gaf, I have had an xbox one for over a year now and for the past year I had two more TVs and two PS4s hooked up in the house that my roommates owned. I have also been into PC gaming for 10 years or so as well, and I have always had a mid to high tier parts.
Right now i am confused about what is a defining characteristic or feature of this generation of consoles. Let me give you an example of what I mean.
When the xbox came out, it was the only console at that time with networking capabilities. Sony and Nintendo released adapters eventually, Sony eventually released a console with built in networking, and Nintendo abandoned networking altogether. Online at the time was very primitive. But then the 360 came out, and Xbox Live evolved and changed everything for consoles at the time. The amount of AAA game demos, AAA public betas, media content, downloadable games, DLC, etc was amazing to me at that time. I had had all of that on PC already, but at that time Steam wasn't large, and everything was disorganized. There were also a lot of slow downloads back then. I remember downloading EA patches from their public FTP site and it was brutal. You could pay for premium download services at the time though. The Xbox Live store at that time also predated the Apple App Store. Sony launched the PSN store, and Nintendo joined in on the online game. Neither service were near as good as Xbox Live last gen in my opinion, with Sony being second and Nintendo being in a distant third in terms of online features and content. That being said, Xbox Live had the unique feature of not being free.
I believe that online features revolutionized the industry at the time. All of the consoles have built upon their online features from last year, but in many ways Xbox Live is worse on the Xbox One than it was on the 360. PSN made a major leap and is also a paid service now. Nintendo now offers a more in-depth experience that still needs work but is definitely making improvements.
But here's the tl;dr: I can't think of anything this generation that is truly ground breaking. Everything is a bit of an improvement over last gen, general hardware refreshes(the fact that PS4 doesn't have 5GHz wireless is amazing to me), I can't really think of anything that is new on consoles. The amount of content introduced to consoles last gen was a ground breaking new feature.
What do you think is the cutting edge feature of this gen? Is it Xbox One TV support? Is it built in streaming support?
And I just want to clarify that this isn't a knock on these consoles. They do so many things way better than their predecessors, I just don't know which one is looked at as this big leap.
Right now i am confused about what is a defining characteristic or feature of this generation of consoles. Let me give you an example of what I mean.
When the xbox came out, it was the only console at that time with networking capabilities. Sony and Nintendo released adapters eventually, Sony eventually released a console with built in networking, and Nintendo abandoned networking altogether. Online at the time was very primitive. But then the 360 came out, and Xbox Live evolved and changed everything for consoles at the time. The amount of AAA game demos, AAA public betas, media content, downloadable games, DLC, etc was amazing to me at that time. I had had all of that on PC already, but at that time Steam wasn't large, and everything was disorganized. There were also a lot of slow downloads back then. I remember downloading EA patches from their public FTP site and it was brutal. You could pay for premium download services at the time though. The Xbox Live store at that time also predated the Apple App Store. Sony launched the PSN store, and Nintendo joined in on the online game. Neither service were near as good as Xbox Live last gen in my opinion, with Sony being second and Nintendo being in a distant third in terms of online features and content. That being said, Xbox Live had the unique feature of not being free.
I believe that online features revolutionized the industry at the time. All of the consoles have built upon their online features from last year, but in many ways Xbox Live is worse on the Xbox One than it was on the 360. PSN made a major leap and is also a paid service now. Nintendo now offers a more in-depth experience that still needs work but is definitely making improvements.
But here's the tl;dr: I can't think of anything this generation that is truly ground breaking. Everything is a bit of an improvement over last gen, general hardware refreshes(the fact that PS4 doesn't have 5GHz wireless is amazing to me), I can't really think of anything that is new on consoles. The amount of content introduced to consoles last gen was a ground breaking new feature.
What do you think is the cutting edge feature of this gen? Is it Xbox One TV support? Is it built in streaming support?
And I just want to clarify that this isn't a knock on these consoles. They do so many things way better than their predecessors, I just don't know which one is looked at as this big leap.