So, uh, meet Adam Orth, Creative Director of Microsoft Studios. Some guy who is going to get very, very popular over the next day or so.
In what is either something that is rather telling or the worst timing ever, Orth decided it was a good idea to try to speak out Always On things on the same day that Kotaku ran yet another rumor about the NeXtBox requiring a constant internet connection to function. Seeing as this is like, the tenth rumor in months from different sources (even if you discount Kotaku at face value which, to be fair, most of us do), it's a bit worrying without Orth's involvement.
When you then have Orth on the same exact day, near the same time, stating things like "I want every device to be Always On", arguing common complaints with terrible analogies and generally being a condescending prick as you see above, it's...well...kind of disconcerting. To say the least. Of course, I'm not explicitly saying the NeXtBox is going to have an Always On requirement, it's just that, at this point, it's more believable that the NeXtBox is going to be shaped like a Chibi Girl to attract more Japanese Marketshare than that it won't have an Always On requirement. Because there is just a mountain of evidence at this point that points to it being a reality and, well....to be fair, when has the internet been -wrong- about something like this lately? Nailed the PS4 specs before it was announced, nailed when and how it was going to be announced, and has given us the skinny on plenty of other things that seemed less-than-feasible.
Like a lot of people, this is going to be a make-it-or-break-it thing for me. I don't necessarily worry that my internet -isn't- stable since it's up more than it's not these days (hope I didn't just jinx it), but I -have- had plenty of issues with it in the past. Some issues that lasted nights in a row with which I took to my PS3 or PSP or Vita to assuage my fury. To imagine that my gaming could be impeded by an outage that is already taking away a lot of my social ability and other means of entertainment (Youtube, mostly) is pretty much doubly infuriating which is exactly I won't be buying into it. There's still time before this thing is announced that they can change it up, but at this point, I'm not hopeful. Hell, even if it -is- announced as something that you can play offline, I'm going to be skeptical, because in my mind, it's something that was built to be played online all the time. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out either way, I suppose.
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