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Re: Xbox without a disk drive?

Posted: November 21st, 2018, 3:24 pm
by pacman000
VideoGameCritic wrote:Let's look at the pros and cons of the digital-only video game ecosystem of the possible future:

PROS
- smaller/cheaper console (no drive)
Could do that by removing the hard disk. No installs would be nice.

VideoGameCritic wrote:CONS
- cannot play offline
- higher game prices
- buggier software (beta)
- forced to agree to EULAs/changing terms
Aren't these becoming the norm for all games?

VideoGameCritic wrote:CONS
- have to use your own bandwidth which may be subject to data cap limits
I'm more concerned about speed. My internet is slow, but cheap. To download software I'd need a faster connection. Paying for a service so I can use another paid service doesn't make sense. (Can't use my new PC online for the same reason. Win 10 eats so much bandwidth I can't connect. So I just use offline apps. I get more done anyways. :lol: )

VideoGameCritic wrote:CONS
- no longer truly own your media
Technically you never actually owned the media outright; you were only licensed to use it. Look at your old Nintendo instructions very carefully. Shoot, I've seen 8mm films with license restrictions.

VideoGameCritic wrote:- no privacy - all online gaming activity monitored (and usage data sold to advertisers)
Don't mind this; I've bought targeted ads myself. ;)

Voor wrote:If you download a game to the console, why do you still have to be online all the time? And don’t you still “own” it?
I "downloaded" a game to my cell phone once. Turns out the initial download only included the game engine & the 1st level. It had to load each new level from the server separately. Deleted it.

VideoGameCritic wrote:Downloaded games have DRM copy protection. Since the game is just a file, there needs to be some kind of guard to prevent it from being copied all over the place. So the console needs to be online to check to make sure it's a legitimate copy.

But if you're ability to play a game relies on some unknown server somewhere, do you really own it? Or is it just a long-term rental?
Hasn't DRM been around for 20+ years? Longer if you include dongles & code wheels. Isn't your issue is with online DRM, not DRM in general.

Re: Xbox without a disk drive?

Posted: November 21st, 2018, 3:35 pm
by Sut
Was reading a similar thread over at Sega 16 when someone made two good points.

1). Games are getting to big for discs.
Discs are just becoming a key code for downloading the rest of the game, it’s getting to the stage where games just won’t fit.

2). Disc speeds aren’t fast enough.
The big advancement this gen has had over the last gen is big open worlds. A disc drive cannot read this data fast enough and if it could it would burn out your drives pretty quick. These games need to be installed on a HDD to run optimally.

Re: Xbox without a disk drive?

Posted: November 21st, 2018, 4:41 pm
by VideoGameCritic
You guys are just giving me more negatives to add!

Game size: Having no limits will just explode the size of games... more so. With physical media there was incentive to keep down the size of the program using clever compression and optimization techniques. Red Dead Redemption 2 does not need to be 100GB. But since it's not their hard drive or bandwidth, they can be inefficient with their code and data. And if they can do something they will.

Subscriptions: Once everything is online, you're going to need accounts for a lot of things, and since they have you by the balls, they will inevitably begin charging monthly fees ("convenience fees"). It always happens this way. Heck, just look at your Comcast bill.

And before you make the lame argument "it's going to happen no use fighting it", remember the words of the great Doc Brown "The future is what we make it"

Re: Xbox without a disk drive?

Posted: November 22nd, 2018, 3:33 am
by VicViper
- buggier software (beta)


I can deal with that, cause it's mostly only true for release before patches, and before that, let's not kid ourselves: games that were released buggy in the 80s & 90s would remain buggy for the rest of our lives, and there are WAAAAY more buggy games than we'd like to remember.

I believe we're way too touchy during the modern era about bugs, while lots of 80-90s games were buggy messes. Even those highly considered, I have to ask myself: how is jumping into a RNG invisible wall into Super Mario 64 (which did ruin speedruns) or teleporting yourself over Tomb Raider 1's waterfall by swimming upward in the 3rd level (possibly just the Saturn version) any better than clipping through a wall/floor in a random modern game? Which is the kind of thing that could regularly happen in NES games (from the top of my head: Rambo, Predator, Ninja Gaiden 1, Castlevania II: Simon's Quest)? Would we think going through walls to finish Zelda Breath Of The Wild in 5 minutes be acceptable today, while it is actually completely forgiven for A Link To The Past?

There's the same amount of bias for Mass Effect when you compare Mass Effect 1-3's visual glitches to Mass Effect Andromeda's visual glitches, they're very similar (heck, if anything I've seen less of them in Andromeda), but apparently it's unacceptable in Andromeda while they're just laughed at for the original trilogy? What?

It's most likely an inherent bias of ours trying to remember mostly just the good stuff of our peak years, even if when you get down to it, there was just as much shit back then as there is now.

Re: Xbox without a disk drive?

Posted: November 22nd, 2018, 8:42 am
by AtariToday
I think having a console without a disk drive might be beneficial to some...myself included. All of the consoles I currently own and have set up are cartridge based ("retro"), and for modern gaming I solely use Steam. I'm now used to the download only style and find it beneficial. Games are frequently on sale and I've even gone the route of picking up a Steam link and controller to play some of these great PC titles on my television via streaming. I've recently moved to a small town and even we have great internet out here. I haven't wanted a modern console up until recently with the release of Red Dead Redemption 2..and i cannot justify spending that kind of money to purchase a new set up for one game. However, if I were to save $100 bucks for losing the disk drive..sign me up!

This model is going to have a niche audience at first. Some serious questions that you'll need to answer before picking something like this up:
Do you have solid internet access?
Do you resell/trade your games?
Are there enough unique titles to make this thing valuable to you, instead of just using a PC/Steam?
Will Xbox offer a cheaper price point on games for going digital only?

if there are positive answers to the above then this might be worth it to you..otherwise stay far far away

Re: Xbox without a disk drive?

Posted: November 22nd, 2018, 12:15 pm
by scotland
pacman000 wrote:
VideoGameCritic wrote:CONS
- no longer truly own your media
Technically you never actually owned the media outright; you were only licensed to use it. Look at your old Nintendo instructions very carefully. Shoot, I've seen 8mm films with license restrictions.


The license restrictions can say anything, but if you buy something physically, you gain more rights than if you buy something digitally. For instance, you have the right to sell your physical copy, or loan your copy, or donate your copy to a library. Also, if something about that product becomes controversial, the physical copy has safeguards from it being altered.

For instance, imagine a game with a celebrity attached - like Mike Tyson's Punch-Out. Later, that license may not be available, and the next update *could* change it to just "Punch-Out". So, you buy "Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, then a year later you find you own a copy of "Punch-Out". Things like this have happened in the book and comic book marketplaces.

For collectors, a digital library has little to no value. A digital copy of a game is just as playable, but since its value is not transferable, it has no value on any secondary value. There is also a risk that when you replace your hardware and need to reinstall software, you are now at the mercy of your digital marketplace. Possibly some games may no longer be available for re-download, or a fee attached to re-downloading, etc.

I'm not saying digital media is bad, nor am I arguing against it - just saying we should recognize what is lost. I also don't give credence to 'Well, that's that way it is in 2018' arguments. Much of the internet is about people arguing about what should be different in the world, so its totally valid to say "Hey, this particular characteristic was better in the past, can't we address that". One way might be to give consumers more rights on their digital purchases, just as the recent law changes addressed gaming after the commercial servers are shut down.

Re: Xbox without a disk drive?

Posted: November 22nd, 2018, 1:56 pm
by VideoGameCritic
VicViper - your assertion that games were buggy in the 80s/90s is false. Maybe a minor glitch on rare occasion, but nothing even in the same BALLPARK as the software being released today. And really, wouldn't I know, of all people??

Re: Xbox without a disk drive?

Posted: November 22nd, 2018, 7:43 pm
by VicViper
VideoGameCritic wrote:VicViper - your assertion that games were buggy in the 80s/90s is false. Maybe a minor glitch on rare occasion, but nothing even in the same BALLPARK as the software being released today. And really, wouldn't I know, of all people??

And as someone who had to go through the nightmare that were the SNES port of Prince of Persia 2, Micronics' NES games and their piss poor arcade conversions (such as Athena), the plethora of terribly programmed Bandai games in the 80s (especially the manga/anime adaptations like Dragon Ball & Saint Seiya on NES), and saw cases of games that were broken on purpose by their own developers so you wouldn't see the end of them, I know that my assertion isn't false.

Even good games were subjected to weird glitches, for example, Final Fantasy 1 on NES, in ProJared's words:

"Half the game doesn't work."

The luck & intelligence stats don't work, a bunch of spells don't work, some even doing the opposite effect than intended (like raising your opponent's evasion instead of decreasing it), and all weapons dubbed "effective" against certain monsters are actually just "normal" weapons, none of them work at all, making the game way harder than intended. That'd be like if in Pokémon the type effectiveness wouldn't exist. Yeah, the game is playable, much like how playing Castlevania without/with only the secondary weapons is feasible, just not intended and forced onto you.

Some older games you can even softlock yourself because of design oversights or glitches.

Prince Of Persia 2 SNES version: Aside from the hot mess that it is (the collision detection is out of this world), they changed how traps worked from the PC version but not the level design (and seeing how they "work", it can be considered as a bug), and as such the first level of the last zone is impossible to complete as intended, you have to take a pretty hidden passage designed from the PC version that used to be only optional, it makes the level barely 30 seconds to complete. That said, knowing that the game has a time limit, and already acts extremely unpredictably, it's very likely you'd give up before noticing the hidden passage. (and it involves a suicidal jump)
Super Hydlide: You can softlock your game by throwing away a specific warp item. (sounds stupid that way, but there's a weight system in this game, so throwing away items is something that has to be done, and you can accidentally throw something important away)
Digimon World: American & Japanese versions are fine. European version has a major glitch though; there's an NPC to talk to that then directs you automatically to a new zone. In the European version, that talk is impossible to trigger, so you can't complete the game, unless you glitch your way through (which involves opening & closing repeatedly the PS1 CD tray IIRC and clipping through the NPC, extremely obscure to say the least, I could never finish the game as a kid I was running around not knowing what to do, that sucked).
King's Quest V: You can softlock by using a certain item to solve a specific puzzle... but that's also supposed to be the only solution available for a later puzzle.
TMNT on MS-DOS: It's the same game as the NES version, except they changed a specific layout and made a jump in a sewer completely impossible to achieve, making the game impossible to complete without glitching through.
I Have No Mouth Yet I Must Scream: Content is censored in some countries; it removes a certain scenario. However, it renders the game impossible to finish, since all initial scenarios must be completed before reaching the final one. Whoops?
Battletoads NES: In multiplayer, the 2nd player's controls in Clinger Winger (stage 11) stop working, so it's impossible to finish the game in 2 Player mode. The 2nd player has to lose all their continues to let the 1st player proceed, rendering the 2 player mode ending impossible to reach.

Am sorry, but saying that there were only minor glitches on rare occasion in retro games is very hyperbolic. I'm not saying there aren't buggy games nowadays, and yeah you could say that these are specific examples there, I could mention more games from that era to show I'm not cherry-picking (even though these examples were pretty much considered mainstream at the time, except maybe IHNMYIMS), or from the early 2000s like Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly (which was pretty much the Sonic 06 of Spyro games) or Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness (especially the PC version), but the point still stands: games in the 80s & 90s were far from pristine, and a glitch or an oversight that prevents you to finish the game is not a minor one.

And yeah, I count design oversights with the glitches too, cause both are mistakes that could have been noticed & solved by both the QA team and the team of developers.

Also, even with technological advances, or because of those, bugs in modern games are to be expected, Breath of the Wild has glitches and you gave it an A+, modern big budget games are just too big of projects nowadays to be glitchless, you are bound to find at least a couple of them even in Nintendo games. Every modern EA and UbiSoft game might range from "moderately bugged" to "glitched up the arse", but at least I can complete them, while I'll never be able to complete Digimon World, and I've yet to encounter that kind of situation in today's games.

Am not saying in general that older games are glitchier than modern games, neither the opposite. Saying however that older games only had minor bugs and were rare at that, is fighting an uphill battle.

Re: Xbox without a disk drive?

Posted: November 23rd, 2018, 3:21 am
by Sut
Yeah I’m going to agree with VicViper on this I remember lots of buggy games.

Robocop on the C64 one of the levels just flat out didn’t work because the developers didn’t expect you to get there.

The originally Jet Set Willy couldn’t be beat due to a glitch. They released a ‘poke’ to fix it (oldie timey patch).

And wasn’t the ‘minus world’ in NES Super Mario Bros the result of a glitch ?

However I do think it’s magnified now just because of the sheer size and scope of modern games. They are big living worlds in a perfect world it shouldn’t happen. But if it could happen to a 48k game is is surprising it happens to a 100gb game ?

I’m not defending the practice the game should work straight out the box. But it’s always been an issue.
The 16-bit era is probably one of the tightest for non-bugs.