A Twitter outburst by Microsoft Studios creative director Adam Orth has raised further concern amongst the video game community that the next Xbox will be an always-online device.
"Sorry, I don't get the drama around having an 'always on' console," Orth Tweeted. "Every device now is 'always on'. That's the world we live in. #dealwithit."
This comment riled BioWare designer Manveer Heir, who responded: "Did you learn nothing from Diablo III or SimCity? You know some people's internet goes out right? Deal with it is a shitty reason."
To this Orth replied: "Electricity goes out, too."
Heir added that whilst LA, San Francisco and Seattle are "very connected places" places likes Janesville, WI or Blacksburg, VA don't offer the same connected infrastructure. "Gamers live in non urban areas too," he wrote.
Orth later reeled off a number of Tweets arguing his point.
"Sometimes the electricity goes out," Orth said. "I will not purchase a vacuum cleaner."
"The mobile reception in the area I live in is spotty and unreliable. I will not buy a mobile phone."
Orth later attempted to calm the storm, claiming his Twitter debate was "just the normal daily back and forth" with Heir.
"Apologies for offending non-cities," he said. "I was trolling him personally."
Heir also defended his friend: "You should know we [Heir and Orth] are good friends who joke around with one another. Don't read too much into our back & forth... All those tweets you are seeing about the city being superior. That's him just trolling me. And I fell for it. Don't bust his balls on that."
Orth has now protected his Twitter account meaning only confirmed followers can see what he writes.
All this has, however, led many to believe that Microsoft's next generation Xbox will be an always connected device. According to LinkedIn, Orth has been working on a secret project at Microsoft Game Studios since February 2012.
Source: @adam_orth via NeoGAF








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bloody27
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Bloodstorm
Dealt with it
Bloodstorm
bloody27
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munkee
EverTheOptimist
CheekyLee
EDIT: How many times have you logged in to your XBox to see a message stating "Some XBox Live services are unavailable", or found that the only thing you CAN'T connect to is XBox Live? Once would be too many, and I know I've seen it more than once. Further, since MS have given away free games as apologies for Live outages, they are unable to guarantee that I will be able to play the games I bought and paid for at the times I want to play them.
MJTH
The problems come when the services provided by requiring always online DRM are bad, and the justification for it doesn't make up for bad service. Diablo 3 had horrible server problems, which made the experience bad because it, the game itself was fine. Blizzard's justification for the always was that they needed it to run the auction house system, which essentially amount to player to player transactions, with Blizzard take a percentage. This made Blizzard look bad.
Same goes for Sim City, server issues, made it hard to log in, but the game itself is was good. Maxis's justification was for it was to facilitate the multiplayer functions, which weren't reliable. This made Maxis look bad.
If Microsoft make a perfect system with required always online connection needed, then nobody will complain. It'll be a success. The worry is that it will have obvious flaws caused by the required always online connection. Pretty what Microsoft need to do to win people over is make a system like steam, but better in every single way. And they need to do from launch. No post release fixes they need to get it right first time, or the nextbox will die trying.