Selling the Xbox One, PS4, Wii U in a tough climate

 

It began early Tuesday with a promise from Nintendo, that an extremely important announcement would be coming at Nintendo’s E3 booth at 11:40 a.m. Press had been gathered before the Los Angeles Convention Center doors opened at noon for early looks at some of Nintendo’s fall slate of games. Nintendo execs walking the floor ensured the media that no one should leave before 11:40 a.m.

Except by the time the announcement came and went, I wished I had missed it. The info-disguised-as-news was simply that the human avatar in Wii Fit would serve as a playable character in “Super Smash Bros.” for the Wii U and the recently unveiled 3DS editions of the game. Cute, but not worth turning off a game session of the oddly crazy superhero action title “The Wonderful 101″ to hear.

But E3 is about the corporate message first, the games second.

Companies such as Microsoft and Sony had to persuade fans that the leap to a next-gen console is a significant one, arguments that have been confusingly made by focusing on cloud computing, social networking and motion-control abilities, many of which were largely missing-in-action at E3. Nintendo’s case was a simpler one, as the company was here to promise that it’s dried-up tap of Wii U games would start flowing again.

There wasn’t necessarily a clear winner or loser in the above, but for consumers wondering if it’s worth investing between $344.99 (deluxe Wii U) and $499.00 (Xbox One) in a new console, E3 likely raised more questions than it answered.

And don’t expect those questions to be answered anytime soon. Sony tabled info on its cloud service until 2014, and even a seemingly innocuous question, such as who’s directing the live-action scenes in the Xbox One’s part show/part game “Quantum Break,” was met with a “we’re not discussing that at this time” answer.

The Xbox One console. (Microsoft)

In the tightly controlled environment of E3 — interviews are often conducted in less-than-ideal settings, with PR reps present with their own recorders running — Microsoft arguably came to Los Angeles with the most to prove. Unlike Sony and Nintendo, Microsoft has been largely keeping its slate of E3 games under wraps, and just prior to the event the company disclosed some of the details surrounding its cloud functionality.

Microsoft is pitching a console in which some of the game content will live locally on one’s home Xbox, and some of the content will live in the cloud on Microsoft’s servers. In, say, a multiplayer shooter such as “Titanfall,” the artificially intelligent (AI) enemies will live entirely on “Titanfall’s” dedicated servers.

“Offloading all that removes the boundaries a little and lets us think a little different,” Respawn Entertainment head Vince Zampella said. “We don’t have to rely on the box in front of you. We can offload and it gives us more freedom in filling up that world with tons of AI.”

In a tech demo. Xbox One’s engineering manager, Jeff Henshaw, attempted to walk journalists through the benefits the Xbox One’s largely always-online features at E3. Using data from NASA, the Xbox One was able to “calculate, map and render the exact position and orbital trajectory” of supposedly any asteroid between Mars and Jupiter.

What reporters saw displayed on a TV was data from about 40,000 asteroids living on the Xbox One. Then — stay with us — Microsoft’s cloud data started feeding the Xbox One 500,000 updates per second, Henshaw said, which brought an additional 300,000 asteroids to the display. This data lived entirely in the cloud.

They can use all of the local horsepower to ensure their game is responsive, instant, fun, intense, but for things they want to make sure are completely accurate but don’t want to burden the console itself with, they can offload to the cloud,” Henshaw said.

“Things like local foliage, blades of grass, atmospheric effects, gunfire,” he said, “those type of things can all be offloaded because they’re going to be in your immediate periphery and you want them to look hyper realistic, but not necessarily something you want to burden the console with.”

Now here’s where things get tricky.

Those who have played massive multiplayer online games know there’s risk in a connection dropping, but someone playing a single-player campaign with in-game content augmented by cloud visuals may suddenly find their game looking rather different should a connection waver.“It’s largely up to the game developer to decide how they want their game to react in different conditions,” Henshaw said. “Sometimes you’re going to have full bandwidth [with] the cloud, sometimes your bandwidth may get constrained and at other times it may go away all together.”


 

So the game world may start to look downgraded. Perhaps, said Henshaw, a fog rolls in, or a field of vision gets shorter. Microsoft didn’t demo what happens when a connection drops (they’re not ready to show that, apparently). But this reporter lives down the street from the E3 site, and it’s rare that I can watch a video in HD via Hulu or Netflix, despite paying for the fastest Internet my cable company will sell me.Phil Spencer, vice president of Microsoft Studios, said I needn’t worry about games losing connections or content suddenly shifting.

What you’ll find,” he said, “is that the bandwidth … required for the kind of games that we’re talking about is not as large as streaming a full-screen, high-def video. For someone watching Netflix in their home, they’re not going to have any problem with this system.”Still, it’s a concept many consumers may need to see in someone’s home before they are willing to embrace it. No game at the Xbox One E3 booth showed it in action and even Zampella, who is fully onboard with the Xbox One, said explaining its benefits can be a bit tricky.

“It’s hard,” he said, “to one-point bullet-point it and say, ‘This is what this thing is.’ But really, this generation goes beyond the hardware that’s in front of you. It really encompasses what support you can get. You don’t even have to know it exists. That’s the power we want to harness.”

Some developers are taking a wait-and-see approach. Tetsuya Nomura is video game royalty, designer of the “Kingdom Hearts” series and numerous “Final Fantasy” games for Square Enix. He’s confident in the technical specs of each system, but when it comes to offloading parts of a game to a cloud, he has no current plans.

“I was interested in learning more about online, but so far I think they just look so complicated,” said Nomura at E3 via a translator. “Both of the consoles have an online capability, but they seem to be complicated. They mention ‘cloud’ all the time, but I want to make sure that that’s easy to understand. Then I can start thinking about it, too.”

The complexity of the topics is perhaps why Sony focused its E3 on its game slate, although many of the company’s most adventurous offerings look destined for the PS3 and Vita, whether it the patient narrative of “Beyond Two Souls,” the noir-ish lyrical dream of “Rain,” or the zany “Puppeteer.”

Sony devoted a significant portion of its booth to indie games, and the comic, anime-stylings of “Transistor” were hard to resist on the big screen. The PS4 game that had me most smitten was the one that required no lifelike renderings whatsoever, the Pixar-influenced “Knack,” and Sony dodged close-up looks at its hardware by playing up its differences with the Xbox One in regard to online requirements.

To be fair, all of the PS4 and Xbox One games shown looked spectacular. It’s impossible to judge a game during a five- or 10-minute play session, and perhaps that’s why so much attention was drawn to the visuals. During a quick demo of the PS4′s “Infamous: Second Son,” when I asked what made the game work on a next-gen console, I was told to look at the detail in the rain puddles. That wasn’t the hard sell I was looking for.

Executives know this is a hurdle.

“I don’t think a game has ever really created a huge mega franchise based on purely graphics alone,” Microsoft’s Spencer said. “There have definitely been games that have seen the light of day because of their graphic capabilities, but once gamers get their hands on a game they know if it has a soul or not. They know if there’s a game there.”

There weren’t many games there when Nintendo launched its Wii U last winter. The Wii U, it was reported, failed to meet its initial sales expectations, having sold 3.45 million units through March. Initially, the company hoped to move about 5.5 million consoles in that period.