Hear Me Out | The Xbox One Reveal

Microsoft unveiled their new, let’s call it an enter­tain­ment sys­tem, yes­ter­day and the inter­net explod­ed with opin­ions. A few of them have been good, quite a lot have been neg­a­tive and some have even fall­en into neu­tral. I def­i­nite­ly have opin­ions of the Xbox One from what I saw yes­ter­day, but they may not be what you think if you fol­lowed my Twit­ter feed dur­ing the reveal. Let’s dive into this cross-exam­i­na­tion style with a seg­ment I’m going to call: Lead­ing the Witness.

So, Ben, did you enjoy the Xbox One reveal yesterday?

Thanks for ask­ing, no I did not. That’s not to say it wasn’t a well-exe­cut­ed reveal, it was just geared towards an audi­ence with which I have very lit­tle in com­mon. I don’t have a cable sub­scrip­tion, I don’t fol­low sports at all, I’ve nev­er got­ten into the Forza series and I’ve real­ly only played one of the Call of Duty games. The main rea­son I got so eas­i­ly and quick­ly frus­trat­ed was that it raised a lot of red flags of sim­i­lar­i­ty to their E3 pre­sen­ta­tion last year which quite frankly bored me.

Will you be pick­ing up the sys­tem when it comes out based on what you’ve seen so far?

As it stands cur­rent­ly, I will be going for the PlaySta­tion 4 instead.

Does this mean you think the PS4 is the bet­ter system?

Not nec­es­sar­i­ly. As it stands right now, they actu­al­ly look pret­ty sim­i­lar. From the tech specs that have been released as of now, they look pret­ty com­par­a­tive­ly pow­er­ful and sev­er­al of the fea­tures of each sys­tem seem pret­ty exciting.

Then why choose the PS4 over the Xbox One?

The first HD con­sole to get its hooks into me was the PS3. Since then I’ve accrued a decent amount of tro­phies, have a good sta­ble of friends and have got­ten very famil­iar with most of the exclu­sive fran­chis­es for the sys­tem. It’s not about me find­ing one supe­ri­or to the oth­er, it’s more my exist­ing rela­tion­ship that had me lean­ing in that direc­tion ini­tial­ly. With both sides being fair­ly equal, I’d pre­fer to stay with the con­sole I have more invest­ed in.

Is there any way you’d con­sid­er an Xbox One?

Sure. I have yet to see what exclu­sive titles are going to be avail­able for the sys­tem and if there’ll be some amaz­ing stuff, I could def­i­nite­ly see myself pick­ing it up down the road. I cur­rent­ly own a 360 and enjoy play­ing some of the great exclu­sives for it. The most dis­ap­point­ing thing about this reveal was that there was noth­ing at that show geared towards me as a per­son who loves games. I’m sure they’ll have much more to show come E3, but unless they show some­thing mind-blow­ing, I’ll prob­a­bly be able to be sat­is­fied with a PS4 for a while.

How about things like used game pro­tec­tion, online ver­i­fi­ca­tion and always con­nect­ed cameras?

To be fair, most of these things are going to be a real­i­ty on the PS4. I don’t like the used game pro­tec­tions at all, but it’s like­ly not going to pre­vent me from get­ting the next gen sys­tems. Online ver­i­fi­ca­tion doesn’t seem like a huge deal until you have that one moment where you’d real­ly like to play a game, but your inter­net is down. As for the cam­era, if they’re spy­ing on me, I only pity what they have to see when I have a day off.

Well, frankly, I think you look stunning.

Why thank you kind sir, but it seems we’re stray­ing from the main topic.

Sor­ry about that, so what would be your rec­om­men­da­tion to peo­ple out there?

My first rec­om­men­da­tion is to wait and see. With E3 less than 3 weeks away, you’re about to be show­ered with excit­ing announce­ments and new games to play. Don’t throw your full weight into any par­tic­u­lar cor­ner just yet because the details real­ly just aren’t out there yet.

Any final thoughts?

When it real­ly comes down to it, I always love it when new hard­ware enters the are­na. It’s easy to wrapped up in bat­tles to decide which is the best so that you can val­i­date your pur­chase, but when it comes down to it, the real fun is get­ting to be among the first to expe­ri­ence new tech­nol­o­gy. Games are about fun, so try not to get too enveloped in all the dra­ma that is always asso­ci­at­ed with these kinds of launches.