Gamer's Outpost Press (Archived)

by Paul Tassi via Forbes

As we head into the fall, the console wars are heating up.

Just kidding, they’re really not. Instead, the PS4 and Xbox One march more or less lockstep into the season sharing nearly all the biggest games. What will undoubtedly be the top three sellers of the holiday season, Black Ops 3, Fallout 4 and Metal Gear Solid 5 are out on both systems. The same goes for Mad Max, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, Just Cause 3, FIFA, Star Wars: Battlefront and Rainbow Six Siege.

I’ve previously credited Xbox One has having a slight window to catch up to the PS4 with two powerful exclusives, Halo 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider, on the horizon, but though both will sell well, in the grand scheme of things, it’s possible (probable) there is no catching PS4 at this point.

The systems have become functionally identical over time, Microsoft having to dramatically rework the Xbox One after E3 2013 to mirror its rival. So now we have two boxes that perform roughly the same with a catalog of games that are 90% of the same as one another.

And yet, I’m asked this all the time. Rather “accused” of it all the time. If I write that this year is Microsoft’s best bet to gain ground on PS4, I’m a shill for the Xbox. If I concede that in all likelihood, Sony  has already won this generation’s console war with a massive lead, I’m a sellout for PS4.

Of course the truth is neither of these, as I own both systems, plus a Wii U and gaming PC for good measure. I have no financial stake in either company, and after owning every PlayStation and Xbox and Nintendo  console before this trio, I don’t have some sort of deep seeded nostalgia bias either that will cause me to choose one brand over another every time.

And yet, there are smaller biases. Ones I will freely admit. But these biases show just how petty the PS4 and Xbox One console war has become. These are not two dramatically different visions for the future of gaming. They are instead small tweaks and personal preferences that cause me to choose one system over another in a given situation.

So, in the interest of full disclosure for fanboys to reference at any time in the future, here are my full list of console biases.

1. I will almost always choose to buy an FPS game (or request a review copy) for Xbox One over PS4. My first experiences with FPS games were obviously on PC, but the first series I really dove into was Halo on the original Xbox, which sort of defined my formative years with the genre. As such, the Xbox One controller simply feels more natural for shooters. It’s half the reason I left a high level Destiny character behind on PS4, and completely converted to Xbox One for that game, once I realized I was going to be in it for the next ten years.

2. In contrast, most other genres I will play on PS4, as I like the diversity of switching back and forth between two systems. And maybe because it was growing up with Tomb Raider, but nearly all third person action games I play on PS4. For some like Uncharted, I have to, obviously, but I’ll also play Arkham games, Shadow of Mordor, Assassin’s Creed, etc, etc, there as well. And it just felt blasphemous to buy Metal Gear Solid 5 for Xbox One given its history with PlayStation, so I own the PS4 copy of that as well. In terms of the great graphics debate? I never once have thought that a game looks better on one console than the other, and my platform picks for wide-released series have to do with genre alone as I say. The technical differences just aren’t there, and if they are, I simply can’t notice them, try as I might.

3. Generally speaking, I don’t like the PS4 controller compared to the Xbox One’s. The thumbstick issue really is horrible, as the rubber shreds and forces you to either get a new one, or these gaudy, uncomfortable caps to put on them. And for some reason, the battery life feels a lot shorter as well, as I feel like my DualShock is always on the verge of death while the XB1 controller can truck for a lot more miles.

4. I hate the Xbox One UI. I don’t really know anyone who doesn’t hate the Xbox One UI. It was based on Windows 8 (ugh) and designed to work with Kinect gesturing (double ugh), and now that Windows 10 is here, it remains painfully outdated. I don’t even have my Kinect hooked up, so I can’t shout at my screen to display menu options that remain otherwise hidden. It’s impossible to find half of what you’re looking for in those tiles, and I cannot wait for the pending redesign that’s coming soon. As such, the terrible UI makes me use PS4 for all non-gaming related functions like watching Netflix or Amazon or Hulu. I do only watch HBO Go on Xbox One, but I think I got in that habit because it was available first on Xbox for some reason, and I just haven’t bothered to download it on PS4 yet.

5. Despite the massive sales lead of PS4, the few friends I have who do own gaming consoles mostly have Xbox Ones. I think there is some nostalgia at play there, as the vast majority of our gaming time in college and high school was on Xboxes, the original, but mainly 360. And mainly Halo 3, which we sunk literally thousands of hours into. I rarely play games online with most of my career-and-family-having friends these days, but when I do, it’s on Xbox One. But when I have people actually over to play games? Quite literally the only option 95% of the time is Wii U, as both PS4 and Xbox One have all but abandoned splitscreen. Needless to say it breaks all of our hearts that somehow with the release of Halo 5, we will have no way to play together in the same room like we used to.

6. The battle of the “exclusives” seems a lot less intense than it used to. We’re lucky if each console gets what, one big-name exclusive a year, with a smattering of smaller ones? So far, I think it’s been a pretty even split in terms of quality of exclusives, though until Halo 5 and Tomb Raider make their debut, I think PS4 has been slightly ahead. Bloodborne remains the best console exclusive between the Xbox One and PS4 in my eyes, and I think Xbox One is still searching for something to match it. I am very hopeful for Halo 5, however, split-screen issues aside, based on what I’ve played in early testing so far. Still though, every year there are so many huge multiplatform games that the exclusives feel more and more like afterthoughts, instead of the titles that used to completely define the console. Overall, I think Sony has an edge here, but both systems have lacked all that many high quality exclusives so far this generation.

7. Console exclusive content makes me hate both brands equally. Sony’s newfound snuggling session with Activision giving away early Call of Duty Beta and DLC access and loads of PS-only Destiny content is just maddening. Though Microsoft has certainly secured those kinds of deals in the past as well, Sony is just doing more of them lately because of their massive market position. First Xbox was the “home of Call of Duty” and now PlayStation is, but both claims for a multiplatform game are fundamentally stupid. You do not “own” the game, you are simply making it slightly worse for players who use your competition’s console. This has been by far the dumbest part of the console wars this generation, yet given how similar the systems are, this is what it’s regressed to.

8. I think Sony has been a little cocky since launch, but I suppose they’ve earned the right to be. Their sales lead is just something to behold, though I can’t shake the feeling that they haven’t quite earned it. Given how similar the Xbox One and PS4 are in the end, to have Sony selling close to double the amount of systems seems excessive, and this literally all stems from a few early decisions Microsoft made with the Xbox One. The elimination of discs makes sense in the long run, but it was the wrong time to do so with the used games economy still in full swing. An always online console is alright for security, but will do more harm than good if a failed “check-in” prevents someone from playing a game they legally own because of a spotty internet connection. But Microsoft has no excuse for pushing the Kinect so hard when it soon became clear they had no actual idea what to do with it, and despite a 2.0 version, the tech itself was never ready for prime time. I honestly credit the Kinect alone and the $100 price increase it forced upon the console as the majority of the reason the Xbox One is trailing the PS4 to this day. That bundling decision is one of the worst in industry history.

So, am I biased? Can you go through the list and tally up which console had more pros or cons? I don’t know, I didn’t count. I know I use them both pretty equally. Both have their strengths, and both have their weaknesses which I am always quick to point out. But fundamentally, I can’t shake the feeling that they’re just so damn similar, and that has made for the blandest console wars in years.

We all have biases like these, but they’re minor and don’t make us “beholden” to one company or another. And for those who have staked their claim with one side or another, why? I get that most budgets will only allow the purchase of one console, but to create this artificial brand war where you become a free recruit to do PR for a corporation seems downright weird. I get that these differences are fun to debate, but it can escalate far beyond that sometimes, and it doesn’t need to.

Anyway, those are my console “biases.” And I have some about the Wii U and PC I could expand on later too probably, but this is the main conflict this generation, and will be for the rest of the decade, it seems.

by  Philip Kollar via Polygon

Interested in trying out Call of Duty: Black Ops 3‘s multiplayer but not yet certain enough to pre-order the game? As long as you own a PlayStation 4, you’re in luck! Developer Treyarch Studios has announced that the ongoing beta for Black Ops 3 is now open to all PlayStation 4 users.

The news comes via a post to Treyarch’s official Twitter feed this afternoon, which reads: “Let’s dial this up a notch. The @PlayStation 4 #BO3Beta is now open for all PS4 players. Let’s go!”

The beta for Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 launched on PlayStation 4 earlier this week, but it was initially only available for people who had pre-ordered the game. Along with opening the beta up for a much wider audience today, Treyarch also increased the game’s current level cap and added a new multiplayer map, along with some other additions.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 will release on Nov. 6 for Windows PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. The beta is expected to run through this coming Sunday, Aug. 23, on PS4. Betas on Windows PC and Xbox One are expected on Aug. 26; it’s unknown if Treyarch will open those beta experiences up to anyone on the platform the way they did here.

by Christopher Grant via Polygon

While work on Xbox 360 backward compatibility continues in advance of its November launch, that hasn’t stopped Xbox chief Phil Spencer from asking his team — a team that already delivered something most of the world thought was, if not technologically impossible, at least technologically “very challenging” with Xbox 360 support — if they could also go ahead and get original Xbox support on Xbox One.

View Phil’s answer on Twitter

Since the Xbox 360 had limited backward compatibility with the original Xbox already, getting that support onto Xbox One might be as simple as using the Xbox 360 emulator to run the original Xbox emulator. An emulator inside an emulator.

Like the Xbox 360 solution currently in development, the Xbox emulator did not support every Xbox game. “The last update for Xbox 360 backwards compatibility in North America was on November 27, 2007, raising the total number of Xbox games compatible with the Xbox 360 to 461,” Wikipedia’s thorough page on the topic states. “Approximately 51% of the original Xbox library is now compatible with the Xbox 360 (as of the November 27, 2007 update).” Microsoft is targeting more than 100 Xbox 360 games to be compatible by the November launch.

While previous PlayStation generations had backward compatibility for PlayStation 1 games, at the very least, the PlayStation 4 doesn’t have any backward compatibility support, instead relying on streaming service PlayStation Now to bring its catalog to the newest console. “The technology involved must be very challenging,” Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida told Polygon following Microsoft’s announcement at E3. He later added, “Backward compatibility is hard. I won’t say we’ll never do it, but it’s not an easy thing to do.

by Tanya Valdez via Video Game Examiner

The bomb dropped last week as we learned that Bungie had decided to discontinue work with voice actor, Peter Dinklage, in the Destiny franchise. The news continued on to declare Nolan North as a replacement for Ghost in The Taken King expansion for Destiny.

For those who do not know who Peter Dinklage and Nolan North are, they are predominant voice actors in the gaming industry. Dinklage is also a well-known actor who many remember as Miles Finch in Elf, Eddie in Pixels, and countless other characters in big Hollywood movies. Nolan North is a beloved video game actor who’s known for voicing Nathan Drake in the Uncharted series, David in The Last of Us, and so many more. He has worked so tightly in the gaming community that he even voiced a character named after himself, President Nolan North of The United States of America, in Saints Row IV.

While that news was circulating last week, we were only left to speculate reasons for Dinklage’s removal from the upcoming expansion. Today, Bungie shares why this decision was made. Executive producer Mark Noseworthy shared that it was basically over his unavailability. He shared with Game Informer that the decision was mainly due to “Hollywood nonsense”.

“Dinklage was awesome to work with but we needed to work with someone who is more available. Nolan is a pro, this is his thing,” he explained. “You can just call him up and say ‘hey, next week we’re doing this internal play test and it would be great to get some Ghost dialogue in there’. And he’s available.”

IGN reported that Dinklage’s availability for his role in The Taken King is apparently crucial because Ghost will now be “more important in the game’s story, offering lore when bits of the environment are scanned,” they explained. “Additionally, missions from the original Destiny are being reorganised to unlock along more logical quest lines. As a result, having someone on-call to re-record their lines if needs be was a high priority for the developer.”

So, while many believed it was due to the heat Dinklage got for his “unenthusiastic performance in Destiny”, this was definitely not the case. Nolan North will now be re-recording all the old lines as well as the new ones. The Taken King expansion for Destiny is still slated for a release date of September 15, 2015.

by Dave Thier via Forbes

We have seen some impressive Xbox One bundles in the past, but this one takes the cake, at least for now. Best Buy has announced a back to school sale that that combines Microsoft’s 500 gb Xbox One (with either Halo: The Master Chief Collection or Assassin’s Creed: Unity+Black Flag) with a 40-inch Samsung TV, aimed at incoming college students. The TV costs $429.99 on its own, which, when assuming $30 (could be slightly higher, could be slightly lower) for the bundled game, puts the price of the actual Xbox One hardware at $40. This is of course the logic of the bundle, which assumes that you would have bought all the of individual components for full price separately, but still, if we assume that, that’s an Xbox One for $40. That’s not bad. That’s not bad at all. The deal will run Sunday Aug. 9 through Sunday Aug. 15, so look for it then.

There are other ways of quantifying this deal, of course: you could say that its $280 off of the complete package, or it’s a 40-inch Samsung HDTV for $150. But I obviously prefer the one that considers the Xbox One at $40, if only for sheer hilarity’s sake. On the other end of the spectrum, you could pay $500 for the Xbox One Halo 5: Guardians Bundle, with no TV included.

“It’s the perfect college student deal, as a gaming console like the Xbox One is a college essential and a 40-inch TV is a great size for a dorm room,” Best Buy said in a statement.

If this sort of thing is on the table, it might be just the beginning. Microsoft was very aggressive about its bundles last holiday season, and there’s no reason to think that it won’t do the same thing this year. The Xbox One is still trailing the PS4 by a significant margin, something that I don’t think Microsoft has quite made peace with. I’d expect the tech giant to bring its considerable marketing resources to bear in an attempt to make this the Xbox One’s turnaround year. The PS4 might prove insurmountable at this point, however. Install base and momentum are hugely important in this industry, and Sony has firmly established itself as its market leader. I know I’ve convinced at least one friend to get a PS4 instead of an Xbox One for the sole reason that we’d be able to play Destiny together.

Keep an eye here for more video game deals as the holiday season gets underway.

by Dave Smith via Business Insider

There’s a pretty strong correlation between male game players’ sexist remarks towards female game players and how bad those men are at playing games, according to a new study published in the journal PLOS One last week, which also sheds some light on the behaviors and attitudes of men that act anonymously online.

Jeffrey Kuznekoff and Michael Kasumovic — researchers from Miami University and University of New South Wales, respectively — watched how male players treated female players during 163 sessions of “Halo 3,” a popular Xbox 360 first-person shooter game that debuted in 2007. The game has an online multiplayer mode that enables actual human beings to speak with each other live, in real-time.

According to researchers, players only spoke in 102 of the 163 total matches, but in those games, “a total of 189 players spoke…all of them were male. This is not to say that women did not play, just that they did not speak.”

Unbeknownst to the players, the researchers had connected an audio playback device to their Xbox controllers, which allowed them to “broadcast pre-recorded audio clips to other players as if they were speaking to each other through the real-time voice channel.”

There were three experimental “manipulations”: a control, where matches were played as normal, as well as male and female manipulations, where the researchers broadcast pre-recorded phrases made by male and female voices to the players over the real-time voice channel on Xbox Live.

“These prerecorded phrases were identical in the male and female condition, harmless in nature, and designed to be inoffensive,” the researchers said. “Phrases included: ‘I like this map’, ‘nice shot there,’ ‘I had fun playing that game,’ ‘I think I just saw a couple of them heading this way,’ and ‘that was a good game everyone.'”

You could probably guess what the researchers concluded. Here it is, from the discussion in their paper:

We found that skill determined the frequency of positive and negative statements spoken towards both male- and female-voiced teammates.

In addition, poorer performance (fewer kills and more deaths) resulted in more negative statements specifically in the female-voiced manipulation.

We thus argue that our results best support an evolutionary explanation of female-directed aggression. Low-status males that have the most to lose due to a hierarchical reconfiguration are responding to the threat female competitors pose. High-status males with the least to fear were more positive, suggesting they were switching to a supportive, and potentially, mate attraction role.

(Flickr/Rachel Johnson) “The idea that video games may be reinforcing such gender segregation as the norm for many teenagers is troubling given the fact that a significant proportion of them are gamers,” the researchers said. “Such ideas have the potential to spill over in real-life interactions and promote socially unacceptable behaviors such as sexism.”

What’s perhaps most interesting about this experiment is that the study’s conclusions could be applied to other settings where online users are allowed to act and say things anonymously — like Twitter, or Reddit. Here’s more from the study:

Our results support an evolutionary argument for why low-status, low-performing males are hostile towards female competitors. Dominance is tightly linked to fitness in men…Low-status and low-performing males have the most to lose as a consequence of the hierarchical reconfiguration due to the entry of a competitive woman. As men often rely on aggression to maintain their dominant social status, the increase in hostility towards a woman by lower-status males may be an attempt to disregard a female’s performance and suppress her disturbance on the hierarchy to retain their social rank. This idea is reinforced by the fact that higher-skilled males that should not feel threatened by a female increased their number of positive comments.

While the researchers note it is novel for male players in their data set to play with females in a male-dominated shooter game like “Halo 3,” they still hope it could show some young male players — and perhaps male online users, too — that “losing to the opposite sex is not socially debilitating.”

The whole study can be found here; it’s really an interesting read. We first saw this study mentioned on The Washington Post.

Three years after console’s debut, Microsoft racked up 55,000 scratching complaints

by David Kravets via Ars Technica; Photo credit: Thomas Hawk

No matter how hard Microsoft tries, it can’t defeat a judicial order requiring it to face a proposed class-action lawsuit claiming that the Xbox 360 renders gaming discs unplayable because the console scratches them.

The decision (PDF) Monday by the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals sets the stage either for litigation over the allegations or a Supreme Court showdown.

As we’ve previously described, here’s what the flap is all about:

The suit claims that vibrations or small movements of the gaming console can cause the optical drive to scratch discs. Microsoft was accused of knowing about the alleged issue before the Xbox 360 launched in 2005. A Microsoft manager, Hiroo Umeno, said in a court document that the company was well aware of the damage that could be caused to discs when players repositioned their consoles. “This is … information that we as a team, optical disc drive team, knew about. When we first discovered the problem in September or October, when we got a first report of disc movement, we knew this is what’s causing the problem,” Umeno said.

Three years after the console’s debut, Microsoft racked up some 55,000 complaints about the issue. Microsoft, which said that gamers’ misuse was the cause, argued that the case should be dismissed because 0.4 percent of console owners reported problems.

Microsoft also maintained that aggrieved gamers could bring a suit individually instead of collectively.

The San Francsico-based appeals court originally ruled (PDF) 3-0 against Microsoft in March. The court on Monday set aside Microsoft’s renewed plea for the court to rehear the case—which seeks economic damages—with a larger panel of 11 judges. No judge on the nation’s largest federal appeals court voted in favor of a rehearing.