Anyone can write for Forbes as its basically all opinion now. Have to take everything there with a grain of salt. That doesn’t mean intelligent people dont post there… Its just not as pro as one would think with the “Forbe’s” name across the top.
DLC hating is my thing. Everyone here knows this.
PS: Death to DLC.
Sinij
2689
It makes it into Forbes when potential fallout would have significant impact on the company in question. Editor at Forbes decided that Xbone fiasco was bad enough to take a chunk out of MS share price. So it got published.
As a collector I totally agree: DLC sucks.
More and more I have to wait buying games these days for the release of the “GOTY” edition that include at least all story DLC. “The Last of Us” currently for example.
This assumes two things I don’t think it’s safe to assume at all.
First, it assumes that we are all making our buying decisions on graphics alone - and I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of us simply don’t. Yes, I’m sure there are some who prize graphics above all else, but there’s a reason metacritic exists not metagraphics. If graphics alone determined which games we liked best, Xcom would be loveless; God of War 3 would be the best in the series (and it’s definitely the worst); and Killzone 2 would have a Call of Duty/Halo-like following. Which is all to say - when it comes to exclusives, gameplay matters much more.
Secondly, it assumes a “spectacular” difference rests on graphics alone. It doesn’t. Think about Skyrim. Great game - not because of its graphics - but because it offers an immersive world. But that world, if we are being honest with ourselves, also feels static. When we stop playing, the world stops. Now imagine coming home, logging in and finding a dynamic Skyrim experience, one where the developer is able to change the landscape, affect the tide of war, etc. The promise of cloud computing, a truly new development, could be a key differentiator this cycle.
dytexx
2692
Oh dear, all of that would have been possible already for any kind of online games (and you could have done such things on an offline PC with a daemon/service always running in the background). Except of course changing landscapes that need artistic interventions. Or anything that would really have required massive CPU time. Or anything that would require massive data transfers. Or anything that could not be done on the absolute minimum of a cloud share that is being planned to be used during the game’s whole lifetime. Or anything that could break basic rules of the game (which absolutely limits dynamics).
Clouds are not magically functionally more useful than any other server structures used in the past. They rather impose more limitations and introduce a new layer of complexity. Clouds mainly just help with scalability.
The reason the world in skyrim is static and unchanging is because the game is so big and they focused on a world with a lot of stuff in it, not a world that could change/react to the player. This is basically the same in every open world game and won’t change becausE the hardware gets a bit better.
You may as well expect starcraft 3 to be turn based.
Are you an MS contractor? You’ve been almost at shill level since this whole deal started like the cloud is a magic supercomputer for all. Well it’s not. The cloud is basically your old mainframe technology in parallel, and it’s not free. MS is not going to run all these out of the goodness of its heart, and companies like Bethesda are not going to constantly update and change worlds for the cloud just for fun, because… it takes money. The cloud is good for stores, storage, and other non-gaming functions. It’s good for streaming movies. It could also be ok for TBS games. But the cloud is not unlimited and can get bogged, it can be unreliable. Prone to DoS attacks, hacking, crashes, plus all the things that occur with regular frequency nowadays interrupting or slowing service.
Want to see how bad the cloud can be for games? Look no further than Simcity. The cloud gets so bogged down, the fastest it can update worlds is ONCE EVERY 10 MINUTES. This is on Amazon’s cloud service, in a game that should be updated every 30 seconds or sooner.
Click on my name and see my posts. I love my Vita, prefer Netflix on my PS3, considered Uncharted 2 and the Last of Us two of the best games of this generation and will buy a PS4… so, no, I’m not an MS contractor.
I do think cloud computing will result in significant changes to console gaming. As for the Simcity strawman, yes that is ONE way cloud computing can be used. It’s not the only way.
Indeed.
Sony: ‘of course’ PS4 can do cloud computing
“Linking, matchmaking… there are already many computations being done on the cloud side,” Yoshida told Polygon. And although PS4 won’t require an internet connection to use, Yoshida said that “if your title needs [an] online connection to provide some online features: Go for it.”
Thr futu…er, same as it always was!
Well, sure. But unless Microsoft has come up with some profound paradigm change, cloud computing is pretty much a fancy Client Server scheme, where the Server can change dynamically depending on your needs.
It’s not a utterly new and previously unseen technological development, not unless Microsoft has been holding out on us, and with the PR issues they’ve been having I doubt they’d hold back such a card.
Darth - You mean like spawning virtual servers as-needed in their cloud compute environment? Sure, that works. Expensive, though. (For a non-MMO, I mean…for MMO’s…)
Wolff
2699
I could be wrong - but I think you are thinking of all the old Forbes model - my understanding is it mostly blog like hosting now.
jpinard
2700
Well, there’s absolutely no reason a developer can’t use cloud computing now. MS will still have their network and if a dev wants to implement they can. The nice thing now is MS will not be “forcing” them to use it which as far as I can see would have amounted to the same half-hearted implementation like companies who tried to put kinect into their non-kinect games which everyone just shut it off because it worked so poorly ie. Forza, Madden, FIFA, etc etc etc.
I find it amusing some of the features of this cloud computing is stuff thats been done for years already. But once again when its brought to consoles its touted as brand new.
rei
2702
ugh. new hw refresh of 360 doesn’t have optical out.
HDMI works just fine, man.
rei
2704
Not for those who want to use current-gen high-end end headsets/headphones.
The three 360s I own don’t have an optical out either. (They’re the first three revisions of the 360s, none of them being slim, and all of them having the old memory cards). But it came as part of the cables I bought. For one, I bought a VGA cable, and that one has an optical out at the end that connects to the 360, so the optical wire goes right there. And I think the HDMI cable has the same thing, a little adapter that connects to the 360 side that has a little optical out. At least, that’s what I got back then with the official Microsoft cables I bought. I’m not sure what cables they are selling these days. Maybe optical outs are less common now than they used to be when the 360 launched.
The older 360s didn’t have optical outs on the box, but they did have optical outs on the component/composite AV cable that came with the system. With HDMI sets you could even hack some of the plastic off that cable with a dremel and use it as the optical out when using HDMI for video (had to hack the AV cable a bit because poor design didn’t allow a standard HDMI cable to fit at the same time the AV cable was in unless you hacked it), or you could get a separate audio breakout cable but electrically you didn’t need one, the one packed in with the system would work.
Optical outs are certainly less common now than they were in 2005, but lots of people still have older 5.1 receivers without HDMI in. I didn’t upgrade my audio receiver to an HDMI switching one until last year.
