Microsoft’s most lovable (only lovable?) employee Major Nelson recently moderated a panel of Xbox One developers at San Diego Comic Con as they talked about some of the Xbox Ones new features. Sadly we didn’t get to go to San Diego, but here is a rundown of the features discussed.
Ken Lobb, Creative Director at Microsoft showed off some footage of Killer Instinct’s EVO appearance (we’re assuming they edited out the booing). Instead of focusing on Killer Instinct itself, Ken’s video montage extravaganza was there to show off the Xbox One’s video recording features. Using Project Upload, Ken (video Ken, not panel Ken) recorded a video showing a fan’s 100+ win streak come to a brutal end at the hands of one of the game’s developers. In addition to this he revealed that the Xbox One basically always has the last 5 minutes of gameplay saved and if you say “Xbox record” then it saves the last 30 seconds of gameplay into a separate file which can be uploaded and shared without having to leave the current game session. So when you kill someone you can record it, upload it and send them the link so they can watch their own head explode over and over again.
In yet another ‘Kinect 2.0 features which are cool but seriously creep me out’ reveal, we learned that the Kinect sensor is capable of recognising who is holding the controller and loading their preferences accordingly. So if I’m playing inverted (because I’m cool) and I hand the controller to Bradley who prefers the standard configuration (because he’s a dork) then the Kinect will pick this up and automatically switch to his preferred settings. Very cool and very creepy.
Don’t let the cute Wall-E eyes thing fool you, it’s an evil NSA spy device that eats babies.
Dan Greenawalt, Creative Director of Turn10, developers of Forza 5 then took centre stage to talk about the rumble features in the new Xbox One controller. Each trigger has its own rumble motor which allows for more intuitive user feedback on things like braking and grip. They also showed off a video of the Prague track which apparently looked stunning in 1080p at 60fps. Not bitter about not getting to go to San Diego Comic Con at all.
Dead Rising 3’s executive producer Josh Bridge then rocked up to show off a video of their upcoming open-world zombie title. Dead rising 3 will have a larger world and more zombies than the series’ previous titles, which let’s be honest were hardly lacking in zombies. Also no loading times so big thumbs up. To cater to the Saw generation Dead Rising 3 will also feature realistic zombie innards, meaning if you cut a zombie in half his guts, liver and general viscera will realistically flop out all over the place. I can’t wait for the mainstream media to get hold of that quote; it’ll be Hot Coffee all over again.
Ryse producer Justin Robey showed us some new Smartglass integration stuff, whereby you can prepare for a multiplayer session in one game whilst playing another and the Xbox One will tell you when the match is ready to start, at which point you just swap games and boom, you’re in.
Nick Burton, lead of new technology at Rare then started talking about Kinect 2.0, saying that the new version fixes the issues of it’s predecessor. The Kinect 2.0 has around 10x the resolution of the original Kinect and can apparently discriminate between your fingers at 3 meters. So you can flip the bird at your Xbox One and it will know.
Kinect 2.0 can apparently pull your soul into the screen, trapping you for all eternity.
But wait, there’s more. It turns out the Kinect can scan your face, map your face geometry and even your BMI and then create a character model which can be used in certain games and presumably as your Xbox Live avatar. This virtual you will be able to replicate your real life facial expressions (pretty sure this is how The Terminator started).
So there we have it. A load of cool new features of the Kinect 2.0. I can’t help feel that if these features had been talked about earlier on that less people would be complaining about the mandatory nature of Kinect 2.0, but C’est la vie.
What do you think of these new features? Let us know in the comments below.