DF Retro EX: Xbox One Reveal Revisited - Is 'TVTVTV' As Bad As You Remember?

[Music] welcome back to another episode of DF retro extra where we look back at conferences from e3 and beyond this time though it's finally the moment of truth the day of reckoning if you will this is the Xbox one reveal and of course as always I am joined by my two wonderful colleagues Richard Ledbetter Thank You Joan I'm not sure I should be thanking you but here we go and of course on the other side we have Alex Battaglia oh I cannot wait to see this I just bought yearly by the way that's amazing I'll see you now you're excited so where do we get where do we start here guys I mean this this conference is it's an important one for what happened in the industry but it's also sort of a masterclass and how not to reveal a console it's totally awful I don't know where to begin with this review to the content prior to to this conversation I'm speechless I just awestruck at how bad it is the thing that really I think we should put this into context this was like two weeks before e3 where they were going to apparently show a big bunch of games but we've got basically an hour here of of nothing and this what we're seeing now is is really does sum up you know there's there's no content here whatsoever absolutely nothing of consequence whatsoever there's an intro to a console I don't know where to begin so I think that actually the best place to begin is to sort of set the stage here for what things were like at this time period mm-hmm so the Kinect had been released two or three years prior it was a reasonable success motion control was considered like a big thing so there's that but on the other side there was also this massive push towards mobile gaming everybody thought that mobile gaming Facebook gaming social gaming all this stuff was basically a threat to the console industry there was questions over whether consoles would even remain relevant and to me this whole thing feels like a combination of one like Microsoft bringing in like the office people and the like the Microsoft Corporation as a whole to tackle this problem in the sense of okay well maybe video games on consoles are not the big thing anymore so how do we get to that wider audience how do we make your own Wii and go beyond and they just missed the mark yeah I think they also looked at the growth of the streaming market during this time and the fact that people were sitting in front of TVs not just to watch movies from like blu-rays or DVDs anymore but it was you know using is like an all-purpose device in front of the TV like with Smart TV I think they looked in that direction then instead of looking for just mobile games almost that's that's the funny thing though you said the magic word you said Smart TV and Richard mentioned this to me earlier and it's true everything shown here can be done on a smart TV now which is basically every TV and the interfaces on these TVs today especially and even you know some years in the past is so far beyond what you could do on the Xbox one here that it just makes the whole thing look redundant and silly like this was not the place to focus it mmm I mean especially the cost of this when it comes out I mean you're paying a steep price for that connect unit and the box when you're already paying for a TV which might have these features to a certain degree and I still think that a lot of this is telemetry driven Microsoft knows exactly what you're doing on your Xbox 360 if it's connected lives live so they would have seen that there'd have been a huge amount of hours being poured into Netflix as opposed to gaming and are thinking well what are people doing with their consoles is it the end of the console as we know it do we need to evolve do we need to do something different hey we've got all of this information coming back telling us first of all I heard that people were watching a hell of a lot of Netflix on their machines and secondly you talked about connects being reasonably successful it was actually I think it was like the biggest consumer electronics success point when it actually launched but I think the issue is that the timing was just incredibly bad for Xbox one here because as you say Smart TVs was starting to become a thing you didn't really need to have that level of integration and you know literally a couple of years later a Smart TV would be just so much better than the interface you got with Xbox one and well you know what can you say about that and secondly Kinect I think even by the time the 360 was winding down everybody was aware of its limitations that the doors had stopped having much of an interest in it so the you know this this just goes to show how long it takes to develop a console decisions that are made years prior come back to haunt you if they're not the right decisions so Kinect was just the wrong product at this point I think it's a bit of a shame I'm gonna be going to see the interface coming up here and it is what's remarkable about it is that the level of engineering that's gone into something that's ultimately not needed it's it's an astonishing technical achievement but it's just not what we want or what we need exactly but coming up here though Don Mattrick is about to reveal the one system as he keeps saying over and over again introducing Xbox one yeah mmm and this is the other thing still in here you know that the box it's just it looks like a set-top box and I suspect that's entirely by design yeah it's it's amazing how their design evolved so it's like there's still this like rectangular box but the Xbox one s and X are just these beautiful sleek looking machines that feel really dense and this thing is this gigantic hollow ugly plastic II looking box it just it fell flat and instantly responds to you I don't like even claims like that though I don't think that's what I would characterize connect as no not at all now that though the controller now this is actually a great piece of engineering and design work I'd say as I mean this base fundamentally they're still using this design as the basis for the XY series X and everything going forward it's a really good controller definitely yeah so that is one of the few successes I think the box itself I mean they were kind of one thing we have to credit them with is the fact that it was a very quiet machine and that persisted into all of their other X boxes Microsoft knew that we needed a quiet machine in the living room as opposed to what we got with ps4 which was significantly louder but the price we're paying for it here in terms of the form factor is is remarkable and one thing that is really sort of catching Maya straight away is how shiny the plastics are woman but when I got my review unit within the day there were fine line scratches already on that unit not been touched the plastic quality's terrible on top it shows every scratch every piece of dust and I feel like that's a that's a mistake they should have seen coming in the sense that Sony made that same error with the original ps3 as well that piano black finish that was slightly transparent it doesn't look good after a very short period of time versus the slim which was totally fine here we go Yusuf Mehdi so which is Tata matric whose kind of not revered in the same way as Phil Spencer is I think he's sort of leadership of Xbox was he's not looked back fondly upon no and we're I kind of think we're about to see why when we see that there's a focus here not on the Xbox one as a games machine but as some kind of weird living room omniscient guardian I mean it's the all-in-one experience I'm thinking about on the Xbox 360 generation xbox had some pretty big exclusive games you have Gears of War you've got I guess the original Mass Effect there you've got halo you know a number of games that you know drove the generation but this conference along with talking about you know TV and all these other is talking about multi-platform games primarily and I think the only exclusive game that is mentioned is remedies control but in a way that obviously isn't really talking about the game right that they've moved away from talking about exclusives to only really multi platforms I feel like they probably felt they didn't need it you missed fort sir there was a force of reveal before so yeah it's true good so there's the original - which I guess similar in concept to what it is now but it has evolved significantly from that similar aesthetic though I still think that this is an area where where Sony you really are ahead of the game in that the interface feels genuinely pleasant place to be and especially when you think back to PlayStation 3 you know in many ways that system was under spec compared to Xbox 360 graphics in particular but you booted up that machine you had that beautiful 1080p front end and it actually just felt like a really high-end pristine experience and we got a hint of that in the PS 5 reveal and it kind of irks me a bit that the evidence is suggesting that Xbox Series X is going to retain this aesthetic which is kind of functional but doesn't in any way sort of invite or welcome you into the system yeah and there's also the concern that it's still gonna be 1080p which like to me that just it seems absurd that such a high-end machine would be straddled with this user interface that you'll spend plenty of time looking at only to have it be kind of blurry fuzzy and not that visually attractive at all like things are really under estimating the importance of having a really nice beautiful sharp front-end multitasking it begins looking at the UI design though this is like coming together with the Windows 8 design around this time period with the tile interface which is interesting because that was also hated but then it's brought obviously onto the Xbox where the tile interface was developed because of touchscreen experience is more or less yeah and so if you're a desktop user it didn't have utility to you for here you're using connect which is even less direct than a mouse and yet it still has the tile interface it seems like a bad design well just I recall maybe a I seem to remember when you would enable connect mode like the tile width or something might change I need okay actually can't remember it's been so long but I could have sworn it switched to a slightly more friendly mode or maybe I'm thinking about just like the surface book or something or the surface laptops where that has the touch mode but I feel like something changes when you switch to connect mode because none of that stuff is really part of the Xbox experience now like a lot of the stuff being shown here has either been stripped out or pushed to the back well there's no connect anymore which yeah I mean well what can you say here I mean this presentation it looks a bit dodgy to me because first of all I'm not sure I would trust that particular stage setup for doing a live demonstration no not at all secondly the way he's jumping between stuff there I mean you know I'm gonna go and jump to a game now he's not jumping to a game he's jumping to a movie of again yeah yup and you know all of this stuff here I don't remember this level of immediacy when I was in art I mean that was the immediate thing when we got this machine is just it is nowhere near as responsive as this stuff would suggest especially things like when you're actually using Kinect to move through the interface like move the hand cursor around and such like it's a slow choppy experience it doesn't it's not great and then there's this snapping stuff that was a big part of the initial launch but it seems to be long gone yes it's not really interesting though because again it's built on this conception that you want to be doing more than one thing at a time on a single single screen you know so here he's talking about I'm watching the first Star Trek film so he's the I'm going to salute Aeneas Lee watch the trailer for the second one hour now I'm gonna book something so meticulous boy you know I don't I don't need this in my life you know I if I'm watching Star Trek I'm watching Star Trek if I want to see the sequel there at some point I will go to the cinema I don't need to this is lit Achatz this is the big mistake here is that they got this weird assumption that people want to be doing all these things on on this one TV based machine that's a bit slow when in reality people will just pick up their phone like the second screen the thing that you would snap is on your phone and it's easier to just look down at the phone do your thing directly with touch and then look back at the TV rather than trying to juggle these multiple slow windows and deal with the not so smooth interface around it yeah I guess the one thing with Kinect going away though is you lose voice command which cool yeah a little bit more immediate I guess then the the hand waving gesture stuff which I actually think is really not responsive and I have a distinct memory of my brother who bought himself an Xbox one me walking into the room and the Kinect always recognizing me as oh yeah because we have the same stature and build and all these things it's like yeah it's not very useful then even in that aspect of making sure that there's only one user and controlled advice at all times it would just like have accidental inputs that's I think the the best command is still Xbox go home which is how everyone felt after this presentation but no it's true though the voice the thing about the original launch - is that the way it was built was that a lot of functions you might need were kind of buried deep in these menu and the menu hierarchy and so for a while like voice from the code the voice input from Kinect was the only way to like easily access things like if you wanted to use a promotional code for instance it was not easy to find I recall I was like well I guess I just used the Kinect voice command to get this because I don't know where it's at or it's because they would bury it so deep and they've massively improved that in the current iteration where things are at least like it's reasonably accessible yeah it's more like getting to your libraries rather quick yeah the library is much much better now you see this split-screen stuff I mean in the PlayStation conference I was talking about the the fact that the second screen experience doesn't work because I've only got one set of eyes so this is kind of like the reason reverse where I've got one set of eyes but now I need to input the systems after access these things simultaneously yeah you know it just doesn't work and you know the other thing of course let's not forget that all of this flashy integration required I think 10% of the GPU allocated so we've already got an underpowered GPU compared to the competition and 10% of that was taken away to account for stuff like Kinect and for this interface so you know we're seeing here it's actually something that's really clever I mean it's as I said an astonishing level of engineering has gone into this an astonishing amount of effort but it's just it's just not the right product and it's fascinating to see a decision so bad realized with so much effort hmm it feels like like you said everything is kind of driven by telemetry because Nintendo also focused on TV when they revealed we you don't even have that dedicated TV buttons there must have been like enough research to suggest that oh people just want to do TV at the time and I don't quite get where all this this came from exactly like why where they were sourcing source in this data and like what led everyone to jump to this conclusion that oh yeah they just want to be able to watch more stuff through our machine and why Sony was able to not fall for that somehow well I wonder on the Sony side of things whether you know they actually knew what was coming with TV technology because they were making them whereas Microsoft would have been kind of wouldn't have had that kind of visibility into what the TV was going to evolve into so they decided hey well we're gonna take point here and do it and you know remember this this console had the HDMI input so you could feed in a set up oh yeah and then kind of integrate it into the whole Xbox front end system here fascinating stuff I mean a huge investment I think yeah the the HDMI inputs still part of the 1s and the 1x not on Series X though so you know if so a weird trick I was using it for I don't need it these days because I've changed my capture setup around as I always had issues with the OSS see being input into the Shogun Inferno because it outputs a slightly oddball I guess resolution and refresh rate well for a while I was using the input on xbox 1x to massage that signal and then send that back out to the Shogun so because you know fun fundamentally yes it adds a lot of input latency but if you just play on the original CRT and you just send that through for capture then it doesn't matter and it looks totally fine so basically just like fixed the signal if you were yeah so yeah this is really interesting primarily because we're finding so little of interest to talk about in the stream here that we're actually talking about little hacks we use to get good capture sources from dodgy HDMI sources and I've got to admit you're right Jon that Xbox one is brilliant for cleaning up dodgy HDMI the pass through there but now I think he's going to start talking I mean you know we've already started talking about the Kinect but now we're getting a deep dive into this rather unwell yeah aspect of the Xbox architecture so yeah we're getting the whole shooting match here about what he's different about Xbox one I mean I guess they had to do something different because of Sony had gone ahead with ps4 reveal what three months earlier yeah so this is this is this is a response to what Sony did and the response was hey we're not going to talk about games for at least half an hour of this presentation oh no like 5 million transistors rich was mentioning it before we start talking about talking about how many transistors your SOC has is really irrelevant it doesn't say anything about the performance figures and then just saying 8 gigabytes of RAM at a point I mean core CPU a cord like this no actual spec details they want to glide over that so people don't they they know tarde no how are ya you know at this point in time that they have nothing to talk about there obviously it didn't you know stop people from having conspiracy theories about how esram how it every like 1 million cycles or something like that could could be a tiny bit faster than a gigabytes of gddr5 when did the rumours of the second GPU specifically the one hidden in the power the power brick what is new due to me but I was for obviously I was kind of in the middle of all of this at the time and we knew the specs because of the of the massive hacks that were happening at the time and we knew exactly what the specifications were there were clock speed tweaks but that slide that we saw earlier was kind of pseudo confirmation to everything we knew at that point was true because it you know it talks about the eight gigs of ram and the eight core SOC oh and there's five billion transistors let's not forget that a big bunch of those will be sucked up by the 32 megabytes of esram on the SOC so yeah but yeah so you know in the context of all of that but the the the the dual GPU thing I believe started from a really early leak about the Xbox one as it came to be where they were talking that there would be two GPUs in the system and nobody could let go of that one so you know even even when there was the the big hack with the with the leak with the the full spec basically if people asking always where's the second GPU it's you know we know there's a second GPU in Xbox one so you know where it must be you know if they're keeping it secret this is kind of what we're seeing now with PlayStation 5 we're you know certain spec points haven't been revealed and it's it's all to get one up over Microsoft when the reality is probably something rather more mundane and different and we probably know the spec as it stands right now yeah yeah and people that it's what I call the vacuum of information if something isn't clarified 100% then the vacuum has to be filled with something and it comes from conjecture rumors misinterpreted comments people talking off guard in a way perhaps they shouldn't and being misinterpreted and yes so we had a big bunch of that sort of stuff the second GPU was one my no favor and I'm going to keep talking about it is the the dual-layer esram we're yeah we're you know 32 megabytes are it's only one layer there's a second layer and it will give Xbox a huge advantage over the over the PlayStation 4 you know this is kind of the bizarre situation that we're in right now where you know the information has been presented but it's not enough so people need to kind of fill in the gaps you know to sort of fit the the fanboy theories I mean we're talking about this because again that you know they're talking about connect and I think the thing that really stands out about this this presentation is how badly it's aged how many u-turns there were and how irrelevant it is to today's Xbox well yeah yeah I mean the controller there is obviously still relevant but you're right the Kinect stuff before like if you take that as its own thing it is fascinating I suppose I mean the problem with Kinect really just comes down to it's just not a great interface for playing games and it was never going to be it's not fun to do that like holding up your arms to pretend like you're driving a car with nothing to hold on to or you know those types of things like when you press a button you know that the button is like it's a binary input usually unless it's analog but you know you know you're pressing the button but with Kinect it's all about like sort of guessing what the game wants so even though you because you it's really just about translating your emotions into that kind of input and you kind of have to guess and some games really messed that up where it's like you have to do a lot of specific actions and it's very difficult to actually pull them off like the steel battalion game I think is a good example of that I forgot that it existed Wow look the kids left the dancing games they I mean that is a situation where the latency of Kinect has no relevance you know that worked okay they had centrioles so Jon do I take it here that you weren't using Rhys voice commands y-yes out of oh well I've used some voice commands early on with the system if or about it for about a week and then you just realize how horribly boring and dumb it is I would hope I kind of liked Xbox on you know you could walk into the living room and just say Xbox on and your console would fire everything up for you I mean it would turn on the TV and stuff and you'd be straight in there yeah it's kind of nice dad but I think the the other thing about the emphasis on the living room I don't know if their telemetry can tell them whether the Xbox is actually in living room or not because I think a lot of people don't game in the living room you know kids in particular they'll be in their bedrooms and whatnot in which case all of this is you know a total non-starter well did any of you guys actually watch TV through Xbox I never actually did no well the problem with doing it to begin with in 50 Hertz territory is that you'd be up sample to 60 Hertz with horrible Giada so no I didn't do it no that's awful we were you in the EU in Europe when this was launching John are you still in the US I had just moved I moved in March 2013 so this would have aired when I was still relatively new in you're right so I presume you weren't hooked up to the TV then for your Xbox one no I mean we did have TV downstairs in the living room but we're in my gaming room I did not have any sort of TV so that Xbox one still there isn't it swear it it oh yeah the alot the Durango is actually now in the living room mainly kept it there because occasionally my son would like to play roblox on there I remember he usually plays on his PC you know he's turned into a PC gamer I'm remembering the leaks about Durango where there was a like a conference I forget where and then like one of the cry tech guys comes out I swear I don't remember I posted it maybe was on Twitter at the time he says like just came back from the Durango conference really great stuff yeah I think that might seem from where the dual GPU thing leaked originally but it wasn't a leak obviously if the information was at all accurate I mean maybe it was the dev key or something who knows but yeah I do remember that thing confusing the break what is he doing here it's they're still talking about the system architecture and all of these things coming together if they've done the windows bit yet they're talking about having the Windows OS similar or not yeah I don't think they have mmm oh wait here it's we're gonna talk a little bit about games I guess because they've got Andrew Wilson from EA coming up here and just seeing him talk like he's still okay he was head of EA Sports at the time but I swear this guy he's immortal he's like the same here as he is in the most recent EA play like he's like ageless it's amazing he feeds off the lifeblood of FIFA Ultimate Team purchases powered by micro ATX micro transactions once again though another multi-platform game haven't shown off any game on the system yet just talking see they always wheel out the Microsoft that's why they always wheel out the EA Sports preview of the next generation and it never looks in any way genuine so you know mostly like the one time they got close and they showed off Fight Night Round three yeah that's right that was the oh yeah good good early on because that actually did look comparable to the final game and the final game was absolutely stunning like that was just a breakthrough for visuals at the time so big respect on that one however oh yeah well you know this so they said like this is this is all ignite engine which obviously has now been mostly replaced by frostbite excluding so yeah mean I don't I don't actually engage in playing any of the sports games but the last time I played FIFA I remember being in frostbite well this is the other thing which is how us-centric this presentation is there's a lot of us stuff here that you know Europeans have got zero interesting whatsoever we get a bit of FIFA which I guess is global but you know NBA NFL I can you know the yeah kind of cut cut from that's gonna have to somebody in France Germany or UK is minimal and you know they're doing it again they're wheeling out these else these sports celebs these athletes yeah what's the point yeah I know I know especially when they haven't shown anything yet like before waiting and by the way Alex Madden has been using frostbite since Madden 18 thank you for looking so and that surprised me yet so there was some discussion on Twitter about Madden today that kind of popped up and it has occurred to me just the remarkably difficult almost thankless job that the people working on Madden must have and any of these sports games like producing a yearly game at this fidelity and they're at now like trying to simulate a giant field of players that all can collide with on another all of their own unique AI while you know managing the ball and all the strategies and strategy is on top of it's so complex like it's insane that these games are still shipping yearly honestly and are these I don't actually know much about the development of these games are these like multi studio games like the call duty franchises or sure about that like I think there might be two kind of teams but I I suspect that it's all still kind of unified wasn't pre-production work I mean they build upon what they do each year but still I kind of want to look more into that actually because it's it's something I've been thinking about lately like just the complexity of developing these sports games and how they're kind of like a lot of people kind of toss them aside like ocean sports games but really it's kind of remarkable that they've been able to keep this up compared to the old days I guess we're seeing test renders here yeah in SD that's very low frame rate obviously because it's running an engine you know I like in an editor nothing really too interesting though the problem here though is I think we'll see is that they're they're just not able outside of that one fight night thing they really don't show what to expect yet which may be the games just aren't in a state to be shown at this point so who knows but still we're 31 minutes in we've still not seen a game but we've had a flash now that's your fault sir which wasn't game day but that's it I think the big difference here is so Sony took a while to get to the games as well and the ps4 reveal but it was two hours so they had more time to show games at the end and you know once Ernie is very engaging to listen to and then they knew that when they would get to those demos it would be kind of mind-blowing so they were kind of building people up we're here you feel like you're in that same building up phase but then it never actually hits well Sony is presenting a vision of gaming that this isn't a vision of gaming yes vision of some kind of fantasy living room that they're inviting you into it's you know it's not my living room it wasn't at the time it's not my living room now and you know it just goes to show what a complete misfire this is I mean you know they're still I mean they're still going on here we still haven't seen any games it's just remarkable force Donal yeah it's yep I was before the Xbox one launched I was invited to a free play event here and that they had in Berlin back then like I can't remember was like maybe September or so before it launched and I distinctly remember almost no-one playing any of the games which is kind of like walking around and drinking because they had free drinks there but then I walked up to the killer instinct booth and I had no idea what the game was gonna be like and that game floored me but obviously they don't show it off here so killer I mean right I get my hands on Xbox one first at Gamescom 2013 nice and I was reasonably impressed with what they had to show like it was fine up here we go so this is this is hilarious because it's just another render yeah Oh though see you look ray trace reflections already back then Wow back then there's the only advice that looks real you see I understand that is funded by the GPU in the pelvic I see you're right that's what it's for it's the reflections GPU the thing is though as you look at this trailer and I kind of wish that this was this was like a single game or you have football the other football basketball and UFC all in one game imagine well see you take your UFC character into FIFA just beat everyone up you see I'm talking about this for years basically video game Avengers where you take all of your franchise killers and put them into one game and I think Ubisoft good but the early often it would be amazing satins Creed versus watchdogs versus Rabbids and what else has me I'm gonna remake no just us so you know that could be a mini game in the game for powerful minutes and we still haven't seen actual games but so at this point in time he is ahead of Microsoft Studios or worse here yeah he's basically in charge of first party at this point and I think he might have been living in London I'm not entirely sure he was definitely living in London at some point but yeah he's in charge of all of the first party output and I think the challenge that they've got here is that they've left this show so late that we're just a couple of weeks out from e3 so if they're going to show their games here what if they got for e3 so the answer seems to have been to fudge it and not really show anything and some of the stuff we're about to see here is shocking in terms of being a non reveal there's there's no substance to it whatsoever so let's just remember how the big event from the PlayStation event in February was that we saw Killzone Shadowfall we sat down we enjoyed a slice of gameplay for a moment there you could be transported into the living room of the future playing the game of the future you're gonna be enjoying November of that year that is a special moment this is what these conferences are all about for me but here yep I agree here we're in that faileth you know it's what I'm calling the trail off' occasion of game marketing now where you don't actually see the games anymore in which case what's the point you know agree it is remarkable I've been saying this all along it's just this trailer 4k ssin of games it really uh it just doesn't feel like you're seeing anything of value yet it's like okay here's a vision of what they want it to be but you get nothing more than that so you get a flash of what forts of five is about in this and it is it for the time it is a stunning game and in the fullness of time we've become aware of the technical challenges that turned ten were facing and getting a 1080p60 game out for launch and it is a remarkable achievement but this is probably based on game assets but I'm not sure well highly doubt is real time I think there is some comparison footage from the real game with some day assets here and the things like the tires along the side of the track I think are different the crowd is no longer 3d and allow these shots and I remember the the ground like looking like it had a parallax look to it with the cobblestones which is also not in the final game to my recollection so I this is just game assets I don't actually think it's real and as a driving game and launched this didn't make the same impression as PGR 3 did for 360 no which just looked unbelievable even though in that case that earlier trailer showed the game at 60fps and the final game was 30 but even still it was amazing oh yeah see turn 10 I mean maximum respect they do with hardware what they do with hardware at launch you know it's it's just pretty awesome I think forts of 5 yeah other amazing team was probably um sort of overlooked a little bit and but I think in the fullness of time it's it's just evolved into a killer franchise and obviously now we've got horizon as well which is just enormous I'm really hopeful that we're going to see something from turn 10 at the July Xbox series X event they could do a lot Wow I would hope I'd like to see something really I mean it's been a while since four to seven they'd had I don't just want to see four to eight but I get you I'd like you know what I mean like I'm very curious to see what what they do next because the talent is clearly there I could probably pour more into the campaign areas where where I would like to see them go one thing is since its night game also have four to five have two times msaa as well possibly it could be EQ AAA I'm not sure it could be EQ yeah that's what can't remember to make but it's it does have a low anisotropic filtering if I recall the score just water it like maybe like 4 X or something like that at best oh here we go so I was getting your site its cited for this because quantum breakage do you think it's a rather special game in many ways I like it yeah but I'm a fan again it's you know that well we've talked about Fela fication in this reveal here we've got Fela fication and TV effect if occation if they're not that could actually get the word out where there's this huge I mean that the thing about quantum break was there was some kind of big multimedia push where it was TV and gaming coming together in one glorious whole yeah right but it plays into the DNA of remedy games of being kind of noir II filmic games but it also it's a big distraction from playing the game I've played through both the Xbox one and the PC version of this game and I honestly I watched this TV stuff in the meantime and its tail so it's just was like I don't know what makes you different honey do you really want to know as she touches her and you see like a boat crashing into a bridge like like what I actually don't know if that has I think did the storyline because in the game this this only happens to people who interacted with the time machine did the little girl interact with yeah I don't know that's what I mean like where does this little girl come into play like it has nothing to do it's like a mind meld but instead of sharing - you're sharing trailered footage from remedy she's the ultimate game marketing through snippets of an engine not on Xbox one obviously stuff which is interesting I remembered the ice where the original reveal of the game had like 900 P assets so the actual amount of gameplay reveal wouldn't occur I think until I games come 2014 if I recall yeah something like that like it happened significantly later than this Microsoft Studios is investing more than ever in studios around the world that Northlight engine is really great it's just kind of shackled to the Xbox one it's it's a pretty good-looking game for the fact that it is on Xbox one that they could push so much like they did that dynamic GI and all the cool lighting effects but 720p with that native like early style reconstruction it doesn't look really great these days I'm basically wait he just said 15 exclusives with 8 brand new franchises I kind of want to go back and do the numbers on that and see how many which which ones actually came to past like I don't doubt that that's that that's real but I wonder what they are missed games and TV come to life in ways that haven't been possible I don't know they're saying that this was he basically suggested that Xbox one is when they had the most number first party games and development and that might be true but if you remember back to the original Xbox there was so many Microsoft published and internally developed games Tong's although I guess that could be like kind of like contracting out to other studios yes their first party published stuff there was a lot so this is like an entire unit that Microsoft put together to do TV yeah right something like that I mean you know Wow Survivor not allowed this came to fruition obviously yeah I don't remember it coming I kind of feel like if you go into Microsoft HQ today and you just say the word TV people are gonna flinch don't remind me of that it is remarkable how things have turned around there if you look back to the series s Xbox one s father and the Xbox one X whole DNA if X had changed completely all of this is gone yeah I will say I would say that Phil and his team have done a remarkable job of turning the ship around because Matt it is completely different now compared to what this is I mean I had some wacky ideas there was a pre Xbox one leak where they were talking about transmedia gaming where for example they had they had a golf game being played out in in real life and you would be taking part in a game version simultaneously so all of the data from the real-life golfing event would be fed into the game and then your performance would be inserted into it I mean it's it's a sounds like a remarkable idea but if you think about how long an actual real-life golf game it takes to play I mean what you're supposed to do without moving from hole to hole maybe watch trailers I thought yes snap some trailers have star trek into darkness there another time about halo I'd have like a golf game over our mini game imagine that being a Halo fan at this point in time and you played halo 4 you liked it maybe you didn't like it whatever but your first look into the next generation of halo is a television show so the tough part here for them is that obviously they had just released halo 4 yeah on last generation machines like the year before this and it's akin to expecting Naughty Dog to turn up at a ps5 event show their new game after just releasing it you know it's like they're just not in a position to show anything new so I'm kind of feeling like maybe they shouldn't have come out at all it's just like you know we're not ready we're not ready to show anything but they're about to reveal their master plan here of getting Steven Spielberg involved in xbox which is about as good as Paul McCartney in destiny you know well you know he's there you know Spielberg is is they're talking about halos this is a big deal but you know again when you've got a console launch you're you're rolling out the head of 343 and you've got nothing to show in terms of gaming this is just like you know pretty disastrous here finally think about this sir TV show I mean obviously we have reviewed the content ahead of ahead of recording this so we've got some idea of what we're talking about and they're talking about Halo TV show here the halo TV show still hasn't happened it's seven years rate hasn't happened they're projecting 2021 for the halo TV show I think Amblin Spielberg's company is still involved but you know again this is why are we even discussing this I agree I mean there's a kind of weird thing where people like to announce their games too early perhaps but now we've got the owner of a TV show that's 70 years later we still haven't seen anything on it it makes you wonder how much production had it even been done at this point if any you know it's crazy I mean guess they had that Forward Unto Dawn television thing that came up before halo 5 remember if that has oh yeah there was some transmedia elements yeah for sure thank you the television you see when you when you look back at this it's you know the is the whole TV TV TV thing and you wonder whether it was just selective editing or mischaracterization of the event which it's not it really is know one of the most spectacular own goals you know we've given Sony a hard time for this is the something else we were talking about earlier John we we really did give Sony a hard time for e3 2006 which was six yeah and indeed 2005 both of them were though both of those were terrible evie press conferences it had a dramatic impact on PlayStation 3 as a platform and this is worse this is much worse because while those loose did not come to pass especially the 2005 one there was a vision related to games there that got people excited and the reason they failed is that the excitement didn't really come to pass or what they what they promised didn't come to pass and so people were disappointed but that doesn't mean that the vision was bad it just didn't work out this time though the vision is not good like this focus on TV and all these like experiences outside of games it's just it doesn't work nobody's excited about this I guess at what point did people understand about the always-on aspect of Xbox one which was scrapped was that an e3 thing or was this actually rumored I was leading out to e3 e3 okay yeah the online thing would happen it was III where they really dropped the ball actually like that's where those famous interviews with Don Mattrick about like the we have a product for these people was called Xbox 360 like all those quotes that would come to haunt them for years it's all from e3 yeah and so this was just like the beginning of that well anything we did have games but we also had this concept of digital licenses attached to physical games yeah went down like a lead balloon you had to kind of validate your used purchase a game store something and transfer the digital license so the key that the disk actually did nothing this was a massive u-turn that Microsoft had to do because Sony you know the classic Uchida thing where you know how to use share use games you just handed a disc over that was that was that was hugely damaging and then there was the obviously you know the specs disadvantage was something that Microsoft had to tackle and they came up with the power of the cloud do you remember that where there would be at here yeah this was in e3 where they basically sat down at a kind of like a sit down session where they talks about how they're going to tap into Azure for kind of offline or other remote calculations that would feed back into the game that kind of happens I mean if you think about what a fortnight or a Call of Duty warzone server is doing I guess that a lot of their stuff is has come to pass on all platforms but in terms of improving the the teraflop count that didn't really happen yeah no did not there was a lot of research into its who after the fact I remember in video doing research about like injecting ray-tracing into games by the cloud and things like that it was definitely something people thought about but it was just not realistic at all the latency is so high I actually remember seeing a demo of crackdown threes like cloud stuff at Gamescom one year or they actually had multiple units running and they were kind of showcasing the way it worked and like a real demo and it was an interesting concept it did seem to work but I'd imagine there's just so many other issues or strange and and other problems around it that just made it kind of impossible to execute the way that they wanted to mmm so it could only ever work in multiplayer because you know otherwise just think about potentially millions of people at which day playing a single-player campaign exactly it would be a mess that will be launching xbox1 around the world later this year wow that's very non-committal yeah lately not gonna tell you when I'm not gonna tell you we're just around or how much they did actually I mean I guess in retrospect we were just a couple of weeks away from e3 so we did learn this information in short order yeah that's true in terms of primary messaging in context at the time what as we set our sights to the future I'd like to leave you today by presenting a warm they're doing a one more thing here yeah but it's not a good one no history completely honest it's not a good one well it's another multi-format game isn't it and to be fair it was like one of the biggest I mean they've ticked off all of the major franchises here you know the sports games FIFA is huge and if you're going to go to another huge franchise where else other than call of duty which is what we're gonna be seeing now can you imagine though if at this time of the reveal it would have been made clear that oh it's gonna be 720p on Xbox one and 1080p and ps4 like what that would do at this point in the cycle yeah direct them never recover I mean that was a when all that news started coming out about these early releases running at much lower resolutions and Xbox one everybody was like wait what like really like that that big of a difference it makes so much sense though like not the GPU absolutely like but like if you have to deal with esram and then slower you know ddr3 for not your entire frame like you're gonna see if much lower res games and it's only continued across the generation if not yet gotten worse and so I think they're like Xbox expecially when generally target around 900 P versus base PS force 1080p and they would usually be that that kind of difference it's just at launch like the golf was huge yep so we had titles like Call of Duty 720p on Xbox and 1080p on ps4 and persisted to like you know like Metal Gear Solid 5 Ground zeroes again the same sort of differential but but generally speaking 900p 1080p was was the difference but obviously there was the the worst performance generally as well on top of the yeah battlefield 4 was 720p and 900p on-base ps4 but the ps4 ran it better the next box one as well and when an Xbox one launched it had that awful scaling issue with that like bassy added a sharpening filter to everything yeah and also it was like crushing blacks if he said it's the RPG or sorry if he said it to full range RGB it was still crushing blacks and sort of like blowing out the whites so you ended up with this like super overly contrasted image and then lower res games it would be sharpened as well so comparing like ghosts or battlefield 4 to the ps4 version it looked much worse yeah so I mean this is basically the only deep dive into a game we're getting and it's Call of Duty ghosts and we do actually see something constantly taking but I don't think it was fully realized in ghosts as such no at this point time I think there's still a lot of research going on into the engine powering the game after this one which would be advanced warfare and that's where you see like the biggest generational difference like a switch to like a more normalized physically based rendering model really great post-processing you know I would say just like it generally it looks generationally different actually than ghosts in a lot yes and I mean you know moving to PBR was the big thing at that point and it was still very new obviously developers on the cutting edge at Crytek and guerrilla games are already moving into that space but you know I I can forgive them for being a little bit behind on that with Call of Duty and many other titles they've got a dokkan emotions out you see guys so they so they do talk about some stuff here that's interesting I guess they use tessellation not a lot of round edged objects like right there on the gun sights which didn't see as much usage this generation for objects like that in games it was more towards the later half of the gen that it was started used for like I would say ground textures less so on discrete models that would move around the screen a lot so it's like experimentation yeah I feel like triangle counts are high enough usually on these discrete models are at in its current form that you don't really need to go crazy with tessellation to make it look good within the context of the game yeah I think this is them where they have a game where a lot of its already designed around last gen consoles so the way you take up fidelity easily is by having an automated yeah to do it which you know that's what it's good for I guess so they're calling it sub D here isn't that just oh yeah tessellation without a long weird yeah yeah it's yeah it's a subdivision like John said I'm wondering but I don't know actually how they did it in the final product there are different ways either split up the model like the way Pixar does it is very different than every other you know way GPUs usually do it so maybe it does it in a special way I haven't see I always laugh because fundamentally this is the idea of subdividing these these models up into smaller triangles that was already done back on PlayStation 1 ya know that was the common approach to get around the a fine texture warping as they would have to essentially increase the complexity of the mesh as it got closer to the camera they did this loss these things about them talking about dynamic environments and I just course have to think back to crisis which had all these things years earlier okay Alex we did we did it we got crazy one thing I don't like about the way they're showing off these models is they're not showing them often like direct lighting but there's just like some sort of ambient light all around them so the models look very flat there are obviously really good looking models I would imagine there's just direct light um well that's the same issue with the PS 5 conference where they showed the guys talking with the black background is match the litt person in front and then just like yeah I'm pletely white or completely black background it looks weird hope there's no mouth is he's actually probably the most memorable part of this conference beyond TV TV this is the best part of the conference by far right there that was the best so so they mentioned volumetric lighting at one point but I'm pretty sure maybe in the underwater scene there is a volumetric light somewhere but for the rest of the game I cannot for remember at all any real volume i've lighting barely remember the game okay yeah i remember the swimming part i remember the space part at the beginning i remember like a jungle area with like a tessellated ground or something like around a creek looks good it was like a that's a sort of earthquake style event at the very beginning if you were cool in the care something like then you get warped into space that's what it is okay yeah I see a completely well that's literally the extent of my memories of Call of Duty ghosts apart from the fact that it was the first PlayStation 4 game that you could actually buy it came out at the same time I think as the last year versions so you could go into a shop and buy a Call of Duty ghosts on ps4 but there was no ps4 to run it on and and funnily enough of course when you first booted a Call of Duty ghosts on ps4 it ran at 720p and it got a patch to run at 1080p which is true also holla did he ghosts showed up on last gen machines or I guess the time current-gen machines cuz this game did appear on Wii U and by this point we you was like you know so like I guess it came out in the previous fall or winter so I was still very very new I'm remembering this dog PC version of the dog have hair works didn't have hair works and I'm misremembering that the PC very nice that sounds like something there might've they might have had but something I remember something like that it's like the only thing it'd be game that has it so I like this kind of stuff I think this is cool it's just that when there was literally nothing else it doesn't work as well right mm-hmm like it's fun to see their models of clothes and see what they're trying to go for well the amount of focus this game is getting in terms of screen time it's exactly what we want we want the developer to be able to set their game and say hey this is what makes things different now imagine if we had this but before this we had turn 10 you come out this is what we're doing for for motorsport five yeah that would have been amazing or you know quite a quiet some Sun of Rome totally absent from this it's not a great game but it looks incredible it looks next year yeah nothing I feel like Rhys actually would have been like that could have been a Killzone Shadowfall moment for them and that if they had shone like here's some gameplay from rise from Crytek to showcase what the system can do and you show one of the more impressive scenes in that game running which they would do it III I think ya know uh but that was that was a that would have been a great way to kick things off because that game does look amazing I mean it's all about making a statement great for what the generation is this actually gameplay footage now I think it's a cinematic cinematic trailer trailer footage there's some of them are also fake which is easy to recognize because they have motion blur in them and the game motion blur it's like okay we got that excellent motion blur in advanced warfare the next year though yeah mainly in cutscenes though on the consoles here's that Creek John yep the motion blur there's some light coming from the left by the way and the sun's on the right hand side so yeah that's big so bad I mean I love dogs so dogs in games perfectly fine I remember you I gave a call to dog Colin and I think Activision had to release a statement to say like his ladies and Colin is it Rex Holland liked about call duty is that they do focus on real-time lighting in their game even you know called duty for or all of the you know black ops one and two before this I guess no their engine targeting 60fps is a pretty awesome thing and I think they deserve a lot of credit obviously this game you can say whatever you want about it but it's targeting sixty and as a launch game that's not easy you know right especially on the ps4 side like doing a 1080p 60 shooter I launched like that that's pretty you know that's a tall order the other thing of course is that final silicon was very very very late and getting to developers so we get to e3 a couple minutes later and we're still seeing most of the titles they're running on PC not on Xbox or Playstation 4 hardware mmm yeah it's just what they weren't ready and that's that's difficult I mean thankfully it's different this time around developers have had def kiss for ps5 especially way ahead of time compared to last time that's good it's important for sure so there we are well basically yeah that's it the conference that's how it ends yeah I mean they they ended the conference by showing a world in ruins and you know that kind of represents perhaps the brand after this show so I mean looking back at this I actually think it was much worse than I had remembered and expected somehow like I guess the hype of it being a new machine even if it was disappointing made it easier to gloss over it but like from the modern lens or through the modern lens it's really really it's questionable to say the least yeah the only level of interactivity that is shown at any one point it's probably fake and that's the interaction with the I guess the hewent user interface through Kinect and you know you see any gameplay like a real gameplay at this day I mean that's the key they basically failed to excite people about a games machine by showing almost nothing games related yeah that's it didn't work it's not really bad actually and but I mean yeah it's worse if the yeah yeah this is just the beginning the tip of the iceberg for them I mean this is it's really interesting that this always seems to happen where you have it happened with Sony you want a ps3 after two successes you know Xbox Xbox 360 they did well and then they just really stumbled out of the gate on this and I'd say Xbox one has never really caught up to ps4 but it's done well in the end and the brand today is very it's in a much better place than it was after this reveal so I mean that's that's something for sure but I think that's lessons learned exactly but I think that's gonna do it for this one it's shorter than our previous ones mercifully although we could have done with some more gameplay demos but thanks for joining us thanks dad and if you guys enjoyed this video this looked back at disaster be sure to let us know by liking subscribing ring in the notification bell for instant updates from digital foundry and of course come find us over on Twitter to discuss anything related to this and more so until next time this is John rich and Alex all signing off [Music]

Channel: Digital Foundry

Views: 430,625

Keywords: df retro, digital foundry, digital foundry retro, xbox one reveal, xbox one, tvtvtvtv, tvtvtv, tvtv, tvtvtvtvtv, halo TV show, Quantum Break, Forza Motorsport 5, Call of Duty Ghosts

Id: JQGTpDJDxLg

Length: 64min 54sec (3894 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 28 2020