The Next Xbox: Xbox One

Hello, hello. This was our liveblog of the new Xbox console reveal. Scroll all the way down and start reading from the bottommost timestamp. Then when you get back up here, scroll down again and tell us what you think, in the comments.

19:01
Don Mattrick was out again confirming that all Call of Duty Ghosts DLC will launch first on Xbox One.

Eric Hirshberg popped out to explain why they didn’t make Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. It’s an entirely new world, narrative and cast of characters. We saw another talked heads video of Infinity Ward staff talking about how great and innovative their new game will be. Also wireframes.

It’ll be written by Steven Gaghan, writer of the film Traffic. The titualar Ghosts are a super-elite fighting force who use all the best modern guerrila techniques that you can perform with a dog. A dog. A fully-fledged member of the team who is a dog.

The dog is actually modelled from a real-life SEAL service dog. They even replicated the scars on his nose and the identifying tattoo inside his ear.

In order to support that, they had to build a next-gen engine. It has curves now. You can smoothly jump over walls and lean over corners. There are fish. This section of the liveblog will work better when the video is available on YouTube.

Multiplayer will have dynamic maps – you can blow up doors and knock down piles of pipes. It’ll also have character customisation. Bagsy the poodle.

There was a gameplay trailer. I’ll find it online somewhere and embed it here later.

18:50

Nancy Tellem came onstage to introduce Bonnie Ross talking about Halo. Presumably this was to show that, unlike Sony, Microsoft does not hate women. Look, there are women on the stage!

They’re making a live action Halo TV series, created in collaboration with 343 Industries and Steven Spielberg. Hah, I knew he would be significant. Apparently he played Pong. Let’s hope Live Action Halo is better than Falling Skies.

Some dudes talked about exclusive Xbox NFL content to make amazing fantasy (American) football. Fantasy league team stats will be updated while the live match is going on.

18:44

Phil Spencer was up next. “We want our platform to be the best place to create”. He showed Forza Motorsport 5 running on Xbox One. It was pretty. It’ll be available at launch and on show at E3.

Remedy, creators of Max Payne and Alan Wake have been working on Quantum Break. They have a game trailer that starts with a live-action family and small child with a cuddly bear and finished with soldiers, guns and slow motion explosion.

There will be 15 exclusive Xbox One games in the first year, 8 of which are brand new “franchises”. No more info on those yet.

18:35

Andrew Wilson from EA revealed that FIFA 14, Madden, NBA Live and UFC will all be coming to Xbox One this year on a new engine called Ignite. We were shown another wanky video, this one having a bunch of athletes talking about sports accompanied by wireframes of sports teams and stadiums in games that don’t exist yet.

The new engine has 10 times more animation and detail for player movement for “true player motion” and there was something about the sound of a crowd spurring on the player.

Wilson announced an Ultimate Team mode for FIFA 14 that will be exclusively on Xbox. Not Xbox One. Xbox. They also showed a trailer. It’ll probably be online soon enough.

18:26

Mark Whitten came up to talk about the architecture: The system, something else and Xbox Live. He said a bunch of numbers like 8GB RAM, 5 Billion Transistors, 64-bit architecture. Also, it has a Blu-ray drive.

He also said a bunch of stuff about it beeing three operations systems in one – something to make games better, something about a Windows Kernel and something about linkign the three together. I don’t know. I don’t really care.

The new Kinect views in 1080p and the human model has more joints to model people more accurately. It can apparently read your heartbeat while you exercise. What? Yes, he actually said that.

Whitten spend roughly a minute saying that the controller has been made better and then moved quickly on to smartglass. It’s a thing.

Also, the new Kinect will be lag free. I will be looking forward to my lightsaber game.

Xbox Live captured videos will have native editing tools and achievements will no longer be static. They’ll apparently be a more customised picture of your behaviour – whatever that means.

18:18

Yusuf Mehdi came onto the stage and demonstrated that it’s voice-controlled. “Xbox On” will turn on the device and take you to your own homepage. It’ll also remember what you were last doing and put that on the homepage. There’s also a new area called “trending”, based on what’s popular with your friends and the whole Xbox community.

You can say “Xbox, watch TV” and apparently switch over to live TV. I don’t understand how that would work unless you have a compatible TV. Maybe it has a set-up like a universal remote?

Apparently you can also control it with gestures but the demo looked far too responsive to be live.

It will have a bunch of extra features to pull up next to the main picture while you’re watching films. You can make Skype group video calls, or call up a visual display of your basketball fantasy team (assuming you created it with a compatible app, I guess). There’s also a TV guide feature that looks much like your typical digital TV interface.

18:10

Don Mattrick talked about Xbox’s marketing messages. Woo, Xbox Live. Whee, Kinect. More devices. “Can we take what you love and make it better? Can we improve a living room by harmonising your experiences?”

Team Xbox is on a new mission – design and build an all-in-one system that’s simple, instant and complete.

It’s called Xbox One. And it comes with a camera.

18:03
Larry Hyrb and a blonde woman I don’t recognise said not very much and then we had one of those wanky videos of talking heads all saying 5 words of a paragraph about innovation. Apparently “You and you TV are going to have a relationship” and it will know your name.

One of the heads was Steven Spielberg.

17:55

Welcome to a post about the new Xbox. I’m putting this up just as the Xbox Reveal stream has opened and will update it every few minutes with a new paragraph. Maybe even pictures! It’s like liveblogging, only not actually live because CoverItLive want money for that shit. I’ll just have to press the update button instead.

So what do we know so far?

1. There will be a FIFA reveal
2. There will be more details on Call of Duty Ghosts
3. It probably called the Xbox because Gamespot accidentally used the new Ghosts ad on their stream and it includes the image below.