With the impending release of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim — Legendary Edition, which bundles all three downloadable content packs along with the original core game, GamesBeat thought this might be a good time to highlight some of our favorite PC mods.

If you like what you see or have some awesome mods of your own to suggest, leave a comment below and you’ll automatically be entered to win one of 10 golden Skyrim NES carts made exclusively for GamesBeat by 72pins. U.S. entries only. The winner will be randomly chosen on May 25, so make sure to check back then.

The lands of Skyrim are peppered with ancient Dwemer ruins overrun by aggressive mechanical enemies, but thanks to another mod by gg77, you can now add a little steampunk to your arsenal. The self-explanatory Summon Dwemer Mechanical Mounts and Followers mod changes Skyrim so you can call a Dwarven Horse, Spider, Centurion, or Sphere to your side.

Make sure to check the mod page for installation directions, known issues and compatibility conflicts, and so on.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Microsoft’s next-generation console, Xbox One, won’t function if you don’t connect it to the Internet.

Following Microsoft’s big reveal event today, the company posted a series of answers to questions that many people were asking. The first issue the company addressed is the console’s Internet requirement.

“No, [Xbox One] does not have to be always connected, but Xbox One does require a connection to the Internet,” reads the FAQ. “We’re designing Xbox One to be your all-in-one entertainment system that is connected to the cloud and always ready. We are also designing it so you can play games and watch Blu-ray movies and live TV if you lose your connection.”

The wording of that answer is broad but telling. Xbox One can lose its online connection, but it requires one to function. They are “designing” it so you can still play your games if you lose your connection — something that the Xbox 360 is already capable of.

The FAQ goes on to say that the Internet requirement enables Xbox One to access the cloud to make games better.

“The cloud makes every experience better and more accessible,” the FAQ continues. “Because Xbox One is powered by the cloud, your games have more power available to create new gameplay, persistent worlds, and deeper experiences. Your games and entertainment are stored and saved in the cloud, so you can access them anytime from any Xbox One. Start a game, movie, or TV show on one console and finish exactly where you left off on another.”

We’ve repeatedly contacted Microsoft and asked its executives to clarify if this means Xbox One needs a connection to start single-player games.

“We cannot go into these specifics as we haven’t made any announcements about that yet,” a Microsoft spokesperson told me.

Immediately following the Xbox One event, Spike TV’s Geoff Keighley asked Microsoft’s Xbox president Don Mattrick if the system requires an “always-on” connection for single-player games.

“No, you don’t always have to be connected,” Mattrick told Keighley. “But for a lot of things, like multiplayer gaming and for streaming content from the Internet, you’re going to need an Internet connection. That’s the world we live in.”

Keighley accepted this answer saying: “So gamers can calm down?”

“Gamers can calm down,” said Mattrick. “We got you covered.”

Only Mattrick was very careful in his wording. He emphasized “always” in his response, which suggests an Internet connection is necessary to run a single-player game, but the game will still work if that connection is lost temporarily.

Kotaku seemed to confirm that today when reporting that Microsoft corporate vice president Phil Harrison said that Xbox One requires players to connect once every 24 hours in order to function.

We asked Microsoft about that, and again, the company told us that its hasn’t announced any specifics, so we don’t know if that is true or what would happen after that 24-hour period.

And that’s the problem. Microsoft isn’t telling us anything. It thinks it can control the message about its exciting new box, but it’s left us worried and confused.

Finally, we asked Microsoft about the 30 percent of Xbox 360 owners who haven’t connected their devices to the Internet, according to a study by industry tracking firm IDC.

“The vast majority of our Xbox 360 owners have Internet in their homes, and we’ve built this platform to take advantage of the tremendous benefits of a connected device,” a spokesperson told us.

Or — in the words of a former Xbox employee — deal with it.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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This sponsored post is produced by Dealzon.

Update: Deal is dead unfortunately. Looks like one too many people tried to abuse the offer by implementing scrips to receive the free $10 credit – some people have over 10,000 codes scraped -_- The promotional page now says: “We’re no longer giving out a $10 store credit, but you can still sign up to be notified of Xbox One availability.”

Amid the storm of Xbox One coverage around the web today, Microsoft Store attempted to build up even more hype and demand for their next-gen console by offering an enticing freebie offer.

If you sign-up for preorder email notification on the Xbox One, you’ll receive a $10 Microsoft Store credit in return for your trouble.

This offer was so good, in fact, that the Microsoft Store servers got hit hard by bargain hunters on deal sites and deal forums from across the web. Things got even more out of hand when people found loopholes for the $10 credit, resulting in many $0 orders being cancelled.

Essentially, the $10 store-wide credit is only valid on items over $10 MSRP, but it turns out this didn’t exclude items on sale. Thus, anything originally over $10, on sale for under $10 was free and ripe for the picking. It didn’t take long for Microsoft to wise up and cancelled thousands of 800 Xbox Live points orders en mass.

Having said that, there are still some choice deals you can get with the $10 credit. Here are a few examples:

• Universal Cassette Adapter – $2 after credit (yep we’re serious)
• Kingston DataTraveler 16 GB Flash Drive – $3 after credit
• Xbox Live 1600 Points – $10 after credit
• Belkin 8-Outlet Surge Protectors – $10 after credit

The $10 credit offer is valid until June 9th, 2013 and the credit itself expires on the same date, so don’t bother holding onto the credit thinking you can get $10 off your actual Xbox One preorder. Why Microsoft didn’t allow that is beyond us, but the credit does work on numerous Xbox 360 titles, PC games, and gaming accessories.

FYI: Microsoft Store’s server is still being hammered quite a bit, so error messages are still being reported left and right when trying to order something. Definitely a YMMV situation.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Microsoft unveiled the Xbox One console today. It’s a next-gen multimedia hub that will play games, TV, and movies in one seamless experience. Xbox Live, the Xbox name, and your Gamertag will all transition to the new hardware, but you’re going to have to leave some things behind … like Super Meat Boy.

The company confirmed today that the Xbox One isn’t backward compatible with the 360. That means the Xbox 360 games you own won’t work on the new device, but it also means that those digital Xbox Live Arcade games you purchased won’t migrate to the next system.

@JeffGrubb Xbox One was built to play an entirely new generation of games, it is not backwards compatible. xbx.lv/XBOFAQ ^JD—
Xbox Support (@XboxSupport1) May 21, 2013

Those digital goods are forever stuck in the Xbox 360 ecosystem unless Microsoft and other publishers make an effort to port the old games to the new hardware. In fact, Microsoft is doing away with the separate Xbox Marketplace channels on Xbox One.

“As the Xbox Live ecosystem continues to grow, the wide assortment of digital games offered through Xbox Live Indie Games, Xbox Live Arcade, and On Demand channels have evolved to one convenient destination for downloading games [on Xbox One],” a Microsoft spokesperson told GamesBeat. “Gamers are better able to discover titles, enabling them to find the games that best fit their needs and play styles. Additionally, Xbox One keeps track of your preferences and helps you discover new games with a smart recommendation system. We will continue to maintain the separate Xbox Live game channels on Xbox 360.”

Xbox One uses a PC architecture that is very different from the 360. In order to add support for those games, Microsoft would have to include 360 hardware inside every Xbox One. That would increase the price on a unit that already includes a console, a controller, and a Kinect motion camera.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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For more on Xbox One, check out our complete coverage.

GameStop president Tony Bartel says that with two new next-gen consoles this year, “the gamers win.” The gaming retail giant is preparing for the upcoming releases of two major consoles: the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One, which Microsoft announced today, and the ramifications this could have on one of its major sources of revenue: used games.

In a phone interview with GamesBeat, Bartel spoke about the importance of the used games market and his concerns for next-gen consoles from Microsoft and Sony, both of which launch before the end of the year. We talked to Bartel to get a major retailer’s perspective on a new console announcement and what it means for the world’s largest seller of games.

The Xbox One may seem like an odd name for the new box. It’s Microsoft’s third console. We asked Bartel his perspective as a retailer on that branding. “[It's] definitely surprising after we heard the speculation. We are going to have to stop saying Xbox 720 and say Xbox One,” he said. “It’s simple. I think that’s what they were after. By the time that this thing comes around, it will be rolling off all of our tongues.”

Bartel would not go into specifics about used games, which will require a fee for play on separate Xbox accounts according to Wired. “They have not discussed that with us yet. What they are going to say, if they haven’t said it already, is that they are going to design it [Xbox One] to work with trade-in and resell games. [Even Microsoft isn't sure -- Ed.] We’re going to work very closely to make this a seamless transition from Xbox 360 to Xbox One,” said Bartel.

GameStop president Tony Bartel

Bartel used Electronic Arts as an example, “EA said, ‘Look, our Online Pass isn’t working.’” The publisher recently discontinued its Online Pass program, which had players pay an extra fee for full online features when they purchased games used. ”Any type of friction implemented into the system would make it more difficult [for consumers],” and Bartel says that retailers and console makers want as little friction as possible.

Pressed further on used games, Bartel says, “We can’t speculate. I’ll go with what we do know. The point is that the buy-sell-trade model is very positive. Over a billion dollars of trade credit is applied mostly toward new games [About 70 percent of trade-in credit goes into new games, according to Bartel].”

Microsoft and Sony won’t kill the used games market, but whose console will launch first? Microsoft or Sony? “That’s a good question,” said Bartel, saying that we know both will come before the end of the year, but “the gamer wins in this whole deal, and that’s what I’m excited about. I like that Microsoft says they have more games in development than they’ve ever had in their history.”

In preparation for upcoming launches, GameStop announced its “First to Know” list. The retailer already has gamers signing up. “First to Know” is a service GameStop offers to those who want to receive email and notifications about upcoming consoles, such as price announcements, release dates and other relevant information.

“We are going to have a good idea of which people are going to want these consoles,” said Bartel. The retailer keeps track of members of its “PowerUp Rewards” program, which GameStop customers sign up for to receive additional trade-in credit and bonuses for being frequent shoppers. That information helps GameStop learn what kind of purchases certain consumers are likely to make and which gamers to target with specific games or consoles.

When asked what the most important thing for a retailer to nail down during a console launch, Bartel said, “I think it’s two things. It comes down to understanding the console and affordability.

Bartel mentioned GameStop’s annual manager’s meeting in Las Vegas and said that there will be extensive training, as the company aims to have the most knowledgeable staff on-hand. ”We will have 40,000 trained associates working this holiday season understanding the differences between the two consoles.”

Price is always a concern, something Sony experienced firsthand when it slotted its PlayStation 3 at launch for $599. “[The] second is affordability. We’re working very closely with both platform holders [Sony and Microsoft] as well as publishers to drive the buy, sell, trade model to ensure that we will be the most affordable retailer.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Here’s something you might not know: One mouse click burns 0.00142 calories. In action-role-playing PC games like Diablo III, you’ll click that mouse literally thousands of times. And according to developer Blizzard Entertainment’s statistics (assuming one monster death equals one click), all that clicking has led players to burn 4.7 billion calories.

Who needs exercise when you have Diablo III?

Blizzard celebrates the first year of its action-RPG with an infographic [see below] full of all sorts of crazy numbers, like players killing 3.3 trillion monsters or finding over 648 trillion pieces of gold. Diablo III requires a constant Internet connection, which led to a catastrophic launch last year filled with errors, negative user reviews, and memes. In spite of its rocky start, 14.5 million unique players have fought against Diablo’s horde of demons.

For its second year, Blizzard is exposing Diablo III to a new set of players — PlayStation owners. During Sony’s PlayStation 4 event in February, Blizzard revealed that Diablo III will head to both the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3 with console-specific changes and features. I can’t wait until Blizzard tells us how many calories we’ll shave off from pushing those analog sticks.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Microsoft wants to make sure you always have a friend online. The company announced through its official Xbox Support Twitter account that it will allow for up to 1,000 friends on Xbox Live.

Polygon spotted the confirmation from Xbox Support, shown below:

@clear_then_die 1000 friends is indeed confirmed ^JG—
Xbox Support (1-5) (@XboxSupport) May 21, 2013

Xbox Live currently restricts your friends list to 100. That’s a limit that many gamers have already met, meaning they have to turn down new friend requests. With the new 1,000 limit, it’s going to take much longer to fill that list. But we’re sure someone out there will manage to do it.

For more, check our Xbox One hub page or our roundup of all available Xbox One information.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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This morning, Microsoft presented Xbox One to the world. It’s an all-in-one entertainment device that plays games, television, and more.

As part of today’s event, we have a ton of new trailers, including a first look at the system and next-gen Xbox games. Below you’ll find the first look at the console, its features, and its specs. We also have the first look at next-gen games like Call of Duty: Ghosts, Forza Motorsport 5, and Madden NFL 25.

For more information about today’s announcements, check our Xbox One hub page or our roundup of all available Xbox One information.

Now, go ahead and gorge on the Xbox One’s visual delights:

Xbox One unveil

Xbox One features

Xbox One specs

Call of Duty: Ghosts

Forza Motorsport 5

EA Sports Ignite games

Quantum Break

Steven Spielberg — Halo: The Television Series

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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With the debut of the new Xbox One gaming system, we could focus on many things: hardware, flashy games, and entertainment options. But one aspect really gets me fired up: Developers should now be able to use Microsoft Azure’s cloud computing platform to make games more powerful than ever.

Wired reports that the game developers and studios can tap Azure for all kinds of things. Microsoft isn’t going to force developers to use the cloud platform, but it will certainly push them to do so.

The Xbox One will not have to be always connected to the Internet to play games, but it does generally require an online connection. And if developers do decide to tap Azure’s cloud computing platform to boost a game’s power, a web connection will be necessary to play that game.

Why Azure?

Microsoft has been building Azure’s cloud computing capabilities for a long while. Azure has been mostly known as a platform-as-a-service that (primarily .NET) developers use to make the process of app development easier.

Microsoft opened up Azure for pure cloud infrastructure use in June. It now competes with top dogs like Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, and Google Compute Engine.

Steven Martin, the general manager of Azure’s operations team, told us this past October that Azure users are consuming more compute capacity than the entire world used in 1998. As of December, Azure’s cloud storage holds more than 4 trillion objects. It also handles an average of 270,000 requests processed per second, with a peak of 880,000 requests per second.

Azure applications in gaming

Now, let’s see what you could do with all that power.

The first and most obvious application of Azure on Xbox One is making Xbox Live more powerful and useful. All your downloaded games and achievements would be synced and available wherever you are. You would also have dedicated servers for every multiplayer game you participate in. Multiplayer matches would be able to host up to 128 gamers in a single session.

Xbox Live currently runs on 15,000 servers, but it will soon move to a stunning 300,000 servers later this year for the Xbox One launch. That’s a lot of power dedicated to making Xbox Live better.

Second (and this is a bit more crazy), developers can offload computational tasks to the cloud instead of relying on physical hardware to do the heavy lifting. Necessary game computations for physics, rendering, and the like could be immensely enhanced with a connection to powerful virtual servers in the cloud.

“It’s not like on day one, everyone will have figured out how to take advantage of that power,” Microsoft interactive entertainment CMO Marc Whitten told Wired. “It’s just one of those stakes we’re placing.”

Screenshot via Microsoft

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Updated at 4:24 p.m. Pacific with Major Nelson’s comment.

Microsoft is contradicting itself about how used games will work on the newly announced Xbox One console. A company executive is saying one thing and the official Xbox Support account on Twitter is claiming the exact opposite. Things are messy right now.

We asked Microsoft directly what it plans for used games on Xbox One. A company spokesperson parroted an answer that is currently available on the Xbox One frequently asked questions page on Xbox.com.

“We are designing the Xbox One to enable customers to trade in and resell games,” a Microsoft spokesperson told GamesBeat. “We’ll have more details to share later.”

Following the Xbox One presentation, tech website Wired posted a story in which a Microsoft representative claims gamers have to pay a fee to activate used games on a second account.

Now, the Xbox Support account on Twitter is telling gamers that “there is no fee to install” games.

@PaulMitchell80 Great question! Again, there is no fee to install the game. Your friend will not pay a fee. ^BA—
Xbox Support (1-5) (@XboxSupport) May 21, 2013

The support team specifically cited an example where a friend borrows a hard copy of a game. That friend will not have to pay a fee, according to Microsoft.

A fee of some sort is still in the cards, according to Microsoft corporate vice president Phil Harrison.

“You can purchase a game in two ways,” Harrison told Eurogamer. “You can purchase it from a retail store or you can download it. So the act of putting the bits on the hard drive — the Xbox One doesn’t really know or care what method the bits got into the machine. If it was from a disc or downloaded from Xbox Live, but obviously the users will then have to purchase that content.”

This suggests that every user will have to purchase a license to play any game, which is then installed on the Xbox One’s hard drive.

“What I think people are now confusing is the purchasing of content in the first instance with the ability to trade and resell the previously played games,” said Harrison. “We have a solution for that and we will be announcing exactly how that works in due course.”

The aforementioned Xbox Support account on Twitter said that Harrison is wrong in his characterization of the “fee.”

@Daramanz That information is not accurate at this time. Sorry for any confusion. ^BA—
Xbox Support (1-5) (@XboxSupport) May 21, 2013

If you’re confused now, don’t feel bad — we all are.

Microsoft spokesperson Major Nelson later tried to clarify the situation on his blog:

We know there is some confusion around used games on Xbox One, and [we] wanted to provide a bit of clarification on exactly what we’ve confirmed today. While there have been many potential scenarios discussed, today we have only confirmed that we designed Xbox One to enable our customers to trade in and resell games at retail.

Beyond that, we have not confirmed any specific scenarios.

Another piece of clarification around playing games at a friend’s house — should you choose to play your game at your friend’s house, there is no fee to play that game while you are signed in to your profile.

Major Nelson is apparently walking back just about everything Harrison and Xbox Support said today. He wouldn’t confirm that you could avoid paying a few if you borrow a game from a friend.

The issue here is that the license for each game is seemingly tied to a single Xbox Live account. How that license will transfer beyond that is still up in the air, and it’s something that Microsoft needs to reveal in detail.

Electronic Arts recently ended its Online Pass program, which charged gamers $10 to activate certain features in used games. It’s possible that move relates to whatever designs Microsoft has in store for the second-hand market.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The mad scientists at Microsoft have finished building their next-gen creation and finally unveiled it to the world today. It’s a multimedia powerhouse that is ready to go head-to-head with Sony’s PlayStation 4. The Internet is buzzing with a confusing mess of details, so we decided to gather together everything we know about the Xbox One and post it below.

We cover everything in this post, but you can get expanded coverage on everything from our Xbox One hub page here.

The basics

The Xbox One is Microsoft’s all-in-one living-room device. In fact, Microsoft confirmed it called the new system “Xbox One” because it is supposed to be the one device people will need for their entertainment. That means video games are just one small piece of its capabilities.

Basic info:

• Price: Microsoft didn’t specify
• Release: “Later this year”
• No backward compatibility
• Requires Kinect
• Single-player games don’t require an always-online connection
• Used games will work but may require a fee
• Xbox Live is back
• Gamertags will transfer
• Friend-list limit raised to 1,000

Questions we still have:

• What happens to Xbox Live Arcade purchases?
• Do used games work?
• Is there a fee for used games?
• How much is that fee, and what does it get us?

We’re working to answer all of these questions, and we’ll post the answers here as we find them.

Technical capabilities

Microsoft’s Xbox uses an accelerated processing unit, or APU, from AMD that combines the CPU and GPU on a single chip for increased performance. This is nearly identical to what the PS4 is running.

Xbox technical specifications:

• 64-bit architecture
• 8GB of RAM
• USB 3.0
• 5 billion transistors
• Blu-ray disc drive
• 500 GB hard drive
• HDMI Out/In
• Ethernet and Wi-Fi

You can read our detailed breakdown of Xbox One’s capabilities in our story that goes under the hood here.

The controller

Over the last seven years, the Xbox 360 controller slowly became an industry standard for console shooters. That standard will continue with some minor tweaks and improvements.

Here are list of features for the new controller:

• Fundamentally the same as the Xbox 360 controller
• Deep groves on thumb sticks
• Impulse triggers
• Wi-Fi radio
• “Precision” direction pad
• Integrated battery compartment

This is a natural evolution of the last controller. It’s not as packed with features as Nintendo or Sony’s gamepads (both of those have touch inputs), but it should please anyone who is used to Microsoft’s design.

The new Kinect

Along with the Xbox One, Microsoft is also introducing a next-generation Kinect motion sensor. The new console will require this new device to operate. That means this 3D camera and microphone is almost certainly included with every console.

The new Kinect’s features:

• 1080p camera
• Wide-view lens
• Skype support
• Can sense rotation of wrist and shoulder
• Detects weight distribution
• Capability to read heart-beat rate

Kinect is also a central part of Microsoft’s media experience. Xbox One owners can command the Xbox to switch from games to a movie instantly with their voice. Hand gestures will also enable people to pinch and zoom multiple apps that are all running simultaneously on the Xbox One.

Xbox Live

Xbox Live will continue on Xbox One. Microsoft confirmed that your Xbox Live accounts will transfer to the new system. If you have Xbox Gold on Xbox 360, then you already have the service on Xbox One as well.

Likewise, player achievements and gamerscore will transfer to the new system.

The company also confirmed on Twitter that it is upping the friend limit from a measly 100 to 1,000.

The multimedia features

Microsoft spent much of its presentation focusing on how the Xbox One integrates with television and movies. The company obviously wants to own entertainment delivery in the living room.

With the Xbox One, TV viewers can use their voice to turn their systems on. From there, they can change the channel by saying “Watch SyFy,” and the Xbox One will tune to SyFy. It does this by connecting a cable or satellite box into the One through HDMI In.

These features also integrates with unique viewing experiences from the NFL and a new Halo television series exclusive to Xbox Live.

The Games: Call of Duty: Ghosts

Microsoft didn’t reveal a ton of new games. This event definitely positioned the Xbox One as something more than a gaming console. Despite that, we did get a look at a few new games.

Here are the confirmed titles for Xbox One:

• Call of Duty: Ghosts
• Forza Motorsport 5
• NBA Live 14
• Madden NFL 25
• FIFA 14
• EA Sports UFC
• Quantum Break
• Destiny

Microsoft and other publishers will show more games at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in June. Except announcements from Ubisoft and more.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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For more on the Xbox One reveal, check out our complete coverage.

Microsoft’s team of super-hardware geeks talked about what is inside the new Xbox One console.

Gamers may not care about the hardware so long as it runs games smoothly and doesn’t get in their way. But the Xbox One is an engineering marvel that combines both cloud processing and a heavily engineered game console to produce game effects that Microsoft promises will be truly impressive.

If you look at all of the tasks that the machine does, it’s clear there isn’t enough silicon in the box, said Nick Baker, a distinguished engineer of console architecture and one of the head silicon engineers at Microsoft. He was a key architect on the Xbox 360 chips as well as the Xbox One chips. But the cool thing about the box — which has chips with 5 billion transistors in them — is that it can tap supercomputers in web-connected data centers to do processing.

That means the hardware inside the box isn’t fixed. Over time, the hardware can get better as Microsoft upgrades the technology in the data centers. For now, Microsoft has more than 300,000 servers in its data centers to support Xbox One and the Xbox Live online entertainment service. The Microsoft supergeeks spoke on a panel at the Xbox Reveal in a session moderated by Xbox Live evangelist Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb.

That processing power enables things like instantaneous Kinect, where voice commands immediately activate tasks on the Xbox, from waking up the machine instantly to changing the channel on your TV. That kind of processing exists alongside other things going on at the same time. You can, for instance, watch TV and then receive a Skype call without turning off the TV show. To do this type of thing, Microsoft had to design the box in a way that it could access memory and caches of data much faster than in past game consoles.

“There are a growing number of transistors in the cloud that you can move the loads onto,” said Boyd Multerer, the partner director of development and ISS Console Development Management (one of the software experts at Microsoft). “I think it’s an inflection point. So over time, your box gets more powerful. We move loads into the cloud to free up resources on the box.”

Todd Holmdahl, the corporate vice president of IEB hardware and another longtime Microsoft hardware executive, said the load can shift from one device to another. The cloud can tackle tasks in games like physics, artificial intelligence, and even some rendering. The tasks that require low latency, with split second interaction between one chip or one device and another, are those that the box — not the cloud — still needs to handle.

“This is a radically different way of thinking about a game console,” he said.

After the talk, Multerer told me that some tasks don’t need to run all the time. Artificial intelligence, for instance, doesn’t need to be calculated for every single frame of the game. Your enemy in a game will close in on you, but it only needs to know where you are every second, rather than every split second. So that task can be offloaded to the slower connection to the servers.

But anything that happens on the screen in an instant — if you pull the trigger on a gun and you see a muzzle flash on the screen — has to be calculated inside the box, Multerer said. Some rendering, like trees in the distance in a scene, can also be offloaded, so long as the software properly divides up the tasks, he said. That kind of thinking is very different for a game machine, but Multerer thinks many consumer products will be designed like this in the future.

The machine has things like Gigabit Ethernet so that it can be ready for improvements in Internet speeds. It has multiple power states so it can reduce power consumption when necessary. The box has a couple of 802.11n radios to connect to the Internet wirelessly and with other devices in the room.

“You can use just enough power for the experience you are in and nothing more,” he said. “The best example of that is wake-on voice, where you say ‘Xbox On’ and it powers up immediately.”

Holmdahl said that Microsoft redesigned the Kinect system. The sensors are now smart enough to detect your facial expressions, which provides for smarter games that know how you are feeling as you play the game. Kinect has a variety of sensors it can rely on, like time-of-flight depth cameras and infrared, which is good at detecting low-light movements.

“You get better identification, better field of view, better audio, better recognition,” he said.

Baker said that the internal Microsoft chip team had to design five pieces of silicon to handle all of the tasks in the console and the Kinect subsystem, which now comes bundled with the box. The team had to test the chips thoroughly, running 10 trillion cycles of simulation in order to make sure everything worked right. The chips had to be designed to work with each other in a coherent way.

The GPU is multitasking so that it can run compute and cloud tasks at the same time that it renders graphics, Baker said. The net result is that it can do billions of calculations per second.

Holmdahl said, “We started with a blank slate. We talked to the hardware, software people. One of the good things about Microsoft is you have those people under the same roof.”

Holmdahl said developers will be able to exploit these technologies as they learn more about things like instantaneous voice command integration into the game console.

The work started a few years ago.

“The development of these things takes a while,” Holmdahl said. “You develop some things that don’t work. We have converged on something that people will love.”

Multerer said the machine has 8GBs of RAM because it needed to have fast-switching between apps and support two things running at the same time, such as the Kinect entertainment controls and the games.

The new generation of graphics chips is based on supercomputing technologies and having the right data flow, with the focus on having the data in the right places at the right time. So there had to be caches of memory on the die, on the CPU, to feed that data to the processor, Multerer said.

Baker said that things like Hyper V, virtualization, and 64-bit processors really started in a data center. Getting them into a living room device wasn’t easy.

“This is really a first,” Baker said.

“And it’s hard to do,” Multerer said. “David Cutler came under our team a year and a half ago and he worked on the operating system himself.”

The machine’s software takes lessons from the services world. The team started with virtual machine technology and it stripped out general-purpose functions out. It boiled it down to the bare minimum so that the virtual machine — a middle software layer — can run extremely fast and won’t slow down games. This kind of software can be partitioned into different parts so it can handle different tasks simultaneously. One of the machine’s operating systems boots up and is “created” when the machine turns on, Multerer said. Then it stays operating while the machine is on, and then disappears when the machine is turned off.

“When you can do two things at one time, it solves a lot of problems,” like figuring out when your friends are online and they are trying to get in touch with you, Multerer said.

There’s a third operating system as well that handles other kinds of services, such as the TV services. Switching between these operating systems quickly gives the system its instantaneous feel, Multerer said.

With Xbox Live, the number of servers supporting the system in the cloud is huge. Those servers can be swapped out. When the hardware becomes more powerful over time, developers can build bigger game worlds and put more action on the screen at once, Multerer said.

Dan Greenawalt, one of the game development experts at Microsoft and creative director at Turn 10 Studios (the folks behind the Forza Motorsport auto-racing franchise), said that Microsoft brought together teams from Microsoft Research and other teams.

“This is the next giant leap forward,” he said.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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For more on the Xbox One reveal, check out our complete coverage.

Ubisoft, Square Enix, and other companies have confirmed a host of new games for Microsoft’s upcoming all-in-one games-and-entertainment console, the Xbox One. Microsoft said today that it would be releasing 15 exclusive titles, eight of which are new properties, in the first year of launch.

Ubisoft in particular is planning a good many titles. It’s promising “at least” six releases in the system’s first 12 months. Action-adventure games Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and Watch Dogs are due out later this year, which is when Xbox One is set to debut. Both are multiplatform titles. The rest are a mix of new entries in existing series, new intellectual properties, and digital titles, according to a press release.

Square Enix and Eidos Montreal have confirmed the reboot of the stealth game Thief for Xbox One as well as PlayStation 4 and PC in 2014.

Alan Wake and Max Payne developer Remedy Entertainment is making a game called Quantum Break [above] exclusively for Xbox One. Activision announced the new multiplatform Call of Duty: Ghosts, which features storytelling from Stephen Gaghan, who wrote the screenplays for the award-winning films Traffic and Syriana. You can watch the new trailers and videos from the Xbox Reveal show below.

Forza Motorsport 5 is also in the works from publisher Microsoft Game Studios, and EA Sports is releasing four titles: FIFA 14, Madden NFL 25, NBA Live 14, and EA Sports UFC, all of which use the new game engine Ignite. It “enhances the human intelligence of athletes” through their movements, which boast even more depth in animation. Take a look at the engine in action below.

EA’s games will release on Xbox One within the first 12 months of the console’s launch. Madden NFL 25 will also be available on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on Aug. 27. FIFA 14 is coming to these platforms and more, including PC, at an undisclosed date. All four games are also making their way to the PS4.

Electronic Arts and DICE’s Battlefield 4 is scheduled for release on Oct. 29 on PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 and is arriving later on Xbox One and PlayStation 4. And Bungie’s upcoming new property, the action-role-playing first-person shooter Destiny, is also coming to the Xbox One in addition to PS4, Xbox 360, and PS3.

Some of these are hitting Xbox One first though Microsoft has not set official release dates for them or the console. We’ll update this post with more games as the news rolls in.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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For more on the Xbox One reveal, check out our complete coverage.

Microsoft revealed its next-gen Xbox One today, and we are discovering new details about the powerful device.

After the event, Microsoft corporate vice president of Xbox Live Marc Whitten told The Verge that the Xbox One will not work with Xbox 360 games. It will support 450 original Xbox games through emulation.

We’ve contacted Microsoft to ask if it plans to sell Xbox 360 games through a digital store and what will happen to digital purchases including Xbox Live Arcade games. The company has not yet responded to our request, but we will update with any new information.

Sony’s PlayStation 4 has almost the identical problem. Like the Xbox One, it is using a new architecture compared to its predecessor that prevents PlayStation 3 games, including PlayStation Network titles, from working on the next-gen console.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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For more on the Xbox One reveal, check out our complete coverage.

Microsoft has revealed its new console, the Xbox One, and it’s promising plenty of power.

The heart of the new all-in-one entertainment system is raw power, corporate vice president for Xbox Live Marc Whitten today claimed during a live event. The console runs on native 64-bit architecture and has 5 billion transistors and 8GBs of system RAM. Its predecessor, the Xbox 360, has only 500 million transistors and 512MBs of RAM.

The console reportedly has three operating systems in one. The first is the Xbox O/S, which Whitten claims gives game developers deep and instant access to the hardware. The second is a kernel of Windows. This gives Xbox One owners consistent access to web-powered applications in a way that Whitten says is flexible, powerful, and simple. The third O/S connects the first two, creating multitasking and the near-instantaneous switching between applications.

“Only Microsoft and Xbox could bring this level of power, performance, and sophistication to the living room. There’s no waiting. You can switch to your game like it’s a TV channel flip,” Whitten claims.

Xbox One also features USB 3.0, a Blu-ray DVD player, and Wi-Fi Direct, a standard that requires less setup by enabling devices to communicate with each other without a wireless access point. Whitten says the console runs quietly as well.

Microsoft seems to be doubling down on its Kinect motion control sensor. One comes with every new Xbox, Whitten says, and it’s completely redesigned to respond instantly to your voice and gestures. Voice commands are now more conversational. A simple “Xbox On” turns on the console, and commands like “Go to Music” and “Watch TV” let you switch quickly between multiple programs.

Whitten says the company’s new proprietary Time of Flight — a standard used to measure the time it takes for an object to travel a distance through a medium — is “rocket-science-level stuff.” “[It] measures the time, about 30 billionths of a second, that it takes individual photons to bounce off of you to create unprecedented accuracy and precision. Over 2 gigabits per second to understand your world.” The Kinect sensor itself is now 1080p and provides a wider scanning area. It understands the slightest rotation of a wrist or shoulder, Whitten claims, and tracks your balance as well. It even reads your heartbeat while you exercise.

“This is a modern, powerful box engineered to deliver now and well into the future,” Whitten says.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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With Microsoft’s introduction of the new entertainment watching experience through its new Xbox One console, one of the biggest winners will obviously be for those that love live sports.

The company announced a new partnership with the NFL that will see America’s most popular pro sports league bring original content to the Xbox. There was plenty of talk about being able to integrate sports scores, play-by-play views, socialization, and more into the TV screen as well as making fantasy football leagues more centralized to your experience. Specifically, we don’t know which games or sports shows will get the new Xbox One treatment, but I assume Microsoft and the NFL will reveal more in the weeks to come.

I got the sense that the NFL programming will seek to use all the available devices in interesting ways that either don’t overlap or take away from the central experience of the content.

The NFL programming isn’t the only nongame content that Microsoft revealed during today’s Xbox One event. The first was a new interactive Halo TV show produced by the legendary Steven Spielberg, who created roughly half the childhood favorite films for anyone born during the ’80s.

For more on the Xbox One reveal, check out our complete coverage.

Remedy Entertainment’s love affair with live-action footage blended into games (think Alan Wake and Max Payne) continues with its upcoming Xbox One exclusive Quantum Break. In the Xbox One’s first year, Microsoft plans to release 15 exclusive titles, eight of which are new properties. And Quantum Break is leading the charge.

Actions players take during the game portion of Quantum Break will ultimately affect the events in the lives of the live-action characters. Hopefully, more details on how interconnected the two are will come out soon. For now, check out the trailer and gallery below.

For more on the Xbox One reveal, check out our complete coverage.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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343 Industries general manager Bonnie Ross has just announced a new live-action television series based in the Halo universe, and Steven Spielberg is on board as a creative partner.

“The Halo universe is an amazing opportunity to be at that intersection where technology and myth-making meet to produce something ground-breaking,” said Spielberg in a prerecorded message.

As yet, no further information exists on whether Halo: The Television Series will involve the Master Chief, when in the continuity it’ll take place, when it will premiere, or even how many episodes have been ordered. But it’s likely to be similar in design to the Forward Unto Dawn web series and, given its origins, exclusive to the new Xbox One console.

For more on the Xbox One reveal, check out our complete coverage.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Activision Blizzard unveiled its not-so-secret, long-awaited (at least since November) installment in the fastest-selling video game franchise of all time. Call of Duty: Ghosts will debut this fall on a variety of platforms including Microsoft’s next-generation game console.

Eric Hirshberg, president and CEO of Activision Publishing, describes the game as the “best Call of Duty ever.” He also said that about the last one, and it is genuinely touching to see how he means it. But you can’t make fun of him. So far, he hasn’t been wrong.

The market for these games has lived up to the hype, as the titles typically generate more than $1 billion within a few weeks after launch, every single year. Such sales have made Call of Duty one of the five most valuable game franchises in the industry. And today, the company has taken the wraps off the latest entry in the series at the event where Microsoft unveiled its next-generation Xbox game console. While the game bears a familiar name, Call of Duty: Ghosts is a brand new game world with new characters, new game play mechanics on new consoles, a new game engine, and a new story.

About 40 million gamers are awaiting this title, which is not just a single game but a whole new sub-brand, much like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Blacks Ops. Like those sub-brands, Call of Duty: Ghosts is expected to spawn multiple titles in a new modern combat universe.

As you might expect, Call of Duty: Ghosts represents another huge investment of time and money in a modern combat game. Developed by Infinity Ward, the title suggests that the game is about ghost-like elite soldiers who perform secret and controversial missions, always operating in stealth. The game scenes showed the signature Call of Duty style: intense action, a gripping narrative, pulse-pounding music, and stellar graphics. The company showed a canned demo of the game running on the next-generation Xbox, and the graphics looked superb.

Activision didn’t show hands-on gameplay to journalists at its event last week, but it said that the animations on screen were running real-time, in the game engine itself as it operated on next-generation consoles.

One of the highlights of the demo showed the Ghosts in scuba gear, diving under the sea to escape detection. They swam through a beautiful undersea environment with cool lighting effects, wave distortions, and many things moving at the same time. Only the most powerful game machines are capable of running such scenes, and clearly Microsoft has one of them. The action got particularly hot when a firefight broke out under water between divers who had guns that worked underwater (that seems to defy the laws of physics). The visuals were indeed so good that there is no way a current-generation Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 could run them.

At an event last week, Hirshberg said, “From time to time, I have read stories about how long Call of Duty can last. They are about whether this franchise is ever going to crest. And I know that it seems that it should be. There is just one problem. It’s not. By every measurement you care to look at, Call of Duty has never been stronger. It’s not only thriving. It’s still growing. Sales of the game, sales of downloadable content, the number of people who play every month, the number of daily users, the number of hours played, the engagement with social media, the video views — just about any measurement you care to look at, this is still a franchise that is on the rise. After all this time, that’s pretty remarkable.”

He added, “Keeping Call of Duty relevant, growing, thriving, and still surprising people — this long into its history — is not easy. In fact, it may be the hardest creative assignment of them all. With a franchise like Call of Duty, we have the dual responsibility to our fans to continue to make and refine the game that everyone fell in love with in the first place, and still find ways to continually come up with new, meaningful innovations each and every time. You can count on one hand the pop cultural franchises that have had this kind of staying power.”

Hirshberg said Activision could have played it safe by creating yet another sequel, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. (There are 122 million search results on Google for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4).

“We chose to push this thing forward and use the opportunity of the next-generation consoles to user in the next generation of Call of Duty,” Hirshberg said.

A preview of the brand new story

Mark Rubin, executive producer of the game at Infinity Ward, said at the event last week that the ambition for the game is to make it run at a smooth 60 frames per second (Movies typically run at 24 frames per second) and still wow gamers with its complex visual animations.

“We’re really excited that we get to be the studio that brings Call of Duty into the next generation,” Rubin said. “This is powered by an amazing next-gen engine that gives us amazing graphics fidelity.”

Infinity Ward hired Stephen Gaghan, the screenwriter for the Oscar-winning Traffic film, to create more fleshed out, emotion-driven characters. Gaghan directed Syriana and he’s a gamer. The bet is that Gaghan’s fleshed-out characters will make full use of the enhanced graphics technology in the new game consoles for rendering human faces.

“What they really wanted in this game, Call of Duty: Ghosts, was emotional reality,” Gaghan said.

The story opens with a catastrophic event that cripples America’s military power and virtually wipes out the southern half of the country. The U.S. is no longer a superpower. The story follows two brothers as they meet up with the resistance.

“As the player, you are actually the underdog, fighting back against these superior forces,” Rubin said. “The team you are part of is formed from the remnants of the U.S. Special Forces. They’ve adopted every technique for modern, guerrilla-style missions.”

In the underwater scene, nothing really looked fake. Bubbles floated upward through the water. Shadows were cast by objects on the surface down into the water below. The music suggests the intensity as the Ghosts try to escape detection via sonar pings. Once the soldiers make contact, they fire at each other using underwater guns. Then the Ghosts fire a handheld torpedo at a giant submarine passing overhead.

Daniel Suarez, vice president of production at Activision Publishing, said that one unique feature of the game will be its reliance on squad combat, with smart artificial intelligence characters carrying their weight in different roles on the battlefield.

A soldier and his dog

Among the new smart AI characters in the game is a dog. That’s right.

“This is someone you care about,” said Rubin. “This is a squad member. You fight for him and he fights for you. He does everything from sniffing out explosive to protecting the team.”

The dog animations were created from scans of a real Navy Seal Team combat dog. The team took advantage of next-gen hardware to create characters with detailed faces and the fur on the dog, said Jake Rowell, lead artist at Infinity Ward.

“The closer you get to it, the more it maintains the curvature” of details such as faces, Rowell said.

Faces will look more lifelike, thanks to the horsepower of the next-generation consoles. Helmets look round, with no jagged edges, even when you see them up close. You’ll see better-looking smoke, fluid dynamics, and interactive dynamics. The non-player beings are smarter. Fish move out of the way when you get close to them.

“It should feel like you are really there,” Rowell said.

Players will be able to customize their characters more than ever, choosing faces, heads, body types and more. The notion is to make players connect with who they are as characters. The new consoles have a technique, Sub D (developed by Pixar for animated movies), that pushes up the number of polygons (the basic building blocks of 3D images) in real-time. High-resolution textures enable much better details. When a beam of light hits a character’s skin, the mathematical models behind the animation cause the light to bounce around under the surface and produce a faint glow to the texture of the skin. On the fly, the engine decides how many polygons should be included in a given animated image so that it looks better. That makes images more realistic.

The character’s arms, one of the few body parts you see a lot in a first-person shooter game, will be far more realistic than in past games with an “exponentially higher polygon count.” The arm animations will show cuts, bruises, and even the dirt underneath fingernails. The weapons will also look a lot more detailed. Jungles in Ghosts will be far more detailed and populated with plants than in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, which came out in 2011.

The multiplayer combat will also be more dynamic. There are events such as earthquakes and floods that will affect the battlefield. There are player-driven actions such as doors with explosives and other player-created traps. And the developers promise that those changes won’t slow down the game. Suarez said that the multiplayer animation quality has typically lagged behind single-player versions in first-person shooters. But Activision is aiming to reproduce the same graphics fidelity in multiplayer as it does in single-player mode.

“Gameplay drives tech,” Rubin said. “All of this was built to enhance gameplay for the player.”

He also showed how a technique called Displacement Mapping enables much higher fidelity for the animation of water rushing over rocks in a river bed. Without the Displacement Mapping, the rocks look flat. But with the Displacement Mapping turned on, the scenes looks fully three-dimensional. The engine adds those effects on the fly.

What this means for Activision

For Activision, the new game is emblematic of its strategy of focusing on a few titles and doing them exceptionally well. With games like Skylanders, Call of Duty, and the upcoming Destiny game from Bungie, Activision can truly say that it puts its “capital into make those things awesome,” Hirshberg said.

The company is investing heavily in marketing as well, since it knows it will face brand-new game franchises appearing for the first time on the new game systems. If the company pulls off its marketing and game design just right, it could keep the Call of Duty juggernaut going. And if it doesn’t, there’s going to be a pretty big crater in the ground.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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It’s taking more and more creative skill to come up with something original in the Call of Duty series. Activision, which announced Call of Duty: Ghosts today at Microsoft’s next-generation Xbox One unveiling in Redmond, Wash., poured a lot of development resources, time, and money into making Ghosts into a game that delivers all-new gameplay, story, characters, and graphics for gamers who might be just a tad jaded. Observers have expected Call of Duty to hit its peak for years now, but Activision says the series is still defying gravity in terms of sales and player engagement.

We sat down with Daniel Suarez, the vice president of production at Activision Publishing, to talk about the Call of Duty: Ghosts and the strategy behind it. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: What decisions did you make in terms of what to reveal? By showing an underwater level, did you intend to tout the graphics?

Daniel Suarez: Absolutely. If you look at what we’re trying to do this year, it’s delivering on all the key message points — new experience, new technology, new gameplay. That underwater level will be one of the things we demonstrate throughout the campaign, but I think that one really captured the graphic quality. The effects, the particles, the fish, the caustics in the water, looking at the light coming through — that hammers it home in terms of the new engine. The new world, we didn’t tackle that issue so much, but I can talk about that in terms of the story.

And then new gameplay experiences: We’ve had underwater in Call of Duty before, but it’s literally swimming from here to there. This is what I call an all-gullied-up experience underwater. It’s playable. The level we saw showed maybe four minutes of gameplay, but it’s actually a much longer level. The game plays up that suspense and stealth in underwater engagements that we’ve never done in Call of Duty before.

GamesBeat: It seems so beautiful that it’s more appropriate for a Finding Nemo sequel.

Suarez: Nah, I don’t think Nemo is going to blow up submarines. Maybe?

GamesBeat: How do you then communicate to people that “It looks better, but here’s why you’re really going to like it”?

Suarez: I want to touch on three key areas. One is that new world. That plays into why this Call of Duty is going to be different for everyone. Mark touched on it briefly in the video, but there’s a whole new universe we’re going to start with Ghosts. The game begins with a cataclysmic event. It demolishes the southern half of the United States. Unlike other Call of Duty games, you are now the underdog. The United States is decimated. It is no longer a superpower. You’re on the defensive. You and your brother are the two main characters portrayed throughout the game. What happens is that you meet up with this elite group of soldiers called the Ghosts. They’re a reconnaissance force that’s holding the line against this new superpower that’s coming in to invade the United States.

The squad component is probably the most integral thing we’re trying to do in terms of narrative and in terms of emotion in the gameplay. We’re building a different type of game mechanic that we haven’t done in Call of Duty before. Traditionally, you have your buddy character, be it Woods or be it Captain Price. Now it’s your entire squad. We’ve added a dynamic group of A.I. supporting characters that will be with you. We also added a dog to the squad. That’s going to add a new dynamic in terms of gameplay, commanding the dog. He’s part of your squad, and he’s actually going to do things in the game that you haven’t done before.

What Stephen Gaghan did – he’s the writer we brought in; he wrote Traffic and he directed and wrote Syriana – he’s bringing in a different level of storytelling than what we’ve done before. We brought in David Goyer on Black Ops, and he was all about telling the dual storylines over longer time periods and creating these twists within the game. Gaghan brings a different level of human connection and character that we haven’t done in Call of Duty before. We believe that next gen will allow us to do that with the performances of the characters, the interactions with the A.I., the interactions with the dog, things like that. That’s the new world as it plays out.

GamesBeat: It seems like you guys are OK with creating parallel universes, where the U.S. gets destroyed over and over again.

Suarez: We can only blow up certain parts of the world so many times, so we have to create this new subgenre to allow us to do it. That’s a joke, by the way.

What we try to do is just create these different universes that don’t intermingle with each other. So Black Ops is a distinct universe. Modern Warfare is a distinct universe. This is a new distinct subbrand in its own universe, too.

Adding on to what I was saying, you have this new world, and the new technology is what gets that new world working. We’re rebuilding all the elements of the Call of Duty engine one by one, starting with the animation system, the lighting system, the rendering system, and the particle system. All these things have been rebuilt for those next-gen platforms to allow us to do more than we’ve done before. The number of bones that go into a character’s face has doubled. The amount of what we can do in terms of particle effects has multiplied six times over. Everything that we’re doing is amped up to a new level – lighting, how we can play with audio, all of those things are going into making this the most beautiful, most dynamic, biggest leap in Call of Duty that we’ve seen.

Once you take those components together, then you add that last concept, which is that everything we do with the tech is to drive the gameplay — how the player will engage, who they’re engaging with, what they’re doing. Engaging with the dog character — that’s going to be a new gameplay experience. The way you’re going to move the environment – mantling over things, peeking over side walls – these are subtle little things, but they’re things we’ve never been able to do before.

That animation system is interesting, actually. Traditionally in Call of Duty, your animation system in single-player was always much more fluid because we could support more animations in single-player than we could in multiplayer. That system has now moved over to the multiplayer system, so multiplayer animations will be much more fluid than we’ve had before. It’s all these things that come together into why we believe Ghosts is going to be the biggest leap forward for Call of Duty.

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Xbox’s popular auto-racing series, Forza, will get a new installment on Microsoft’s newest system, the Xbox One. Microsoft Game Studios chief Phil Spencer announced during today’s reveal event that Forza 5 will launch with the new system.

Check out the trailer and first screens from the announcement trailer below.

For more on the Xbox One reveal, check out our complete coverage or our liveblog and livestream.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Microsoft announced the Xbox One and the first games it confirmed for the new system were four titles from EA Sports.

Electronic Arts sports division revealed FIFA 14, Madden NFL 25, NBA Live 14, and UFC are all in the works for the Xbox One. The publisher is using a new graphics engine, called Ignite, that EA claims will bring in a new sense of realism.

“Today marks the beginning of a broad strategic partnership between EA and Microsoft,” EA Sports executive vice president Andrew Wilson said. “We share a common vision with Microsoft that games should be intelligent, dynamic, connected, rich with emotion, and — most importantly — fun.”

Wilson went on to promise that all four games will fundamentally change the way people play.

“Ignite was designed specifically to blur the line between real and virtual, ” he said. “Sports are just as much about your head as they are about your feet or hands. We built new technology that allows players to make decisions with four times more calculations per second.”

The increased graphics power of the Xbox One helps EA Sports show more of the playing field at any one time. This should give players more context during the game or match.

EA went on to show a sizzler reel of its four announced games. It didn’t have much gameplay, but the animation is smooth. We’ve included a gallery below:

For more, check out of complete coverage of the Xbox One reveal and our livestream and liveblog.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Xbox Live is going to the cloud.

At today’s Xbox Reveal event, corporate vice president of Xbox Live Marc Whitten announced that the new Xbox Live service for the upcoming Xbox One console provide access to movies, games, and save files from “anywhere.” He also said that the system will feature a “dedicated DVR” to capture your gameplay and upload that to the cloud as well. However, these were not shown in action, as Whitten only spent a few minutes discussing the online service before moving on to the next part of Microsoft’s presentation.

For more, check out of complete coverage of the Xbox One reveal and our livestream and liveblog.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Microsoft just blew the doors off of every integrated television experience with the reveal of its next generation Xbox One video game console.

The new Xbox will bring improved voice and gesture controls to watching TV. It also brings in live TV from the Xbox One (something you could do a bit clunkily on the Xbox 360 with Verizon FiOS and Xfinity TV from Comcast), Skype Internet calling, a new Trending feature that shows what’s popular among all Xbox Live community members and multitasking while watching programs.

Seriously, if the demonstration is any indication for how it’ll actually work, you’ll never watch TV the same way again.

Microsoft entertainment VP Yusuf Mehdi showed off how you’ll be able to turn on all the devices in your living room by speaking “Xbox On,” which pulls up your Xbox Live profile without the need to click through several sign-in screens or software updates. Apparently, the console will recognize your voice to do this, and it could possibly even distinguish between others that might use the console.

From there, Mehdi proceeded to change the channel by speaking. For example, you change from watching ESPN to Syfy by simply saying “Watch Syfy.” That’s right — no more “flipping” through the channels when you know exactly where you want to go. Mehdi didn’t make this clear, but I think this means those with a cable subscription (to Comcast at least, which was what they used in the demo) will no longer need to rent one of those crappy cable boxes that was probably made a decade ago.

As for the gesture controls, they seem to be utilized when switching between functions, like Live TV or another app. And speaking of other apps, the new controls make me think that multitasking on a television screen isn’t just an unnecessary pain in the ass. The demo showed off the ability to pull up sports stats during live games, chat rooms with friends, and pulling in a Skype voice call while you’re watching something.

For more coverage, check out our complete coverage and our liveblog and livestream.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Microsoft gave the world its first look at its newest home video game console, the Xbox One. While Sony has yet to show us the actual box for its PlayStation 4, Microsoft started its reveal event by immediately unveiling the new console, the controller, and the new Kinect, a motion-tracking camera and voice recognizer. Below is a gallery of photos of all the new toys, including some HD shots straight from Microsoft.

Here’s what the reveal looked like live:

For more on the Xbox One reveal, check out our complete coverage or our liveblog and livestream.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The Xbox One is real. Microsoft’s next-generation system also has a new controller that looks very familiar.

Xbox One comes with a dual-analog gamepad that has nearly an identical layout to the Xbox 360 joystick. That makes a lot of sense, since many consider that controller as the industry standard.

“The Xbox One controller is updated with over 40 design innovations,” Xbox Live vice president Marc Whitten said. “It features updated ergonomics and an integrated battery compartment that just fits better for gamers of all ages.”

Xbox One’s controller is actually slightly different in its shell and edges. It has sharper angles in its design, and the thumb-sticks have a deep groove. Finally, the direction pad is now a plus rather than the hated circular pad from the 360.

For more on the Xbox One, check out our complete coverage or our liveblog and livestream.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Microsoft unveiled its next-generation Xbox, the Xbox One, this morning at an even on its campus.

The company’s aim is to usher in the next-generation of entertainment, using games as the Trojan horse into broader control of the living room. More than eight years in the making, the new machine represents the company’s ambitions to become the most important gaming and entertainment company in the world.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the Xbox One,” said Don Mattrick, head of Microsoft’s game business.

The system turns on in an instant with your voice commands.

It will be interesting to see the reception for it. The world has changed since Microsoft last introduced its Xbox 360 game console in 2005. Apple’s iPhone ushered in a new era of smartphones and tablets that are contenders for the leisure time of consumers. Microsoft has acknowledged this changing landscape and is making the new Xbox more connected than ever.

Nicknamed the Xbox 720, the new machine’s most direct competition will be the Sony PlayStation 4, which is expected to debut in November, as well as the Nintendo Wii U, a less-powerful system that is struggling to gain a foothold in the market. New game consoles typically sell millions at the outset, but Nintendo sold only 3.45 million units in its first five months.

Source: GamesBeat

The Xbox One’s revamped Kinect sensor.

Microsoft sold an estimated 77 million Xbox 360 game consoles during the current generation of hardware. Sony sold about the same, while Nintendo has sold 99 million Wiis. But Microsoft has dominated the charts of consoles sold and game sales for the past couple of years, and companies like Electronic Arts are betting heavily that it will be a leader in the next generation alongside Sony’s PlayStation 4.

Those results are far better than anyone ever expected from Microsoft, which was fundamentally a software company entering the hardware business back in 2001. With the original Xbox, Microsoft moved too slowly. It sold about 25 million units, beating Nintendo’s underpowered GameCube. But it was trounced by Sony’s PlayStation 2, which sold more than 150 million units in its lifetime.

Microsoft essentially moved from zero percent market share in 2000 to 12 percent market share in 2006 in the hardware business. And as the market currently stands, Microsoft has about 30 percent of the hardware unit market, compared to 30 percent for Sony and 40 percent for Nintendo. But in dollars, Microsoft’s share is higher than that, as Wii game sales slowed down dramatically in the last couple of years. Now the company plans to complete its conquest of video games in the coming generation.

The machine has an accelerated processing unit (APU) chip from Advanced Micro Devices. AMD, which also makes the APU for the PS4, is making a semi-custom chip for Microsoft, using eight processing cores, or computing brains, based on Jaguar micro-architecture designs. The chip will combine graphics and processing on the same sliver of silicon, and it represents a shift away from IBM’s three-core Power chips that were used in the  previous Xbox 360 game console.

Microsoft and Sony will likely distinguish itself based on the number of cores they will have in each chip. Sony has eight Jaguar cores in its chip, and it also has a special kind of graphics memory that will speed the transfer of data within the chip. Durango has an eight-core 64-bit APU running at 1.6GHz, with 8GBs of DDR3 main memory and a large hard disk. Microsoft’s machine has similar capabilities on the semiconductor level, but its games may not run as fast as Sony’s in part because Microsoft is expected to dedicate some of its performance to running Kinect 2.

Kinect 2 is expected to be a more accurate version of the Kinect motion-sensing system that Microsoft launched in 2010. That system enabled players to control their games with gestures, rather than controllers, using body movements. But it wasn’t particularly accurate, and you had to stand in a sweet spot about 10 feet away from the console. With more processing power dedicated to the motion-sensing tasks, Microsoft will be able to make Kinect 2 more accurate and cover a wider area. Kinect 2 is expected to ship as standard on the new box, with better accuracy, improved voice recognition, a better camera, and dedicated hardware processing. If the latter is true, it will make the box more expensive to make. But the tax on processing power may not be as great.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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It’s the end of (another) era. The Xbox 360 didn’t always have the smoothest run over the past eight years, but sometimes that makes for the best stories and the most vivid memories. And as with the PlayStation during the PS4 announcement, the video game community is sharing some of those remembrances on Twitter, using the #XboxMemories hashtag.

Here are a few that nicely encapsulate the grand adventure that was owning an Xbox 360.

Getting our debug original Xbox and only have that anthropomorphic foot-racing game from Eidos to play on it.

— Adam Sessler (@AdamSessler) May 21, 2013

Microsoft reps glaring at me through an entire Dead or Alive demo for no good reason. #xboxmemories

— Jeff Gerstmann (@jeffgerstmann) May 21, 2013

#XboxMemories Trashtalking to dudes in Halo multiplayer matches that their mothers must love them & that their fathers were in their lives.

— Stephanie Bayer (@NSSteph) May 21, 2013

#XboxMemories Seeing the first Gears tattoos on fans and realizing how big things were going to be.

— Cliff Bleszinski (@therealcliffyb) May 21, 2013

As I’m cleaning up my office this morning, stumbled across my OG Gamertag press kit. #xboxmemories twitter.com/gizmogladstone…

— Darren Gladstone (@gizmogladstone) May 21, 2013

When Sony used crying dolls, Sixaxis and $600 to keep people from wanting a PS3 at launch. #XboxMemories twitter.com/lynchtacular/s…

— Casey Lynch (@lynchtacular) May 21, 2013

My original Xbox outlasting my four Xbox 360s. #XboxMemories

— James Mielke (@jamesmielke) May 21, 2013

#xboxmemories Being legitimately excited to play Blinx: The Time Sweeper for the first time on the Xbox in the Y’s rec room.

— Steven Strom (@stevenstrom) May 21, 2013

#XboxMemories That time I was playing and Steve Ballmer broke into my house and lashed me across the face with his giant, whip-like tongue.

— Jim Sterling (@JimSterling) May 21, 2013

My jaw dropping first time I played Gears Of War and saw true next gen graphics. #XBOXMemories

— Miracle Of Sound (@miracleofsound) May 21, 2013

Video capping Dreamcast gameplay as a ZDTV intern while @adamsessler & Gamestop TV covered the Xbox reveal at GDC 2000. #XboxMemories

— Miguel Concepcion (@NormalMode) May 21, 2013

#XboxMemories playing halo for hours at ends with my brothers and his friends and laughing to god damn much

— Princess Simon (@sidster21) May 21, 2013

When the Xbox 360 launched I was still in highschool and amazed by Oblivion’s graphics. (Those trees! That shiny armor!) #XboxMemories

— Eline Muijres (@ElineMuijres) May 21, 2013

#XboxMemories singing Metallica at 4am while accompanied by plastic guitar bass and drums

— Tracey O’Donnell (@tracey2213) May 21, 2013

Hooking up 4 TV’s and consoles back in high school for 16 player Halo 1 action. #XboxMemories

— Cyrus Fayazi (@FozzyTheGamer) May 21, 2013

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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We’re mere hours away from learning the name of the next Xbox console. Microsoft’s set up a big, scary tent and part of the GamesBeat team is outside waiting for access. We’ll be updating this page throughout the day with the latest news out of the event.

GamesBeat’s live coverage

The next-gen Xbox reveal: Live from Microsoft (liveblog and livestream)

The story so far

What to expect at Microsoft’s next-generation Xbox announcement
Next-gen Xbox may turn your room into the game using a special projector

Xbox One

Microsoft unveils its next-generation Xbox One game console
Meet the new Xbox One controller
Xbox One system, controller, and Kinect (gallery)
With the new Xbox One, you’ll never watch TV the same way again
Xbox One’s revamped Xbox Live goes to the cloud
Halo: The Television Series coming to Xbox One
NFL will bring exclusive original TV content to Xbox One
What’s under the hood of the Xbox One?

Games

EA Sports announces 4 Xbox One games running next-gen visuals
Microsoft reveals Forza 5 for Xbox One (gallery)
Remedy Entertainment’s Quantum Break blends live-action storytelling and games (Gallery)
Xbox One does not have Xbox 360 backwards compatibility

Interviews

Activision goes all out in Call of Duty: Ghosts in the name of innovation (interview)

Previews

With Call of Duty: Ghosts, Activision seeks to continue a video game franchise that defies gravity (preview)

Reactions

Full (red) circle: Twitter shares its #XboxMemories

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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While Sony and Microsoft are battling for next-gen buzz, Nintendo is working on improving its “next gen” Wii U.

The Japanese publisher released an update for the Wii U today. It is a minor patch of the April update that improved performance and loading times. System update 3.01, according to Nintendo, will make the Wii U system more stable. Nintendo also notes that it will improve “compatibility with certain software.”

As usual, Nintendo warns users that this update could take an hour or more to download and install. Unplugging or powering down the console in that time could brick the system — so don’t do that.

Nintendo’s Wii U is struggling to find an audience, but the company is hoping to turn that around starting with the upcoming Electronic Entertainment Expo in early June. At that trade show, the publisher will start detailing the new Smash Bros., a fresh 3D Mario, and an updated Mario Kart for its latest home console. Those important titles should help the console sell to core Nintendo fans.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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