My hope is that the hardware upgrade will allow the return of split screen play that was omitted on games like Halo 5. It would have had it, had hardware not come up short.

@SirNormanislost: The whole point of continuing a franchise is to carry over what is familiar. If there is no Shepard, there is none of the familiar crew and companions, if none of the locations are the same, it's really not a "Mass Effect" game. They might as well call it something else.

Dragon Age 2 was a similar disappointment. None of your player characters carried over. The game looked and played differently.

It's like when back in the 80's, Konami needed a sequel to the NES hit Castlevania, they bought a similar game that was already in production at another developer, and tried to pass it off as a sequel. Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest. Which is the reason I tend to sarcastically refer to Dragon Age 2 as DA2: Hawk's Quest.

It's like a TV show spin off about a character that never appeared, or marginally appeared on the earlier show.

If "Dallas" could bring back "Bobby Ewing" through "his death was all a dream", certainly Bioware could have brought back Shepard, the crew, and not have screwed the Milky Way Galaxy all the way back to the "Big Bang".

The ending of ME3 hobbled any chance of a decent sequel, follow up, etc. It screwed the pooch. It left the galaxy in an untenable position. Planets destroyed, Mass Effect relays destroyed. The only way forward was a completely hero character, setting, and companion and enemy characters. So, how could this really be a sequel? People want sequels because they deliver what the audience or player wants, that is familiar to them. Bioware, I believe, deliberately shot the franchise in the foot out resentment towards EA. This foot dragging, wrench thrown into the gears by a production crew is not with out precedent. In 2001, Tim Burton ended the Planet of The Apes reboot with an untenable ending because of a growing animosity with 20th Century Fox.

What EA/Bioware should have done was IGNORE the ending, and pick up the story from the ending in the Citadel DLC for ME3. Movies have done this. Aliens 3, and Highlander 2 were out right ignored in subsequent sequels. Terminator Salvation was ignored, and removed from the story line leading up to Teminator: Genisys.

Console gaming can improve with hardware advances with out altering the software of the games themselves.

Higher clock rates, SSDs replacing HDs, will reduce texture pop and load times. More advanced upscaling circuitry can bring 1080p gaming to Xbox One titles that are 720p that upscale to 960p, like "Ryse of Rome". 4K can be approached in the same way. The games themselves won't have to be modified. Right now, I have couple of games with such slow load times I won't play them until I move them to a USB 3.0 SSD, Dragon Age: Inquisition for example. If MS came out with a new Xbox that booted with an SSD, upscaled higher, reduced texture pop and increased frame rates, I'b buy it. Though I'd keep my existing one, for head to head playing (Halo 5, and Starwars Battlefront have glaringly and annoyingly left out split screen co-op play. It's because, while the Xbox One was a great advancement over the 360, it doesn't seem to have the processing power to bring all the 360 features over to the One, and maintain the expected improved performance. A dollar short so to speak.

Console gaming can improve with hardware advances with out altering the software of the games themselves.

Higher clock rates, SSDs replacing HDs, will reduce texture pop and load times. More advanced upscaling circuitry can bring 1080p gaming to Xbox One titles that are 720p that upscale to 960p, like "Ryse of Rome". 4K can be approached in the same way. The games themselves won't have to be modified. Right now, I have couple of games with such slow load times I won't play them until I move them to a USB 3.0 SSD, Dragon Age: Inquisition for example. If MS came out with a new Xbox that booted with an SSD, upscaled higher, reduced texture pop and increased frame rates, I'b buy it. Though I'd keep my existing one, for head to head playing (Halo 5, and Starwars Battlefront have glaringly and annoyingly left out split screen co-op play. It's because, while the Xbox One was a great advancement over the 360, it doesn't seem to have the processing power to bring all the 360 features over to the One, and maintain the expected improved performance. A dollar short so to speak.

This is great news for "Move". The existing "Eye" has too low resolution to make movements sufficiently precise. Tried the existing "Move" setup, with an added rifle type mount. When we played Resistance III, the aim jumped all over the screen. Since physical real life is maximum resolution, aside a telescope or a microscope, only the camera needed improvement, not the actual controller. To improve Kinect, Microsoft would have to force you to buy an entirely new Kinect device. Which in greatly more expensive than the existing "Eye", as well as probably still greatly more expensive then a high definition "Eye".