Developers Respond to Xbox One

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joshuaboy
joshuaboy Members Posts: 10,858 ✭✭✭✭✭
edited May 2013 in IllGaming

The people making games wonder where the games were, too.


For the gaming crowd, Xbox One debuted to varying degrees of disdain and indifference. But what about those who are actually making the games for Xbox One? What about the box, its guts, and its features excites them, and how did the announcement affect their teams?

IGN spoke with a handful of game developers about the Xbox One. Here's what they had to say:



Eric Osborne, Senior Writer and Head of Community at Bungie:

I’m excited for the next generation of games. Not just the horsepower, but the services both parties are building around it. When we went down and looked at what our pillars for Destiny would be -- which, by the way, have existed since 2009 -- and then looked at their pillars in candid conversations we were having...they’re almost like a mirror with each other. Shared stories, building your legend, living worlds that feel alive instead of a disc in a drive, spaces that are fundamentally cooperative. All those things line up so well with next-gen messaging. It was exciting for us to see that something we were building was not only fundamentally next-gen without the hardware, but we sort of became the de facto tip-of-the-spear for next-gen by nature of what we were building. I think that’s a really fun place to be...



David Goldfarb, Director at Overkill on Payday 2:


Let's see. I heard more marketing buzzwords than I expected to. I heard a lot about the living room and the TV being super important, which seemed weird given this was a game console. Then there was a bunch more marketing talk telling me how great my end-user experience would be. Never again would I need to switch sources. Then I heard I would get to talk to my console to turn it on. Which I'd frankly not do. I do enough embarrassing s*** in the course of the day - talking to my console is one step too far.

Then the games. I thought everything looked over-filtered and CG. Call of Duty was the best of the bunch. No real standouts except the dog. The dog was my big takeaway. I heard nothing about making self-publishing on the platform easier, nothing about the indie or online strategy, nothing about always-on. Also little about why we, the gamers, should not worry about the fact that in the age of iPads and iPhones and mobile everything, where most of us watched their conference not on TV but on phone or laptop, that their strategy seems to run counter to our user/consumption patterns.

But I will still buy one. :)



Brian Reynolds, Game Designer (Formerly Zynga):

I do most of my console gaming on Xbox 360, so I’ve certainly been tuned in to the long-awaited announcement of the next-gen. It’s actually kind of hard to tell from the “announce” so far what the console gaming experience is going to be like – I don’t personally care at all about all the TV stuff, completely uninterested, so I guess I’m still in a holding pattern.

I was a little sad to hear that I won’t be able to play my 360 games on it (and what kind of console announce only offers bad news for gamers?) since that will presumably mean I’ll have to maintain an operational Xbox 360 in parallel. Hopefully my Xbox Live account at least carries over and I’ll have unified Gamer Points and stuff… having to start over at zero would be getting into borderline rage-quit territory for me. :-)



Denis Dyack, COO of Precursor Games:

We are excited about the potential of X1 and look forward to speaking with Microsoft on how Shadow of the Eternals will be made available on their platform.



Laurent Detoc, President of Ubisoft North America:

It's a pinnacle year in the video game industry. Xbox One allows new possibilities for dynamic gameplay like what you'll find in Watch Dogs. It also goes beyond gaming innovation to attract entertainment enthusiasts and welcome new audiences to grow the industry.



Josh Tsui, President of Robomodo:

I’m always pretty stoked on any new console. It’s been 8 years since the last Xbox and it still boggles my mind that it still holds up. Stuff like more horsepower and awesome graphics are expected. What gets me excited is any possible new business model that may come up for independent developers. Right now that’s being held close to the vest but I’m hoping they take Sony’s lead and figure out a proper venue for that.

The new Kinect is going to be really interesting. I think the first Kinect was fun for what it was but it was always the “first pancake”. It worked and all but it’s really the next pancake that is awesome. The stuff I’ve seen so far seems like it’s delivering the promise from a few years back. The hope is that the granularity of control is improved to the point where developers are making games they really want to make with awesome feedback as opposed to altering the controls to work within the limitations. I can see this truly blowing things up.
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