bludger.org

Xbox Live: First Impressions

January 7th, 2009 - 1:33pm

With my Christmas present for 2008 — an Xbox 360 — came a one-month trial membership to Xbox LIVE. The intention of the trial is, of course, meant to encourage you to continue using the subscription-based service once the trial is over. The price is certainly not high, around $75-90 a year depending on if you shop around, but coming from a background of only having paid PC games online (which — besides games such as World of Warcraft — are usually free) means I am more critical of such a service.

My first impressions are not as high as my original expectations. I’ve played probably 10-12 hours of games online, as well as using the Gold service but not for multiplayer much more than that. Though it may be the games I am playing, both the multiplayer and other online service seems like it’s missing out on a whole lot of sophistication. I’m one for stats, so a while back when playing Battlefield 2, the ability to see my stats on sites such as bf2s.com was awesome. I could see my (admittedly pathetic) statistics such as playtimes, accuracy, preferred weapon, favourite level, score rates and much, much (much!) more.

Why I don’t have access to these sorts of statistics is beyond me. I should be able to see, at a minimum:

• When I signed up to the service
• How many hours I’ve spent playing games (broken down by single player, co-op and other multiplayer)
• A history of my last week, month, year’s sessions
• My average time between achievements (which means achieving certain things in-game, such as finishing a level without dying)
• An easily-viewable list of all my achievements
• Who I’ve played with most

The above should be the absolute minimum starting point for stats and it should be available online in graph form as well. Instead, you get a very limited screen (alternatively, if you sign into MSN you might get a slightly-less limited screen) of information. Wouldn’t it be great if I could see the last few matches I’d played online and see the players so I could provide reputation scores a lot faster? While we’re at it, why can’t I see my previous reputation scores (and I wonder if you can override them). If graphed, I could see that I provide more negative feedback on weekends, for instance. I’d have no problem with people seeing at least some of these stats (which I should be able to show and hide as I want). Since I work with this sort of stuff regularly I don’t see why it would be difficult to implement.

The reputation system doesn’t seem too work well, either — particularly since one of the games I’ve been playing doesn’t seem to have a lot of people online. The reputation system is difficult to input positive or negative feedback, and it’s too simplistic. Also, I’ve never seen anyone with a negative reputation and a number of people with the highest scoring reputation have simply been jerks.

Nor does the “TrueSkill” skill matching system seem to work as advertised (maybe I’ve not played enough to have a proper baseline?). I’ve been in games where I was hopelessly outclassed — why is this? If I have the lowest ranking in a game and am pitted against people with the highest rankings, surely something’s not right.

For a service touted as having consistency, getting into an online game isn’t consistent at all. Some games I am required to select a host, some automatically choose one for me. Where one was chosen, I connected and was subsequently disconnected because I had not downloaded additional content. Surely I should not connect at all in the first place? Afterwards, the game’s main screen reloaded and I had to wait for it to load, then the multiplayer menu to load. Why?

It gets worse: most of the games do not provide dedicated servers, meaning individual players act as hosts. This is poor because those hosts always have advantages over the other players, and often their home Internet connections are not sufficient to support many players. If so many PC games have free dedicated servers (which anyone can download and run — ISPs often run them and it provides a more reliable connection and a more level playing field), what am I paying for, exactly? I can’t even change my username without having to pony up almost $15!

Even though there are a lot of negatives, there are some good points in there. If I’m playing a game, and a friend notices I’m playing they can invite me to play. Better still, friends on MSN can send me messages while I’m playing (which you can turn off, if you don’t want to be bugged). The voice chat in all games is a great feature too, even though more often than not it turns into an insult-fest. Turning individual users off isn’t too tough.

Being able to have an identity which carries from game-to-game, and not having to worry about signing up individually for each game is great and it would be nice to see guilds, communities or permanent groups in the service other than having to create a party each time you play.

At this stage I am not convinced the service is worth my money. I’ll keep playing while my trial continues to see if I’ve missed the point but I think it needs the following features implemented before I become further interested — particularly if I’m being charged:

• Dedicated servers for each game
• A consistent and specific (i.e. not requiring me to virtually load the game again) interface for multiplayer games — the current one just isn’t good enough
• More interaction with the service via the web
• Recording of stats and pretty graphs (even if I have to opt-in as with Flickr)
• It’d be nice to see a mode similar to Wii’s WiiConnect24 which could flash if friends are online, even when the console is off, though I doubt the current hardware is capable
  

This seems a pretty scathing review of a service I haven’t used comprehensively, and I think the only way to know for sure is to try more games, ones with larger numbers of players. Regardless, the points above don’t exist on the service in it’s current incarnation. For a paid service, Xbox LIVE doesn’t seem to offer a whole lot of benefit over simply buying the PC version of the same game and playing it online for free. Having a list of friends online is about it, which can be easily resolved with an IM client on the PC side.

Tags: gaming, internet, nerdy, ramblings, xbox, xboxlive