Xbox 720 Leaked Info
Victor Chavez / Jun 19th, 2012 No Comments
The internet was abuzz with rumors of information being leaked about the new Xbox 720. As this story goes, lawyers for Microsoft went to file some documentation that detailed the Xbox 360 successor. This document went online in a matter of minutes, claiming the release for this new console will be next year. With this console being updated to support a new Kinect, a Blu-ray drive, and a very exciting feature to be released in 2014, augmented-reality glasses. With all these stories about the specs of this new console for Microsoft flying around and the urgency of the Microsoft team to having these papers removed so quickly, it added fuel to the fire that there was a lot of truth in these purportedly leaked documents. It leads you to wanting to believe these rumors are true, but without any official announcement, we’ll just settle for an in-depth review of what was leaked.
XBOX 720
On the 56-page document posted to Scribd, the document detailed signs of the successor to the Xbox 360. A key point was the release date being 2013 for the price of $299 with an updated Kinect, named Kinect V2. A few points to take away from this would be the new Kinect will support four player cooperation, instead of the normal two player cooperation you have now. Also the Kinect V2 is going to adapt to your living room or bedroom, so no more rearranging your room just to get a group of friends to play the Kinect. This would be a nice addition to the Kinect considering a lot of games are party games and would be fun if you could get more players and friends involved. The second major bit of leaked information begs us to ask if the release date and price accurate. If they are, that leaves a lot to be said about E3, that just passed. Why didn’t they release any information at E3? And if the price is accurate, would that be the base model or is that going to be the high end model? Only reason I am asking this question is because if it is a true price tag, how are they going to be able to give this console at a price like this with this kind of power?
According to the documentation this “Xbox 720” is going to come equipped with a Blu-ray optical drive and promises to be 4x or 6x greater power over the present Xbox 360. On the pleasant side of this documentation, it does give gamers an ease of mind not listing anything about not playing used titles. One of the biggest stories about this whole leaked document business is the added support for augmented-reality glasses. Given the project name “Fortaleza” these glasses are planned to be launched in 2014. These glasses will reportedly run on Wi-Fi and 4G connections which lead me to believe that gaming will definitely not be the full capability of these glasses.
Some of the lesser known details to be taken from this documentation is there is going to be features that indicate the Xbox 720 will have some sort of “always be on” functionality. But there is no additional information about this feature anywhere on the document so we can only wait for more details on that point. Also they are predicting this console’s life span is going to be 10 years with an estimated sales over 100 million consoles. Finally, listed on the document was “Cloud Value Proposition 2015”, this section indicates Microsoft is going to be looking to cloud services in the future. This means that we might no longer need to buy hardware ever again for our consoles, or, that we’ll not be visiting stores to purchase our video games and have all our music, pictures and (most importantly) our game saves in the cloud.
With all these features hopefully coming the Xbox 720 like Blu-ray support, 4x-6x more power, augmented-reality glasses and Kinect V2, I am finding it tough to believe that this new unit from Microsoft will be released by next year and for the price of $299. We will see in time, as there’s a remote chance that Microsoft will make an announcement as CES 2013 in Vegas. Chances are they are they just going to wait for E3 2013. Only time will tell us about the successor to the Xbox 360.
Stay tuned to Gaming Illustrated for the latest news on the gaming world and for Xbox 720 rumors.
Victor Chavez
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