Earlier this morning we broke the news on +Geeks of the Round that Microsoft would be revealing its 8th gen console next month on May 21st. Rumors have been flying all over the damned place about it, getting particularly heated after Sony revealed some details on the upcoming PlayStation 4.
Some of the rumors are good, and others are freaking horrible. I'm sure most of you have heard the one about requiring an internet connection to function, which would probably be the stupidest fucking thing they could ever do. Seriously, they go that route and they may as well just hand over the 8th generation to Sony (who said very specifically that they would not be doing that).
We'll be getting some much-needed details soon enough, but for now I just wanted talk about some things I'd really like to see in the next Xbox (whatever they end up calling it).
- Less Hardware Issues - Let's face it; the 360 was a damned trainwreck when it launched back in 2005. The Red Ring of Death is something that still plagues the system to this day, but not as badly as it was back then when it had a fucking insane 30% failure rate. That seriously cannot happen again; people will be far less forgiving if the same thing happens two generations in a row. Fix that shit!
- More Real Exclusives - Let's be real here: the 360 sucks at exclusives. Don't get me wrong here; games like Alan Wake, Gears of War, and the Halo series are fantastic, but most of the 360's bread and butter has been multiplatform titles like Assassin's Creed and all the Call Of Duty games. Meanwhile Sony has been taking risks and gave us awesome exclusives like inFamous, Uncharted, Heavy Rain, The Last of Us, Beyond: Two Souls, LittleBIGPlanet, Resistance, Killzone, White Knight Chronicles, God of War - the list goes on. Microsoft needs to get on the ball and and get their game studios working on content that simply cannot be found anywhere else. If your best games I can just as easily play on Sony's console or my PC, what the hell do I need your console for?
- Seriously, Don't Require Online - This has been the rumor that has been killing their momentum for pretty much every gamer who's looking forward to buying a next gen console (sorry Wii U, but you don't count). There are still people in lots of places around the world, even here in the U.S., that don't have access to consistent high-speed internet. I know soldiers that take their 360s with them when they're on deployment so that they can play some Madden when they're off duty. By requiring the console to be online at all times, you've totally eliminated all of these people from wanting to own your console. This is stupid. Don't fucking do it.
- Larger Storage Format For Games - Back in the early 2000s, DVD was a perfectly acceptable storage format. It was fairly large, scalable to a degree, and was enough for most games at the time. By the end of the 6th generation we were starting to see games that came on two DVDs, so clearly something larger was needed. Sony's answer to this was the Blu-Ray format used in the PS3, which had more than five times the storage of DVDs. Microsoft's answer was...to do DVD again. What the fuck were you thinking!? This idiotic move single-handedly held back multi-platform 7th gen games because developers were unable to take real advantage of Blu-Ray's storage capacity to avoid alienating 360 gamers. Games that were two disks on the 360 quite easily fit onto one of PS3's Blu-Rays with room to spare! Don't do this shit again, Microsoft. Swallow your pride and put a damned Blu-Ray drive in your next console.
What do you all want to see in the next Xbox? Let me know in the comments below and we'll find out details on what we can expect next month!
