Xbox One Revealed
Microsoft has unveiled their new console: the Xbox One. The one hour reveal event was a perfectly scripted showcase devised to give the world its first glimpse of how Microsoft will take over the living room. Thankfully, we actually got to see the new console at this unveiling. Yes, it’s what’s inside that’s more important, but showing what the actual console looks like provides a heightened sense of impending reality as well as something to oogle at.
The new console has definitely taken a new direction as far as style goes. Instead of something that overtly looks like its a video game machine, the Xbox One is instead more simple looking. It’s rectangular shape makes the console look more similar to non-gaming electronics like an AV Receiver. This is obviously intentional as the event today was all about showcasing the console as being much more than just something to play games on.
The new controller that was shown off looks like it could be a winner. The Xbox 360 controller is probably the best controller ever made and it’s new replacement doesn’t seem to deviate too far from its proven predecessor. Thankfully the D-pad has gotten a makeover.
The first half of the event was all about how the Xbox One will function as your television hub. The console is designed for you to plug your cable/satellite box into it rather than your television. This allows you to use features such as an integrated programming guide, almost instant switching between tv, games, movies, and music, and even being able to do things such as pulling open a browser next to the television programming.
All of this can be easily controlled using the new Kinect which will be included with every Xbox One. With higher resolution cameras and lower latency processing, this Kinect 2.0 will make use of voice and gesture commands to get you doing whatever you want to be doing with relative ease.
Although everyone knew that Microsoft was investing into original television content, the announcement that Steven Spielberg was involved with a live action Halo series was quite a surprise.
A new partnership with the NFL was announced which proved to be one of the most exciting as well as disappointing moments of the event. As soon as they started talking about the new partnership with America’s biggest sports league, there was so much anticipation about what awesomeness was about to follow. Unfortunately all this partnership seems to entail integrating some fantasy football features while you watch the games. I can’t imagine Yahoo Fantasy Football gets any support.
EA was present to hype up their latest EA sports editions but they were a bit scant on details. All of the pre-recorded statements from athletes about how they play their game seemed to miss the point of the whole event.
The whole presentation was concluded with a showcasing of the newest Call of Duty offering. This part was kind of comical because there was a lot of talk about how big Activision was being by naming the game Ghosts instead of Modern Warfare 4 and about how much better the game looks than Modern Warfare 3. Everyone knows Modern Warfare 3 looks terrible and its visuals are horribly outdated. Good job for improving them.
The biggest and most obvious criticism about the event was the overall lack of attention paid to games and gaming. Microsoft had forewarned everyone about this and they had let it be known that most gaming related news would come in three weeks at E3. Unfortunately, this knowledge only makes the pill a little easier to swallow. There was a brief mention that Microsoft had 15 exclusives lined up to release within a year of launch, 8 of which are new IP’s.
The hope is that Microsoft’s vast resources will allow it to have all these extra entertainment features without sacrificing anything related to gaming. Sony’s event proved that the PlayStation 4 will be a great gaming machine . . . but that’s all it will be. Microsoft has set their sights higher but time will tell how it turns out.