Cliff Bleszinski Isn’t Fond of Microsoft’s New Console Strategy

The console market is changing at a rapid pace and adopting a tiered model with multiple specifications which cater to users with contrasting demands. This is a similar strategy to the PC and a major shift in attitude towards only launching one system which becomes outdated rather quickly. Both Sony and Microsoft have decided to forgo the traditional console cycle and it’s unclear how this will be received by today’s market. Cliff Bleszinski, former design director for Epic Games and responsible for classics like Unreal Tournament discussed Microsoft’s Project Scorpio in an interview with Kotaku Australia and said:

On the multiple console strategy: “Is Microsoft going full Sega 32x and Mega CD right now? I think it’s weird. The way the branding’s going, it feels like the way Mercedes name their cars in the United States, y’know; the S class! The SOK! The SK! Which fucking one is this? Consumers only have enough time and attention for that. It’s like dude, are you trying to turn the Xbox into a PC? What’s going on right now?”

On Scorpio: “I think it feels like an apology move for them for not making the console as powerful as it should have been in favour of making sure the Kinect was boxed in with it. So now they have to play catch-up. In a way, you can trace this all the way back to their well-intended E3 from a few years ago — where they were trying to go fully digital, etcetera, etectera, and the internet backlash made them back pedal.”

On being “VR ready”: “The thing about setting up VR is that it’s a bit of a pain in the butt. I’m from the generation where your parents got the VCR, plugged it in and the clock was blinking twelve forever. Getting any home electronics installed shouldn’t be a lot of work. So it’s another one of those things that is almost making it like a PC, or going full circle.”

On Scorpion-enhanced games: “When you do that, you genuinely tend to see games that don’t fully shine on the high end. Like we saw with this past console generation [publishers] were hedging their bets with a chicken-and-the-egg thing. They were putting the games on PlayStation 3 and 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One and basically you get higher resolution textures but it’s still a masked texture instead of being dynamically generated. So they’re kind of hobbling themselves in regards to that kind of scalability. It’s trying to have your cake and eat it too.”

On potential effects on multiplayer: “If you make a game and it’s on the cheaper console and it’s 30 frame per second and 60 frames on the other console, that could affect the performance in a twitch shooter, for example. It’s the same thing with Cross Play for action games which I don’t understand the desire for. I can understand with co-op games but if you have a shooter and one player has a controller and another player has a keyboard and mouse and the controller person is at 30 (fps) and the mouse-and-keyboard person is at 60, most of the time the keyboard person is going to completely dominate. So good luck with your match making.”

On keeping it real: “Look, I have a lot of friends over there so I wouldn’t criticise them unless I was pretty positive about it…If Phil Spencer was here right now I’d tell him he back peddled to his face. And he’d say “you’re a dick, but you’re right!”

Clearly, Cliff Bleszinski isn’t too fond of Microsoft’s new console or their decision to release numerous models in such a short time since the Xbox One’s release. Personally, I think choice is a positive thing and the standard console lifecycle in today’s market means games often run at a sub-par resolution or inconsistent frame-rate. Perhaps, having two or three models will allow consoles to compete better with the PC platform but it has to be dealt with in a delicate manner so it doesn’t annoy early backers.