Four developers working on Xbox One games discuss how they're harnessing the console's potential to do things that weren't previously possible.
There's no question that the next generation of consoles is going to deliver games that look better than the best-looking games on current hardware. But there's only so much excitement you can wring out of the idea of a shooter or platformer or role-playing game that looks better than current games, but plays just like a hundred games you've already played. At PAX Prime in Seattle, we tracked down developers working on four Xbox One games to ask them about how those games are leveraging aspects of the next-gen console--the processing power, the cloud, and yes, even the Kinect--to provide experiences that wouldn't be possible on the Xbox 360. Here's what they had to say.
Josh Bridge, Executive Producer, Dead Rising 3
"We have the opportunity to go to a fully open world, and streaming, which has allowed us to create more of a perpetual sandbox. So let's say you're driving around in a car, you smash it, you leave, go to the other end of the area, then come back--it's all still there. So it becomes more your world that you can manipulate. We've never seen this before, this amount of density. We basically took the volume knobs on Dead Rising and turned them all the way up, and that's the game we've always wanted to make. On the 360, we hit a wall. We had to stop, load, dump everything else, so now that's a big change for us."
"It changes the dynamics of the game, changes how we approach the whole experience, and it pushed us into a position where we were like, 'You know what? Zombies are the enemy.' So we put more investment there, went deeper on them, giving them more awareness, making them more aggressive, and then we went deeper on your ability to fight different types of zombies. The controls feel a lot better now. You can run and gun, you can swipe and melee a lot better, and then we went for crafting. We love customization. Play how you want. Big open world, all these zombies. And then it's like, OK, well, here you go! Here's a whole bunch of stuff, hundreds and hundreds of weapons, and then you figure out how you want to play, on your own."
Torin Rettig, Producer, Killer Instinct
"I'd say that one of the most exciting things we can do is matchmake anytime. On current-generation systems, basically the way matchmaking works is you have to kind of opt into it. So you go into a lobby, and you decide to either automatically search, or you start a lobby yourself, or you just kind of open yourself up to open matchmaking and eventually it happens. And then after that's done, you have to actively opt in again, and then wait until you get a match, and maybe you like that match, or you don't. Then you play a game, then you opt in again, and there's a lot of waiting involved. It's kind of a high-friction experience. It's like, 'I just want to keep playing. You know I want to keep playing, so why aren't you letting me do it?'"
"So with Xbox One, we can do that. We can basically matchmake with you anytime. We can matchmake with you while you're playing Killer Instinct. We can matchmake with you while you're playing some other game. So you can basically just set yourself up, say 'Hey, I want to be matchmade in a player match with these settings, at this skill level,' and it'll just actively search for matches. And when that match is ready, it's like, 'Hey, you want to jump into the match?' Boom, you can just go. It's looking for games, matchmaking with you, while you're in a multiplayer match. So the idea, what we want to happen, we want to get as close to, as soon as you're done with one multiplayer match, bam, you're right into the next one. Hopefully, we've given you options. Do you want to fight this guy? You want to fight this guy? You want to fight that guy? At the very least, we want you to be able to jump into a match right after one is over, and because we can search for matches while you're playing, that allows us to get really close to that really seamless, never-ending battle."
"Another one of the things is the amount of data we're collecting about how players play. So not just how many wins or losses that you have, but what character you like to play with, what kind of moves you like to use with this character. But we can also track on a global scale how the matchups are looking, so we can see if there's a lopsided matchup. It's like, 'Thunder is winning against Glacius eight out of 10 times. It seems a little skewed. What can we do about that?' And then we can look deeper, we can dig into those matches and see, OK, how are these wins happening? Or how are these losses happening? We can use that information, along with actually getting into games and seeing how players are playing to determine, 'What do we need to do about this? Should we do anything about this?' And that's a really important point. Because we also have the ability to just live-update gameplay mechanics, or basically the aspects of how a certain character works. So frame data, priorities, things like that, we don't have to push out a big patch. We have all of these parameters in a config, and we can just tweak characters kind of on the fly."
"The other next-gen thing that we can do is game-DVR. It will record your last five minutes of gameplay, which is cool in itself, but what also exists is upload, and upload is a way to take those clips and splice them together into your own personalized, edited video. You can add commentary and voice-over, you can add picture-in-picture from the Kinect, so you can show your hands. So you can make your own run, your own series of videos. So, 'I wanna do a KI Thunder strategy series.' You can do that, and it'll show up on your own personal upload channel. And that's so key for a fighting game, because there's so much technique out there, and we want players to be able to come in and have a resource they can go to and find out how to play the game better instead of going through the crucible of just getting rocked online match after match, which can be kind of frustrating."
Apple CEO Tim Cook, who has been promising for months that the company will announce amazing new products starting this fall, is set to take the stage today at a company event where he’s expected to introduce new models of the iPhone.
