Man those Halo Wars 3 concept art showing space battles is crazy, I really want it to happen too, but I don't know if the Global Publishing team has enough support for it, since there are way more internal studios now.
I wish I had never seen this, now I need it.
I'm ready for XSS some crazy design like the XSX. A cube.
Yeah I thought a cube would be cool too back when they showed XSX, but now I'm expecting a slab. Something more "normal" for the mass market.
The expectation is that the Series S will be spec'd to run the same games at a lower resolution, so assuming they accomplish that there wouldn't be much to show.
Personally, I'm still not convinced of a couple of things.
1) I'm not convinced Lockhart/Series S comes out before holiday 2021. They will want to focus manufacturing on cranking out as many Series X's as possible, not splitting those precious resources between two models - one of which is essentially a budget option. Plus, it runs the risk of muddying their focused next-gen messaging by immediately having two models with nothing but a letter to distinguish them.
Lockhart was also believed to have been mothballed by Microsoft until roughly fall last year, and I'm not sure how you'd have a console in mothballs ~16-18 months before it's supposed to come out.
2) I'm still not convinced Lockhart is what we think it is. This 4 TFLOPS rumour seems to have taken root, but strikes me as skirting very close to the line in terms of the power required to reliably translate Series X games to something like 1080p or 1440p. There was a more recent leak suggesting it could be closer to 7 TFLOPS, which I think is more realistic.
No, if they only show games on XSX and then also say "by the way we have Series S coming," people won't be convinced that Series S can actually run next gen games well. My point is that when they reveal Lockhart, they will also show games running on Lockhart to dispel the concerns. I'm expecting something like a big game reveal (Halo, Fable, whatever) and then "oh, by the way - that was running on Lockhart. Here's the XSX version..."
1. No way Lockhart launches up to a year later. Maybe a few weeks or even a couple months at most. Remember that the "insiders" were all wrong - it was never mothballed. And why does producing Series S units prevent them from producing Series X units? There's no connection there.
2. No idea what the final specs are but I wouldn't bet on 7. The rumors of 12 for XSX were exactly right. Why do we think 4 for Lockhart from the same source is wrong?
www.gamespot.com
