Gevonden op de site: PC Zone EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: XBOX LIVE It may not be 'live' as soon as we had been lead to believe, but if Microsoft's promises are to be believed it could well be worth the wait 22:02 Today in Seville Microsoft unveiled its long-awaited plans for the project it hopes will set its struggling console shoulders-high above the competition: Xbox Live. Live is Microsoft's online serice for Xbox, a closed broadband network for gamers to connect to, where each and every Xbox game with online features can be played from the click of a button. Sign up for the service and choose your own unique online name, or Gamer Tag, and you can build up your online alter-ego into one of a new breed of virtual sportsmen, tackling players from all around the world on your route to the top of the gaming leagues. Xbox Live is not merely a list of games servers, however. The Seattle giant has gone to great lengths to make the Live experience as close to playing on the sofa at home with your friends as you possible. Live gives you access to potentially millions of friends across the world, and coming with voice communication software and headset out of the box, Microsoft has created an experience it likes to call the 'virtual couch', where instead of sitting in your front room with a couple of mates playing split screen, your sofa now spans the globe. Eager to find out what makes this multi-million dollar project tick, we recently jumped at the opportunity to sit down with Xbox' director of software development Jon Thommason. Can you outline how Xbox Live will work? Thommason: Sure, let's talk about at retail. It's going to be a little bit different than at the test drive period than what happens at the retail launch, so let me describe retail launch and I can tell you what will be different between now and then. At retail launch you'll walk in to your store and there should be some sort of Xbox Live display. In the display there will be an Xbox Live starter kit; this will consist of the headset, a coupon for 12 months of service, and, of course, some free games. They'll be small games, not as big as the retail stuff... Will these be games written specially for Xbox Live? Thommason: They're definitely Xbox Live games, written to take advantage of the service. We'll change those games, cycle through them over time. The ones we'll have in the US this Fall won't probably be the same as the ones that we do next year. We'll change them all the time, maybe every three or six months. And this will be priced at roughly the same as a single game? Thommason: Yes, roughly the price of a game. So, you'll pick this thing up and that gets you set up online for a year. So, you take it home and plug your Xbox in to your DSL line and once it's plugged in, in most cases, it should configure autonatically and it should just work. The starter kit comes with a disc which you'll put in your machine and it'll contain some of those free games I talked about, but one of the things it'll do is update your dashboard for you. It does this fairly silently, but there's a bunch of new stuff that gets installed. It'll then take you in to our sign-up process. This is a few steps you have to go through in order to get online. In here you get to choose your Gamer Tag, your unique name that identifies you worldwide as who you are... ... and can this name be changed? Thommason: There's not really a way on the Xbox to change it, and there's some good reasons for that. We really want people to develop their reputation around that and have that be how they're known. You can change it from customer support, but it's not something we recommend changing, we'd like you to leave that alone. The next step is to enter your Credit Card information; this is how we authenticate you are who you say you are. We actually don't bill anything on the Credit Card. Is there no option for someone who doesn't have a Credit Card? Thommason: You actually need to get one somehow, and it could even be a Debit Card. There are a lot of reasons for doing that. Such as charging for content, by any chance? Thommason: We really want to enable publishers to put content out there that people can pay for, and if we haven't allowed for any billing mechanism then we're kind of restricting the publishers with what they can do in the future. Actually in the US you have to have someone over the age of 18 to validate the account. We don't have that same requirement in Europe but we still think it's a good idea to have it there. The interesting thing about that is that we don't want people abusing the service in lots of ways and having that credit card data there keeps the service a little better protected. When we surveyed gamers one of the things they told us was that security was really important; once they see cheating going on on the servers they just stop playing. And as you've got the Gamer Tag linked to an individual, it makes things a lot easier to police? Thommason: Yes, and the individual is linked to a Credit Card - see that's the chain right there. We think people will abuse the service a lot less and it'll make it a more fair and level playing field. So, to set up your Credit Card you simply enter your Credit Card number and your billing address so we can validate it and then that's it - you're signed up. And once you've signed up that one time, that's the only time you have to sign up. Actually, there's something I missed from the sign-up phase. In between choosing your Gamer Tag and entering your Credit Card information there's a step of entering your subscription code. This comes from a coupon in the box and this is what activates your 12 months subscription. This is what says that you bought the kit and it's unique to you. From then on you just have to put a game in, it could be any game you buy from retail - Unreal Championship will be there, Mech Assault, Ghost Recon, Whacked!, Phantasy Star Online... Phantasy Star should prove popular... Thommason: Actually, Phantasy Star Online may be a game that we put in as one of the bundled in games... Really? Thommason: It may be, we're still working things out, but that could be one of the free games. So you're aiming for retail... Thommason: ... early next year... ... but you've said that some of them could be playable this year? Thommason: Right, so all those game I mentioned before will come out in Europe this year, many of them before December even. So at some point this year we'll let you play those games - we'll be announcing all those exact dates at X02. So how will we be playing these without the service? Thommason: What happens is that the game launches and those folks on our closed beta will get to play. And everyone else? Thommason: When we get to the Test Drive phase. The Test Drive is basically the same. The product that you get will be virtually the same as the product you get at retail but the difference is that you go to a Web site to sign up. You go through the same process as the Xbox, you enter your Credit Card etc, but the product is mailed to you and charged to your Credit Card there from the Web. I guess it's like ordering something from Amazon.com. They still pay for their fee to get the starter kit, but the difference is that their 12 months does not start until we go live at retail. They get the advantage of getting to pick their Gamer Tag early, but they get all the extra months until we get to retail. What are you doing to create an online community? Thommason: The biggest thing we're doing for the online community right now is the stuff that's happening off the Xbox - all the fan sites and Web sites. We expect these to play a big part. The things we're not doing today but plan to in the future are user interfaces outside of the game to help people connect and build community and stuff. We're not doing that right away, though, We'll do a lot of things on Xbox.com and the various international Xbox sites. We'll do contests and giveaways - a lot of things to create community. Anyone you play with in a game you can add to your Friends List. So if you're playing a lot of random matches you can punch in their Gamer Tag and add them to your Friends List. Can you use the headset to talk to your mates on your Friends List through the Dashboard? Thommason: Not currently today. That's an interesting kind of story - it's something we're open to doing at some point in the future, but we're trying to walk a fine line with the telecommunications companies. We really don't want to position the Xbox as a telephone - free long distance calls on Xbox. I guess it has the technology to do that, but we want to work really closely with our partners and I think there are few things we could do that would upset them more than being a free long distance provider. So you can talk to them in the game but not outside of it, then? Thommason: Not on the Dashboard, no. We actually don't have a keyboard today. I guess you could do it with a virtual keyboard, but that doesn't sound like too much fun to me.
I guess one of the biggest selling points of Xbox Live is the voice communication. How important has this been to Microsoft? Thommason: I can't emphasise enough how important voice is. It's kind of funny and I've done this a couple of times just for fun to see how it works: you go and play a game with voice - there are a couple of games on the PC which have text chat that are similar to games on Xbox - and then go and play a game on Xbox Live with voice. I can't tell you how different an experience it is. Just simple things. Like when you're playing Halo... ...on Xbox Live? Thommason: Well, we've simulated Halo with speakerphones because it doesn't have voice chat. Just being able to shout "Hey, you go left" compared to having some canned message or having type text chat - it makes a huge difference. It just makes it possible to really pretend like you're sitting on the same couch, being able to collaborate in realtime... kind of like having a virtual couch! Having that 'virtual couch' across the Internet really makes the experience - it's like night and day. So how does this effect cheating? Surely if someone's dead you don't want them helping from beyond the grave? Thommason: It depends on the game. I think in some cases people will keep voice enabled when somebody's dead. In other cases, in Ghost Recon for example (which is a pretty hardcore simulation) I would expect that you can't talk when you're dead. But I haven't seen it yet, so I don't know for sure. I don't want to speak too much for individual games because I don't want to dictate to the designers because they're the ones that really understand their audience - I know about operating systems and networks! What's the delay like on the chat? Thommason: It depends on the game, they get a lot of control about how much they buffer. A lot of our games are running at about 4/10ths of a second right now, because we like to buffer up a bunch of packets so they can make sure it never breaks up if the network glitches a bit. We've seen other games that can do much better - down in the quarter of a second range. There's always a bit of latency, probably a little bit more than a cellphone. Our voice is generally about cellphone quality. What happens if every player starts speaking in the game at once? Thommason: Actually it doesn't change a whole lot, strangely enough. Our architecture is all fully designed to have independent voice channels between boxes. The exception might be a game that has a lot of players, say a massively multiplayer game. They're going to have to come up with some clever schemes to make sure that they only have a relatively small number of voice channels. Typically eight is kind of the top-end for today's broadband on Xbox, so you generally won't get more than eight voices at the same time. But it also gets too confusing beyond that. And, of course, you can mute out players, too. Thommason: You can. You can mute out players by Gamer Tag and once you've muted them, they're muted - and that's it. Can you choose only to hear gamers by Gamer Tag, if you only wanted to speak to friend A and friend B? Thommason: No, you actually have to actively mute. We decided that generally people wanted to be able to talk to each other as opposed to the opposite. We've heard that individual games can track how well a player is doing in order to match him up with a suitable opponent. So how does this all work? Thommason: Individual games can write to what we call our 'statistics database'. We actually have a whole bunch of servers which will track things by Gamer Tag, but it's up to the game whether it uses it. The game can tell our service that a player with a certain Gamer Tag just accumulated whatever points and they can write to the database. And, of course, they're allowed to make queries back to ask who's got the high score, so they can build their leaderboards. So is there a way for gamers to access this and find a player with stats similar to his? Thommason: Well that's how our OptiMatch system works. You're allowed to make a query against a high score, or a level, pull it all together and group people. You've mentioned OptiMatch there. How do your match modes work? Thommason: What the gamer's going to see for Xbox Live games is two match-making modes. Well, I should say three, actually. One is called QuickMatch; this gets you straight in to a game as quickly as you can without any kind of complex set-up. You take what you get. The next type is OptiMatch; this lets you effectively form a query against our match-making database for what type of game you want to play. So if I were the sort of player that, say, killed a lot of players but rarely got killed in Unreal Championship, it would match me against someone suitable? Thommason: Yes. It's up to the game, the service doesn't do it itself. Unreal certainly has the ability to use the statistics they accumulate in their match-making queries. It's up to them how richly they use that.
And the third game mode? Thommason: Is Create-a-Match. If you didn't find the right match for you with the other two, or if you're going to play with friends, then you can go Create-A-Match. When I go and do that I get to set all the parameters. As soon as I do that it advertises my game to the match-making server and tells it that I've just created a game with, say, two slots for 'friends' and four slots for other people. So what it'll do then is allow two of my friends join and up to four other people and then I start the game because I am the host. A lot of other games are join-in-progress games. So I could be in the middle of a deathmatch and people can come and go as they choose. But I may be the one to host the game or set up a dedicated server with Unreal. Those are the three main games - QuickMatch, OptiMatch and Create-A-Match. And on top of this we've heard you've got technology to match you up against someone close to you on the Internet, by IP address (your unique 'location' on the Internet -Ed). Thommason: Yeah, that's exactly right. Underlying all the stuff in our match-making service is a technology to know where you 'are' on the Internet and we can put IP addresses close to other IP addresses together, making for games with much less 'lag' - lower transit time between the two Xboxes. That's really what effects the quality of the game the most is how long it takes in milliseconds for a single packet of data to travel between Xboxes, and it varies hugely. If you're going clear around the world... it can take half a second sometimes and that's a long time. You don't want someone to have shot you before your Xbox even knows they're there. Thommason: No you don't. Exactly. Imagine if your Xbox only updated on another player every half a second! That's not any fun. Just so you know, though, games know how to accommodate for that; games aren't that silly. Even if they can't update that often, they don't just update with position, they can update with velocity and direction and actually interpolate. So they can see where a player was moving to and what speed, so in-between the updates it makes you move at that speed. Now the next packet of data they get will say where he's really at, but instead of actually jumping to that position the game smoothly moves you to that position, so you don't see a big jerk. The best games do a good job of that sort of position interpolation. You mentioned publishers charging for content earlier. Do you see this as a key part of Xbox Live? Thommason: It's going to be one of those things that ramps up over time, but I see it as being really important. We get a huge amount of interest from the game developers out there because they're really interested in extending the shelf life of the game. There's nothing like having a whole new set of levels or a whole new character or whatever to extend the life of the game. Now the question is how much of this is going to be free versus how much is pay-for and the answer is we just don't know yet. They have to make a trade-off: if something's free it means that everyone is going to get it and it helps extend the life that way, whereas going for premium means you're actually trying to make money off that. It's kind of wait-and-see. What kind of things do you see being free and what do you see being premium? Thommason: I'd expect the premium stuff to be stuff like full-on expansion packs, full level kits - things that really have a tangible value. I'd expect most everything else to be free, but that's just my expectation. Do you expect to see 'mods' making an appearance? Thommason: I do think so. What I'd expect is to see the ones which have been really successful on the PC. Games like Unreal Tournament and Unreal Championship are not radically different games, and I'd think you'll see some of the best mods from Unreal Tournament get ported to Unreal Championship. How about opportunities for players to get their own addons uploaded somewhere for other players to download? Thommason: I think so, but I think that the way that will generally happen is that the player will create them on the PC and that the publisher will then pick the best of them and get them on Xbox. I think that over time more and more companies will add level creation features to their Xbox games. Activision did a great job of that with Tony Hawk, right? I do think that that sort of model will happen over time and publishers will find ways of getting them on Xbox. It is something we're interested in as well, creating an infrastructure to actually get those levels back from the Xbox to the service. Where do you see episodic games fitting in? Thommason: I don't think we'll ever exclusively get there but I'd like to see a lot more of that. I think TV is such a rich medium today. It's easy to poke fun at it, but the level and quality of fiction has really improved recently. We have some really movie-quality fiction on television which is very episodic. I'd love to see the games industry take on some of that fiction - I think it would broaden our audience significantly if that happened. Now, do I have any great predictions if this is going to happen? I don't know, it's just my wish more than anything. I value that sort of story and I think that there's a lot of people that value that kind of story. Look at the broad acceptance of television - it's huge. If we had that broad acceptance of games we'd be a much bigger industry. What sort of take-up do you expect to see with Xbox Live? Thommason: You know it's one of those things where I really can't make any predictions on numbers but my philosophy on it is really simple: I want every single subscriber who comes to Xbox Live to have a great experience. And if we start out really small and all those people have a great experience then I'm happy.
