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Horrible.Video Games Other

[[folder: Xbox One reveal]]

• The reveal of the Xbox One was a disaster on par with the Sega Saturn E3 '95 presentation, caused by complacency on Microsoft's part due to the success of the Xbox 360. Instead of getting gamers even more hyped for its new system, the presentation caused the mother of all backlashes against the Xbox One (or "Xbone", as it was eventually nicknamed).
  • The presentation focused on multimedia features - in particular DVR functionality and Skype calling - at the expense of games. The few games that Microsoft did show largely consisted of AAA blockbuster titles not exclusive to the Xbone. Microsoft's vision was an all-in-one entertainment device, hence the name "Xbox One" (despite the initial confusion with the original Xbox name being considered that to some people at the time). But gamers, the people who were most likely to watch the presentation, were obviously more interested in video games, with everything else being a secondary concern.
  • The same presentation also confirmed some rumors that were floating around and causing suspicion and worries among gamers. They would later go back on their word for reasons detailed below, but by the time they did, the damage was already done. Among the more troubling rumors were massive restrictions that were going to be placed system-wide:
    • The Xbone would require an online check-in every 24 hours, or else it wouldn't work. This was a particularly bad and unpopular idea, considering the server meltdowns that SimCity (2013) and Diablo III had when they tried the same thing with this sort of DRM - and those were individual games, not an entire library. These worries turned out to not be completely unfounded; just over a year after the Play Station 4 and Xbone were released, a Christmas Day DDOS attack against both the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live temporarily took down both consoles' networking capabilities. Had Microsoft stuck to their guns on the DRM, new PS4 owners would merely be stuck with offline games, but because there would have been no offline games on the Xbone, every single Xbone would have been a gigantic paperweight until the DDOS ended, a catastrophic PR blow that the Xbox brand probably wouldn't have been able to recover from.
    • The Xbone would have unprecedented restrictions on used games, charging players money just to be able to play a copy of a game someone else had purchased. Not only would this have made borrowing a needless hassle, but even today a not-insignificant number of gamers can't afford to buy everything new for at least one of a multitude of reasons, including if they were a child with no independent income. In many cases, these people would have to buy a game used, wait for a sale that may not happen, or just not get the game at all. This restriction would have significantly limited their ability to buy games for the Xbone, which may have prompted parents to discourage their children from wanting an Xbone on the basis that "that other console can play used games", and there's no guarantee that these parents found out about the U-turn before their families were committed to the PS4.
    • Every Xbone would come with a Kinect, a camera peripheral that was always on for the purposes of the "Xbox On" command, and would be required to be plugged in for the console to function. At the time, Edward Snowden had just recently exposed underhanded surveillance by the NSA and caused Americans to become concerned about privacy, so the idea of having a device in your living room that was always looking at you and listening to you was met with derision and mockery. Obviously, the NSA was a political issue beyond Microsoft's control, but they could've considered people's concerns in light of Snowden's revelations. Many potential buyers also had no interest in the Kinect, since the previous generation of consoles had caused many people to associate motion controls with gimmicky gameplay and shovelware. In particular, the previous Kinect had done the most serious damage to the perception of motion controls because Microsoft focused too much on one-upping the Wiimote and the PlayStation Move and not enough on making something that functioned adequately as a video game control scheme. This, combined with the aforementioned terrible showing at E3 2010, meant the Kinect name was tainted no matter how much of an improvement functionality-wise the Xbone's Kinect was. Forcing people to get the expensive peripheral along with the console seemed like a waste of money. In short, the Xbone's Kinect was a victim of Microsoft's tone-deafness to both the political climate and people's opinions of its predecessor.
  • Then there was the Microsoft E3 2013 presentation. While it did have some games to show off to garner some hype, Microsoft was still going into this conference with the botched reveal hanging over their heads. This was their best chance to turn things around in their favor. Unfortunately, they blew it. When pressed on the controversial policies, Microsoft, at best, simply dodged the questions entirely. Most infamously, however, they showed outright contempt, especially with Don Mattrick, President of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business, recommending that gamers alienated by the always-online DRM stick with the Xbox 360. This, naturally, only further fueled the flames of outrage that consumers had built towards them. It also allowed Sony to effortlessly upstage Microsoft by revealing that the Play Station 4 would not restrict offline play or used games in any way. Sony even released an "instructional video" on game sharing as a very memorable Take That! to Microsoft. As Jim Sterling pointed out, Sony was applauded for doing nothing different from normal, almost entirely because what Microsoft was doing different was so consumer-hostile.
    The positive reaction to Sony's presentation brought Microsoft to their senses, and soon afterwards they announced they would remove the 24-hour check-in and the used game policy despite previously claiming this was impossible. A press release announcing this was taken as a tacit admission by Microsoft that they saw how badly they would lose the upcoming console war if the restrictions remained. In addition, just six months after release they were forced to release an Xbone SKU without Kinect. Up to this point, an Xbone with a Kinect had led to sales being on par with, if not worse than, those of the Wii U because of a higher launch price. Since the slightly-more-powerful-on-paper PS4 was $100 cheaper, people couldn't justify paying more money for the Xbone. Even after making the Kinect optional, there was no way Microsoft could recover from the initial disaster of a reveal because it prevented them from establishing early momentum. The Xbox One's lackluster sales (estimated ^note {out of seeming embarrassment, Microsoft stopped publicizing the Xbox One's sales after a year of its release} 41 million units sold vs. the PS4's 92 million, as of April 2019), years after all three consoles were established in the marketplace and after Microsoft removed the main things putting people off, are at least partially attributable to the initial terrible presentation; first impressions count, after all, and when the first impressions are unprecedented restrictions and focusing too much on secondary functionality, that's going to affect consumer perceptions even after a course correction. Watch an extremely tired Angry Joe rant semi-coherently about the reveal (yet somehow manage to sum it up best) here, and read an article more coherently explaining everything wrong with Microsoft's approach here. Josh Scorcher would later declare it, and the Xbox One launch in general, to be Microsoft's second biggest failure, behind only the Red Ring of Death.
  Angry Joe: You fucking idiots. I... I... no... this... I just... I can't even start! This is... This is literally the worst reveal event I-I've ever seen. This, literally... if you can't bring the big guns, if you can't bring the good stuff to your reveal, DON'T DO THE REVEAL! Wait until E3!
  • In later interviews, it's become clear that discontent at the entire ordeal extended to within the company itself. It ended up being a Creator Killer for Don Mattrick, as he became CEO of Zynga just two months after the Xbox One's announcement. When Phil Spencer, previously the head manager of Xbox's game studios, was appointed Head of Xbox in 2014, he was told that Microsoft was seriously considering pulling out of the console market (which they ultimately didn't) thanks to Mattrick's failure to prevent the now-abandoned policies from derailing the hype train. While Phil Spencer is a genuinely respected figure and credited for keeping the brand afloat throughout the 8th generation, he cites the Xbox One's announcement as a massive Old Shame for the division.
  Phil Spencer: If you were an employee in team Xbox, then you were [a part of a team of] thousands of people that work on the Xbox. But there's like a handful of people that stand in front of cameras, on the stage and talk about things. There can be a divide between, 'Why is that person saying that? That's not the product I'm building,' or, 'Why are we doing that? That's not what I think we should be doing.' The feedback we got from the employees, maybe said and unsaid, was, 'We've been working really hard for two years to ship this product. You stand on stage at this event and blow up all the good work that we've done by talking about the product in a way that's not really matching what the soul of an Xbox console is about and what our customers are looking for from us.'

• An issue that came to a head in Grand Order was the preponderance of Saberfaces, the very first of which dates back to the original Fate/Stay Night game, in the form of Artoria's corruption-polluted form, Saber Alter, whose contrasting personality to her original self made a huge impression. Fate Zero had Gilles de Rais mistake Artoria for Jeanne de Arc, making her technically the first Identical Stranger "Saberface," but Jeanne's legend is tied up with King Arthur's,^note The sword she unearthed in one part of her legend might've once belonged to Arthur and Gilles was quite mad, with the two otherwise being very different in design and characterization, so the connection wasn't overpowering. Mordred from Fate Apocrypha was a literal clone of her "father," but the story worked there by tying it into her issues with her own identity, gender, and family. Even Nero, the "Red Saber" from EXTRA who is generally seen as the point where it got out of hand, had the meta-reason of her personality being meant to contrast the original, being far more prideful, loud and wild than Saber ever was, despite otherwise being by far the most gratuitous example in the franchise, and Okita from KOHA-ACE was a joke and a parody of the fact it was getting out of hand. Grand Order's overuse of Alternate Self versions of popular characters, on the other hand, quickly got completely out of control in the first years of the game's lifespan, featuring not only the original Artoria, Jeanne, Mordred, and Nero but Artoria Alter, a new Jeanne Alter, Artoria Lily (representing a young and innocent version of Artoria), Artoria Lancer and Lancer Alter (who are also complained about for having more sex appeal than their counterparts), Mysterious Heroine X (a meta-joke character who claims to come from a Bad Future overrun with Sabers and Saberfaces who represents Artoria wanting to kill off her clones and reclaim her position as the franchise's poster-girl), Alter and grown up versions of her, swimsuit versions of many of the above, and Jeanne Alter Santa Lily, whose own profile complains about how out-of-hand the cloning has gotten. Things have died down considerably in later years, but even the India Lostbelt featured Lakshmibai, the "Jeanne de Arc of India," as an Identical Stranger for Jeanne.
• The habit of gender-flipping random historical figures started with Saber, and it was originally seen as a selling point. It worked out extremely well, in part because the creators were aware of the oddity of King Arthur secretly being a woman, and treated it with some delicacy. Not only was she the only recipient of a Gender Flip in the cast, but her backstory was heavily informed by the differences that resulted from a girl assuming the role of King Arthur, with elements of the myth being able to work with the alterations, such as the reason for Lancelot and Guinevere's affair, and Arthur being more of a mythological figure than a historical one anyway. But then came Fate/EXTRA, which gender-bent Emperor Nero and Francis Drake for no reason other than to do it, even though they're very well-documented historical figures and the roles they assumed would have been impossible for women in their societies, and gave them racy and revealing character designs, where the original Saber could still plausibly have been mistaken for a feminine young man. Grand Order followed that trend, with gender-bent historical figures and amped-up sex appeal in their character designs, such as Minamoto-no-Raikou and Ushiwakamaru, two famous male Japanese generals who are so obviously women (Raikou has an impossible figure and near-skintight armor and Ushiwakamaru is barely wearing anything, much less enough to obscure her gender) it's impossible to imagine them fooling anyone. Sometimes, the game takes advantage of the gender-flip to recontextualize the original mythology or history and tell good stories, such as making Raikou and "his" sister Ushigozen into two sides of the same being and adding depth to her relationship with Kintoki, or digging into Nobunaga's struggles with her family, then her retainers refusing to accept her rule despite her genius at least partly because she was not only a nonconformist but a woman. Other times, it is largely-gratuitous and seemingly changes little about the character, such as Ushiwakamaru's gender having no meaningful impact whatsoever on her difficulties communicating with or empathizing with others and her complex relationship with her ultimately treacherous brother, or Jing Ki (who doesn't even have a fanservice-y design and could easily pass for a long-haired pretty boy) being almost totally unchanged save for having a feminine voice actress and a series of running gags about her being a single lady and drinking to excess during couples' holidays.
• The most common critique of the E. Pluribus Unum Singularity was that it felt less like an American story and more like a grab-bag story, featuring the Celtic servants, the Mahabharata, and the cast of Fate/EXTRA. But pretty much every Singularity before or since has had some characters who didn't fit the setting; most notably, the Hungarian Elizabeth Bathory's appearance in America, for example, was preceded by her popping up in France and Rome. The difference was that America was the first (and to-date only) Singularity where characters who didn't fit the theme far outnumbered ones that even arguably did: only three characters were actual Americans (Geronimo, Edison, and Billy the Kid), only two others have much connection to America (Helena Blavatsky and Tesla), and of those five, only Edison and Helena play even-somewhat significant roles in the story, with Tesla dropping in at the eleventh hour of the final battle and both Billy and Geronimo being unceremoniously bumped off soon after their introductions to instead concentrate on Nero, Elizabeth, and Robin Hood as primary allies. None of them even got the honor of being one of the three SSR characters introduced in America, who ended up being two Celts and an Englishwoman instead, and both Elizabeth and Nero are already often criticized as overexposed across multiple stories and events already; both of them had already received heavy story focus and got their own yearly events throughout Part 1, and Elizabeth got hers well into Part 2. In other words, the new characters who needed their screentime most were starved to instead feed two of the characters who needed it least.
  • One common criticism of the Agartha chapter is its use of rape, slavery, and oppression in a gender-inverted fashion deliberately designed to imitate ways men have oppressed women throughout history, which comes across as gratuitous, and even in poor taste. Nasu has always used uncomfortable themes in his stories, and not always gracefully. Tsukihime had many characters with slavery and sexual assault in their backstories, and the original Fate/stay night had many acts of sexual assault happen not only in the past but on-screen, with both going into detail on the long-term psychological damage this mistreatment caused to the cast. Even at the time, many complained that these things made these storylines too dark and depressing to properly entertain, or that the rape was unnecessary and used to add edge points that other forms of abuse could easily do instead. But, unlike Agartha, such seriousness was always treated, well, seriously, with the characters clearly impacted deeply and even damaged permanently by the horrors they'd encountered and suffered. Agartha, unfortunately, instead tended towards Mood Whiplash, such as making jokes about the Ambiguous Gender of the chapter's allied servants or the silly and fragile ego of the Assassin who rules the Nightless City, shortly after witnessing the horrific public torture of one of the city's male inhabitants for trying to escape. It made the social criticism and examination seem frivolous, like the story wasn't taking its themes seriously by letting them have an impact on the characters, and was instead just throwing them in for gloom's sake.
• The Lostbelt Kings and Grand Servants (not counting the First Hassan, who came out years before them and was himself improved up to their level after the fact) are Purposefully Overpowered and limited characters who have basically distorted the entire metagame around themselves since release (the weakest of them, Ivan the Terrible, is "only" the absolute best servant in his class in the entire game, and is weaker simply because he focuses on having a complete performance to his peers' hyperspecialization in their niches). This has attracted many complaints of greed-fueled Power Creep from the playerbase over time, especially since it feels like more and more Challenge Quests are designed to provide challenges for these superpowered and rare characters that a majority of their players may not even have access to. Power Creep is nothing new in this game. Waver, after his buffs, could help trivialize most farming, Tamamo is only not seen as just as overpowered as many of her support caster peers because her schtick is more useful for enabling the Arts stall meta than faster playstyles, and Merlin is a limited and powerful Servant who also distorted the entire metagame around himself upon release, all of them receiving complaints of power-creep that obsoleted many other servants very hard. However, not only are two of those Servants in the general pool rather than limited, but the one who was not, Merlin, was originally advertised as the most overpowered servant the game designers would ever make... and he still showed up in pickups fairly often, as opposed to being potentially gone forever after his initial release, so it wasn't as if poorer and newer players would never see him again. Merlin was also seen as a one-off blip added at the conclusion of the game's first Myth Arc, rather than an overpowered monster of a servant literally added with each new individual story arc.^note It's worth noting, too, that while the other support casters work very well even when borrowed from other, older and richer players in the Support list, Scathach-Skadi, the Ragnarok Lostbelt King and premier Quick support caster, works best when there's two of her, meaning that, unlike Merlin, a player needs to have a Skadi of their own to unlock her true power. And, of course, Challenge Quests and other difficult content were originally intended to be friendly to free players; something even new and underdeveloped rosters could get through with luck, effort, and strategy, serving as fun challenges to overcome even if Merlin could sometimes trivialize them. But in trying to present difficulties that could challenge even a high-paying player's mighty Lostbelt Kings, the gamemakers have made it less and less possible to beat with a normal, free player's roster without hacking the system to its limits. Finally, many free Servants made somewhat obsolete after the release of earlier powerhouses would often receive Rank Ups, trying to, if not bring them into parity, at least carve them niches to differentiate them from the competition, like Florence Nightingale's upgraded NP allowing her to impose debuffs on enemies with buff removal or Invulnerability Pierce that would ignore Merlin's defensive measures, or Jeanne's Noble Phantasm losing its self-stun and adding a debuff cleanse to make her a premier defensive support despite Tamamo's stiff competition in Arts teams. But since at least one Lostbelt King comes out each story arc, such enhancements have become less and less common, since, after all, a new one's to keep on coming and helping the less-powerful servants keep up is a losing battle.