Oh my dear...xbox 720?!?!

[kerska]

In another year and a half we'll all probably have to dish out like $600 for these.

More Power! Microsoft's New Xbox 720 Will Be 6x More Powerful [REPORT] - Yahoo! News

[Guitarman700]

6x more powerful....but still not even close to a high end gaming PC.

[Grand Moff Tim]

The more powerful and complicated the console, the more effort it will take to develope games for it. The more effort it takes to develope games, the more they will cost to be made. The more money they cost to be made, the less risk investors and publishers are going to be willing to take. Be prepared for even more samey games that are the gaming equivalent of "summer blockbusters," like we've already been seeing hints of with the current console generation. More sequels, more remakes, more safe bets, less creativity, fewer exciting new IPs.

Sometimes I wish we'd just put a freeze on hardware developement, and instead of cranking out a new one just as developers are finally starting to really sink their teeth into the current generation consoles' abilities, we'd actually give them a few years to crank out some high quality games for a few years while they're all at the top of their game. That's not going to happen, though, and there are going to be some great current-gen developed games that are going to be rushed ports over to the new consoles that are buggy as shit and not as good as they'd have been on older tech.


Grumble grumble grumble.

[vampiregenocide]

I'm ready for a new Xbox. The 360 is starting to look its age.

[Mordacain]

Originally Posted by Guitarman700

6x more powerful....but still not even close to a high end gaming PC.

In raw power perhaps. The reason you can see amazing results on consoles that can sometimes rival high-end PCs with actual games is having a static set of hardware to develop on. Reducing the number of variables in the components allows developers to push what they've got a lot farther in a far more efficient way.

I'm not saying that to lead to a PC vs console debate, those have been done to death (and I was an avid performance system builder for years); I merely mean that there have been several games from this generation that I've played multi-platform and have preferred playing on the console (Skyrim, Dragon Age 2 among the top). There have also been some games developed on console that I've not seen the equal of on a PC (God of War 3, Uncharted 3).

Personally, I feel new hardware is required to ultimately keep gaming evolving and to keep from having nothing but sequel after sequel. Some of the greatest new IPs have been launch titles (or very early) on their respective platforms (Halo, Uncharted, Gears of War).

My

[nojyeloot]

Originally Posted by vampiregenocide

I'm ready for a new Xbox. The 360 is starting to look its age.

^
You must play A LOT of games.

OP: Thanks for posting this. Cool update in the gaming world.

[Guitarman700]

Originally Posted by Mordacain

In raw power perhaps. The reason you can see amazing results on consoles that can sometimes rival high-end PCs with actual games is having a static set of hardware to develop on. Reducing the number of variables in the components allows developers to push what they've got a lot farther in a far more efficient way.

I'm not saying that to lead to a PC vs console debate, those have been done to death (and I was an avid performance system builder for years); I merely mean that there have been several games from this generation that I've played multi-platform and have preferred playing on the console (Skyrim, Dragon Age 2 among the top). There have also been some games developed on console that I've not seen the equal of on a PC (God of War 3, Uncharted 3).

Personally, I feel new hardware is required to ultimately keep gaming evolving and to keep from having nothing but sequel after sequel. Some of the greatest new IPs have been launch titles (or very early) on their respective platforms (Halo, Uncharted, Gears of War).

My

I agree on most points, admittedly. But the 360, for example, lacks Blu Ray, has a shortage of RAM, among other things. It seems it IS time for a new Xbox...

[Cheap Poison]

Damned!
Again i missed the last 719 other xboxses...

I was about time, never took so long for them to jump to the next generation before.

[kerska]

Originally Posted by Grand Moff Tim

The more powerful and complicated the console, the more effort it will take to develope games for it. The more effort it takes to develope games, the more they will cost to be made. The more money they cost to be made, the less risk investors and publishers are going to be willing to take. Be prepared for even more samey games that are the gaming equivalent of "summer blockbusters," like we've already been seeing hints of with the current console generation. More sequels, more remakes, more safe bets, less creativity, fewer exciting new IPs.

I agree, but disagree at the same time. I mean it's going to cost more out the door regardless. But as with any type of new launch, you hold out a few months and the prices drop drastically. Games probably won't get phenomenal right off the bat as I'm sure a lot of games will come out in an attempt to just show off the new possibilities, but Epic and a couple other game studios have already gone public about working on new IPs for the next gen of consoles. I don't think publishers and investors are going to look at this and go, "Oh, new console? Too risky." I'm willing to bet they jump on it. Think about it...A new Call of Duty comes out every year around the same time as they are planning on launching this. Looking at a publisher/investor point of view, they will probably do something like package the console with the new CoD game. That would sell regardless just because it was CoD. It will probably come with blu-ray and all that jazz since PS3 did that. I'm sure they will probably throw some new stuff in there too to try to one-up competition.

As far as new IPs and less creativity...There are always going to be the crossovers like Halo and CoD and all the other heavy hitters, but there will always be cool exclusive IPs and studios that will take risks and start something new. Maybe not right away, but they'll get there.

[Xaios]

Someone needs to photoshop Steve Ballmer's face over a picture of Palpatine yelling "UNLIMITED POWAAH!!" as he's zapping Mace Windu with force lightning, although replace Samuel L Jackson with some prominent Nintendo/Sony exec.

[Grand Moff Tim]

Originally Posted by kerska

I don't think publishers and investors are going to look at this and go, "Oh, new console? Too risky."

I don't think they will, either. I think they'll be less likely to jump on new IPs that aren't as likely to get them their money back. That's already happening with the current console generation, and more expensive development is only going to exacerbate it. If anything, they'll invest despite expecting to lose money on the hardware (face it, that's pretty much a given) and recoup it on software sales. That'll double their desire to ensure their software investments are safe bets.

[SpaceDock]

I am so ready for this.

[Marv Attaxx]

I wanna see what sony's coming up with.
Another "as much power as possible but ....ing expensive" machine or something that's about the same power as the 720.
I hope for the first lol

[beneharris]

so the rumored release isn't even for another year and a half. that means more than likely they are going to try to get it out before christmas, and if they miss that, i would think they would wait to release it until another major holiday, or sales won't be high enough.

2005-2013ish isn't a bad run. thats double the run of the original xbox.

[Mexi]

in fact, Microsoft has said in the past that they wanted an 8 year life cycle for the 360, so the current timeline sounds about right. In all likelihood, Sony will announce their console within 6-8 months of Microsoft because they too have said that they don't want to release their console too far behind the Xbox again, like the PS3

[Michael T]

I agree it needs more RAM & faster processor Buuuut, I would be happy if they finally created a console that you could do Software updates on for $50-100 bucks instead of fishing out a few hundred for a whole new system.
I for one love my 360 & am very content with its performance. Update my software, don't make me buy a new system Damn it !!!
Oh well I'll still buy it, Damn I'm a tool, lol

[Kwirk]

Originally Posted by Michael T

I agree it needs more RAM & faster processor Buuuut, I would be happy if they finally created a console that you could do Software updates on for $50-100 bucks instead of fishing out a few hundred for a whole new system.
I for one love my 360 & am very content with its performance. Update my software, don't make me buy a new system Damn it !!!
Oh well I'll still buy it, Damn I'm a tool, lol

Hardware?

[ZOMB13]

I'm very happy with my Xbox 360 (aside from the RRoD...) I'm not a huge gamer anymore but I'm at the point where I don't care about how powerful a console is if the games for it suck, not to mention really expensive.

I think the 360 will be my last console, I still keep thinking about going back to N64...

[leandroab]

Still not worth it

[guitarister7321]

AMD 6000 series

[Isan]

An amd 6670 is quite high end ... not top of the line but it is great

[Mordacain]

Originally Posted by Michael T

I agree it needs more RAM & faster processor Buuuut, I would be happy if they finally created a console that you could do Software updates on for $50-100 bucks instead of fishing out a few hundred for a whole new system.
I for one love my 360 & am very content with its performance. Update my software, don't make me buy a new system Damn it !!!
Oh well I'll still buy it, Damn I'm a tool, lol

Software can't really increase performance beyond a certain point. Once the developers discover how to use 100% of the hardware and every coding trick they can use to maximize performance the only way to go from there is with new hardware that has greater computational capabilities.

Also, something to keep in mind, the XBox360 GPU (Xenos) was based largely off of the Radeon R500 series of chips and they kept up quite well with PCs with GPUs 3 generations newer (personally I feel the Xenos only started looking worse for wear around the R800 series. This is because having a set hardware structure allows a developer to really push a piece of hardware; for one, they know its capabilities inside and out and for another, they don't have to code for compatibility across multiple different platform configurations.

[ZEBOV]

I wonder what constant problems this Xbox will have that Microsoft will never fix

[GazPots]

What problems did the old one have that they didn't fix?

[Xaios]

The Radeon HD6670 is a good videocard by current standards, but not great. Good bang for the buck. It's roughly as powerful hardware-wise as an Nvidia GeForce 9800GT, which was released in March 2008, although it supports DirectX 11 which wasn't available when the 9800GT came out.