WTB wrote:
There's absolutely no chance in hell the next Xbox would have hardware issues on a par with the 360. It'd be the end of Xbox if it did, regardless of its subsequent success. No way can you come back from that twice. It'll be checked and quadruply checked before release.
Oh I'm sure they'll try their best, and certainly harder than they did last time, but I'm just not that convinced that any amount of testing they can do between the time the hardware is completely finalised and the time they need to start selling it will be as strenuous as the real world useage of millions of actual people all over the world. Maybe I'm over-egging the pudding a tad here but it's still a very real risk with new hardware that will (hopefully) be as cutting edge as a new Xbox will be. I also suspect people have become inured to a certain extent to hardware failures and although it's not a good precedent to set by any means the ups and downs of both the Xbox 360 and PS3's hardware lifecycle have taught it as a fact of life so I don't think it would be the death knell you're predicting.
WTB wrote:
As for the last this generation has to offer, it's mainly sequels any way! New hardware, new IPs, proper 1080p, 60 frames per second, 64 player Battlefield multiplayer (I bloody hope). So long as it's 100% backwards compatible with the 360 - both retail games and XBLA - I'll be queuing up at midnight.
Even if the last games of this generation were mainly sequels, and I'm not convinced of that, does that mean they won't be worth playing? You yourself seem happy at the prospect of Skyrim currently and have bummed Gears of War sequels, CoD games in general and Forza 4 to name just a recent few. I dunno, you just seem bizarrely eager to write off the sort of games you're actually enjoying right now while leaping to the conclusion that new hardware will somehow magically bring new IP (why neccesarily should it?) which is an odd position to hold I think. It's also worth noting that the 360 has always had
very limited backwards compatibility and the PS3 quickly moved to none at all so if, as you say, that's a requirement for you then you could already be heading for disappointment there.
Don't get me wrong, I'm thoroughly looking forward to the next gen stuff and I'm becoming more and more aware of the hardware limitations of the stuff we're seeing now, but writing off current games as crap sequels and mythologising the amazing new games that will appear as soon as consoles become more powerful seems a bit of an unbalanced view.
Um, I'm increasingly aware that every time I post in this thread it's to talk about stuff not directly related to Skyrim. Apologies folks, just tell me to shut up if that's the consenscus as I really am not intentionally trying to derail this thread.