Well May 21st has come and gone and Microsoft has revealed their next generation plans and it is called the Xbox One. The presentation in my opinion, like Sony's, left quite a bit to be desired since other than Forza 5 it seemed a bit light on the games. This presentation simply wasn't for the gamers, NFL tie ins, live action Halo television series, and Star Trek trailers? Those things have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with gaming. I'm not quite sure where to start with Kinect 2.0, I think it's great that it has been improved and I can even understand why it will be bundled with every system. However, I find the fact that it is required for the system to operate annoying. I'm relatively sure that not everyone wants to swipe and gesture their way through their menus. Then there's the fact that Microsoft stated that it's always listening, I'm trying not be paranoid about that since it is supposedly only listening for "Xbox On" to power on the console.
On to the hardware, the specs of the Xbox One seem very similar to the PS4. With a custom designed AMD x86 8-core APU, 8GB of RAM, and blu-ray drive it's really seems like Sony and Microsoft have been shopping at the same store. There are some differences though, for one the PS4 is using faster RAM where as the Xbox One has 32MB ESRAM onboard its processor. Time will tell which design is better though. Thus far my only issue with the hardware is that the 500GB hard drive is not upgradeable, but game installs will be mandatory. It seems a bit odd to me, how difficult would it have been to include a user upgradable hard drive?
The real elephant in the room though has nothing to do with hardware specs or non-gaming functionality, but the way that Microsoft has stated how used games will be handled on the Xbox One. Apparently there will be fees involved, while don't purchase used games this also means games can't be borrowed or loaned out (something I do). That really sounds like a headache to me since the fees would still apply if you wanted to play the game. Actually, putting this post together it makes me wonder what this will mean for GameFly? Who really wants to pay to rent a game and then pay again to play it? I plan on eventually owning all three next gen consoles, but from what I've seen so far I'll likely delay a Xbox One purchase. However, with E3 just around the corner and Microsoft promising 15 Xbox One exclusives, 8 of which is are new IPs that very well could change. If it doesn't though I thankfully still have a decent library of games to keep me busy for a while.
