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Designer of Gears Of War: Bites on Scorpio, calls it an excuse for the Xbox One

At E3 2016, Microsoft announced two new consoles to the Xbox family, the Xbox One and the beastly Xbox Scorpio.These two new consoles are bringing exciting new features and performance improvements over the base Xbox One. These consoles will have much more horsepower to drive games at a much stable framerate and HDR with Scorpio allowing to run VR and upscale games to glorious 4k.

Cliff Bleszinski originally intended to show off the new game Lawbreakers  at E3 2016, which will be available on the PC. Cliff has a huge role in the making of Xbox’s Gears of War exclusive with him contributing to Gears of War 1, 2, and 3. In an interview, journalists asked about how Cliff felt about Microsoft’s upcoming Scorpio, yes you guessed it, he isn’t impressed.

He said:

“Is Microsoft going full Sega 32x and Mega CD right now? I think it’s weird. It’s like dude, are you trying to turn the Xbox into a PC? What’s going on right now?”

He then had a few thoughts on why the Scorpio idea came to Microsoft’s mind:

“I think it feels like an apology move for them for not making the console as powerful as it should have been in favour of making sure the Kinect was boxed in with it. So now they have to play catch-up. In a way, you can trace this all the way back to their well-intended E3 from a few years ago — where they were trying to go fully digital, etcetera, etectera, and the internet backlash made them back pedal.”

When you do that, you genuinely tend to see games that don’t fully shine on the high end. Like we saw with this past console generation [publishers] were hedging their bets with a chicken-and-the-egg thing. They were putting the games on PlayStation 3 and 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One and basically you get higher resolution textures but it’s still a masked texture instead of being dynamically generated. So they’re kind of hobbling themselves in regards to that kind of scalability. It’s trying to have your cake and eat it too.”

Additionally, Cliff then explained about how dissed he was about the cross-play multiplayer feature Microsoft is trying to achieve. He explained how unfair this would be. Especially when we could expect Xbox players playing with different variables of performance. He think that this idea isn’t good by explaining how of an unfair advantage players will experience during gaming online. He states:

“If you make a game and it’s on the cheaper console and it’s 30 frame per second and 60 frames on the other console, that could affect the performance in a twitch shooter, for example. It’s the same thing with Cross Play for action games which I don’t understand the desire for. I can understand with co-op games but if you have a shooter and one player has a controller and another player has a keyboard and mouse and the controller person is at 30 (fps) and the mouse-and-keyboard person is at 60, most of the time the keyboard person is going to completely dominate. So good luck with your match making.” (via)

Well, generally being a PC Gamer, I wouldn’t agree with every single word that Cliff says, but most of his words here do make a point. However, on Microsoft’s side we could see why they wanted a new console, especially when AMD brought new performance hardware to the table. And with the rising demand of VR and 4k, why not? the Scorpio is coming!

Usman Abdul Jabbar

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