It's been three days since this whole Resolutiongate' started and it doesn't like it's going away anytime soon. For the uninformed, Microsoft insiders have confirmed rumors that Call of Duty: Ghosts and Titanfall are locked at 720P. Whilst we have yet to hear confirmation from either Microsoft PR or the respective studios, we're not hearing denials either.
About a week ago, I wrote two statements that have since turned prophetic:
1) The majority of Call of Duty players are not gamers (Confirmed by Infinity ward)
and
2) More and more games on the Xbox One are going to be downgraded to 720P (confirmed by CBOAT and the recent rumor)
Naturally, it wasn't long before that chameleon-like survival instinct kicked in and certain people changed their tune faster than you can say 'Dee-Ar-Em'. Already, dozens of Sony, Nintendo and PC fanboys have died, their necks snapping like twigs from all the double-taking caused by the sudden shift in stance:-
"I don't play games for the resolution!"
"It's about the games, not the graphics."
and my personal favorite -
"The difference between 720P and 1080P is negligible! No one can tell the difference!"
This is a stark contrast from their position just after the Xbox One's reveal whereas the PS4's been touted and ridiculed as a 'beefed up PS3' and the Xbox One's power of the cloud would guarantee 4k resolution to the chosen ones. Fast forward a couple of months and the Xbox One's become the 'underdog', the bastion of 'real gamers' who do not wish to mix hands with the 'graphic whores'.
I believe there's a saying about worms doing something...flipping? Twisting? It escapes me at this moment.
In one of my earlier pieces, I've mentioned HOW these people behave and what their mentality has been like during these months. How they huddle together in Reddit, praising Major Nelson, sneering and wondering why everyone is against them.
Today, if you'll permit me, I'd like to get into the spirit of WHY. Why do they act this way? Why are they not able to see past the lies and the deception? Why do they allow themselves to be duped in over and over? This question has been tackled by many people more intelligent and more knowledgeable than myself but I would humbly beg your forgiveness as I offer my opinion:
By all counts, the Xbox One reveal was a disaster yet if I were to fish out one nugget of success from that brown mountain of failure, it would be that the Empty Suits had convinced a very zealous group of one thing --The Power of the Cloud.
Microsoft had one task and they pulled it off so gloriously. Sell the people on an implausible concept, powered only by their imagination. Let THEM dream up what the Cloud can do without facts or figures. It was absolutely brilliant. Like a snowball rolling down the hill, the power of the Cloud kept growing and growing into this giant, ludicrous concept -- entire worlds filled with intelligent NPCs with ZERO loading times.
It was a glorious future...one recognized by normal people as a load of hogwash.
I'm not completely disparaging the concept of the Cloud, it will definitely play a major part in gaming but as a tool to push 4k graphics on the Xbox One, not so much.
Still, the Defenders want to believe in that future. They have to believe it. They NEED to believe it and because of that, fear is what drives them. To recognize the faults of the Xbox One is to recognize that the Cloud is just a bunch of hot air and that won't do at all. As a friend of mine once told me, "Please don't destroy my reality, it's the one thing I've got left."
To defend their lies, Microsoft has reversed not only their positions but many official statements over and over again (need I mention Major Nelson's reassurance that the DRM cannot be removed). The Cloud believers see this and begin adopting the mannerism of the Empty Suits. They begin to echo their views, their shifts and, quite tragically, their morals.
I'd like to take a break here and show you an exchange between Black Buster Critic (one of the most vocal anti-Xbox One users on Youtube) and a person named ABBA.
**paraphrased not verbatim**
BLACK BUSTER CRITIC: Do you agree that Forza 5 ships unfinished? There are millions of people without internet, as shown by the amount of Xbox Live accounts vs the amounts of units sold. Do you not agree that single player campaign customers have the right to the finished product?
ABBA: I don't know anybody without internet.
BLACK BUSTER CRITIC: It's not about you, it's about your fellow gamers -- do you agree there are people without internet?
ABBA: I don't know anyone without internet so I can't emphasize with them.
BLACK BUSTER CRITIC: But you can emphasize with Kinect more than your fellow gamers? You agreed that there are no good games for the Kinect and that we need to buy it so it can survive.
ABBA: Yes, that's exactly what I said.
BLACK BUSTER CRITIC: Do you know the Kinect?
ABBA: What?
BLACK BUSTER CRITIC: You've said you cannot emphasize with people you don't know. I assume you can emphasize with the Kinect because you know it personally?
ABBA: ..........what?
***
The repetition of -What- there is very important because it reveals the inability to detect contradictions and correlation of ideas.
But I digress.
I consider myself well-to-do. I've owned all three systems this Gen and I plan on getting only the Wii U and the PS4 next Gen. Yet for the life of me, I cannot see myself in a position where I would sneer and condescend people without money or internet nor do I picture myself not calling out Sony or Nintendo on their hypocrisies.
During the PSN outage, my credit card was not stolen because I only resorted to using Playstation Store Cards. Yet, in spite of that, I was able to understand where people's rage was coming from because I have EMPATHY. I never laughed or insulted them saying "Haha, should have used PSN cards!" because, again, I have EMPATHY.
Back on the earlier seasons of Dexter, the titular serial killer targeted a sleazy car salesman. Immediately, after waking to find himself wrapped in plastic, the man started giving out reasons for Dexter to spare his life, each one increasingly bizarre and every single one of them contradictory to the one before it. What was humorous, both to Dexter and the audience, was that the man never once showed an inkling of embarrassment or shame as he danced and waded his through an ever-complex narrative. To his credit, he was trying to save his bacon but then again, he was a confirmed sociopath...so there's that.
This is what's happening over at the Microsoft camp. The gamers, true gaming execs, have left Micrsoft and we're left with sleazy car salesmen. We've traded J. Allard and Peter Moore for Larry Hryb and Penello, the passionate gamers for the sleazy car salesmen who sprout an ever-changing narrative. Without passion or convitction, you show no absolutely no emotion when you're caught lying, effortlessly jumping from one position to the next.
SFDebris, whose reviews of Star Trek are as funny as they are informative, likens the Voyager series' writers handling of Chakotay to the shaking of a Magic 8-Ball. This is precisely the feeling I get whenever I wake up to see MSFT crew doing another dance.
So, Magic 8-Ball, let me ask you this. Should I insult indie games? Should I say HD graphics are awesome or should I say resolution is useless? Are retail games destroying us or are they very important?
*shakes Magic 8-Ball*
--BETTER NOT TELL YOU NOW--
Interesting...
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Disclaimer: MightynoX has shook hands with Keiji Inafune (Megaman), Hideo Kojima (MGS) and Ryukishi07 (When they cry series). All three agreed that he's a massive clown.
Ritual of Bonds Vol.2 follows on from Vol.1 to add a smattering of new content to SWORD ART ONLINE Last Recollection
Publishers XSEED Games and Marvelous Europe, and developer Voracious Games have announced Potionomics: Masterwork Edition for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and Switch. It will launch this fall.
Nekki has announced that the forthcoming gun fu game, SPINE, will receive a movie adaptation to expand the franchise.
"Why do they act this way? Why are they not able to see past the lies and the deception? Why do they allow themselves to be duped in over and over?"
Can't speak for everyone else but I'll give ya my take. See when the X1 was on stage at E3 they revealed Killer Instinct. Now when they did this they did it in a way that was strange in the industry at the time. They announced the game, the characters, played some of the music and showed some gameplay. Now funnily enough they didn't go through a power point listing the number of particles on screen at once, number of polygons each character was made up of, or even the resolution the game ran at. It's weird I know but I think they figured people would look at it as a whole and say "That looks fun, I want that"
Now fighters are a different breed and 60fps had to be confirmed in order to guarantee smooth gameplay. But other than that. Resolution doesn't matter. Polycount doesn't matter. The gameplay and the experience you have are all that matters. And I've played it. The game is fun. Does it running at 720p ruin my fun? No. Does it having low poly characters compared to others ruin my fun? No. So I'm really missing the point as to why resolution matters. Sure I'd like to see it in higher def, but if it isn't ... who the heck cares? Other than people already not planning on buying in which case who cares what they think?
You make the perfect blogs LOL!
Keep up
Regardless of content, the title ALONE deserves some praise. Very creative!!!
It makes sense that the XBone wouldn't be able to display these games at 1080. If the Ps4 can just about manage it with superior specs, the Xbone pretty much doesn't have a chance. I wonder if the ambition of the games being made is based on an overestimation of the power of these new consoles. Perhaps devs need to reel it in a bit.
No matter what though, none of these things are necessary for a game to be good. There are SNES games that are yet to be topped in terms of their quality as far as I'm concerned. This is my opinion and I haven't wavered from it. The experience is more important to me than the compensating tech-fetishism that's so widespread among the gaming community. Do you care about the games or do you care about how well your machine runs those games? If it's the latter, then that's what companies are going to cater towards, and games will not grow as a result. They'll just remain empty, stupid graphics showcases and as benchmarks for shut-in gamers trying to compensate for their own lack of power with their PCs and consoles.
There's also the issue that the Ps4, although objectively better in the specs department compared to the Xbone, will hav its multi-platform games toned down to achieve parity with their xbone counterparts. Whether or not this will matter depends on whether or not the game in question is actually "toned down" on the ps4, or whether both versions are built the same way and use the same amount of resourses. If the former, then the more fully realized vision of the ps4 version will be compromised, and what the game is supposed to be, and how it is supposed to be experienced is also compromised. That mightn't necessarily be a noticeably bad thing, but I feel like there's definitely potential there for a game to be a real mess compared to what it was supposed to be. The again, the gulf between the performance of the Xbone and the Ps4 isn't THAT huge, and it's possible that multi-platform ps4 games won't have to be toned down all that much to meet the Xbone's quality.
If it's the former (going back to the point about 16 lines up) then it really doesn't matter. Neither game in this case has been compromised, and the experience is what it is supposed to be.
I think developers and gamers alike need to realize that realism and intense graphics aren't that important and they don't make a game good. If gamers think this, this is what they get, because this is where the money is; developers will make graphics intensive games. If developers think this too, they're even more inclined to make those kinds of games. But this mentality ensures that games won't grow as a medium, and also that while they'll have the impressive surface appearance of reality, below the surface they'll be six year old children. Graphics need to be more meaningful; they can't just be realistic for no good reason other than masturbating people's tech boners and "because we can." On top of this, stylized graphics are more impressive anyway, because they require a much greater level of creativity and imagination than merely rendering reality does. Graphics shouldn't be an end in themselves; they should serve a narrative purpose. And again, they don't even NEED to be good - in the way that we understand it nowadays - for a game to be good, look at Chrono Trigger. Those graphics are old sure, but they still look great and they do a great service to the entire game and its narrative.
lifetime gamer, 31 started on atari and nes...
the reason specs matter is because its a early symptom of a disease the platform will likely suffer from its entire life cycle... if one of the very first games ported to it can't be at the same resolution as the ps4 counterpart, what is gonna happen when the devs really start upping the ante.
look at the graphical leap this gen (perhaps resistance 1 to TLOU) almost no comparison... how will the xbone handle this gens TLOU? short answer is, there is less of a chance that devs will be able to draw out enough power in the xbone to make multiplats look anywhere as good as their ps4 counterparts... and for someone looking for the most future proof tech they can buy, that REALLY matters to me!
im sorry, i LOVE gameplay (souls series is amazing! ni no kuni FTW) but i don't need to buy a machine that cant push graphical boundries to get that... the ps4 will have just as good of games, it just looks like from what we've seen so far that they'll be more immersive too! (due to better graphics)
my two cents!
ps. If all anyone REALLY cared about was FUN, the wii u would be to at least 7mil by now...