Okay, I'm ready to get an XB1 in theory, but there are two niggling thoughts in the back of my head.
1. The hardware problems from last gen. Nintendo and Sony have decades of electronics experience, MS has almost none and it's shown.
2. Always online. Yes they did away with it, but they still have Titanfall as their crown jewel. They may well have removed the requirement, but you don't just throw away 6 years of development and philosophy as quickly as removing a bulletpoint from a presentation. MS had a conviction that online was a way to advance gaming and I believe they are going to prove that to us whether we like it or not. They took away the requirement yes, but I have to think their agenda remains to the point where they will promote the online experiencesuch that single player is so threadbare "they'll have to go online".
Why should the second point concern me? Well, I like to own my games, for one, and by linking the experience to a proprietary network it means that once MS turns off the servers all I'll have is a disc. Used games are the only way I can get a lot of titles given the price of games down here, and this shoe will drop before the end of the generation. But mostly, I don't enjoy playing online as much as the single player experience.
BONUS CONTENT:
Oh and this Forza microtransaction stuff. It may be an indication that the wrong people have influence over MS's XB1 vision.
I did however appreciate the bonus content and wanted to make that known.
Forcing everyone to pay an extra $100 for Kinect is crap.
Over the years, the Xbox brand has morphed from a solid provider of quality titles into a smorgasbord of vague multimedia proposals that do little for me in regards to what I am interested in the most, which are games. There's nothing right now that could interest me in picking up an Xbox One (and to a lesser extent, a PS4) and I don't see things changing anytime soon, if at all.
Yeah, I think with both consoles I have the promise of a future, which is why I got at least one of them. The best games on the consoles that I enjoyed this generation were all true surprises, From Gears of War 1 and 2 to No More Heroes and Uncharted. I know those experiences will come around again this generation.
Returning to my PC roots this year has shown me that the consoles don't have to provide all the best experiences, and you really could get by on just a PC, but to enjoy the best of the best, you need to have a Nintendo home console and handheld, a gaming PC and at least one of the Microsony boxes.
I think they care about online because they can control everything with it. They just used gaming as an entry point because at the time they were jumping into the game console business, ONLINE GAMING was all the rage and the only company who had bothered with it was little SEGA.
So why not consume SEGA's idea and throw a billion dollars into it? Then eventually when we have people by the balls, we can convert everything into a rental service for games and turn Xbox into a TV & entertainment provider.
It's not a bad theory given Microsofts shift to Software as a Service across their platforms. It's also where media consumption is going in every other aspect (Spotify versus iTunes, Netflix versus BluRay).
Sigh.