Xbox 360 Version of Champions Online Being Held Back By MS 154
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by
Soulskill
from the ready-set-wait dept.
from the ready-set-wait dept.
Tomorrow marks the launch of Cryptic Studios' new superhero MMO, Champions Online. It was developed for the PC and the Xbox 360, but the console version will be much delayed, according to Cryptic CCO Jack Emmert, because Microsoft is holding things up. "Microsoft's a big company, and they have to work out all the various issues related to MMOs. It just takes time for the big beast known as Microsoft to get moving. I really have no explanation other than that, because it's as baffling to developers as it is to everyone else," he said during an interview with VG247. The game itself is apparently finished, but Emmert isn't sure it'll even go live for the 360 by the end of this year. Square Enix developers made similar comments earlier this month regarding Final Fantasy XIV, which will be available first on the PS3 largely because it's taking a long time to work out how the game will interact with Xbox Live.
When Sony exert less control than you (Score:5, Insightful)
You must surely recognise that you are on the wrong side of the debate.
The key question here is how will Microsoft Monetise this new games to make more money for XBox Live via the subscriptions that people take out for these games. They don't yet have the sophistication of Apple's App Store for content, subscriptions and upgrades so the choice is either allow more freedom (the Sony choice) or batten it down until you can develop, and enforce, something that ensures the money passes through your pockets.
There's more on the table here than money... (Score:5, Insightful)
While I agree with those who believe that MSFT will milk this thing for every penny they can... there's more on the table here. Console MMORPG's are a potentially enormous genre -- both in terms of revenue and in terms of audience.
For years now, MMO's on consoles have seemed like a oddly absent category. Where are they? Why isn't _____ making _____ for the _____?
Sure there was Sega's "sort of" MMO, and a few others -- but they were MMO's for the console, not 'true' MMO's.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Microsoft, in some respects recognizes the huge-ness of what this title represents. Yeah, okay .. bring on the Vista jokes if you must .. MSFT has whiffed on the "huge expectations front" before, but a failure with XBL (as a platform) with C.O. would have repercussions across dozens of forthcoming MMO titles.
There's more on the table here than just the release date of one title...
So many typical /. MSFT haters here... (Score:4, Insightful)
Am I the only one who thinks the 360 is one of the few things MSFT has got right in the last few years?
I'm no fan of our evil corporate overlords but hell, I like my 360. Halo rules. Geas of War rules. And XBL is a well done online offering.
What? It should be free? Sigh....
How unacceptable of Microsoft... (Score:5, Insightful)
...to actually require the developer to deliver a complete, bug free, enjoyable gaming experience BEFORE they ship it instead of sometime in the indefinite future.
CO is a very good game, but it's undergoing nearly nightly changes and by the developer's own admission the support for a gamepad controller is only half-baked at the moment.
So no way in hell is the game complete enough to pass the standards of any console game company, let alone Microsoft which has some of the highest standards around.
The standard PC philosophy of "just ship it, we'll patch it later" will not fly in the console world, even if the console vendors are open to the kind of ongoing incremental enhancements that MMOGs are known for.
G.
This is a GOOD THING (Score:5, Insightful)
What would you prefer, that this be rushed through without planning, server load testing, and figuring out exactly how it interacts with existing services?
Or, when it is released, that is works?
I prefer the second.
Re:Sony - Exert Online Control? Are You Joking? (Score:4, Insightful)
It might be the way it's done on PCs where there is no possible central authority, but on consoles there really should be some kind of coordination.
Take EA as the big example of developer run servers. A lot of their "old" online games no longer work online even on the xbox because they demanded to run their own servers. Other games, such as those on the original xbox not by them, still work.
MMO? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What a surprise. (Score:1, Insightful)
That's not even funny - Microsoft's "Live Team" stomped so hard on what was initially a decent game (AC2) it's a wonder that Turbine didn't call deliberate foul.
Re:This is a GOOD THING (Score:3, Insightful)
I prefer the second.
That's a given.
The issue is, Microsoft is being really slow about it. In a market that fights hard to get games released on time, it's strange that "planning, server load testing, and figuring out exactly how it interacts with existing services" would take so little time to get right on PS3 and PC, but so long on XBox360.
Re:So many typical /. MSFT haters here... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sony - Exert Online Control? Are You Joking? (Score:4, Insightful)
In the MMORPGs, it's not a "bad idea", it's a *requirement*.
Re:Obviously not a coder (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, to be honest, I have not done much winsock coding. All that I know about it is when I tried it for the first time, I had a windows app communicating with our game and sending and receving packets bug free in under a day. I didnt have a single problem or error that wasnt my fault (despite checking for all of the error codes that the winsock API can generate).
As for why they they made the XBOX version of the API that is only partially compatible with the PC version, well that is an API that is targeted at a specific hardware. DirectX for the PC is targeted at any number of consumer cards. The xbox version is targetted at specific custom hardware that is close to the PC version, but not entirely like it. In addition, since the hardware is known for the xbox, the xbox version of direct x gives you lower level access to the hardware. (See better debugging, faster code, more utility, plus support for hardware functionality that does not exist in the standard PC cards). They release different API versions for the PC for different hardware revisions. The hardware manufacturers asked for this so that they could conform to the standards as for cheaper / released sooner hardware. (Or so they said when they gave presentations at one of the studios that I worked at). So they often come out very quickly as a way for the hardware manufacturers to incrementally support new features between major revisions).
Im not sure how many companies are switching to OpenAL. All I know is that I have worked on nine released games in my professional career (multiply that by three if you want to include unshipped titles and individual skus of the same game (which I guess is relevant since you want to debate competing APIs here)), and I have never worked on a single title that has shipped using OpenAL. Not to say it's not widely used, but for now Im going to dismiss your anecdotal evidence. In my experience some games use OpenAL, and others do not. I dont see any one system being left in massive numbers for another.
If you want to bash MS about APIs ten years ago, well there are good reasons that a lot of companies used glide. First of all, it did NOT work on all graphics cards. Most vendor's drivers for their hardware was very buggy at best. Also, one card that it did NOT work on was... The 3dfx line of cards. Which supported... Glide. So if you wanted to write code for what was the best card on the market, you HAD to use 3dfx's proprietary API. (3dfx's decision, NOT microsoft). Why did glide work so well? Well, because it was written for a known piece of hardware only. Much like... DirectX for the xbox. (see above). So if I understand it correctly, you were just bashing microsoft for making a separate api for a custom piece of hardware, and then in your next point you are bashing them for some other company doing exactly the same thing?
I agree, DirectX started out as a piece of garbage. I also feel that OpenGL evolved into a piece of garbage (granted this was back in the 1.0 days). I much prefer microsoft evolving the API rather than just tacking on tons of extensions (or worse, vendor specific extensions), to try to program for a paradigm that just didnt make sense anymore. (See DirectXs early support of multitexturing versus OpenGL tacking it onto the side of an API that wasnt planned with this feature in mind). I hear OGL has gotten much better in this respect, but in my previous experience I left it precisely because MS came out with different versions of directx as hardware and graphics programming evolved. I still shudder at the memories of trying to get OpenGL working on several cards with it's huge mess of extensions that really didnt belong.
Im going to stop here, but I just wanted to defend MS (yeah, not popular on this site
Re:Get The Fuck Out Of Gaming You Piece Of Shit (Score:3, Insightful)
I didn't realize gaming was some sort of exclusive club that you could banish people from. Games are really just toys, including the XBox and, yes, even your super-awesome-godly-PS3. You know who also cries and fights over toys? Children.
PS: Most PS2 owners have gone through several, and the fact that first-gen PS2s weren't the best in terms of reliability is hardly a tightly-kept secret. I don't see how its shocking to realize that a system with moving parts like a DVD drive will eventually break.