Gaming Everything
Plenty of games have been announced for the Xbox One thus far. But if there’s one genre that’s underrepresented, some may point to the RPG category.
Microsoft Studios boss Phil Spencer acknowledged to Eurogamer that the Xbox One may be lacking in the RPG space as of now, but “you will see those games come to our platform.”
“RPGs for me personally, that’s the genre I grew up playing, starting with the old Ultima series. Those are games that are in my heart. When we launched 360 we invested in Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon with Sakaguchi-san. Those were really important games from us. RPG games take a long time. You want to make sure those games are great. Lionhead’s taking Fable in an interesting direction and we’ve been playing that game for a while. That’s a ton of fun. RPGs specifically, we showed The Witcher 3 at E3, but I know what you’re asking. You’re asking about the more traditional RPG. I know you will see those games come to our platform. There’s just nothing to announce right now.”
Spencer also spoke about Microsoft’s commitment to Japan. The company is “continuing to invest there,” he said.
“Specifically about the Japanese market – and I’ll be at Tokyo Game Show in a month – the Japanese development community remains incredibly important to us, and we’re continuing to invest there. We’re having great conversations with people. We’re not announcing anything, but I can say both RPGs and specifically the Japanese developers are really important to our ecosystem. I know Dead Rising 3 isn’t an RPG and is being developed in Vancouver, Canada, but I’ll just say the relationship with the publishers and developers in Japan is something we’ll continue to invest in as important.”
Finally, Spencer touched on the topic of Xbox One’s killer app. He believes that gamers will determine what this title turns out to be.
“Even Halo – and I was there at the original Xbox – we didn’t know it was Halo. And for those who remember how Halo performed at the E3 prior to the launch, I’ll be honest, there were some issues with how Halo played.
“You never know what the hits are going to be. We build things, we put our passion and creativity into the products, and then you put forward something, and the consumers decide what are the killer apps. The gamers will decide what the killer app is.”
“We’ve got a breadth of content I’m proud of: Killer Instinct; we announced Zoo Tycoon, which is a completely different genre of game; Project Spark, which is a creativity application tool/game, which I think will bring a ton of people in; Forza; Call of Duty; Battlefield; Dead Rising; Ryse.
“In the end the gamers will decide what the killer app was. There’s enough content there that everybody will pick their thing that will work. I know from a quality level – and I’m playing all the games now at home – the teams understand what the platform is capable of. We’ve got people making use of Kinect, like Kinect Sports Rivals. We’ve got some tried and true shooters and fighting games. The quality across so many genres is something we haven’t seen at launch before.”
