You might recall reading about an unannounced Xbox One game called Savage Frontier back in September. At the time, there was speculation that it might be a Dungeons & Dragons game - "Savage Frontier", after all, is the name of one of the Forgotten Realms. Xbox One director of development Boyd Multerer has now revealed all in a Microsoft.com profile.
If you're tempted to read the profile in full, know that it is among the most obsequious things ever written. Allow me to cut through the gloss: Savage Frontier is, in fact, a test game for Xbox One that features a 3D simulation of our solar system. It allows you to zoom around planets and inspect the constellations among other other, astronautical pastimes.
Sounds like it would make a pleasant change from the likes of Call of Duty, right? You could leave the thing running as a conversation piece during a party, perhaps. Or perhaps not. The app doesn't appear to be slated for release.
Elsewhere in the piece, Multerer rehearsed the case for Xbox One's multiple-OS design. "When Xbox 360 shipped, there were no smartphones, laptops were expensive and rare, there were no tablets," he said. "You didn't have any of these things, and you didn't do anything other than play the game you were playing."
Nowadays, of course, connected devices are ubiquitous, and consumers expect the apps they run to evolve over time via updates. This puts stress on developers, said Multerer, who need a stable technical platform for their games. Hence, the Xbox One's combination of a Windows-based partition for apps and a dedicated game-only OS that draws on the larger portion of the console's RAM.
"[Developers] want to know exactly how much RAM they can use, and exactly how much CPU, and exactly how the graphics are going to work, and that should never change," Multerer said. "The needs of the gamer and the needs of the game developers are at direct odds, so how do you serve both at the same time?
"That's the real reason why we did two separate operating systems. One is more static, aimed letting game developers ability to deliver the best games, and one is aimed at the gamer to give them an evolving, changing, updating console that will be able to support the next big social network that hasn't even been invented yet."
http://www.oxm.co.uk/69822/xbox-one-sim-savage-frontier-revealed-but-will-it-see-release/
