XBone

Late Night Open Thread

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For the first day of my vacation I mostly stayed in out of the cold weather playing mostly Hard Reset Redux and Shadow Warrior 2. I guess it was a Flying Wild Hog day. 😛 I did notice with the new patch to SW2 I had to place all of my accumulated skill points. And of course at the end of the night I had to turn to my go to game for absolute relaxation:

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The new and improved Skyrim is slated to release in just a few days. I’m thinking I’ll download it, but I won’t invest much time into it until I know most or all of my mods will work in it. Speaking of mods has anyone seen this for the console versions? Mod limits of 1 GB for PS4 and 5 GB for XBone? Of course with the PS4 version the mods are limited to vanilla assets only. Wow, Microsoft actually did something appealing for a change?

Of course on PC we won’t have this problem. After reading the article though I did have to take a look at my Skyrim install, it’s a nice 49 GB in size. The joys of not being held back by a console ecosystem. 😛

XBox Fitness goes the way of the Zune dodo

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It seems like the only real consistent thing about Microsoft is their ability to shut down games and programs that people use. This time XBox Fitness is the next target.

“Given the service relies on providing you with new and exciting content regularly, Microsoft has given much consideration to the reality of updating the service regularly in order to sustain it,” Microsoft’s Erica Bell wrote in the announcement. “Therefore, the decision has been made to scale back our support for Xbox Fitness over the next year… While our team is saddened by this news, we couldn’t be more proud of what we’ve accomplished in the past two and a half years.”

I don’t know why people continue to support a company that has this sort of a track record, other than blind fanboyism and people who don’t know shit from shinola about Microsoft’s history. But as long as they continue to support such a flake of a company it’ll keep happening and happening.

The XBox One may have mods for Fallout 4 coming, but there’s still going to be restrictions.

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I’ve been listening to my console friends rejoice about finally being able to mod Fallout 4 on their fave systems. But that modding comes with a restriction if you’re on the XBone.

Mods are coming to the Xbox One version of Fallout 4, but, they won’t work exactly like the wild wild west of PC modding. The XB1 is a closed platform owned by Microsoft, afterall, so there will be some restrictions. In a live stream event Bethesda detailed some of those restrictions, the most significant of which being that mods for the Xbox One version of Fallout 4 have to be smaller than 2GB.

2GB doesn’t sound like too much. In fact that would drive me insane, especially with the mods that I find for Skyrim which can span into the double digits. Though I’m sure the console peasants won’t mind, as they’re already used to living with restrictions anyway. 😉

Farewell to Project Spark

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The Grim Clipper
The Grim Clipper eagerly waiting to touch Microsoft’s next product.

I remember when a former co-worker of mine tried to get me to check out Project Spark. It was a Windows 8/XBone exclusive, and it didn’t strike me as a good reason to ditch Windows 7 (like most OS exclusives being released today). Looks like I’m not really missing out on it either since Microsoft and the studio responsible for this game will be pulling the plug on it.

“This was an extremely difficult decision for our team that we do not take lightly,” Team Dakota community manager Thomas Gratz said in a statement. “When Project Spark transitioned away from active development last fall, many of our team members moved to other projects within Microsoft Studios. While this means there have been no layoffs at Microsoft, it also means it’s simply no longer feasible to continue the behind-the-scenes work involved with keeping Project Spark up and running with meaningful updates and bug fixes, so we have come to this hard decision.”

I’m not sure about the logic behind this. There are games on other platforms that haven’t been touched in years by developers… so why does Project Spark have to be taken off the market? Seems rather short sided to me, and good reasoning not to back anything heavily backed by Microsoft especially going by their track record. Giving up on their smartphone, giving up on Win 8 and going straight to 10, giving up on shipping a Kinect with the XBone because of the creepy requirements, closing the studio responsible for Fable after basically telling them to completely rewrite the new fable, oh… and of course:

ss-grim-reaper

Of course this doesn’t bother me at all. I learned a long time ago not to invest too heavily into Microsoft’s products, it’s much more painless that way.

Gaben wants everyone to play nice… together on all platforms

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pc gaming master race
Gabe reaching out to the other platforms

It doesn’t surprise me that Gabe Newell would want PC and Console to play with one another:

It’s a dream that Valve honcho Gabe Newell seems to share. A member of the PCMasterrace subreddit by the name of Eternifity sent the Gaben an email asking him to “open the gates for cross-play gaming.” The benefits of doing so, he said, would include increased community sizes, fewer platform-exclusive games, and increased freedom of choice when purchasing a gaming system. “Opening up multi-platform multiplayer gaming is the next step to a better gaming community,” he wrote.

This has been evident since Portal 2 where PC, Mac and PS3 users could play together. Still, it would be interesting to see how well that would play out.

Today I defused a console war between two co-workers of mine… by declaring myself the winner.

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One of my co-workers came in to buy the new Tom Clancy game for his XBox One, and my boss is a PS4 user. He started trolling him about how PS4 is the superior platform. So I raised my hand and said “You both lose, PC Master Race FTW” and they couldn’t argue. :v Although my boss for some reason thought PC Gaming wasn’t popular. Which is true, it isn’t popular…. among people who don’t know how to mod. You know, console users.

I also heard today about a guy my father knows. He built him a high end PC for video rendering a couple years back. i5 2500k processor and I can’t remember what type of GPU… but I know it’s an NVidia, a powerful one. He happens to also like playing Skyrim… on console. That was a lot for me to take in first thing in the morning while eating my breakfast. Turns out his reasoning was because he didn’t like the idea of using a keyboard and mouse instead of a controller. And modding? That’s really hard too because apparently you have to use torrents. Yeah I don’t know what he’s smoking either. Sure isn’t what I’ve been smoking.

420yoloswag

I can understand someone playing Skyrim on a console if they couldn’t afford a PC to play it on, but when you have an extremely beefy expensive build and continue to resort to the console version because a keyboard and a mouse are too hard that is just astonishing. Mind blowing, simply mind blowing.

Microsoft wants to make an Upgradable Console

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I thought I’d be done talking about the latest Microsoft hooplah that’s been taking place, but the other day not long after talking about Microsoft’s attempt to get everyone to go over to their UWP platform I read an article that forced my head to hit my solid oak desk. Microsoft wants to make the XBox One an upgradable device.

“We see on other platforms whether it be mobile or PC that you get a continuous innovation that you rarely see on console,” he said. “Consoles lock the hardware and the software platforms together at the beginning of the generation. Then you ride the generation out for seven or so years, while other ecosystems are getting better, faster, stronger. And then you wait for the next big step function.”

I can only speculate at this point, but knowing Microsoft the XBox One’s upgrade path would probably consist of starting out the consumer with what one would consider bottom tier hardware, and give them the option of upgrading using Microsoft’s proprietary hardware. Basically the Mac of PC Gaming, only with a Mac at least you can still mod games far more openly than you can with Microsoft’s proposed walled gardened ecosystem.

Even other people, such as the CEO of Epic (makers of the Unreal Engine) has spoken out about how foolish this is.

“Unless Microsoft changes course,” Sweeney says, “all of the independent companies comprising the PC ecosystem have a decision to make: to oppose this, or cede control of their existing customer relationships and commerce to Microsoft’s exclusive control.”

Meanwhile on the Microsoft side:

“The Universal Windows Platform is a fully open ecosystem, available to every developer, that can be supported by any store. We continue to make improvements for developers; for example, in the Windows 10 November Update, we enabled people to easily side-load apps by default, with no UX (user experience) required.”

Really? Then how come there are two different versions of the new Tomb Raider floating around with Microsoft’s being the one with issues such as missing features from the Steam release? If you buy The Witcher 3 from GOG or Steam for example, you won’t notice a difference. Same with most Steam and Nonsteam games as they both use the same executable and get the same updates. Microsoft’s method fragments the PC Gaming ecosystem by making dev’s choose between UWP and the more traditional means of developing a game, and consumers go over to yet another application (and OS if they haven’t moved to 10 yet) to grab these titles.

This move isn’t Boneheaded, it’s XBoneheaded.

Oh, and on a funnier note I had to change the brackets around user experience. In the original article they used [] instead of (). If I left the quote in it’s original state it would have read as:

“The Universal Windows Platform is a fully open ecosystem, available to every developer, that can be supported by any store. We continue to make improvements for developers; for example, in the Windows 10 November Update, we enabled people to easily side-load apps by default, with no UX [user experience] required.”

Yeah, I’m happy with my current gaming experience thanks. 😛

What’s the best thing Microsoft can do for PC Gaming?

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NOTHING!!!!!!

“For us, E3 is a console show and an Xbox show, and for us as Microsoft, Xbox is our gaming brand, and it’s the thing we can fill an arena like this, we get millions of people to watch us on TV and we show our games and it’s a brand that people care about,” he said.

C’mon Microsoft we get the picture. You have a console to sell and PC gaming gets in the way of your little walled garden. They’re making Linux sound better and better everytime they pull this crap.