OXMUK
Microsoft is spending more money on console games than it ever has before, and Phil Spencer is the man with the chequebook - which he's putting to good use at Capcom, Remedy and Crytek. He's also got his one-time nemesis, former Sony Worldwide Studios boss Phil Harrison, on the team to run the European studios.
At E3, we spoke to Spencer about how he's picking Xbox One's first-party offering, which ranges from meaty blockbusters like Ryse: Son of Rome through startling originals like Capybara's Below to protean world-builder Project Spark. You might want to check out this earlier chat with Spencer and former Xbox head Don Mattrick, too.
Why have Forza as a launch game?
We knew that racing was going to be really important to Xbox One. For Sony, for us, for Nintendo with Mario Kart - it's just a massive category. We built Turn 10 from the ground up and it was bumpy at the beginning - Forza one was a nice game, but it was about six months late, Forza 2 had similar problems hitting dates - but the quality was always there. It has grown into a true first-party studio, in that the team think about all aspects of the platform and how they can really leverage them.
So we saw them embrace Kinect early on, with the head tracking. They didn't do the Joy Ride thing; they said "Forza is a racing simulator, what can we do with the technology that is part of the race simulation experience?" So head tracking makes sense. The SmartGlass implementation they did around Forza Horizon, I thought that was great. And they have kept the quality bar of their games at an incredibly high level.
You see a studio diving in deep, for a core gamer, for a racing fan, what do I really care about in terms of the racing franchise? Well I care about realism, I care about immersion, I care about the sound. They just really are embracing what it means to take the full fidelity of the box and bring it to mark and we want to be there day one. Which is sometimes a crazy endeavour for a studio to try, but they have their army hats on and they're going to do that.
Where did the idea for Quantum Break come from?
When we began talking to Remedy about Xbox One, we started to talk about things that we were really focused on as a platform holder - immersion, using the full breadth of the platform, connecting to users, what we're trying to do in television. And if you know anything about Remedy, storytelling is in its DNA.
And one of its challenges is, how does that artform of storytelling actually get to the masses? Because how many people got to the end of Alan Wake? Of course I hope everybody did, but not everybody did. How many people even looked at something like Max Payne, which from 30,000 feet is a cop shooter game, and realised there's a strong story underneath it?
So Remedy had this idea around live action and games coming together. Not like Forward Unto Dawn, which basically previewed one of the characters in Halo 4, but actually putting these things side by side and having them interact with one another. Where choices you make in the game can actually impact the television show and the television show will actually change over time based on choices people make in the game.
There are some production challenges there, in how you think about timelines and how you produce content, but this is what we've been working on. We're early, this isn't a day one game, but we're in production, so we're in a phase where we can say we believe in this, we have a mechanic that can really work.
So how does it work, then? What do you do in the game?
The mechanic revolves around time, and people who can stop time. The technical capability that we have with the platform really starts to shine here. If I'm playing, say, Halo, and all of a sudden the letterbox comes in to restrict the screen, I can set the controller down because I get this set-piece that plays out that I don't interact with.
We do that because we want you to pay attention to the story, but also because we're using all the horsepower of the platform to render what you see. We're turning off the AI, we're turning off any level of control or animation for characters that you don't see, we're purging memory. Then when we letterbox out we load the game engine back in and you play it.
In Xbox One you can interact with those set-pieces directly, and play in them. This isn't just that the scenes are more graphic. In the gameplay segment, there's the huge tanker hitting the bridge, you see the little warp effect which is the players actually impacting time. And they freeze the tanker halfway through ramming through this bridge. And that bridge scene, as its going on, you're actually playing in that bridge scene. Because we have the RAM, the GPU, CPU capability, we can take something that used to be completely passive and allow you to play through that scene.
The enemy AI, the enemy pathing, all of those will actually take place while that gameplay is frozen in time. And you can freeze that at any point; right at the beginning when the tanker hits the bridge, after it's torn all the way through, so it puts you in complete control of these huge set-pieces that turn into something that you get to play with.
How does it split between the game and the TV show?
The soul behind creating - I hate to use 'trans-media', let's just say the live action and the game - we understand that certain people just want the live-action part. Other people might want to play. Our end-goal is that you're doing both, and those two things interact with one another.
So our goal isn't that we've fully cut 14 episodes of a television show that runs while we release the game, but actually that these two paths intertwine where as a gamer I'll make decisions that will impact how the TV show plays out and vice versa. We want to add some level of interactivity to the live-action which feeds actually how we progress the game.
I can see how the game would affect the show, but not the other way round.
Yeah, because today, television is one-way. So ignore this game for a second, let me just talk about where I think TV is going to go. The reason we're investing in TV is that over the last ten years we've seen how games change when they're connected to the internet.
It wasn't just multiplayer games - we were all playing Quake before the Xbox came out so we knew what multiplayer games looked like. Friends; we knew it was cool to play with people we know. But now I knew what my friends were doing. We added Achievements. Games now are actually services unto themselves, like League of Legends on PC. Television, even without this game, will be more interactive.
There are some production challenges there, in how you think about timelines and how you produce content, but this is what we've been working on. We're early, this isn't a day one game, but we're in production, so we're in a phase where we can say we believe in this, we have a mechanic that can really work.
So how does it work, then? What do you do in the game?
The mechanic revolves around time, and people who can stop time. The technical capability that we have with the platform really starts to shine here. If I'm playing, say, Halo, and all of a sudden the letterbox comes in to restrict the screen, I can set the controller down because I get this set-piece that plays out that I don't interact with.
We do that because we want you to pay attention to the story, but also because we're using all the horsepower of the platform to render what you see. We're turning off the AI, we're turning off any level of control or animation for characters that you don't see, we're purging memory. Then when we letterbox out we load the game engine back in and you play it.
In Xbox One you can interact with those set-pieces directly, and play in them. This isn't just that the scenes are more graphic. In the gameplay segment, there's the huge tanker hitting the bridge, you see the little warp effect which is the players actually impacting time. And they freeze the tanker halfway through ramming through this bridge. And that bridge scene, as its going on, you're actually playing in that bridge scene. Because we have the RAM, the GPU, CPU capability, we can take something that used to be completely passive and allow you to play through that scene.
The enemy AI, the enemy pathing, all of those will actually take place while that gameplay is frozen in time. And you can freeze that at any point; right at the beginning when the tanker hits the bridge, after it's torn all the way through, so it puts you in complete control of these huge set-pieces that turn into something that you get to play with.
How does it split between the game and the TV show?
The soul behind creating - I hate to use 'trans-media', let's just say the live action and the game - we understand that certain people just want the live-action part. Other people might want to play. Our end-goal is that you're doing both, and those two things interact with one another.
So our goal isn't that we've fully cut 14 episodes of a television show that runs while we release the game, but actually that these two paths intertwine where as a gamer I'll make decisions that will impact how the TV show plays out and vice versa. We want to add some level of interactivity to the live-action which feeds actually how we progress the game.
I can see how the game would affect the show, but not the other way round.
Yeah, because today, television is one-way. So ignore this game for a second, let me just talk about where I think TV is going to go. The reason we're investing in TV is that over the last ten years we've seen how games change when they're connected to the internet.
It wasn't just multiplayer games - we were all playing Quake before the Xbox came out so we knew what multiplayer games looked like. Friends; we knew it was cool to play with people we know. But now I knew what my friends were doing. We added Achievements. Games now are actually services unto themselves, like League of Legends on PC. Television, even without this game, will be more interactive.
Did you always anticipate updating it post-release?
Absolutely. This is the epitome of games as a service: something that starts small. It'll be like World of Tanks, where with one player it's not so interesting but then it grows and grows. The community will be updating, and this is something that we're invested in and we're definitely looking at growing it over time.
How much longer will you be supporting the Xbox 360?
Years. Last generation was different for us, we moved pretty quickly. This time, you will see us staying committed to the Xbox 360. I think it's a great platform. In certain areas, like trying to switch apps quickly, it shows that it was built in a different era, but in terms of the price point, the content library - I don't have the stats, but I bet it's the largest content library ever created in the history of the game space. So it's a great time even now to get into the Xbox 360 ecosystem. It's something we'll remain committed to on the content side as well as the platform itself.
We're holding out for Crackdown 3.
I'm going to bite my tongue.
We still believe!
I do too. I do too.
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