J Allard Interviewed 233
malchus6 writes "J Allard, one of the Xbox honchos over at Microsoft, spent an hour in an online chat answering questions regarding the upcoming release of the 360 including some pointed questions having to do with the two different price points, no wi-fi inclusion, his opinion on HD-DVD and more..."
More readable format? (Score:5, Informative)
Why is there almost no proper capitalization? I mean, it's already damn near impossible to read but a five minute skim/correct session wouldn't have been too much to ask, would it?
On to the article (slight edits for format, no other changes):
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Major Nelson (Moderator): We are just about to get started
Major Nelson (Moderator): Welcome to today's chat. I am happy to have J join us for an hour to take your questions on the Xbox 360. Just to let you know, due to J's injury he does have someone typing for him, but all of the answers are directly from J himself. With that said...welcome J. Also, we already have over 1,000 questions...many of which are similar, so we'll chose the ones that are most representative of the majority of the questions.
J Allard (Expert):
A: we'll get going with the first question now....
J Allard (Expert):
Q: My question: Can Microsoft guarantee that the HDD will be fully uitilised when present or are we going to see long load times with a slow DVD unit as standard from most developers.
A: just like last generation utilization of things like xbox live and the hard drive will be up to the game designers and just like last time we expect game developers to be excited by this. we have been in clear communication for more than a year that some scenarios will include a disconnected hard drive and it has not slowed them down
J Allard (Expert):
Q: Mr. Expert, will the Xbox 360 games use the hard drive for game saves and caching like the original Xbox did?
A: absolutely. we think game designers have all kinds of innovative ideas that the hard drive will be used for. use of the hard drive is not limited to game scenarios. like xbox 1 you will be able to do things like rip and store music and don't forget about live scenarios and all the downloadable content
J Allard (Expert):
Q: Why is the hard drive so highly priced? A 20GB hard drive now a days goes for about 20-30... why $100? I believe this will deter alot of sales..
A: the 20 gb hard drive is a 2.5 inch user servicable drive and is more expense than a pc "crack the box" drive. it's one of the reasons we pushed to create a compelling premium bundle.
J Allard (Expert):
Q: Why is the hard drive so highly priced? A 20GB hard drive now a days goes for about 20-30... why $100? I believe this will deter alot of sales..
A: one of the reasons that we designed a user removable hard drive is in direct response to the hard core gaming audience to make it easier to take game saves, game maps, soundtracks, etc. easily to their friends house or lan party. they also wanted the ability to upgrade to larger capacity drives. and if the drive is not present because someone in the house took it on the road, you still want to be able to use the console for movies, music or games.
J Allard (Expert):
Q: will the loss of HDD mean that all games will be made without the HDD in mind, therefore effecting users of the premium pack?
A: absolute not. consider this last generation where somewhere in the neighborhood of 20% of game consoles had hard drives attached. this did not deter game developers from utilizing the hard drive both for exclusive games and cross platform games on xbox. this generation our first party team and our exclusive content developers are just as committed to using the hard drive and like we they demonstrated with this generation our third party cross platform developers are committed as well. games like splinter cell, madden, and tony hawk all demonstrated unique capabilities in hard drive configured systems.
J Allard (Expert):
Q: Can we stream videos from our PCs?
A: yes. if you have media center on those pcs. you will be able to stream standard and high definition video.
J Allard (Expert):
Q: Why even offer the core packa
Re:Not a sales pitch for them, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:An Hour? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Games? (Score:1, Informative)
Then you haven't been looking very hard. Try GameRanking's list [gamerankings.com] with links to media coverage for each game.
Re:Clarification (Score:2, Informative)
I read that in an interview with billG.
Re:Backwards compatibility (Score:3, Informative)
Re:And the real reason... (Score:2, Informative)
Or, if you have a clue:
We aren't choosing Blu-ray because we don't particularly like the idea of paying our lead competition royalty patents.
There's no clear indication that Blu-ray will give Sony a "significant advantage" as you claim. Yes, Blu-ray has more storage, but it's not clear that any game is going to make use of anywhere close to even HD-DVD's "mere" 20GB+ storage capabilities in the near future.
How few XBOX 360's need to be sold this year (shipped to customers not stores), before you consider it to be a failure?
Uh, that's not even a question. That's a leading statement. Unless you meant for it to be similar to "So how long have you known that you are brain damaged?"
Which I think you did.
Oh, and no, I have no intention of buying an Xbox360. Or a PS3. Or a Revolution. The only consoles I've owned so far were a PS and PS2, but neither of them get enough use for me to seriously consider another console.
Re:More readable format? (Score:3, Informative)
Let's just hope developers do a check for the hard drive so they can at least cache files to it so games load faster.
Also, regarding load speed... why couldn't MS use a 16X DVD-rom instead of a 12X? I bought a 16X like 4 years ago.
Re:More readable format? (Score:3, Informative)
More than you'd probably think. The two other major uses of the HD I could think of were custom soundtracks (I own a couple that use this) and downloadable Live content, such as maps, vehicles, etc. Granted, most people didn't utilize these features, but they WERE there on many titles.
Re:Games? (Score:3, Informative)
PGR3
Perfect Dark Zero
Ridge Racer 6
Gears of War and Quake 4 are also big ones coming up, not yet sure if they will be launch titles.
Re:Games? (Score:3, Informative)
Here [ign.com]'s a list; here [joystiq.com]'s another; yet another here [gmr-source.com]. Finding them took all of 20 seconds on Google.
Five Years (Score:4, Informative)
Who cares?? In 5 years Microsoft will replace the Xbox 360 and only certain games will be compatible.