The Xbox One hasn't been on the receiving end of positive press the way the Detroit Lions haven't been on the receiving end of a win since Barry Sanders wasn't a victim of retirement. Well, more less-than-savory news has emerged for the Xbox One regarding Crytek's Ryse: Son of Rome... according to the developers they didn't really showcase the game the way it should have been and that's because the Xbox One wasn't necessarily designed for it. In a way, it goes hand-in-hand with the reliability rumors that have recently surfaced, which compliment other news such as games being downgraded from 1080p to 900p.
Crytek admits to a fault that we were all pretty much aware of: Ryse has a stronger focus on visuals over gameplay.
According to MMGN, Crytek producer Michael Read told them...
"When we came into E3, we didn’t have a lot of our combat systems ready," ... "Admittedly we were focused more on the visual tech and the quality of what we were trying to deliver overall, and unfortunately there were certain things that people looked at, and especially when you haven’t really had a hands-on with it, you don’t really get the same sort of experience that we envisioned."
Read's comments are a follow-up to what he recently mentioned to Gaming Bolt, where he tried defending Ryse from being just a QTE-fest where players were basically ho-humming through soldier clones and only doing cool stuff because it was practically a playable cinematic sequence. Read was quick to state that the game is no longer just a QTE-fest and that Ryse has risen above David Cagism.
Crytek is now fully committed to making Ryse an actual game, a full-fledged game, a game they're proud to showoff. MMGN admits that at E3 the game wasn't much of a game but a button-synchronized interactive movie version of Zack Snyder's 300, minus the beautiful naked women and stylishly choreographed fighting.
Read goes on to say that they've refined the combat in Ryse and that the parts of the game that should shine, will shine because the team and Microsoft have been working to get the Xbox One up to par...
"We were wanting to show more depth of where the combat’s at, and more of how the combat system works. I think the multiplayer experience does a pretty good job of that.""I don’t want to create a sob story here, but when you’re dealing with next-gen hardware -- I mean, seven years is an extended period, the technology has evolved a lot from the Xbox 360,""Microsoft has had to rewrite a lot of their code for the Xbox itself to be able to run this sort of software. So we’re still working on that, and it’s a mutual collaboration: we’re helping them try to decipher those pipelines."
That last part is frightening. Why would you have to rewrite a lot of code to get the Xbox to run video games? Isn't that what it was designed for?
I always suspected that the Xbox One was a home entertainment console and not an actual game console, but in a way, Read confirms this. This would also explain why so many of the Xbox One games had to run on PCs instead of actual XB1 hardware and it also explains why even low-level games like Lococycle weren't capable of running on the Xbox One at E3.
If the game console was designed first and foremost as a television set top box for sports and watching TV on your TV, as well as working as a copyright enforcer for the MPAA, it would explain why so many of the game features are about as lacking as a 100-pound man-nerd trying to please a big beautiful woman: there's just not enough meat on the stick. In a way, Crytek and Microsoft are trying to beef up the Xbox One by giving it software Viagra, hoping it can compete with a very masculine and well endowed PS4.
Nevertheless, Michael Read chalks up the E3 Ryse experience as a slight mishap on the way the game was showcased, saying...
"The trouble is that sometimes [showing it early] can take away from what we can potentially do in the game, and showing hands-on, this is what the people see. I don’t think we showed it in the best possible way."
No, no... Michael it's okay. Some games are QTE-fest... just live it up and embrace it the way Capcom did with Resident Evil 6... we all saw how that turned out.
