They want you using Kinect for all this. If they include a headset, that's one less reason you don't need it.

That its a poor alternative probably never occurred to them.

They've demoed some of the new noise cancelling features of Kinect. It's good. Better than Kinect 1. Good enough to get by? Maybe. It's not as if an ordinary headset magically removes background/TV noise either. And as for mouth breathers, well, there's a special place in hell for them.

It's irrelevant to me anyway. I'll almost never be playing a game with sound coming from the TV. Certainly no multiplayer one, so I'll need a decent combined headset. Shame my Logitechs won't work but maybe it's just a case of a £3 cable.

Dead Rising 3 sounding good.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-06-13-dead-rising-3-preview

Framerate is mentioned but afaik that's always one of the things they optimise toward the end of development. Hopefully.

Is Dead Rising 3 a launch game?

Cool. And Titanfall is sounding very cool.

Quantum Break sounds mental

http://www.joystiq.com/2013/06/13/demystifying-quantum-break-with-remedys-sam-lake/

In a good way.

MattyJ wrote:

The games really are selling it to me at the moment.

Me too. As it stands, I can see me cancelling my PS4 pre-order at some point between now and the end of the year. If they can sort the shitty DRM out, I'll stay at base camp.

Likewise. The games lineup at launch looks brilliant. It's a rare thing that I there will almost be too many great games at launch. I will have some difficult choices to make. I can afford two, maybe three at a push. I'll need a second pad too so that will eat into funds. And two fucking headsets. -.-

Forza 5 and BF4 are my definite buys. Might just get them and get Santa to fulfil the rest of my wish list.

*hit save too early*

MattyJ wrote:

Olimite wrote:

MattyJ wrote:

The games really are selling it to me at the moment.

Me too. As it stands, I can see me cancelling my PS4 pre-order at some point between now and the end of the year. If they can sort the shitty DRM out, I'll stay at base camp.

DRM doesn't really affect me, and now the family stuff isn't household limited this could actually work awesome. Me and my two bros could legitimately share a game between us, and as we are only all online at the same time to play together anyway, all just chip in for a copy.

But you can't play online at the same time, right?

I'm so foggy over all this policy stuff at the moment!

I thought only 1 person could play 1 license at any one time. You can share it with your 10 family members but only 1 person can use it at a time, is that correct?

Longish piece about the new Smart Match and Reputation systems.

Xbox One Smart Match

Earlier today I chatted with Chad Gibson, Principle Group Program manager for Xbox Live Gaming features and Mike Lavin, Sr. Global Product Marketing manager for Xbox Live on our live E3 broadcast. They outlined how the new Smart Match feature works on Xbox Live. Last week, before E3, I had a long conversation with Micheal Dunn from our team who leads the development on the new Smart Match system. I asked him to sum up what his team is putting together for all of us

Asynchronous Matchmaking

I’m Micheal Dunn, Program Manager on Xbox Live Services. I love how console games and especially co-op games bring people together to “spend quality time.” It’s great to play with friends and family online, but it’s fun sometimes to try a new “bar” so to speak and meet new people to play with online. I’ve met people from all over the world while playing on Xbox Live.

We all have better things to do than wait for people to show up to play a game. It would be great if I could start up the flight sim game, see if anyone is online to play, put in my play request and then switch to something else while I wait for people to show up. That is what Smart Match on Xbox One allows people to do. It makes it easy for a title to create a match request and then “untether” me so I don’t need wait in the title while the match search is processing. I can switch to reading a quick social blog or watch a viral video and when the match is ready Xbox One tells me to pull me back into the title to play.

The new Smart Match service allows titles to change their match model from traditional peer-based host searching for players typical in Xbox 360 to now completely untethered cloud-based. The example I gave was for a low population title like a flight sim game, but there are also great results for the more popular shooter and sports titles too.

You will be able to launch a popular shooter or sports title and see the “typical wait time” for different online game modes. For example, imagine a match area for a quick match] that might have a wait time of 1 minute, and then another match area in the title for “match by downloadable content (DLC)” with typical wait time of 7 minutes. Chances are you’d never wait in a game for 7 minutes to play online, you’d just make do with “quick match” and lowest common denominator DLC. With Xbox One titles, you can instead pick the longer “match by DLC” option if you please, see it might take 7 minutes to find a match that night, and switch to another task while Smart Match in the cloud is searching for you. You end up with a much more enjoyable match result since you get to play with people with similar DLC versus just the lowest common denominator levels in the base title. You get to make the most use the latest map or car you just bought to keep the game play fresh and interesting, versus just going into quick match with the same options every night.

With Beacons in Xbox 360 you could set a toast to tell other friends of your desire to play a specific game online. Smart Match on Xbox One goes way beyond that to help you tap into the full player population for a title, versus just the friends you know, and means you skip waiting in a match search screen in the title. This is a true departure from consoles that don’t have a way to switch between tasks quickly. Plus over time Smart Match empowers Xbox One titles to unlock many more ways to play online without the penalty of segmenting the available pool of people each night to match with. This same pattern depending on the title can include player attributes to search for such as very specific skill or social elements like spoken language or even people of similar age. You will see lots of new play styles open up for online play as titles start to experiment more with match types, without you needing to be stuck waiting for players to show up.

With Xbox One, I’m looking forward to putting in my match request in for a super special online play style or specific DLC needed for a play mode, then kicking back and letting Xbox Live do the work to find me a good person to play with while I practice my mad skills. Here’s an example of playing Ryse and then getting a match ready toast to jump into Killer Instinct online play that was shown in Monday’s E3 presentation.

http://majornelson.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/clip_image002.jpg

Reputation

You can usually tell a family member to stop crunching on corn chips in your ear or yakking on the cell phone while they play with you. With a stranger you meet online it doesn’t always turn out that way though. Sometimes you meet someone online that decides it’s cool to hum Top 40 songs as they go through a match or sometimes meet someone that can’t seem to avoid swearing at everything that #$%^ happens to them. The majority of Xbox Live players are polite online and know how to socially adjust to the people they are playing with, but there are some bad apples you run into that just seem to like to cause trouble. With Xbox One we’ve built a new social reputation model to help expose people that aren’t fun to be around, and also create real consequences for those few bad apples that continue to harass our good players.

Sometimes it’s hard for strangers to know what “polite” means with different social norms and backgrounds, and even harder when you aren’t in the same room face to face with someone. You have few social cues to rely on, and typically a stranger sees no real reason to listen to your complaint about their behavior. We all care a lot about behavior on Xbox Live and player feedback options in Xbox One allows you to help educate those who don’t seem to follow good social gaming norms. We simplified the feedback mechanism also to be less of a “survey” and more direct feedback options, even linking things in like block or mute player actions into the feedback model.

All of the feedback from player’s online flow into the reputation service to evaluate a players online social reputation. The more hours you play online without causing others to have a horrible time the better your reputation will be, similar to the more hours your drive without an accident the better your driving record and insurance rates will be. Most players will have good reputations and be seen as “green” good players you’d enjoy playing with. Even those good players might receive a few player feedback reports each month and that is OK. Xbox Live is looking to identify players that are repeatedly disruptive on Xbox Live. We’ll identify those players with a lower reputation score and in the worse cases they will earn the “avoid me” reputation. Looking at someone’s gamer card you’ll be able to quickly see their reputation.

Smart Match sees their Xbox Live rep too and when a person’s social reputation gets low enough the service will only match those low reputation players with similar low reputation players. This gives them the benefit of playing with people just like them. Ultimately we want to help encourage good behavior between strangers. By the way, before a user ends up at this extremely low reputation level we will have sent many different alerts to the user reminding how their social gaming conduct is affecting lots of other gamers. The chart includes examples of the reputation score that will be seen in the gamercard.

http://majornelson.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/clip_image004.png

This reputation system will evolve as we track the feedback we get from actual players and titles, plus add more consequences for bad apples that we want to stop #$%^ crunching on corn chips in your ear. All you need to do is block or report players that are abusive, cheat, or causing various amounts of non-fun mayhem and their social reputation will reflect that. We’ll keep the good friendly players together with other good friendly people, and keep a seat for the bad apples in their own special place. Our team and I built this for all of you and we hope you like it!


http://majornelson.com/2013/06/11/xbox-one-smart-match/

Those all sound like great improvements from the foundations they set with Live on the 360 so whyyyyy did they not just stick a headset in the box if they care so much the stingy dorks.

They'll win back some faith on my part if they do headset/sub bundles for a discount in shops but hell no they won't.

Wasn't this meant to be implemented years ago on the 360? The five star reputation system and the gaming zones. It seems to have been phased out as Live had been updated through the years. It never worked anyway. This, if it works, will be a huge improvement.

Bojangles wrote:

Wasn't this meant to be implemented years ago on the 360? The five star reputation system and the gaming zones. It seems to have been phased out as Live had been updated through the years. It never worked anyway. This, if it works, will be a huge improvement.

I'm pretty  sceptical about these systems now. They seemed to sort of work on the 360 early on when people were playing a spread of on-line MP. Once it settled into everyone playing a dozen or so huge titles, the needs of their matchmaking systems seemed to take over. Less successful games with smaller communities simply can't do anything but try and find you a full lobby.

This does seem to be more featured though. The idea of using the feedback in a meaningful way, and not just feedback, in game stuff like how many people mute you, has to be an improvement.

The 5 star rating thing was always bollox. You could go from the starting 3 stars to 5 with about 3 bits of feedback. They gathered the data then never did anything with it. Perhaps it came into play when deciding user reports.