Topic: The everything Xbox thread

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@ThanosReXXX The weird thing is they also have the 8TB hub (an externally powered 3.5" drive) and it's very tempting at $150, especially with X's disk consumption, but they make it only in white. White HDD look silly next to the black X. Seagate makes an identical non-XB branded drive that's slightly cheaper in black which is probably why, but the reviews for that drive are anything but good, and teardowns show it's using a really slow 5200RPM "Archive" series drive with minimal cache and is very slow and, apparently, extremely loud. Meanwhile the XBox branded one, many claim it's really fast, and that one of the tech review sites tore it down and it had a Barracuda Pro 7200RPM in there. The internet now accepts that truth. My strong suspicion is it actually has the same slow Archive drive as the non-XB model, and they shipped alternate versions to reviewers that were vastly superior, since the product official statements tell you nothing about the speed, they can put any drive they want in it and it's not false advertising. Odds are if one black $150 8TB drive has a cheap slow drive, the other one that is white but identical, at the same price, with XBox licensing on top of it, is probably not going to include a better drive that retails as a bare drive for significantly more money than the one with the enclosure and all! That's pretty cheap. Might someday grab one for cheap backup anyway, but, meh.

The 2.5's I got some WD's for $95 or so with a good reputation. Not "official accessories" but they work...and more importantly are black to match the X (And I got blue for the PS4 one...ok the console has no blue on it, but my controller is the same blue. It blinds me from how bad the DS4 layout is )

In this case, especially with X, it can really make use of seriously fast hardware (it almost maxes out the USB3.0 bus) so I dove in with my own setup. ~$200 for a Toshiba 6TB 7200RPM fast drive and $35 or so for a nice enclosure with a fan. Drive runs a bit hot (my enclosure has a screen and temp probe and tends to run 103F with fan on, and 115+ without fan, based on external probe.) Also they look pretty cool, I have a tower of two of said enclosures (the 6TB + original 2TB HHDD I got) sitting next to the vertical 1X.....it looks kinda slick. Not to sound like the guys with the CCFL and LEDs in their Thermaltake cases but....add the Razer Wolverine's rainbow chroma on top of the console and it's kind of a nerd heaven

TBH I love the convenience of the little USB-powered drives. They're quiet, small, and take no extra plugs. If I werent all digital and the X weren't a storage hog, Id' have just stuck with that. But I do admit the performance is fun I compared the speed of loading Sea of Thieves on the two. Load on the WD 2.5 took about 4x longer than the 7200RPM

I get impatient easily. That's an X problem though. 4k textures (geeze, 8k consoles will need SSDs just to have bearable performance. It'll be like Vita memory cards all over again! )

I eyed those green ones originally too Nintendo got me into splashes of color. I like my blue on PS4. XBox green would be cool, but the X is so sleek....it's kind of wrong to take away the tuxedo look

Streaming: I still have my doubts about the streaming console rumors. Personally it makes little sense. The whole point of streaming support even according to MS's streaming presentation at E3 is "console quality games" on your phone or laptop or tablet or Smart TV (but the best experience is on XBox hardware etc. etc.) Making a dedicated machine for it seems to defeat the point. Branding said machine XBox rather than Surface and broadening its appeal as a set top box makes less sense. And the internet is simply not there for that to be a viable system at all. And if that's the base model, honestly they're going to need to support X for a long time if they set some PS3-like $600 price tag on the big machine It makes too little sense to be real, so I'm skeptical. The streaming service is certainly real, but a dedicated hardware unit for it really seems left field. Not least of which all the existing XBoxes are already more than capable of streaming.

However no, streaming access on the X, the S, the OG, any PC, Windows tablet, or phone...strike that, Windows 10 Phone (because MS never does Android and iOS other than Office, which will be a problem) would be able to be forever more or less. That's the whole point of a streaming service. A Switch can do it, let alone an OG X1. It's just video, some input processing, and maybe some local prediction stuff that has to be able to run on phones. You already have the streaming client on your Windows 10 PC, it's built in. Right now it only streams from a local XBox One, but no different streaming from a cloud-based XBox One, Two, or Twelve. Honestly it works pretty well (locally.) If internet could give that performance and I can access the entire library for low prices? Sure, I'd subscribe. Shame about the internet.

"If people are just going to sit on their current gen consoles, and Microsoft isn't able to attract people to the actual new device, then Scarlett is simply going to fail, and Xbox owners will be left with streaming-only, inferior versions of Scarlett software. "

Wait....you do realize that's the actual goal and intention of the industry, right? Getting rid of the boxes and going streaming only is their dream. Total price control, content control, life cycle management, access control, all developed for one internal platform. That's why the huge push on it. Crazy Yves thinks Scarlett is the last console ever, and then it's all just streaming services to phones and Smart TVs from then on. 2K is more pragmatic that it won't be a huge wave of customers but that the idea of "not having to buy boxes" is very tempting and beneficial to them. EA is on board. MS is clearly on board (and stands to benefit the most from it considering they're one of only 3 cloud data center operators with the scale to run it for everyone else.........) I mean abandonment of Scarlett and everyone paying monthly to play on an XBox 1S forever and ever (while most game publishers will also pay them to host the games themselves in Azure.....) is what they would pay and lobby to have happen!

Of course they're all off their rockers and haven't met Comcast apparently, just yet. But that's what they're trying to force to happen one way or another. At least until their corporate cloud pipe dream blows up or Comcast-NBC-Universal-Fox-Sky-Bread-Water-Blood-Wine decides to tie them up in court for a century or three.

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@dew12333 I found this:
https://www.destinypedia.com/Emblems/Destiny_2
Perhaps that will tell you what the emblems that you have, will be good for. They're supposed to be more than decorative, and add to your skill/tech/weapon tree.

@NEStalgia I could have seen that coming, the detective work with the hard drives. I'd never have the patience or the time to do that. I just have two criteria: it needs to be a quality, officially licensed product, and it needs to be user-friendly (preferably plug and play), and this little 4TB gizmo is both.

Currently, I'm downloading and/or re-downloading all the games that I had to remove to make place for updates, new Games with Gold, and the rest that I never chose to download in the first place, due to them not triggering me as much as the once that I did download. So, it has been downloading and installing, ever since the mailman dropped the drive off at my door at 1pm, and it's still going, because I had about 36 titles queued. Guess it'll be done by midnight or tomorrow...

As for the rest: I might have to remind you of a song from a certain 80's and 90's pop music making lady called Kim Wilde, who once had a song called "you keep me hanging on". That or that quote from that mafia movie about being dragged back in...

Guess I have to reply now...

We agree on the streaming rumor. I just mentioned it because it's the most prevalent one, currently, I never said that I completely believe that this is going to happen. In most comments, I also added something along the lines of "provided the rumor is true". or something to that extent, so that already should have told you enough.

But you did build upon that whole streaming point, by dragging in the S and X as possible candidates for the streaming of Scarlett content, so there's more than one guilty party here...

And I assume that by "Crazy Yves", you mean Yves Guillemot. Well, mr. Guillemot has never really been known as the hardware visionary, so what he says about that, holds little to no value for me, and probably most gamers and gaming media. They just report on it, much like they report on anything that the handful of "famous" analysts always fling onto the web or into the ether.

But what I do believe, is that Scarlett is once again going to be a normal console. It might be the last one, but the world is not ready at ALL, for streaming only. Gaming is not Netflix or Hulu, so far more bandwidth will be needed, and there are simply too many areas around the globe, that have barely evolved beyond dial up speed, and even if they have, the lines are anything but stable in their delivery, so that's not gonna happen.

I guess, that in the end, only the definition of what Phil Spencer means with "setting a new standard in console gaming", will be what is relevant. I do hope that he means powerful, because he used a similar line to hint at the X, or Scorpio, as it was codenamed back then, so I'm cautiously hopeful that this will be the case.

If it is going to be a weak-@ss set top streaming box, then the Xbox One will most definitely be my last Microsoft console, because I'm not down with that at ALL. I want my games to be mine, and my console to be mine, and if servers for games are discontinued, then I don't want some a-hole on the other side of the ocean to decide that my single player game will then automatically also be disabled.

If need be, I'll hack the console to unlock that again, but that'll probably only work with physical media, or illegal downloads, and I rather have the first.

As for the rest: as I've already quite elaborately said in my previous two or three comments, I don't believe that Microsoft will be okay with people staying on the Xbox One, regardless of whether or not that would be able to stream Scarlett content. There WILL be a new box, that WILL have to be sold, and not being able to convince/entice people to move onto that new platform, WILL impact sales and thus profit margins of Scarlett in a highly negative way. There are no if's, and's or but's about that simple fact.

And even the X isn't going to be powerful enough anymore, if games get more and more demanding of the hardware that they run on, so everything has to move forward, in that regard. A streaming service is fine, the industry is focusing more and more towards that goal, but it isn't going to happen to Scarlett, yet. Unless of course, that rumor IS true, but then there will at least be one real console and one streaming box to choose from. Everybody happy, I'd say... I'll pick the actual console over an empty internet box any time.

I already had this gripe with my cable TV provider, or internet TV provider, nowadays: my old set top box had a local hard drive, that I had quite a bit of control over. Now, I have online storage, the amount of which is only marginally larger than my hard drive was, and there is now a time limit on how long I can keep programs on there, forcing me to watch older programs first, if I want to prevent my provider from erasing them for good. The convenience is a plus, and it comes with a couple of other bonuses, such as recordings continuing if there is a local disturbance or power outage. (with the old box, you'd run the risk of only half a program being recorded or a recording being corrupted)

But yeah... we bend the knee to such practices, because I still want my internet and interactive TV bundle, which is also cheaper than buying all kinds of subscriptions on services like Netflix, HBO and Fox, because I'd need to buy practically all of them, to be able to watch all of the series that I want, so I'm not going to do that.

Anyway, back to consoles: the same counts there, and the user can have a bit more control over that, than over broadcast and internet services from providers, so the choice should still be an option, and Phil Spencer did seem to hint at not wanting to disappoint either one of the camps, so both physical only and digital only fans should be able to get what they want, and that is probably also the origin of that rumor.

Guess we're just going to have to bide our time, and wait what mr. Spencer has in store for us.
Meanwhile, I'll be more than busy for most of the coming year, what with all the newly downloaded software, on my beautiful little white 4TB drive...

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@ThanosReXXX The massive downloads are painful. Heck the disk copy locally is painful....I'm doing it 500GB a day so I don't melt the poor thing. But yeah, I do research everything to the extreme!

As for Yves, yeah, no question he's not exactly on target with the whole streaming thing, but it indicates intent. He may bout out of touch with reality, but we now know what he wants to happen and how Ubi will try to shape that reality, whether successful or not. And with EA, 2K and MS all commenting in on the plan we know it's an industry wide attempt to shift. 2K's CEO directly mentioned Yves comments ("One of our competitors..." ) and disagreed that it would bring a wave of new customers like Yves thought but was more or less on target with the rest. EA is quieter, probably because most of their games are competitive PvP at this point and that's unsteady waters for them, they'll let someone test it first, but then go all in when they see the financials. MS...again, stands to gain the most. So what we know is, the publishers really want to get rid of console boxes. They want to make datacenter builds and end it there. That's what the publishers want to make happen. You and I may know the internet, and thus customers will never support that in reality for a long loooong time. But like with AOL-Time-Warner, the visionaries never seem to understand this, and their business intentions should be viewed through the lens of that intent for the immediate future.

To be clear I have no doubt Scarlett is a typical console and that it will be (relatively powerful) though we don't know how much of that power is for flourish of 60fps at 4k/8k with ray tracing and how much is actually necessary for game design. But the big unknown is how major the intent to focus the industry into streaming looms darkly. Mattrick's XBox would have must made an all streaming platform and told us to #dealwithit. Spencer isn't Mattrick, but Microsoft is Microsoft. The cloud IS their intent in all things as a corporate objective. Even MS office is a "streamed" subscription now.

But yeah, you and I agree on the state of the internet. But these companies seem to prefer forcing the tech, and hoping the major metros carry the business, screw flyover country. Don't like the product, move to a better zip code. At least the publishers, not sure about MS. Even Sony's offering downloading of the Now catalog....if the only mainstream game streaming service is abandoning ship, that's telling. Doesn't mean they won't go for it before realizing they're losing money though.

Though you know, and I know, convenience and value drives consumers. I was against the shift to digital music. But iTunes came along and made it convenient. I was against the shift to streamed television. But then Netflix came along and gave everyone unlimited movies for $10/mo without switching discs. Heck, audio cassette had way better SQ than Compact Disc. But CDs were more convenient..... Whatever company says "buy no device, push no buttons, play whatever for $20/mo in latest quality" will get all the business, even if it's a stuttering mess. I do fear the concerted industry push toward streaming. And I'll be eyeing the unsaid aspects of that during the "Scarlett" launch closely. I'm oddly less worried about Sony in that regard than I was in 2013 when they'd just bought Gaikai and OnLive.

As for "having to sell Scarlett" it depends on their sales model though right? I mean if it's just "XBox (2020 Edition)" and then there's an XBox (2022 Edition) and then XBox (2024 Edition), do they care if you're using XBox (2017 Edition?) You're in the food chain. You'll upgrade eventually. Just like Surface. Just like Windows. Just like Office Perpetual licenses. Getting the hooks in was the hard part, once you're on the train you'll get there eventually. You'll get that XBox 2024 Edition in 2024. Or subscribe to XBox 365. And eventually you'll get to pick between XBox 365 or a Perpetual XBox 2026 for only $900 (only supports one player, excludes some games, has no cloud saves, we recommend XBox 365 Pro.)

As for me, I have more games than I can play in 8 years, so I'll probably get a Scarlett when it's replaced by that XBox 365 sub and Yves is selling Far Cry All Access subscriptions to refrigerators and GPSes for only $50/mo. Unless X is forward compatible. Then I'd buy in a year or so after launch. (oddly.) This next year is like every game I ever wanted to play all at once. What the heck will the next gen offer? TESVI. Ok, I'm screwed.