All in all, the hardware specs are lower than we expected, but if they made games that weren't trying to be super graphical intensive and used simpler or fewer shaders/effects, hitting HD 60fps wouldn't be an issue it seems.

I'll play devil's advocate here, and say the hardware is fine. The 360 was great for it's time, and in the 10 years it was up we saw good games, most of them playing at high framerate, although nothing I'd say is photo-realistic, most if not all of them were stylized. One of the first games i played was Blue Dragon, and it does the job just fine for what it was.

However it's the games they are trying to push. Smaller gameworld areas, fewer in crowd size, simpler models, simpler textures, etc, and in turn faster load times. Recently it was a total surprise when i popped in my Disgaea game and it booted/loaded screens and areas inside of 2 seconds, making me totally remember why i loved those games so much. Fast, fluid, simple, good gameplay, story, etc. But graphics were sprites and 3D was more basic (landscape).


The hardware of 8th gen is/was over-hyped, and the games and expectations to always be 'bigger and better than before' no longer applies, as games are already too big (data/disc wise), too expensive, too hyped for what they deliver. If everyone toned down their expectations not to be much higher than the PS3/360, then some things would be easier to program due to the larger memory size and better CPU and GPUs.

Truthfully we already saw this happen before. The Xbox to the 360 transition, one of the driving games was looked and played over, and they said 'it looks/feels like a Xbox game, only slightly better graphics'. But now it's even worse. Now it's all about trying to get the shiny graphics in, and nothing about the gameplay. Battlefront (EA) is a perfect example of who the target is for their audience. All looks and no good gameplay.

Maybe the hardware is fine as it is, if they make the games that are good for that level of hardware or less. Instead they are pushing and pushing for frankly the absurd. Naturally with Ubisoft fighting a war with Universal over ownership via a takeover, it's curious if it won't just be considered another film industry by Hollywood that they can milk to death with Copyright takeover.

No one has any faith or vision. :P

Why does this remind me of some of the later 3DS games where it had crappy frame rates that were unplayable with the 3D on but played fine on 2D...

An upgraded processor every few years is a great stride forward for consoles. I think that anyone who thinks otherwise is simply not looking at the alternative.

The current model has a new console that's incompatible with the previous one. If you want to play old games, you have to keep the old console. If a developer wants to support the old console, they have to program for an old platform, one that's completely different than the current one.

If a new console version is the same as the last, just with more processing and graphics power, then a user can buy the new gen and the current library will simply run. That's an amazing thing right there. No need to keep multiple consoles, no worry that the old console will die and it will be hard to find a replacement, just get a new one and carry on playing. Not only that, but the old games could run at a higher resolution and frame rate.

From the developer side, instead of neglecting the old gen or having to duplicate development effort, a PC-like quality system can be implemented. This will mean that those who don't want to upgrade their console can still get a fair share of releases. And because there will be very few versions of the console, compatibility testing would still be quite easy, unlike on the PC.

So the way I see it, if Microsoft releases a new Xbox version every couple of years, once processing and GPU power doubled or so, it's pretty much the holy grail of console gaming.

If the clockrate/GPU speeds were the only things that improved, then that might not be a problem.

But then if there's any OS differences or larger changes, then you'd have to know if it was the XBone, XBone_revA, XBone_revB, XBone_revC, XBone_revD, XBone_revE, etc. It's another thing the consumer has to know something about when the console's big strength is 'buy it, plug it in, play'. If they have to worry about a specific revision or specific hardware the XBone needs to run their games, they are in no better boat than having a computer. And a lot of the hardware and specs go over a lot of peoples heads.

I wouldn't bet my money on that if I were you. The Saturn, N64, and GameCube all had addons that increased their power. Even better, these addons were not full fledged hardware that attached to them, they were low key replaceable parts. We're talking mostly RAM boosts, but better than nothing.
I can't remember if the Sega DreamCast had upgradable parts. I'll check for that later.

That would invalidate their whole argument, though. MS said they would be able to have hardware innovation that maintained forward and backward compatibility.

I'm still having a hard time seeing what the problems are. Better, cheaper, lower power, smaller hardware, all running the same games forward and backward.

I believe there are a few 3DS games out there that only run on the New 3DS model that has hardware boosts.

Well, people like to complain. :P See? We're all complaining. Let me complain some more now.

Off hand i don't see a disadvantage. But there's always the possibility say the newer model has 4 more cores in it, then games are made assuming the system has 12 instead of 8 cores, then someone with an older system tries to run it and it doesn't exactly crap out but drops to 20fps due to bad assumptions, or a system requiring more memory and starts using Virtual Memory/Swap Space for the missing memory.

If the games HAVE to be made using the original hardware and it playable, then better hardware can only give better performance. However the reverse isn't always true.

Worse they named the updated hardware the 'New 3DS', and not something cool like '3DS Gold' which would stand out more.

I do question Nintendo's Hardware Naming department to be honest. Some of the stuff they come up with is simply laughable.

With the exception of power consumption and thermal dissipation, I'm not sure how any of that's going to work if it doesn't allow people to play games that they couldn't already play. Why would anybody pay for an upgrade?

Nintendo used to do the right thing in that regard with their GB line. The later revisions would play the same games, but had sharper graphics anyways. It's not something I foresee being reasonable with current generation consoles though. They were able to do that with the GB line because of the way the games were coded without requiring that the games be recoded for the fixes.

Aren't you now talking about something different? I think this was about your XBox being upgradeable (e.g. you could add more RAM to it or replace the CPU/GPU with a faster one), but you seem to talk about newer consoles being backwards compatible.

I don't think anyone is against backwards compatibility. PS2 was great because it seemed to have near flawless backwards compatibility to PSOne library. I loved the ability to replace my broken PS with a newer PS2, still being able to play my PS games on it, and also having access to PS2 games. I was disappointed when Sony dropped backwards compatibility from newer consoles.

Microsoft bringing upgradeability to consoles _now_ seems a bit odd, because doesn't it seem that now the advances in CPU and GPU power have slowed down a lot also on the PC side? So nowadays there is _less_ reason try to keep up with the new tech levels, than earlier.

Having said that, maybe Microsoft's point is not to bring upgradeability to consoles, but what they said elsewhere: not being restricted to only one platform. They want "XBox" to be a gaming and entertainment service across several platforms, not certain piece of hardware. It goes far beyond the idea of upgrading your XBox console hardware.

How exactly they will achieve that, I don't know. Since MS is so active with cloud computing nowadays, maybe their ultimate idea is to turn "XBox" into a streaming gaming and entertainment service? That would make it easy to run it across several platforms. XBox on your Android tablet? Can do!

Yeah, why make a certain set of hardware and optimize games for it for 10 years?
Oh wait, wasn't this why consoles existed in the first place?

There really is no reason to buy PCs that are marketed as consoles and are just the same but with more restrictions.

I wouldn't call that "prolonging the console's life cycle", when in reality you're replacing the current console with a better one after just a few years. Besides, I bet the owners of the current generation will be really happy to hear that the console they bought not long ago is already outdated, and future Xbox games will either run like crap or not at all on their "old" version of the console. :P

Let's just go with your original intro line: "I think it's stupid."

Here's what all this looks like to me: Originally MS tried to cater to casual gamers and multimedia users with their Xbone ( TV! SPORTS! OMG! ). Apparently that wasn't successful enough, so now they're doing a 180° ( Heh ) desperately trying to regain the trust of the "core gamers". But since many of them have long moved on to PS4 and PC, I guess some flashy new hardware specs are the only option they have left to lure people back in. Overall it doesn't seem like they really know what they're doing.

By the way folks, whatever happened to that whole power of the cloud nonsense? In theory the Xbone has unlimited processing power, because it's hooked up to Skynet... right? Right.