cloud, we don’t have to worry about estimating how many servers we’ll need on launch day. We don’t have to find ISPs all over the globe and rent servers from each one. We don’t have to maintain the servers or copy new builds to every server. That lets us focus on things that make our game more fun. And best yet, Microsoft has datacenters all over the world, so everyone playing our game should have a consistent, low latency connection to their local datacenter.

Most importantly to us, Microsoft priced it so that it’s far more affordable than other hosting options – their goal here is to get more awesome games, not to nickel-and-dime developers. So because of this, dedicated servers are much more of a realistic option for developers who don’t want to make compromises on their player experience, and it opens up a lot more things that we can do in an online game.

Wrapping up…

This is a really big deal, and it can make online games better. This is something that we are really excited about. The Xbox Live Cloud lets us to do things in Titanfall that no player-hosted multiplayer game can do. That has allowed us to push the boundaries in online multiplayer and that’s awesome. We want to try new ideas and let the player do things they’ve never been able to do before! Over time, I expect that we’ll be using these servers to do a lot more than just dedicated servers. This is something that’s going to let us drive all sorts of new ideas in online games for years to come.

And then there was this Interview with Giantbomb and the Titanfall team

Respawn:

When you look at it. Microsoft and Google are really the only two people who have a “Cloud”. A technical description of a cloud. They have data centers all over the world with tons of fast machines in them and they can slice them up however they want and turn them into virtual machines. And what they have done is exposed that in a very awesome way for Xbox One games. So if you’re in Connecticut  and you want to play a game, we can say okay, here is the data center that you are going to go to because its the closest one and you have a 30 ping to it.  And there’s no empty servers, so lets spin one up for you in 5 seconds and off you go.

We don’t have to provision hardware, we don’t have to go out and buy a bunch of servers and rack them in different places, it’s just there. It’s easy. It gets rid of all that fear of how this is all actually going to work. We have that available to use.

Let’s get crazy here and say it (Titanfall) gets popular in Japan. If we didn’t think it was going to be popular there and we didn’t buy a bunch of servers to put there, we would be screwed. (Cloud) Helps alleviate those types of problems. – You couldn’t make this game without the dedicated server support

Giantbomb:

So what do you do on the PC? Do you have to replicate elements of that structure for your version or do they have something you can use?

Respawn:

We won’t get all the niceties on PC that you get on Xbox One. There will have to be some engineering of things 

If Microsoft’s Cloud is nothing more than a PR Gimmick. Then it has to be one of the largest gimmicks in recorded history. Adding up to a total that goes well beyond $10 Billion so far. It sounds as if this could actually be a system that could provide a lot of flexibility for the future of the Xbox One. And if dedicated servers are available to all developers. That is probably going to be a nice selling point for both game developers and players.

Stay tuned to VGN – VideoGamesAndNews for the latest gaming news.

The Multiplayer Features No One Is Talking About

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Asynchronous Matchmaking

Have you ever had a game that you love playing, but isn’t that popular? I remember loving Tom Clancy’s Endwar, long after it had lost its popularity and the servers were low. This was pretty frustrating, because I would sit in a lobby forever before finding a match. The new Xbox One system allows you to search for a multiplayer match and can give you an estimated wait time. As the system is preparing the match, the player is free to go watch TV, browse the internet, listen to music, or go play another game. No more waiting for your friends to show up in the lobby, or peddling around while you wait on a match to begin. Once the server has found a match and the game is ready to start, then the player can jump right into the action.

Players can also search for games based on a number of different criteria. Major Nelson’s blog mentions that some games may feature searches for matches based on Skill, language, and even find players of similar age.

Reputation

Are you sick of being matched up with players who spew hate and racist remarks? Idiots who scream or sing into the mic? How about players who drive backwards in racing games?

The new Xbox One features a Smart match reputation system that rewards you for good behavior. The more time you spend online without people complaining or muting you, the higher your reputation will be. You will be placed in matches with players of similar reputation. Players who enjoying raping ear drums will be matched with each other and so on.  With the power of the cloud, reputation is calculated in real time and can be evaluated based on individual titles. Microsoft assures players that they don’t have to worry about having a few games where people abuse the system and report them for no good reason – the system will measure the player based on overall experience.

Dedicated Servers

Possibly the biggest feature that stands out to me as a gamer is the fact that all Xbox One games will have Dedicated Servers for multiplayer. That means, no more peer-to-peer hosting games where the host has an advantage, no more host leaving session – server migration – no more rubber-banding. The games should run smoothly and also support as many multiplayer players in games as the developer can.

Source:

Major Nelson Smart Match: http://majornelson.com/2013/06/11/xbox-one-smart-match/

Wired: Inside Xbox One: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/05/xbox-one/

VGN Gaming News

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Xbox One originally was planning on allowing players to have a “Family share plan”. The family share plan would allow players to select 10 people whom they wish to share their game libraries with. The idea was just starting to get some coverage when Xbox decided to pull that feature when they changed their DRM and Used game policy. (Xbox One Eighty)

Now, it appears that Steam may be looking to implement a very similar policy based on some code which was found in the latest Steam Beta Update.

If Steam follows through and allows users to share their game libraries with other players. This would be a huge selling point for Steam. And with the Steam Box coming in the future. Gamer’s hypothetically could play their PC Steam games on their consoles – Have access to their library as well as friends libraries – and still get great steam prices and discounts.

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Sources: Neogaf | Verge

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The “We Are Watching You Act of 2013″ bill also would require video providers to provide a camera-free set-top box and service if at a customer’s request. Rep. Mike Capuano (D-Mass.) and co-sponsor Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) introduced the bill, House Resolution 2356, on Thursday.

The bill would potentially affect Microsoft’s Xbox videogame console, which uses the Kinect camera attachment to provide voice and gesture controls of games and entertainment.

Read More: Variety

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