The XBox Thread - Page 150

On June 15 2013 03:01 On_Slaught wrote:


Must say when I frist say this I thought it said "Xbox One teams up with NSA."

I was like "yep, it begins." Though that sort of thing wouldn't be made public

On June 15 2013 02:53 Acrofales wrote:

I work in the general area. It is (still) a pie in the sky. It is future tech. What MMOs do, what Dota does, what basically ALL online server-based games do is child's play compared to what Microsoft is promising. Many (astounding) things are possible today. The drivatar idea, for instance, is completely doable and will undoubtedly enhance gameplay. I think that that is a great idea and stuff like that has serious promise.

What MMOs do is simply track players' movements and actions. And even that screws up with the minimum amount of latency: try playing a WoW arena (or battleground) with > 200 latency. You'll see fireballs hit you out of nowhere and your own abilities can hit already dead people. Loot lag, or trade lag, is (or was, because it has been a while since I played) a fairly common problem. It is not a big deal in an MMO, because both players and game are explicitly prepared to deal with this. Not to mention that Laggrimmar became a term for a reason, and I know people who couldn't visit Dalaran because their game simply lagged out.

And, once again, these are incredibly simple operations (basically database operations, albeit massively parallel database operations), and small messages. All complex operations (such as generating what the world looks like), and scripting the giant dragon you're fighting's behaviour, are done client-side.

Furthermore, look at the development time and cost of your average MMO. It is far longer and far more expensive than that of a "standard" game, because the code is extremely complex, because ensuring the client has consistent behaviour (and things don't go wrong serverside, like items being inadvertently cloned, or a dragon being alive for one party member, but dead for another), is HARD. And the servers? WoW has approximately 10million subscribers. I googled peak concurrent users and found around 800,000, so lets round up to 1,000,000 (and peak is not average by any means... it's like the release day of TBC: servers were crashing all the time). These are distributed over 10 datacenters, which total(ed, during cataclysm) 13,250 server blades, 75,000 CPU cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM. So that means that to BARELY be able to perform these simple operations, you need 1 blade server per ~80 users.

Xbone is promising to not only give far more complex operations, but to far more people, at a far lower cost (WoW subscription is more than XBL subscription). The costs of being able to both develop this, and run this, are unrealistic at today's level of technology.

EDIT: I don't really see anything wrong with Microsoft planning for this in the future. There are things that will be able to be moved to the cloud in the foreseeable future. However, it will not work NOW, and imho, is a bad design principle for a singleplayer game. Sony (and PC) are far more sensible. DESIGN for the moment, but plan for the future. Xbone offers nothing the PS4 cannot do as well, but are trying to market it as if they do... and all of that to hide the fact that they are shoving unwanted and unneeded restrictions down your throat (forced online, kinect always on, etc.)

On June 15 2013 03:21 paralleluniverse wrote:

OK then. Go tell them to scrap their current plans for Titanfall and reverse the millions of dollars they've spent buying 300,000 servers. Because what they're doing is impossible, because you say so, nevermind that WoW now has no problems running persistent worlds on their servers.

On June 15 2013 03:43 Mannerheim wrote:
More insights from CliffyB;



What an absolute turd.

On June 15 2013 02:53 Acrofales wrote:

I work in the general area. It is (still) a pie in the sky. It is future tech. What MMOs do, what Dota does, what basically ALL online server-based games do is child's play compared to what Microsoft is promising. Many (astounding) things are possible today. The drivatar idea, for instance, is completely doable and will undoubtedly enhance gameplay. I think that that is a great idea and stuff like that has serious promise.

What MMOs do is simply track players' movements and actions. And even that screws up with the minimum amount of latency: try playing a WoW arena (or battleground) with > 200 latency. You'll see fireballs hit you out of nowhere and your own abilities can hit already dead people. Loot lag, or trade lag, is (or was, because it has been a while since I played) a fairly common problem. It is not a big deal in an MMO, because both players and game are explicitly prepared to deal with this. Not to mention that Laggrimmar became a term for a reason, and I know people who couldn't visit Dalaran because their game simply lagged out.

And, once again, these are incredibly simple operations (basically database operations, albeit massively parallel database operations), and small messages. All complex operations (such as generating what the world looks like), and scripting the giant dragon you're fighting's behaviour, are done client-side.

Furthermore, look at the development time and cost of your average MMO. It is far longer and far more expensive than that of a "standard" game, because the code is extremely complex, because ensuring the client has consistent behaviour (and things don't go wrong serverside, like items being inadvertently cloned, or a dragon being alive for one party member, but dead for another), is HARD. And the servers? WoW has approximately 10million subscribers. I googled peak concurrent users and found around 800,000, so lets round up to 1,000,000 (and peak is not average by any means... it's like the release day of TBC: servers were crashing all the time). These are distributed over 10 datacenters, which total(ed, during cataclysm) 13,250 server blades, 75,000 CPU cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM. So that means that to BARELY be able to perform these simple operations, you need 1 blade server per ~80 users.

Xbone is promising to not only give far more complex operations, but to far more people, at a far lower cost (WoW subscription is more than XBL subscription). The costs of being able to both develop this, and run this, are unrealistic at today's level of technology.

EDIT: I don't really see anything wrong with Microsoft planning for this in the future. There are things that will be able to be moved to the cloud in the foreseeable future. However, it will not work NOW, and imho, is a bad design principle for a singleplayer game. Sony (and PC) are far more sensible. DESIGN for the moment, but plan for the future. Xbone offers nothing the PS4 cannot do as well, but are trying to market it as if they do... and all of that to hide the fact that they are shoving unwanted and unneeded restrictions down your throat (forced online, kinect always on, etc.)

On June 15 2013 03:13 Blisse wrote:
Not sure if this was posted, but I'm sure you guys will have interesting discussions of this..

http://www.neowin.net/news/anonymous-xbox-engineer-explains-drm-and-microsofts-xbox-one-intentions

On June 15 2013 03:44 a176 wrote:


you have to be specific about what is truly cloud enabled and what is not. have people quickly forgotten the shit that went down in sim city? the drivatar example is one thing they could offload to the cloud, but they don't actually have to.

mmos are obviously entirely server based so there isnt even a point to argue about those. but when you see them throwing around cloud buzzwords even during the "next halo" presentation, god, it makes me want to vomit.

On June 15 2013 03:50 jinorazi wrote:
isnt it just more simple to offer digital copy and disc copy
make digital copy cheaper (no shipping, no mfg, no middleman), people will buyt the cheaper digital copy that cannot be resold.

problem solved, but no, lets make it more complicated!

On June 15 2013 04:08 takingbackoj wrote:

Not sure what you mean by this. Xbox One will have discs still as well for initial installation if you really want a disc for some reason

As for Xbox's cloud system, I like what I am hearing so far and also like the fact that as it stands, Xbox One seems to have a high ceiling. I will listen to people's theories on forums but as far as business decisions and tech understanding, im willing to bet MS knows what its doing as opposed to forum goers.

On June 15 2013 04:08 takingbackoj wrote:

Not sure what you mean by this. Xbox One will have discs still as well for initial installation if you really want a disc for some reason

As for Xbox's cloud system, I like what I am hearing so far and also like the fact that as it stands, Xbox One seems to have a high ceiling. I will listen to people's theories on forums but as far as business decisions and tech understanding, im willing to bet MS knows what its doing as opposed to forum goers.

On June 15 2013 03:43 Mannerheim wrote:
More insights from CliffyB;



What an absolute turd.

On June 15 2013 04:27 JimmiC wrote:
Perhaps I'm naive, But whats so differnt about what xbox is doing with games compared to what ipod did with music. Why was their no outrage when you couldn't play your CD's on your ipod? OMG you had to keep your old cd player to play those (keep you 360 to play your 360 games). You couldn't hold an itunes song, so on and so forth. So I don't see the big deal. I think a lot of people wern't mad because it opened up the ability to dowload free music. Better known as stealing. But since it was a small amount people justified i to themselves. I'm sure Game makers and xbox are trying to protect them selves from this hence the DRM and Checkins.

I really doubt that people are that mad and have no interent, esspecially the ones on the forums on the internet. Its that stealing will be harder. You can still ehad over to a friends house and log on with your crap to play your games. If you wanna share games trade log ins?

I care which system is better and which has better games, I have interent access so checking in once every 24 hours, sure why not, my current one is connected always. If my inet goes out usually it is back up within 24, if not whatever I won't play my games, I'll crack out the old 360 if I get bored.

Seriously how good are people's life that this seems like a big problem?

On June 15 2013 04:35 JimmiC wrote:



That makes a ton of sense, I think people just like being mad and don't think about benefits, or logically.