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I'm really getting quite excited by the way that Microsoft are pushing their plans for the 360's online service now - that's unquestionably where they see the main appeal of the next gen lying.
A decent Live Arcade service, with new titles appearing regularly and the claim that they'll be ensuring the quality and diversity of content - mention in this week's Edge article about PomPom and the 360 version of Mutant Storm of how "there won't be twenty slightly different versions of Hearts" is promising. I want to see them open the service up to unproven bedroom coders, though - PomPom are pretty well known already. Imagine if they could get Kenta Cho developing new downloadable shooters for it - I'd explode.
The Project Gotham Racing 3 article in this issue is also fairly juicy. A 'Live TV' option, which will allow you to spectate on races in progress. If that could be extended to other games, it could really take off. Dead or Alive Ultimate already has a lobby system which forces you to wait in line for your turn in winner-stays-on matches, but allows your to observe and comment on the bout currently taking place - extend that to a game like Street Fighter 3 and you'd be onto a winner - allow people to watch fights between masters in real-time, let them pick up new combos and strategies from them. Or have people use the system to mentor others in games.
If PGR3 allows the audience to leave feedback on the people racing, it could help to eradicate some of the nastier elements of online console gaming - people are currently happy to dish out some really nasty abuse or ruin games for others because they know that there's only the others playing with them who can report them for it. If you're letting anybody and everybody watch ranked races in PGR3, then let them report crappy behaviour too - if you know that you've got a potentially enormous number of people who are going to put the word out when you behave like a dick, you're less likely to do it.
Then there's the stuff about microtransactions (I think that's the term MS have used - please correct me if I'm wrong). That's pretty interesting, the idea that players can charge small amounts for content they've created themselves. I'm heavily into Forza Motorsport atm and that's got a superb system that lets you create custom decals for the cars in your garage, then sell those cars to other players for agreed amounts of the in-game currency. What's great is that it takes a lot of time and effort to create anything half-way decent, so the more attractive custom rides look that much more special and become more desirable. Imagine being able to make some real cash off the work you've put into that - how much would that increase the sense of ownership and involvement in the game?
Legal issues surrounding that whole sales-between-players thing which might lead to it being either dropped or really limited, though. Say you create some new content that infringes on existing trademarks - what would happen then? I've got a Pac-Man car, for example, which is based on existing promotional art for the game. Could I possibly put something like that up for sale?
But yeah, really quite looking forwards to seeing what MS do with online now. It could be revolutionary, it could be a fairly straight evolution of the current system. |
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