Microsoft’s J Allard discusses the future of Xbox gaming
By Michael Lafferty

“You are going to see a lot more in terms of dynamic physics, dynamic modeling, and the impact that the user leaves on the world to make the world feel more vibrant”

His passion is obvious and is merely an extension of his vision for what lays ahead. J Allard is also about as personable as they come. What people see during his public speaking seems to carry over into private conversations.

Allard is a corporate vice president and the chief XNA architect at Microsoft, and one of the driving forces behind the Xbox 360 and its focus on leading the gaming industry into the era of high-def (HD). Armed with a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Boston University, Allard joined Microsoft in 1991. His career with Microsoft began working to design the TCP/IP networking strategy for the company and by defining the Windows Sockets API (application protocol interface – which is, essentially, a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications), which is the key API for the Internet.

According to his biography on the Microsoft site: “As a founding member of the Xbox® platform project, Allard drives digital entertainment initiatives by overseeing all design and engineering of the Xbox console, development kit, peripherals and the Xbox Live service.”

GameZone caught up with Allard at E3 in Los Angeles and had a conversation about gaming, gaming platforms and the future of the industry.

As the interview began, it was noted that when the Xbox launched in 2001 the console brought a new level of graphical quality to console gaming, one which other companies embraced and gaming on the console level became a much more visually pleasing experience. Will the Xbox 360 carry forward that ideal?

Allard: “Thank you for saying that you feel like Xbox has advanced the industry, because that’s what we set out to do, that’s our program. If we can advance the industry, long-term, we will get some market share out of it.

“I think the 360 takes it forward. Obviously going to high-def, obviously having everyone master it at the wide-screen ratio is going to have a visual impact. It might not happen, say, in weeks, for a lot of people, in terms of the last generation, just at first glance, but we’ve got so much processing power in these next-generation boxes that the thing that will start changing is dynamic lighting. You kind of get to the point at 720p, the 16x9, where you say ‘ok, it doesn’t quite look real.’ The difference between not looking real and looking real is not more pixels, bigger fill rate – it’s soft shadows. It’s every tree in the forest being synthesized dynamically so they all look different. You are not seeing those repetitive trees with the repetitive textures. It is actually doing procedural animation … so that every time you fall off your skateboard, it’s not a pre-determined calculation in terms of how that is going to play out. You are going to see a lot more in terms of dynamic physics, dynamic modeling, and the impact that the user leaves on the world to make the world feel more vibrant.

“A lot of games if you walk on the sand and you leave a couple of footprints, five lines of footprints behind you and you turn around 180-degrees, and you only have those five footprints, and they stop. In the next-gen, we have the capability in the system to not only create that more dynamic world, but also to remember that more dynamic world. And I think that, when you think about the next step visually, we have to not shatter the user’s illusions by having bad lighting and bad environments.”

But doesn’t that responsibility, to realize the dynamics of a more immersive environment, fall more to the developers and not the hardware developer? 

Allard: “You are spot on. We have a great tool and that is why we have the XNA initiative, and will be working very closely with the third-party developing community, is to create the tools that will allow people to go to the next level of facial animation, to go to the next level of dynamic lighting, to go to the next level in procedural geometry or physics – that’s really important. So even though we have a very comfortable development environment to take it to the next level is going to require new types of tools that today aren’t commonplace.” 

When does it get to a point where, visually, games cannot get much better, and developers will have to start to focus on aspects of games (like content layers, and the gameplay itself) that have heretofore taken a backseat to the visual elements?

Allard: “We are probably starting to approach, with the 360, the azimuth of, you know, more pixels are better. Even if you look at the last 10 years, the four new IPs in the last 10 years, the four new game concepts, only one of them was visually arresting. Nobody would have looked at the second trailer of The Sims and said ‘yeah, 20 million units.’ Or Grand Theft Auto, or Pokemon. None of those games gave great trailers. Even Halo, in 2001 – I remember, I was here at E3 and we were pitching Halo and people were saying ‘it’s a disaster, terrible framerate, bad level design, FPS will never work on the console …’ The thing that all those games had in common was the great gameplay, and the innovative gameplay, and compelling either story or mechanic that didn’t exist before.

“When you say we can’t control the third parties, you are right, but we do have a responsibility as a first party to go and start innovating. So you take something like Project Gotham Racing and we are able to take that to the next level and introduce the notion of spectator mode. A big new idea. And we have to be on the vanguard of that and hopefully third parties will pick up on the good ideas.” 

Will taking games to the next level in terms of gameplay result in having to educate the users or players, or do you think they are ready and open to new ideas? 

Allard: “I think they are ready, because I think there is other mediums that are further ahead. You look at digital music. Five years from now the average teenager is not going to thinking about albums any more. When you and I were growing up, we thought about albums and cover art. They are being conditioned to think ‘Ok, a la carte, I want to customize my experience my way.’ They are being conditioned through other media, through something like the marketplace, and the gameplay mechanics that people want to innovate – nobody said ‘I want the Grand Theft Auto world.’ The game designers innovated it in such a way in a compelling environment that worked with a broad audience that they introduced to gamers, but the gamers weren’t necessarily searching.

“Whenever you design a new product, and you go to ask consumers what they want, they don’t know. You can ask black and white questions, like do you want backward compatibility, they will always answer ‘yes.’ Do you want free-flowing worlds, with no level loads, do-anything scenarios and ‘huh?’ “ 

Does Microsoft ever discuss with a developer just how that developer is using the tools and technology a product like the Xbox puts at their disposal? 

Allard: “We always want to have two-way dialogue with the developers. The team, and myself, we don’t try to fancy ourselves as game designers. More often than not, the dialogue is the opposite direction.

“We hear all their feedback and try to design a well-balanced system. So then when they are implementing their games, oftentimes we can have suggestions, like ‘hey, did you know about this?’ So we have this team, the advanced technology group, and this team publishes white papers on a weekly basis when we find things that are working for the development community or an untapped attribute of the system that people are not utilizing because they don’t understand it very well, we try to get it out there.”

While Microsoft does have Final Fantasy Online coming for the 360, for the most part, massively multiplayer online games have not transitioned from the PC to the consoles in great numbers. Why does he think that is?

Allard: “I think it is a new genre that hasn’t matured yet. We are still trying to figure out the playing mechanics. If you want to be rude, in a way, and say that MMOs started out as chat rooms and then we added graphics … it’s just like how the adventure category matured. It started out with tactics, then you added graphics and then you could actually control the protagonist with keystrokes but it was relatively sophisticated and then we got to Tomb Raider, and there was a progression. I think we are at a certain point in the content and continuum now where we can think ‘well, what is a control scheme that works in a massively multiplayer game with a controller?’ What’s the communication model? Where a lot of massively multiplayer games on the PC is a lot of type-think, it’s all text based. How do we incorporate voice? How do we incorporate video? And a lot of MMOs are often set in a very distinct fantasy setting, which is just one space. Where is the massively multiplayer court game, or racing game, or action game, and so on? I think you are going to see, in three or four years from now, massively multiplayer games gaining incredible support. We’ll be taking a lot of concepts that have been birthed on the PC, the fantasy MMOs and starting to incorporate them into the other genres. And I think the fantasy MMOs have matured to the point where they can work with a controller and voice in maybe even a more compelling way.”

The Xbox Live system is getting an upgrade with the 360, allowing players to track the last 700 players they gamed with, among other features. Why is the service expanding in such a way?

Allard: “Why are we expanding it? Because there is more to do. The team that created Live is a bunch of frustrated gamers what were frustrated with the online anarchy, and we established a clearer vision. And we are trying to wrestle that to the ground so that it is a more manageable and more enjoyable experience. It’s one of those things were it is still fun setting up playing online. We wanted it to be natural.

“It’s really a combination of advancing the vision to make the online gaming experience better for us hardcore gamers and making it more approachable for a broader audience … and then just responses from the community on things we just didn’t finish the right way.”

While the Microsoft presence in the North American market is strong, it does not have the same great presence in the Asian market. What will it take to bolster its market share over there?

Allard: “In Japan, for example, we have to have the right content for the Japanese consumer. And that’s something we failed in with Xbox 1. The good news is we’ve brought on board a lot of great developers, so I think we’ve remedied a lot of the creative energy that was lacking in Xbox 1 to help us compete in Japan. But then you look at China, Singapore, Hong Kong – the style of gameplay and the fact that gaming is not in the home but it’s actually in public spaces and the types of games they are playing where it is all MMOs, where it is avatar based, where it is highly personalizable game experiences. We have to not make the same mistake we made last time and go into territories with content that is not suitable. So we are starting to work with more developers from Taiwan, more developers from China, more developers from Hong Kong that will be creating content that we think will be more successful there. And we are also going to bridge the gap between consoles and PCs in terms of the programming environment, it is going to be much more common to develop for Xbox 360 and Longhorn than any other two platforms out there – we are committed to that – we are going to join them up on Xbox Live.”

As someone who is a gamer, who has seen the expansion of the console market, what is the most exciting aspect of the 360?

Allard: “I would say that the most exciting thing is we have eliminated almost any excuse for the world’s greatest game talent not to be developing for the platform. … We’ve created the platform for them, and now we get to see what they are going to do with it.”

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