Microsoft @ E3: A Space Odyssey. June 10 [9:30 AM PDT/ 5:30 PM BST]

[SkyLlama]

I said before, and I will say it again: Microsoft did say that they would be watching out customer feedback. I don't think the XB1 will stay the way it is. The sales will plummet and they will get desperate. They will get rid of their policies eventually; it's just a matter of when.

 

I first and foremost don't think sales are going to be bad, but I do expect some things to change also. Once they get feedback for real world users of the system I very well expect the 24 hour check-in to be changed to a more Steam like approach or at the minimum extended.

[Patticus]

From Kotaku:

 

I’m on the battlefield. I’m stomping through the corpses of my comrades swinging my sword at anything that moves. I begin a combo, I slash twice and then whooom slow motion is initiated, shit is about to get ‘cinematic’. A button prompt hovers elusively above the sword I’m about to drive into the throat of my enemy… argh I’m too slow! The prompt flickers, disappears.

I missed it. Damn.

 

But then somehow, for some reason, I still complete the cinematic ‘kill’.

 

What?

 

Maybe it’s a bug I think, but no. Next time I deliberately press the wrong button. The kill goes ahead, no consequences. Then I try hitting no buttons whatsoever. The kill goes ahead. I put the controller on the table in front of me, the kill goes ahead.

 

What is going on here?

 

I ask one of the Crytek people hovering at the booth – is this a bug? Why am I completing kills when I hit the wrong button prompt? Or, worse, no button at all. Turns out it was a deliberate design choice.

 

“We don’t want the player to feel frustrated,” I am told.

 

What's the point in having QTEs when the game does them for you?

[RK64]

From Kotaku:

 

 

What's the point in having QTEs when the game does them for you?

 

That's....just sad.  God of War has QTE's a good bit in the games but you still had to input them right or die.  You also have a solid combat system and have more or less full control during the cinematic parts.  Ryse has.....none of this and looks painfully simple.  That game should have stayed as a Kinect game, at least it could have remained interesting.

[Patticus]

Hopefully that's just for the game's Easy difficulty, a la Resi 6, and that harder modes do not include that. Otherwise it's very much a press A to win, but if you don't, we'll do it for you affair, which would make it perhaps the worst form of dumbing down I've seen in a game to date.

 

The flipside to this is that players who are overly attached to their gamerscores will be all over this game; the attach rate for this over the first few months will be through the roof. What better game to play to get your score up than one which plays itself?