Sources:
DualShockers: PS4 & Xbox One vs 1080P, 60 FPS

DualShockers: 720P Upscaled to 1080P Simulation Battlefield 4

Gamespot: Do we need 60FPS?

VGN: Video Games and News

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While some people may not have any problems deciding what they want to do either way.  There may be some who are on the fence.  In this video, I talk about some of the pros and cons for using and not using your real name on the next gen consoles.

Sources for articles quoted in the video.

Can you change your PSN ID name?: playstationlifestyle

PS4 Will let you use your real name online at launch: Kotaku

PS4 will encourage gamers to use their real names online: Computer and Video Games

Video Games and News

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Q: The schedule for the launch of the next generation isn’t quite as busy as you might think, especially with Watch_Dogs getting delayed. That’s potentially a good thing for you, leaving it open for you to become a really big early seller. What are your expectations?

Patrick Bach: Well we’ve been very aggressive with Battlefield 4 in that we want to be out at launch with the next gen consoles. I think people might not grasp how hard that is, to develop a game at the same time as the hardware. We’ve been struggling quite a lot to keep up with the changes we’ve seen – both sides need to adapt and you end up being late. Everything is very complicated. Battlefield itself is a really complicated game, so it doesn’t make our lives any easier.

So we knew we’d set ourselves a tough challenge, but people on the outside seem to think that because there are going to be launch titles, it’s easy. What are we spending all our time doing? They don’t understand how hard it is! Talking about Watch_Dogs, I don’t blame them, there are times when we’ve considered doing the same thing – luckily we’ve overcome those hurdles and thought about what the game actually is on the next gen. We’ve had an excellent team working that out at the same time as the game itself, which is a big struggle. We can see that a lot of the next gen games coming are, arguably, lesser when it comes to the scope of features because of this problem.

GamesIndustry Patrick Bach Interview

VGN: Video Games and News

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Xbox Live Compute – dedicated servers! If you have played a lot of multiplayer games, you know that playing on dedicated game servers has advantages over peer-to-peer gameplay. With server-based multiplayer gaming, not only can more players play the game (think hundreds of players simultaneously), the gameplay will be much more reliable for the players. No more host migration interruptions, suboptimal experiences for the host, home network NAT constraints, or player cheating! Additionally, Xbox Live Compute can be utilized to persist game state so that your squad can live to fight another day without losing any progress. A great example of a game that is using Xbox Live Compute for their dedicated server multiplayer experience is “Titanfall.” ~Xbox

 

Xbox Live Compute: GamesIndustry

Microsoft Dedicated Servers: GameInformer

Xbox One Cloud: Xbox

Multiplayer for Xbox One:

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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

Watch more Red Dragon

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Xbox One Release Date: November 22nd.  That means, the Xbox will launch one week after the PS4 in the US, and will launch one week ahead of the PS4 in the EU.  

Source: Gamasutra

UK retailers have begun offering free copies of Forza Motorsport 5 to those who preorder a Xbox One Day One Edition.
Source: Gamespot

Xbox 360 to be supported for another 3 years with 100 games set to launch.“We are going to continue to invest in Xbox 360 and the two devices can work in concert,” he said. “So it isn’t just like the day we ship Xbox One, Xbox 360 won’t work, we will continue to support it. In fact, we are going to ship over 100 new games on Xbox 360, so you will still be able to play your games, just not on the same exact box.”

Source: CVG

Xbox One to allow loaning, trading of downloaded games.When asked about reselling digital games, Penello said, “We were trying to implement the ability to trade [and] loan digital games with your friends, which is something that no one else was doing,” Penello said. “I believe, in retrospect that people have calmed down and gone back and actually looked at what we said, people are starting to understand, ‘Wow, they did want actually to allow me to loan and trade’ which other digital ecosystems don’t want to do. And so, yeah, I think we need to do that. That has to be part of the experience. Right now, we’re focused on launch and we switched the program back to discs, because that’s what customers wanted. ”

Penello added that the “family sharing” feature, which would have let users share their license rights to play an Xbox One game with up to 10 family member accounts on any Xbox One system, was a good idea, and one Microsoft will revisit “when the time is right.”

Source:  Gamesindustry

Xbox One Specs (CPU) Upgraded

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Major Nelson (Aka Larry Hyrb): Says No Plans for Kinect-less Version of Xbox One and Microsoft is 100% behind Kinect 2.0: Reddit

Microsoft PR man Albert Penello goes a step further with his statement regarding a SKU Version of Xbox One Without Kinect:

“Are we listening and adjusting the plans? We are. Are we making some concessions in areas where people have strong feelings? We are.

Are we altering our vision or losing faith? No.

We made one policy decision that was a major reversal around digital rights vs. physical media. It was the only time major features were changed, like family sharing, and some of the online check-in stuff that was related to it. It was the right call.

If you go back to the Unveil and E3 conferences, today’s announcement doesn’t change or diminish what we’ve said we were doing at all. All we said today is that we weren’t going to brick the box if Kinect was unplugged. People making a leap thinking that means we’ve completely disconnected Kinect from the system would be wrong.

Once you guys experience the console, some of the criticisms may be valid, and many won’t. The controller will not be the best way to navigate the dash – things like instant switching, snap mode, sign-in, and search are going to be vastly superior with Kinect. There is no controller UI that will beat “Xbox, Snap Skype”, or “Xbox, Go to Killer Instinct”.

The idea that the controller is the best way to navigate makes sense in reference to Xbox 360, but it’s not true in Xbox One. You can completely control the dash with a controller, but many cases are deprecated versions of how it will work with voice.

If we were to remove Kinect from the bundle, then THAT would be a 180… but it’s not going to happen. This was a very minor policy change, for people who had privacy concerns or repair issues. As someone earlier stated, my guess is that very few people will take advantage of the feature. But knowing it’s there as an option is important. ” ~Source: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=76121819&postcount=1327

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Xbox One No Kinect, Xbox One No Kinect Bundle, Xbox One No Kinect Requirement, Xbox One No Kinect Version, Xbox One, Kinect, Xbox One without Kinect, Kinect-Less Xbox One, Will Microsoft Sell Xbox One Without a Kinect, Kinect less Xbox One, Disconnect Kinect, Unplug Kinect, Xbox One News, Xbox One Features, Xbox One Specs, Xbox One with Kinect, Xbox One Comes with Kinect, Major Nelson, Albert Penello, Microsoft PR, SKU, Xbox One Bundle, Xbox One Bundles, Xbox One, Xbox One Camera, Xbox, Xbox 1, Xbox1 Kinect, Xbox One 2013, Xbox One Sold Without Kinect, Xbox One Kinect Always On, Xbox One Kinect Always Watching

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Every Xbox One includes a headset now: Family sharing is back to a certain extent. And new controller features are discussed, including a 20% reduction in input lag compared with the Xbox 360 Controller.

Xbox One Headset Included: CNET

Xbox One Sharing Digital Games on Xbox Live Gold: Xbox Wire

Xbox One invested $100 Million into the Xbox One Controller design: CVG

Xbox One Controller Trailer

VGN: Video Games and News

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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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