I was eager to see what Microsoft was up to, although my decision had already been made. You can watch the recording of the live show broadcast around the world, it’s a must watch if you are into sports and fantasy leagues.
After Major Nelson’s cheap-shot at Sony for not showing the console, in February I might add, I was pretty sure the Xbox form factor would make it to the reveal and it did. I never understood why people wanted to see how PS4 looked like, when in fact they even did a hands on with the PS4 controller, something which us gamers will be interacting with for the following years most of the time, instead of drooling over how our PS4’s looked. And it wasn’t as if we were going to be forced to buy a PS4 without seeing how it looks first. I’d rather know what the box does and what’s inside it, instead of how it looks. Granted, I may refuse to buy it if it is going to look like orange colored manly parts but luckily, [lightbox link=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjXU1anoC5Y”]this teaser[/lightbox] reveals that it won’t be the case, and expect a full reveal on June 10th.
There were rumors that the first half of the show would be talking about hardware and features, and the latter half would be about games. The first half indeed barely mentioned games at all, while the latter half did not fully consist of gaming, roughly a good 10 minutes of it was about NFL deal which people outside of the States give 0 amount of funks (NBA is quite popular tho), and a “moviefication” of a game, instead of the game (Halo Live Action Movie). The NFL portion was amusingly cut short with an eager “Yeah!” from the presenter on stage, as they were probably running late.
They opted to not reveal any hardware specifics other than the system being “Native 64bit, 8GB of RAM, 8 core cpu, 5 billion transistors” whereas PS4 reveal talked about type and speed of RAM, specifics of the APU with unified RAM access, TFlops of the GPU, how secondary OS functions are handled by specialized chips so it doesn’t interfere with the games. If you are content with the XBox One’s shape over these details, I have nothing to say. All the Xbox reveal does is to let us know that they have a lower spec machine compared to the PS4.
Major points of the reveal are listed here, followed by a comparison chart for both reveals.
- Showing the Xbox form factor (it looks and works like a set-top box.)
- Constant emphasis on entertainment instead of gaming.
- Talking very long about on watching sports, fantasy leagues, TV integration.
- Refraining from detailing hardware specifics on the main reveal (later they did a technical presentation with a little more detail which very few knew or mentioned of)
- Triple OS in one. (At least you know who’s going to eat that RAM away. Don’t worry tho, there will still be plenty of RAM for good looking games)
- Halo action movie
- Very few games.
- EA sports videos having what looks like placeholder wireframe videos of game assets, along with bullet time action target visuals telling us they haven’t really gotten far in development to show a rasterized picture.
- Fifa 14’s Ultimate Team exclusive to XBone.
- Call of Duty timed exclusive DLC.
- Eric Hirshberg of Activision and the whole Activision presentation refraining to use Xbox One as many times as possible and used “next gen” instead, so much so almost all the presentation could be used for a PS4 reveal with a few cuts where he mentions Xbox and Kinect once. Only time Xbox name is heard is when Mr. Hirshberg announced Call of Duty running on Xbox hardware.
- Promises of 15 exclusives for Xbox One in first year, most of which are original IP’s, not mentioning how many of them to be exclusive to Kinect.
