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For more on the Xbox One reveal, check out our complete coverage. Microsoft has revealed its new console, the Xbox One, and it’s promising plenty of power. The heart of the new all-in-one entertainment system is raw power, corporate vice president for Xbox Live Marc Whitten today claimed during a live event. The console runs on native 64-bit architecture and has 5 billion transistors and 8GBs of system RAM. Its predecessor, the Xbox 360, has only 500 million transistors and 512MBs of RAM. The console reportedly has three operating systems in one. The first is the Xbox O/S, which Whitten claims gives game developers deep and instant access to the hardware. The second is a kernel of Windows. This gives Xbox One owners consistent access to web-powered applications in a way that Whitten says is flexible, powerful, and simple. The third O/S connects the first two, creating multitasking and the near-instantaneous switching between applications. “Only Microsoft and Xbox could bring this level of power, performance, and sophistication to the living room. There’s no waiting. You can switch to your game like it’s a TV channel flip,” Whitten claims. Xbox One also features USB 3.0, a Blu-ray DVD player, and Wi-Fi Direct, a standard that requires less setup by enabling devices to communicate with each other without a wireless access point. Whitten says the console runs quietly as well. Microsoft seems to be doubling down on its Kinect motion control sensor. One comes with every new Xbox, Whitten says, and it’s completely redesigned to respond instantly to your voice and gestures. Voice commands are now more conversational. A simple “Xbox On” turns on the console, and commands like “Go to Music” and “Watch TV” let you switch quickly between multiple programs. Whitten says the company’s new proprietary Time of Flight — a standard used to measure the time it takes for an object to travel a distance through a medium — is “rocket-science-level stuff.” “[It] measures the time, about 30 billionths of a second, that it takes individual photons to bounce off of you to create unprecedented accuracy and precision. Over 2 gigabits per second to understand your world.” The Kinect sensor itself is now 1080p and provides a wider scanning area. It understands the slightest rotation of a wrist or shoulder, Whitten claims, and tracks your balance as well. It even reads your heartbeat while you exercise. “This is a modern, powerful box engineered to deliver now and well into the future,” Whitten says. Filed under: Games, Media GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here! .blurb-cat-games hr { margin: 10px 0 10px 0; }

Remedy Entertainment’s love affair with live-action footage blended into games continues with its upcoming Xbox One exclusive Quantum Break. In the Xbox One’s first year, Microsoft plans to release 15 exclusive titles, eight of which are new properties. Quantum Break is leading the charge. Actions players take during the game portion of Quantum Break will ultimately affect the events in the lives of the live-action characters. Hopefully more details on how interconnected the two are will come out soon. For now, check out the trailer and gallery below. Filed under: Games GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here! .blurb-cat-games hr { margin: 10px 0 10px 0; }

343 Industries general manager Bonnie Ross has just announced a new live-action television series based in the Halo universe, and Steven Spielberg is on board as a creative partner. “The Halo universe is an amazing opportunity to be at that intersection where technology and myth-making meet to produce something ground-breaking,” said Spielberg in a prerecorded message. As yet, no further information exists on whether Halo: The Television Series will involve the Master Chief, when in the continuity it’ll take place, when it will premiere, or even how many episodes have been ordered. But it’s likely to be similar in design to the Forward Unto Dawn web series and, given its origins, exclusive to the new Xbox One console. For more on the Xbox One reveal, check out our complete coverage. Filed under: Games GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here! .blurb-cat-games hr { margin: 10px 0 10px 0; }

Bonnie Ross, general manager of 343 Industries has just announced a new live-action television series based in the Halo universe, and Steven Spielberg is on board. “The Halo universe is an amazing intersection where technology and myth-making meet,” said Spielberg in a prerecorded message. As yet, no further information exists on whether Halo: The Television Series will involve the Master Chief, when in the continuity it’ll take place, when it will premiere, or even how many episodes have been ordered. But it’s likely to be similar in design to the Forward Unto Dawn web series and, given its origins, exclusive to the new Xbox One console. Filed under: Games

Activision Blizzard unveiled its not-so-secret, long-awaited (at least since November) installment in the fastest-selling video game franchise of all time. Call of Duty: Ghosts will debut this fall on a variety of platforms including Microsoft’s next-generation game console. Eric Hirshberg, president and CEO of Activision Publishing, describes the game as the “best Call of Duty ever.” He also said that about the last one, and it is genuinely touching to see how he means it. But you can’t make fun of him. So far, he hasn’t been wrong. The market for these games has lived up to the hype, as the titles typically generate more than $1 billion within a few weeks after launch, every single year. Such sales have made Call of Duty one of the five most valuable game franchises in the industry. And today, the company has taken the wraps off the latest entry in the series at the event where Microsoft unveiled its next-generation Xbox game console. While the game bears a familiar name, Call of Duty: Ghosts is a brand new game world with new characters, new game play mechanics on new consoles, a new game engine, and a new story. About 40 million gamers are awaiting this title, which is not just a single game but a whole new sub-brand, much like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Blacks Ops. Like those sub-brands, Call of Duty: Ghosts is expected to spawn multiple titles in a new modern combat universe. As you might expect, Call of Duty: Ghosts represents another huge investment of time and money in a modern combat game. Developed by Infinity Ward, the title suggests that the game is about ghost-like elite soldiers who perform secret and controversial missions, always operating in stealth. The game scenes showed the signature Call of Duty style: intense action, a gripping narrative, pulse-pounding music, and stellar graphics. The company showed a canned demo of the game running on the next-generation Xbox, and the graphics looked superb. Activision didn’t show hands-on gameplay to journalists at its event last week, but it said that the animations on screen were running real-time, in the game engine itself as it operated on next-generation consoles. One of the highlights of the demo showed the Ghosts in scuba gear, diving under the sea to escape detection. They swam through a beautiful undersea environment with cool lighting effects, wave distortions, and many things moving at the same time. Only the most powerful game machines are capable of running such scenes, and clearly Microsoft has one of them. The action got particularly hot when a firefight broke out under water between divers who had guns that worked underwater (that seems to defy the laws of physics). The visuals were indeed so good that there is no way a current-generation Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 could run them. At an event last week, Hirshberg said, “From time to time, I have read stories about how long Call of Duty can last. They are about whether this franchise is ever going to crest. And I know that it seems that it should be. There is just one problem. It’s not. By every measurement you care to look at, Call of Duty has never been stronger. It’s not only thriving. It’s still growing. Sales of the game, sales of downloadable content, the number of people who play every month, the number of daily users, the number of hours played, the engagement with social media, the video views — just about any measurement you care to look at, this is still a franchise that is on the rise. After all this time, that’s pretty remarkable.” He added, “Keeping Call of Duty relevant, growing, thriving, and still surprising people — this long into its history — is not easy. In fact, it may be the hardest creative assignment of them all. With a franchise like Call of Duty, we have the dual responsibility to our fans to continue to make and refine the game that everyone fell in love with in

It’s taking more and more creative skill to come up with something original in the Call of Duty series these days. Activision, which announced Call of Duty: Ghosts today at Microsoft’s next-generation Xbox unveiling in Redmond, Wash., poured a lot of development resources, time, and money into making Ghosts into a game that delivers all-new gameplay, story, characters, and graphics for gamers who might be just a tad jaded. Observers have expected Call of Duty to hit its peak for years now, but Activision says the series is still defying gravity in terms of sales and user engagement. We sat down with Daniel Suarez, vice president of production at Activision Publishing, to talk about the new game and the strategy behind it. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview. GamesBeat: I was curious what decisions you guys made in terms of what to show, showing an underwater level like that. Was that something intended to show off the graphics? Daniel Suarez: Absolutely. If you look at what we’re trying to do this year, it’s deliver on all the key message points. New experience, new technology, new gameplay. That underwater level will be one of the things we demonstrate throughout the campaign, but I think that one really captured the graphic quality. The effects, the particles, the fish, the caustics in the water, looking at the light coming through, that hammers it home in terms of the new engine. New world, we didn’t tackle that issue so much, but I can talk about that in terms of the story. And then new gameplay experiences, we’ve had underwater in Call of Duty before, but it’s literally swimming from here to there. This is what I call an all-ghillied-up experience underwater. It’s playable. The level we saw showed maybe four minutes of gameplay, but it’s actually a much longer level. The game plays up that suspense and stealth in underwater engagements that we’ve never done in Call of Duty before. GamesBeat: It seems  so beautiful that it’s more appropriate for a Finding Nemo sequel. Suarez: Nah, I don’t think Nemo is going to blow up submarines. Maybe? GamesBeat: How do you then communicate to people, “It looks better, but here’s why you’re really going to like it”? Suarez: I want to touch on three key areas. One is that new world. That plays into why this Call of Duty is going to be different for everyone. Mark touched on it briefly in the video, but there’s a whole new universe we’re going to start with Ghosts. The game begins with a cataclysmic event. It demolishes the southern half of the United States. Unlike other Call of Duty games, you are now the underdog. The United States is decimated. It is no longer a superpower. You’re on the defensive. You and your brother are the two main characters portrayed throughout the game. What happens is, you meet up with this elite group of soldiers called the Ghosts. They’re a reconnaissance force that’s holding the line against this new superpower that’s coming in to invade the United States. The squad component is probably the most integral thing we’re trying to do, in terms of narrative and in terms of emotion in the gameplay. We’re building a different type of game mechanic that we haven’t done in Call of Duty before. Traditionally, you have your buddy character, be it Woods or be it Captain Price. Now it’s your entire squad. We’ve added a dynamic group of AI supporting characters that will be with you. We also added a dog to the squad. That’s going to add a new dynamic in terms of gameplay, commanding the dog. He’s part of your squad and he’s actually going to do things in the game that you haven’t done before. What Stephen Gaghan did – he’s the writer we brought in, he wrote Traffic and he directed and wrote Syriana – he’s bringing in a different level of storytelling than what we’ve done before. We brought in David Goyer on Black Ops, and he was all about telling the dual storylines over longer time periods and creating these twists within the game. Gaghan

Xbox’s popular auto-racing series, Forza, will get a new installment on Microsoft’s newest system, the Xbox One. Microsoft Game Studios chief Phil Spencer announced during today’s reveal event that Forza 5 will launch with the new system. Check out the trailer and first screens from the announcement trailer below. For more on the Xbox One reveal, check out our complete coverage or our liveblog and livestream. Filed under: Games GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here! .blurb-cat-games hr { margin: 10px 0 10px 0; }

Microsoft announced the Xbox One and the first games it confirmed for the new system were four titles from EA Sports. Electronic Arts sports division revealed FIFA 14, Madden NFL 25, NBA Live 14, and UFC are all in the works for the Xbox One. The publisher is using a new graphics engine, called Ignite, that EA claims will bring in a new sense of realism. “Today marks the beginning of a broad strategic partnership between EA and Microsoft,” EA Sports executive vice president Andrew Wilson said. “We share a common vision with Microsoft that games should be intelligent, dynamic, connected, rich with emotion, and — most importantly — fun.” Wilson went on to promise that all four games will fundamentally change the way people play. “Ignite was designed specifically to blur the line between real and virtual, ” he said. “Sports are just as much about your head as they are about your feet or hands. We built new technology that allows players to make decisions with four times more calculations per second.” The increased graphics power of the Xbox One helps EA Sports show more of the playing field at any one time. This should give players more context during the game or match. EA went on to show a sizzler reel of its four announced games. It didn’t have much gameplay, but the animation is smooth. We’ve included a gallery below: For more, check out of complete coverage of the Xbox One reveal and our livestream and liveblog. Filed under: Games GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here! .blurb-cat-games hr { margin: 10px 0 10px 0; }

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Xbox Live is going to the cloud. At today’s Xbox Reveal event, corporate vice president of Xbox Live Marc Whitten announced that the new Xbox Live service for the upcoming Xbox One console provide access to movies, games, and save files from “anywhere.” He also said that the system will feature a “dedicated DVR” to capture your gameplay and upload that to the cloud as well. However, these were not shown in action, as Whitten only spent a few minutes discussing the online service before moving on to the next part of Microsoft’s presentation. For more, check out of complete coverage of the Xbox One reveal and our livestream and liveblog. Filed under: Games GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here! .blurb-cat-games hr { margin: 10px 0 10px 0; }