The Punning Pundit

General:

I expect each of the next gen. systems to ship with at least what the X-Box shipped with, and what the PS2 is being upgraded to: a Hard Drive, and a broadband adaptor. I also wouldn't be too surprised to see out of the box 4 controller support. To be completely honest, I don't think that there is a whole lot of room for innovation in the hardware, though the software side of things is set to explode. Other than better graphics, we shouldn't expect too much new next time around…

More Specifically:

The reason for the Hard Drive is simple: the thing is bloody useful. Players are able to turn their consoles into media centers (more on that later), bringing the much-anticipated "convergence" around in a way that no one quite saw coming. It also lowers load time dramatically, increasing the intensity of game play by not forcing the player to pull out of the game's world...

The Broadband adaptor is perhaps the most important addition since the introduction of optical media. As PC games showed; nothing is quite as fun as a good death match. Testing one's mad skillz against the computer is one thing, but going up against an entire team of thinking humans is something else entirely. This is called "value added". Also, the ability to download patches, new levels, weapons, and that sort of thing is something that PC gamers have come to expect, but that consol gamers have only just gotten a taste of. While Sly Cooper may not benefit from this sort of thing, the first football game that allows players to DL the latest real-world stats in real time will be a big winner...

The last pair of consol generations have featured a new game input that doubled as other-media input. I remembered reading at one point that the Japanese consumers were going nuts over the PS2 because it was a DVD player that also played PS1 games. I expect this trend to continue. This time around, the hard drive will double as a TiVO type system. In fact, Sony will be testing that out with their new PS2, seeing if the concept works. I can't imagine why it wouldn't, so I expect to see this feature as a standard next time around…

Software:
The biggest problem that any new system has is introducing enough software to satisfy new owners of that consol. Simple backward compatibility would be enough to satisfy that short term. Indeed, done correctly, this could lead to a big early start...

General Advice:

The advice I would give to any consol maker at this point (especially Sony) is to buy the best graphics engine that can be squeezed into a US$300 budget. These graphic engines will be around for 5-6 years; at the end of their life cycle they will begin to look a bit dated. All other things being equal, a game that can be played on (or, more importantly, bought for) either the X-box or the PS2 will be played on the X-box; its graphics are just that much better...

Boxing Ring
It may sound counter-intuitive, but I fully expect the XB2 to be the leader of the next generation of consoles. The XB1 simple doesn't have any obvious weaknesses on the hardware side, and there is no reason to expect that the XB2 might inherit any. Indeed, the X-box itself is supposed to be the single easiest platform to program for, mainly owing to its compatibility with DirectX...

The value of that compatibly cannot be overstated. DirectX is a tool that many (if not most) PC game programmers actually program in, and most, if not all have familiarity with. The contrast here is with the PS2 programming interface, which is by all accounts a complete pain. If the question comes down to "which box is easier", then we know who wins...

Control Issues
The first thing MS needs to do is completely re-think their existing controller. Their current controller is no longer the hideous monster that originally shipped with the system, but is still not at all optimized for gaming. It is as if they said, "find out what everyone else is doing with controllers and give us that. But more black, and, er rounder." They need to find out what gamers really want from their controllers and redesign the big black boomerang from the ground up. The second thing they need to do is not ship that controller...

The thing is, there is nothing obviously wrong with the S-type (current) controller. It lacks the simplicity of the "big A" style from Nintendo, and is certainly far from the analog perfection of the PS2 controller, but the S-type does well for itself. I just have this nagging feeling that it could be better. MS's best bet would be to ship with the S-type and introduce several controllers onto the market to see what people say about them. It would be a conscious effort to imitate what they did following their last controller fiasco; and that yielded decent results...

Advice for Microsoft

Something the XB1 has a reputation for that the XB2 is by no means guaranteed of is hardware superiority. I know that I earlier wrote that there isn't much room for improvement on the hardware side, but that was only partially correct. The XB1 was a revolutionary system; until the full value of that revolution is comprehended all that is left is evolution. I expect better processors, better graphics engines, and bigger/faster hard drives. While MS has been the leader in these things in the past, there is no reason to think that it will be in the future. Microsoft's number 1 priority for the next box should be to maintain its hardware edge. Even if it can't maintain that, it needs to stay within close range of the other systems...

The biggest piece of advice I have for Microsoft is to ignore the Linux people. They are not a very large segment of the gamming community, but they are a very loud one. Ignoring them makes them shrivel and die. Or, hell, MS could always release their own Linux package. Sony did that with the PS2, charged US$200 per and ended up with a bit of good publicity. It doesn't seem to have done any lasting harm...

The other big thing Microsoft absolutely must do is to get more exclusive content. While it is a boost to MS that any cross-platform game will look better on the XB1 than any other consol, this means nothing to someone who only owns the PS2. Microsoft needs to get more consoles into more homes and that means it needs more exclusive content. Sony's deal with Squaresoft has been a huge boon; MS needs to find a similar deal, and soon...

In the end, I think Microsoft will be able to overcome all these issues. I don't doubt for a moment that they will find the solutions to their problems. They know what their issues are, and seem to be actively solving them. For a variety of reasons, I think Sony is about to take a fall. Microsoft is primed to take over the #1 spot...