Let me start by saying that I'm just short of being blown away by the Xbox 360. The new dashboard is light years beyond the green ka-chunk of the original Xbox, and I've had several amazing experiences enabled by the new gaming technology.
For instance:
- I ripped my favorite albums to the hard drive and then selected custom soundtracks while playing Kameo: Elements of Power. Bashing an army of flaming trolls while listening to Limp Bizkit is one of the more surreal experiences of my young life. A few minutes later, I unlocked an elemental power and watched it bounce around the screen, seemingly in perfect time with Ben Kweller's "Lollipop" cover from the Stubbs the Zombie soundtrack. Letting us replace in-game music with our own soundtracks is brilliant. Let's just hope that the rumors that some games will be permitted to override this feature are false.
- I opened up a voice chat channel between our two online 360s so I could chat with GrrlGotGame over headsets (connected to our wireless controllers, I might add!) while she bashed junkies in Condemned: Criminal Origins and I took on a nasty boss in Kameo. Mostly we talked about what to make for dinner in-between attacks on our respective enemies.
- I downloaded the free demo of Outpost Kaloki X and played through the first two levels. Partway through the third level, I decided to buy the game for 800 Microsoft points (aka $10). I was able to purchase it without quitting my current session, and it quickly unlocked the ability to save my game and even gave me an Achievement. That's really slick, and it's exactly how it should be. If only the rest of the console had this kind of attention to detail…
So, as good as the Xbox 360 is, I know it can be much better. I think all but the most entrenched fanboy can agree there are some things that are counter-intuitive, clumsy or just need a little spit and polish.
It's my hope that an early 2006 dashboard refresh will include some or all of the following features:
- A Purgatory zone. Recreation, Pro, Family and Underground are a great start. But gamers caught cheating or inappropriately griefing their fellow gamers without their consent and a clear "safe" word should be moved to this zone where they can do no harm and maybe even learn a lesson. It even seems fitting in a Sartre-esque way: Hell really is other people. In this case, people just like you.
Time in Purgatory could be on average 15 days or until legit gamers (only matched to Purgatory players at their own choice) rank them well enough to trigger an early release. Maybe they can even do some community service (or if they're famous enough, PSAs - "When you pwn your fellow gamer, gaming pwns you!") to work off some of their sentence. Oh, and no one in purgatory can rank anyone they play, so they can't claw their way out by getting their fellow inmates to help.
- Xbox Live profiles that can be stored in multiple places. OK, so this one is just a pain. Let's say you have two 360s and two profiles, each tied to a Gold account. Each has its own hard drive. But if you want to access two Profiles on the same console at the same time, you have to move one to a $40 Memory Card, or recover it to the other console by typing in your Passport e-mail address and password. (By the way, this last step renders the original profile useless until you recover it again by moving it or retyping the Passport information, which is not cached.)
We can understand that you don't want two people using the same Profile at the same time. So block anyone from logging with the profile if someone else is already using it. But let us store active, ready-to-go Profiles anywhere and everywhere we might need them.
- A better shopping experience. Xbox Live Marketplace is a big improvement over the in-game download interface in the original Xbox. And it's great innovation to be able to download hi-def videos and movie trailers, dashboard skins, avatars and even Xbox Live Arcade games with a payment system that supports micro-transactions as small as 25 cents.
But it's hardly the best online shopping experience. First off, there's no cart. If you want to buy something, you select it and download it right away. And you're stuck there waiting until it's done downloading - anywhere from a few kilobytes for a lowly Gamer Picture to a gigabyte for a large demo. There's not even an impulse aisle. All you can do is stare at the progress bar.
The good news is you can abort a long download and pick it up right where you left off later. But you really should be able to download your files all at once in he background while browsing around in the dashboard, or be prompted to get any pending items on shutdown, so the 360 can simply grab your queued files and purchases and then power off when you're ready to call it a night - or a morning, as the case may be.
Oh, and items marked New shouldn't be the items that you list as new for weeks on end. They should be the ones that are new since my last visit.
- Purchased content is licensed for all of your 360s. Another thing that's wonky is how licensing works. If I'm reading it right, purchased content can be readily copied and used on all of my 360s as long as I can fit it on a memory card. Also, anyone can play a purchased Xbox Live Arcade on the original console that housed the transaction (or maybe just the hard drive), and I can use my Passport to transfer my privileges to another system if needed. Sounds good, right?
But there are some wrinkles. First, how can you tell the demo-only version from the full version so you don't accidentally overwrite it when moving it around? Does it even matter? Also, why can a second person play Bejeweled 2 and Outpost Kaloki X on the first 360, but not Geometry Wars - which shows up as demo for anyone but the original purchaser (at least for me)? It's all very inconsistent and confusing.
Let's make it simple. Like iTunes, let us authorize a few systems that can play any of our purchased content, be it games or themes or gamer pictures. Make us provide enough personal information (like a credit card) that we'd never sanely entrust to a stranger - this should all but eliminate abuse. Build in a check so multiple people can't use the same license for the same Xbox Live Arcade game at the same time. That's fair, since we'd have to buy two copies of a retail game to play each other on more than one console.
You can even offer to sell us a second license on the fly! Just let us take turns, if we choose, and play the games on our own individual hard drives so we can keep track of things neatly - without our brains exploding as we try to remember who bought what, on which system, with whatever hard drive and where our Profiles are stored today. You know, those things we can't store in more than one place.
- Better overall usability. The new "blades" interface is brilliant. And that whooshing sound effect, wow. But let's face it, any UI that has to tell you how to find a feature by supplying written directions just isn't done yet. And that's exactly what happens when you download a new Theme: "To use this theme, open the Xbox Guide and select Personal Settings, Themes."
Even with the written directions, I kept looking for Themes under Display Settings - where you'd find them in Windows. Turns out, you're supposed to use the oversized Guide button on your controller to access Personal Settings, which contains all of your personal settings - except for those stored on the Settings blade or accessed by clicking your Gamer Card. That's right, there are three different places for settings before you even launch a game! Why not just put Themes in Display Settings too, so you can access them from either place?
The "Find your item" option for other downloaded files such as trailers and demos is only a small step up on the UI faux pas ladder. How about just "Play it"? Teach me how to fish in the manual, but let me use the features I want wherever they make the most sense to me. Isn't the 360 supposed to be about personalization and choice?
Also, we shouldn't have to unplug our Ethernet cables to so we can mark ourselves to appear offline before we log in. Keep in mind that you now expose our online state to anyone on the Internet with an Xbox Live account who's looking - including, quite possibly, bosses, coworkers and parents. Give us the choice to start with a profile selection screen so we can decide whether to appear online before we login. Or whether we even want to login in. If I'm watching a movie with my sweetie or my kid, I'm probably not going to want to see popup alerts whenever a buddy pops in a new game.
Yes, there's an auto-profile login selection preference, but the 360 seems to ignore this and sometimes just autologins like an overanxious teen at his first makeout party. Some people may think it's cute, but most of us want a little more control.
- An easier-to-use Music Player. The new visualizations are nice, but the text input for the Music Player really needs some work. Sure, you can plug in a USB keyboard if you have one, but 360 text input is generally pretty easy to do with the controller (apart from the Caps key really being a Caps Lock). So why does it take forever to enter a few song titles? How about adding auto-complete and the ability to easily fill in the artist and album fields for an entire CD for all tracks at once?
Better yet, offer us multiple music databases so we can choose the entry that has the most accurate or appealing data format for each album. If something is wrong or not-yet-entered, let us 360 users (at least those who are not in Purgatory!) help out by uploading our work after we've corrected or hand-entered it. Also, let us play the songs on the Rip Music selection screen where we're actually making our choices, so we don't have to back out and scribble down all of the song titles we want to rip and those we want to skip. What a pain!
Oh, and while we're at it, figure out a way to better support iPods. Heck, even cheap car stereo kits and cassette adapters can manage a passthrough any protected tracks (yes, even through the dock connector) that have been ripped to AAC or purchased from iTunes. I plugged my iPod into my 360 and was only able to play one song out of the 30 or so from my holiday playlist. Here's the kicker: It was the one song I hadn't paid for.
- Create and share our own Themes. Remember how Forza Motorsport let gamers really trick out their cars with elaborate artwork by simply overlaying different colored shapes? Gamers made the most amazing pictures with this simple little interface. Even people without a design degree could turn out some halfway appealing car decorations.
And while it's nice that we can pick out a single background picture for our 360 dashboards and adjust the color of the accents and the pop-up pane background, it's hardly Theme creation. Let us adjust every blade and popup to our exacting specifications and save them as custom Themes. Then the very best ones - at least those that don't violate copyrights or community standards - can be sold over Xbox Live Marketplace, with the seller getting a small piece of the action.
We'll still buy the professionally made ones, but only if they're very, very good. Maybe we'll even pick over the ones we buy and improve them. I love the Penny Arcade Theme, but I'm not so wild about the popup pane background. If I could just change that one little thing to whatever I wanted, I'd be thrilled. Oh, and I really want to create a really nice Futurama theme. I already have all of the art I need. Where's the interface that makes it happen?
- Achievement icons usable as Gamer Pictures. Achievements are great. Unlocking little tokens for our accomplishments tantalizes us further into the game. And there are generally a handful of Achievements that only the hard-core gamers will ever earn.
Likewise, Gamer Cards are amazing. We can see how our friends are doing and even hit them up for help if they're further along in a game than we are.
Why can't we get these two great tastes together? The pictures for Achievements are about the same size as Gamer Pictures. Shouldn't we be able to display them on our Gamer Cards? The idea of Gamer Score is interesting, but it's a little abstract. What does it really say about you? If it's low, you're a loser or a "newb." If it's high, you have the mad skillz, a bunch of different games and/or too much time on your hands.
C'mon, if I ever earn an award for beating Call of Duty 2 at the highest difficulty, I'm going to want everyone to know it the second they pull open my Gamer Card - at least until Halo 3 arrives. And I beat that at the highest difficulty. Or at least on normal.
- Even better Gamer Card browsing. Did I mention that Gamer Cards are waaaay cool? We already like to surf them, just like we surf actors and directors in the Internet Movie Database, consider related purchases and recommendations on Amazon.com or browse artists and playlists in the iTunes store.
Gamer Cards are fun to pull up when you're playing a game and scanning the lobbies and leaderboards. You did this part right. But I can't help but think we should have even more ways to browse them right from the Dashboard and find people who are very much like us that we can invite to chat and play.
- Original Xbox save support. It's bad enough that some saves on the original Xbox were arbitrarily locked. But every original Xbox game played via emulation on the 360 now has its save locked, too. Check it out, you can't copy any of them! Meanwhile, every 360 game save is unlocked due to the fact that the hard drive is now an optional component.
Enough with trying to control our every move. Game saves are OUR data, sometimes even more precious than those Word docs and Excel spreadsheets that we backup religiously ever night (well, some of the time). Face it, hard drives are unreliable. Every one of them will fail, some sooner than later. They should be treated as the ticking time bombs waiting to explode that they are. Our data is valuable and should be easy to back up or move to another drive, so we can preserve our progress and downloads - forever if we like.
That's cool. But you still need to work on the overall experience. If we regular gamers who eat, drink and breathe technology have a hard time figuring this stuff out, how do you think those casual gamers are going to fare?
And while we're talking about marketing, why don't you bundle a small memory card with the so-called $300 Core systems. It doesn't have to be big, let's say 8MB to keep costs down and the need for future purchases up. It'll be just big enough for some saves and small downloads.
Because this holiday, you do realize what's going to happen, don't you? The kids will crack open their holiday presents, excited to get an Xbox 360. Yes, even the Core system. And when the excitement wears off, as it will rather abruptly, mom and dad are going to be pissed to find themselves running to the store the next day in search of a $40 memory card - just so there's someplace to save a little game progress. Ouch!
Don't worry, they'll fill up that 8MB card and be ready to upgrade to some more expensive (and profitable) storage soon enough. But they won't feel sucker punched as they realize how little they really saved buying the Core system.
And that's what this is all about: creating the best overall experience for gamers of all ages and types and making them feel happy about their decision, sucked in and totally engaged.
That's probably what the original marketing brief called for. And you hit surprisingly close to the mark. Just keep improving the 360, give gamers more of what they want and you'll do just what set out to do: 1) redefine console gaming and, 2) make a boatload of money doing it.
We'll be happy to help with the second part when you finish delivering on the first.
-=Gamewatcher
UPDATE: There have been some strong reactions to this piece. See related Blog entry.
