I won’t be going to E3 this year. Judging from the blogs out there and the tomb-like silence at my own studio, it feels like I’m in a rather exclusive club. All the same, last year’s E3 felt functionally identical to the one before it, so I thought taking a year off would help me appreciate it more next year.

The one thing that I’m sorry I’ll miss is getting a chance to see the XBox 360 in person. I haven’t commented on the XBox 360 yet for the simple reason of not having anything other than rumors with the substance of vapor. Microsoft finally decided to help by putting up a website where you can rotate a model of a XBox 360 controller. Thanks, Microsoft! That clears things up!

Some fairly concrete details have started to emerge, and will probably be set even more in stone in the next few days. Gamespot has a fairly in-depth analysis, which includes the sentence, “Best of all, Microsoft has confirmed that you’ll be able to turn off your Xbox 360 with the wireless controller.” I guess now we know the sort of features Gamespot editors base their purchasing decisions on!

For the most part, though, there was a sigh of collective relief amongst anyone trying to make an online game when the conflicting reports all began to agree that the XBox will ship with a 20 GB hard drive, which is detachable and upgradeable. As recently as last month, the rumor mill pointed to Microsoft multiple versions of the next generation XBox, with the base version not having a hard drive. Microsoft, for their part, wasn’t giving any details to anyone who wasn’t already bound in blood to them, which created many conversations like this one:

MMO Developer: Hey, we were thinking of developing an MMO for your next console, but we gotta know: is it going to have a hard drive?
XBox Rep: Would you like it to have a hard drive?
MMO Developer: What do you think? Of course we do. We’ve got to stream down new content, not to mention deliver patches and hack fixes. That’s before we even get into doing any of those microtransaction downloads you’d strongarm us into including.
XBox Rep: Do you really need a hard drive to carry out your vision?
MMO Developer: Look, twinkletoes. If I can buy a keychain harddrive nowadays for 30 bucks, you damn well can stick one in your ‘media center’. How the hell are you going to replace Tivo and iTunes without a damned hard drive?
 XBox Rep: Yes, but let’s talk about your needs.

This is usually where the XBox rep gets strangled. I can only hope that the boys working on Vanguard had an easier time getting information. This is important to us because the conventional wisdom is that games that require peripheral purchases fail. Previously, the exception was driving games, because the people who really like driving games are nutty enough to buy ridiculously expensive steering wheel controllers. DDR has probably adjusted the conventional wisdom to some degree, but for every one of those, there’s a great game like Samba de Amigo that fails because buying a game AND two sets of maracas is a bit much. Getting a hard drive built in removes a barrier, making it a lot easier to convert current MMO players from the PC to the console.

The other interesting thing is that Microsoft seems more willing to allow developers to support a keyboard for chat. When my old startup pitched an MMO to Microsoft 3-4 years ago, they were insistent that there would be no keyboards, and all chat would be voice chat. Compare that to what they told Gamespot about the 360:

He told us that, “we will allow you to plug in a USB keyboard. It’s very useful for the text entry. What we’re not enabling it for, we’re not enabling it for gameplay.” So the keyboard is a go for text entry, but a no-go for game control.

Well, it’s a start. Your average gameplayer isn’t going to want to have to put down a controller to type on a keyboard, but the important thing is to get the hardware port on the machine. Interested devs can beat Microsoft into submission with common sense at their leisure. I suspect it’d take one play session of Vanguard in MS’s usability labs for them to see the error of their ways.

So as an MMO developer, I’m cautiously optimistic about the XBox 360. All the same, I’m glad someone else is going to be the pioneer here.

Original comments thread is here.