Month: November 2017

The Xbox One X launch is just days away, and many people around the world are excited to get their hands on Microsoft’s new console. By now, we know almost everything there is to know about the device, from its release date and price to all its enhanced games. We also know a special Scorpio Edition is coming and we have all the details on how to pre-order an Xbox One X.

What we don’t know is how the Xbox One X will do after launch. So we asked a bunch of GameSpot staff what their thoughts on the console were. Check out their responses below and let us know what you think about the new Xbox console in the comments. Oh, and be sure to read our Xbox One X review!

Chris Pereira | News Editor

As someone who bought a PS4 Pro right away, I’m obviously eager to get my hands on an Xbox One X. The absence of a headlining new game to showcase it is not a problem for me, as that’s not really the point. This system is the console equivalent of someone who buys a new video card for their PC when the old one still works; it’s meant to let you experience a better version of the games you could already play–a proposition that is certainly not for everyone, as Microsoft admits.

But I’d argue that its arrival is good news for everyone. Xbox One is four years old, and we could easily be facing a more traditional console launch in the next year–one for a system that doesn’t play the games on your shelf and won’t let you play with friends who decide to stick with their Xbox One. Instead, we’re letting the people who care about framerate and resolution get what they desire without upending things with a completely fresh generation of hardware. I don’t expect Xbox One X to sell to a massive audience, but it should make people like me happy without impacting the Xbox One owners who don’t care. Seems like a win-win.

Jimmy Thang | Technology Editor

On paper, the Xbox One X features great specs and seems to be great value despite being cost-prohibitive for many. I predict it will sell extremely well into early next year, but like Phil Spencer said, it’s not for everybody. Considering the Xbox One S is roughly half the price, I see Microsoft’s white variant selling better overall for a long while.

If you ask me, with both the release of the Xbox One X and the PS4 Pro, the traditional five-to-seven-year console life cycle is dead. It’s been replaced by a quicker, more gradual release cadence. While this can be a boon to both game developers and console manufacturers, it can also make it harder for Microsoft to fundamentally rock the boat against Sony.

Its US $499 / £449 / AU $649 price point will keep it primarily in enthusiasts’ hands for a while, but I believe the Xbox One X (or newer variants of it) will overtake the standard Xbox One / S in the coming years. How fast it does that will largely depend on the adoption rate of 4K TVs, how aggressive Microsoft will be willing to lower its price, and how many compelling exclusive games it will be able to deliver.

Oscar Dayus | Staff Writer

With just a few days to go until launch, there seems to be a great buzz around the Xbox One X… for seemingly little reason. It sounds powerful, sure, but I think Microsoft is lacking a big, fresh exclusive to really show off what the device is capable of, and to give me a reason to go out and buy one. After all, my original Xbox One is perfectly capable of gathering dust by itself…

Eddie Makuch | Associate Editor

When Microsoft announced the Xbox One Elite controller in 2015, some balked at its US $150 / £120 / AU $200 price point. That’s more more than double the cost of a normal gamepad. Who would buy that? As it turns out, Microsoft saw huge demand and more than a million have been made. I see a similar path for the Xbox One X. At $499 / £449 / AU $649, it’s double the cost of the Xbox One S. It’s not for everyone. Microsoft itself has admitted as much. Microsoft has also gone on record to say the Xbox One S will sell better than the Xbox One X this holiday and into the future. So who is the Xbox One X for? Given the price point and specs, it seems to be aimed at the enthusiast crowd. Xbox One X is for those looking for the very best. While that is a smaller market than what the Xbox One S will appeal to, there are more factors to consider.

For one, if multi-platform games look and perform better on Xbox One X–as we’re expecting them to given the console’s extra horsepower relative to everything else out there–Microsoft gets a leg up on Sony in the messaging department. Want to play Call of Duty: WWII at its highest possible graphical level? You need an Xbox One X to do so. Microsoft is hoping to swing the pendulum back in its favor with the Xbox One X, as it was the PS4 that took the cake early on by being the most powerful console on the market. No more. Finally, it’s exciting and encouraging to see consoles finally get closer to the PC space in that, if you want to spend more for better performance, you can.

Tamoor Hussain | UK Editor

I don’t think Microsoft is overly concerned about hitting big sales numbers, though that would no doubt be nice for them. Phil Spencer’s messaging has been clear: the Xbox One X is intended to be an option to those that want to play games in optimal conditions. At this point in time, given the price of 4K TVs, that’s not a massive number of people, certainly when compared to the amount of people that have traditional HDTV setups.

Microsoft’s goal with Xbox One X is to bolster its ecosystem and having the X alongside the original Xbox One and Xbox One S, in addition to Cross-Buy, is a good way to do it. Of course that makes the metrics by which it measures success a little more tricky to ascertain, but after the mixed multimedia messaging around the Xbox One’s launch, the key concern for them is reminding people that they are about games. They’ve started to shake that off a bit but I think the One X will be what really helps them turn the corner since they can say, “This is the most powerful games console on the market.” From that perspective, I think the device will be successful and it will pay dividends in the next generation, where Microsoft will be able to truly shed that baggage.

Peter Brown | Senior Reviews Editor

While I don’t predict Xbox One X will translate into a watershed moment for Microsoft, I do think it’s an exciting if small kick in the pants for console gaming at large. It only loosely counts as a new console (it’s a refresh, albeit a significant one), but it gives players something new to consider, and hopefully greater room for developers to experiment. We may also see Sony react with new hardware of its own, at least faster than it would have otherwise. I haven’t seen a reason to be head over heels for X but I’m at least looking forward to the reactions it inspires on all fronts.

Michael Higham | Associate Editor

The Xbox One X will be a slow burn. Nobody should expect it to fly off store shelves week one, but it’s significant for establishing an ‘upgrade path’ for console games. As games start to showcase the power of the new console, its place in the gaming hardware space will be more apparent. We’ll see it surpass the capabilities of the PS4 Pro and PCs within the same price range, but it’s not going to make a clean break from the original Xbox One (or S) and those versions may hold back games’ full realization from a technical perspective. Look at Destiny 2: it runs in 4K, but at a locked 30 FPS, and I’m willing to bet the limited framerate is for parity’s sake for the game’s competitive space between the different consoles. Maybe by the time the One X hardware becomes ‘old,’ we’ll be ready for the next generation. Or maybe this is the next step towards an iterative console cycle in which companies will have to decide how generations of games are handled.

I admire the technical achievement that is the Xbox One X, but personally, it’s not enough to change what I want out of games. In that regard, the new console isn’t for me, and I’m not the target audience. But if you want the best version of console games without shelling out the money for an equivalent or better PC in today’s market, the Xbox One X is probably for you.

Justin Haywald | Managing Editor

I’m holding out for the retail release of the HoloLens.

Pixomondo has a lot of cool projects in the works, including its latest, a digital aquarium experience situated underground below Times Square called National Geographic Encounter: Ocean Odyssey. But the company’s most famous and impactful creations are, without a doubt, Game of Thrones‘ dragons. At the company’s Los Angeles office, Pixomondo’s leads told GameSpot about their newest work, as well as the surprising inspirations behind Drogon, Rhaegal, and Viserion on Game of Thrones.

“I think from outside, it feels like, ‘How hard can it be? It’s a dragon, and it looks natural, and it acts like a dragon would act,'” said Pixomondo CEO Thilo Kuther. “But the way to get there is a lot of meetings, discussions, back and forth of versions, until [we] settle on a specific one.”

Pixomondo started creating Game of Thrones‘ visual effects, including the then-tiny dragons, back in Season 2. In subsequent seasons they began focusing exclusively on the dragons, as the beasts became exponentially more complex and demanding to animate.

“That opening discussion [back then] was, coming down to budget about the dragons, that they would not compromise–that they only have a certain amount of money for the dragons, so if it’s not possible to do certain things for the money, then they’d rather not show the dragons, and cut back on the dragons if the quality’s not right,” Kuther said. “With every season it got clearer and clearer how complex that task was.”

Daenerys’s dragons are some of the most realistic ever to grace the screen. As we watched a highlights reel describing some of the studio’s more impressive processes for building them, Pixomondo Executive Producer David Garber said they’ve accidentally fooled children into believing dragons are real. “A cute story I like to tell is, I showed this to a group of little 9-year-olds, and they said, ‘How’d you get the dragon to do that?'” he said, chuckling.

It’s not surprising that they look toward real life animals to determine how the dragons would move and act, but the creatures they choose as inspiration are a surprise. First off: chickens.

“When they got bigger in Season 3 and 4, there was a lot of, ‘So if a dragon is this big, how can it lift itself up? What is it? Is it a bat? Or is it a bird? Is it an eagle? And the amount of energy that went into these discussions is beyond belief,” Kuther said. “That’s why they went to a Trader Joe’s and bought a chicken, and took it apart, and said, ‘So, how does that work?'”

They used that hands-on research to determine everything from how the dragons’ muscles move when they’re walking around on the ground to how much downward pressure they need to create with their wings to lift their bodies into the air. They even watched YouTube videos of bats and chickens flying. But as the dragons continued to increase in size–and thus in the amount of detail Pixomondo needed to create on the screen–they started going bigger in the real world too.

“If the dragon gets 10 feet size in just the body, then you see every tiny tendon underneath, and that skin starts stretching, and if it breathes in and out, then you see how the skin starts stretching over, and it’s rolling over the muscle and the bones, and if you don’t do this–just the breathing, if it doesn’t breathe–you immediately feel there is something wrong,” Kuther explained.

“There was a lot of discussions about even looking at elephants, on how skin rolls over the bones,” he continued. “It stretches, it rolls over the bones, so [the animators] went for reference to see how that would look on an animal of this size.”

The results of that research are evident in the Season 7 scene in which Jon comes face to face with Drogon and runs his hand along the dragon’s face.

“You have an expectation of what that’s going to look like,” Kuther said. “That’s why they looked at elephants, where there is rougher and harsher skin, but then you have, around facial areas, their skin is softer, and when you touch it with your fingers, it would actually give in. So you see the fingers pressing in a little bit. When they shoot it, they usually have a cushion where you can touch it and press your fingers in, so we’re taking that information and applying it to the skin.”

Pixomondo’s latest project deals more directly with real world animals. The National Geographic Ocean Odyssey experience in New York lets the marine-curious walk through around nine different digital underwater environments. These spaces were created in part by Pixomondo’s digital artists, and partially with photogrammetry, a process that uses thousands of photographs to create massive 3D environments, then applies those photos to the environments like stickers to create realistic-looking digital, 3D spaces. The Odyssey includes curated but realistic underwater encounters like a day in the life of a “bait ball” composed of thousands of fish, and a playful sea lion that interacts with guests, whose actions and gestures are interpreted by a Microsoft Kinect.

“It’s kind of a disruption of that aquarium and zoo world,” Kuther said. “You can show day and night within minutes. You can turn all animals to X-ray and show the bone structures of these animals. You can have data overlays that are not possible, and you can create moments where two animals would never survive next to each other.”

The Ocean Odyssey encounter is open now in Times Square–and, of course, you’ll see more of Pixomondo’s work in Game of Thrones Season 8, whenever that happens.

It’s clear from the marketing alone that the Justice League movie’s Aquaman is not exactly the same character comic book fans love. But the actor behind Aquaman’s newest incarnation had a message for fans during a Justice League press conference in London: “Stick with it.”

“For the people who are like, ‘He’s not really Aquaman,’ it’s like, just wait a little bit longer,” Momoa said. “Stick with it for a little bit longer.”

Marvel set a template in the first phases of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with heroes mostly debuting in solo films before the focus shifted to team-ups and collaborations in films like The Avengers. DC is doing things differently, and Aquaman will appear first in Justice League, with a solo movie coming in December 2018.

“I want people to know that, in a year, you’re going to understand where he came from, what happened to his mother, what happened to his father, and how he was treated in this world,” he said. “He didn’t know how to use his powers. And sometimes he saved people, and sometimes he lost people, and his human side didn’t know how to cope with those things, and he would cover up those things. There’s a lot of layers to this guy, and I think once we do get to the solo film and you get to see the man, he’s going to take responsibility and help the world and become a king eventually.”

This incarnation of Aquaman is a Zack Snyder creation, Momoa said.

“It all kind of came from Zack’s mind,” he said. “I mean, Aquaman wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him.”

“I just wanted to make sure the fans knew that this gruff character, this man who lives within the tides, and is not really accepted in two different places–we needed to know where he came from and why he is this grumpy kind of bit of an a**hole to Batman,” he continued.

Momoa described himself as “a big kid” and said he couldn’t help tugging on Batman’s cape while on set.

“It’s just surreal that I’m here playing this guy and around these guys,” he said. “You’ll see us all up there and you’ll feel the same way.”

Ben Affleck, who stars in Justice League as Batman, chimed in: “I was like, ‘Who the f*** keeps pulling on my cape?'”

Justice League hits theaters Nov. 17.

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Xbox One X Release is 3 days away!

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The Mighty Thor has returned in Thor: Ragnarok! And he’s brought a few friends with him. But for as fun and wicked 1980s awesome as this third Asgardian film is, there are still plenty of dangling story threads and questions that we’re still puzzling over.

Of course, many of these issues may be resolved in future MCU movies… but for now, here are our 5 biggest WTF questions about Thor: Ragnarok…

Complete and utter spoilers follow, of course.

Look, Thor’s Asgardian buddies have never gotten the most extensive treatment, in part because his solo movies have had to split time between them and his Earth pals. But now that Jane Foster and the rest were jettisoned for Ragnarok, you’d think at least the Lady Sif would’ve gotten a bigger part.

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The questions around DC’s long-awaited Justice League movie intensified when, earlier this year, longtime DC director Zack Snyder stepped down from the film. He was replaced by Joss Whedon, who had served as the driving force for much of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Justice League‘s cast and producers addressed some of those questions, including how much influence Whedon ultimately had over the film, during a press conference in London.

“The movie is Zack’s DNA,” said Ben Affleck, who stars as Batman in Justice League. “The cast of the movie, the design of the movie–there’s something that people who don’t actually work on movies don’t understand, which is how much of the work is done in prep–the casting, the sets get built, the story is written. The ship is, in essence, sailing. I found as a director you can maybe change 10%, 15% or something, on the day. Zack’s ship set sail with us, and we were fortunate that when Zack was not able to continue, we got really lucky in that we got a guy who is very accomplished in his own right, and particularly in this genre, and he kind of sprinkled some of his fairy dust on our movie and finished it.”

Many fans of DC’s and Marvel’s movies are familiar with both Snyder’s and Whedon’s work, and it will be natural to watch Justice League with both directors in mind. But Affleck said it will be impossible to pick out exactly who is responsible for individual scenes.

“I don’t think there’s any way to go back, to me, and look at those scenes and go, ‘That’s a Joss scene, that’s a Zack scene,'” Affleck said. “It was more that they were both working together toward a common goal. Debbie [Snyder] would know better than I would, certainly, but I got the sense that Joss was working from what he had discussed with Zack before he stepped in.”

Deborah Snyder, Zack’s wife and frequent producing partner, spoke candidly about Justice League‘s production and Zack Snyder’s feelings.

“I think for us, this whole thing is so bittersweet, because we have been working on this franchise for the past, you know, almost eight years, when we started developing the script for Man of Steel, and then we moved on to BVS, and also Zack developed the story for Wonder Woman, which was leading up to the point of Justice League, where these characters were finally going to come together,” she said. “Not being able to complete his vision was extremely difficult. So that makes it hard.”

She reiterated that Whedon and Zack had already been collaborating when Whedon took over directing. “We were lucky that we had Joss already working on script pages,” she said. “And our feeling is that we’re hoping people don’t think about how the movie was made when they [go] to see it, because these characters are bigger than any director. They’re bigger than any of us. And we love and adore these characters and we love and adore all these people here.”

“It’s been just a great privilege and fun to work with Zack and Debbie and all of the actors in the various films,” added Justice League producer Charles Rover. “It was sad not to have Zack there, but as we’ve been saying, to have Joss come in, and he had already been working with Zack–and now we’re just really happy with the movie and really happy with the dynamics of what we’re doing.”

Justice League hits theaters Nov. 17.

In late August, former Valve scriptwriter Marc Laidlaw published Epistle 3, a strange letter detailing what appeared to be the conclusion to the Half-Life series that Valve never produced.

After a decade of Half-Life 3 jokes, Laidlaw’s post felt like the bittersweet end of an era. Even though we’ve known it for a while, something about reading an ex-series writer’s fanfiction of what could have been made the truth clearer than ever: Half-Life 3 isn’t happening.

At least, not officially.

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With Justice League only weeks away from hitting theaters, it was inevitable that there would be discussion about the transition of directing duties from Zack Snyder, who stepped away from the film due to personal tragedy, to Joss Whedon, who handled directing reshoots.

At a press conference at the film’s London junket, star Ben Affleck and producer Deborah Snyder spoke out about the transition between the two directors, and why, in their minds, Justice League remains Snyder’s movie.

“The movie is Zack’s DNA,” said Affleck, who reprises his role of Batman/Bruce Wayne from the Snyder-directed Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. “He cast the movie, he designed the movie. People, I think, don’t understand who don’t work on movies, which is how much work is done in prep. The casting, the sets get built, the story is written, the ship is in essence sailing.

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