Topic: The everything Xbox thread

@DarthNocturnal

You didn't hear it from hearsay, you heard it from Octane 2 pages ago in this thread!

@Anti-Matter in goroawase, the number 825 could maybe be interpreted as “when to shop”

Somehow. For some reason.

@DarthNocturnal by random hearsay, you mean @octane right?

@Ralizah i like having my whole library accessible like a Mini console or 8 in 1 arcade cab. This gen including switch indulged me in that and it's impossible to go back. I like the games i haven't played yet being there, and downloads aren't exactly fast for most people. For me they are and it's still to annoying. Plus you always risk "abusing"your consumer isp.

If you play mostly story driven games one at a time, delete them, and treat them as disposable then, yeah no need to hoard them. Then again, why are you not hardcore digital already, then? . But games that aren't like that, that are gameplay driven instead, be it halo, forza, cod, anch, Splatoon, mmos, skyrim and fallout for that matter..... Or games you're expecting dlc on, and any GaaS, it needs to be installed.

Xbox is 300+games, almost 6tb of games ready whenever i want them. Ps4 has my vr games, the exclusives, trails of Cold steel series, p5 all sitting there ready to go. THOSE games can remain that way. But the idea of redownloading tens of gigs to play any new game or switch seems impractical.

Cool that you're probably getting an XSeS though! I think you'll like the ecosystem. It does favor digital, but that's not a problem since S is AD anyway. There's the storage issue, but that's an issue on all these new machines. I guess that's about to become an issue on pc, too, once developers get accustomed to producing for these drives.

I hope they announce the expansion cart prices when pre-orders starts. If it is truly over $200, then I simply get Series X. 'Cause Series S with expansion cart would cost me more than Series X.

I cracked and started playing Flight Sim on PC. I wanted to wait for the Xbox version, as while my PC can run it on ultra, my display is a 24 inch non-4K monitor, compared to a 65 inch 4k OLED for Xbox. It's such an amazing piece of technology. Yes, you get some weird stuff due to the AI building the world, but it's pretty rare, and a worthwhile trade off for what you get in return.

I'm playing it as a sort of persistent world, alway using real time weather and time, and always starting my next flight from the airport/field where I last landed. I've done a little tour of the UK, and now I'm currently making my way towards America. I don't really want to do 5 hour flights, so instead it's a journey made up of smaller journeys. I've gone Inverness, to Iceland, stopped at 3 different airports there before making my way to Greenland. Unfortunately, it looks like a lot of the airstrips in Greenland haven't been assigned as airports in the game, so now I'm making a 3 hour flight to Newfoundland. Once this is out of the way, that should be the last boring flight with nothing to see for a while as I can make my way down the east coast.

@Peach64

I absolutely love Flight Sim. I'm so impressed with the graphics for even a mid-range rx580 and need to play it more (too many games in backlog) My first flight was taking off from Dundee airport in Scotland, flying over my house and my brothers house in Carnoustie and then crashing while trying to land in Arbroath but I've got a whole planet I want to explore and hopefully can upgrade my PC later in the year to run a bit smoother. It's crazy value that you can get these games on Game Pass, which is the best value proposition in gaming and is a big reason why I want to get Xbox Series S after being more of a Playstation gamer (although I did have the original Xbox and 360)

@Magonigal Similar here. I was a 360 gamer, then got a PS3 right at the end to play exclusives. After that it was PS4, so I'll be getting one of the new Xbox consoles to catch up on Xbox One games and also future proof myself. Will probably get a series X. I'm kind of lucky in that I haven't had my job effected by Covid, but I haven't spent much at all in the last 6 months due to mostly staying at home.

I'm still mostly physical with console games. I've got rid of all other physical media, but gaming has always made me nervous. I don't need to worry about old movies, TV shows or music being inaccessible, but games do give me that feeling. With next gen though, I'm going to try and let it go. Get rid of that urge to 'own' and preserve and just embrace Game Pass.

@Peach64

Although I've had all the Playstations I'm more platform neutral beause I'm more about the games rather than the hardware so Xbox didn't really appeal to me again until this summer. I've played some really cool games on Game Pass for PC that i normally couldn't afford or just because I wanted to play them but probably wouldn't buy, so it's allowing me to expand my gaming. I'm pretty much all digital now so Game Pass is ideal for me to play a lot of games I wouldn't get the chance to normally.

Question:

Xbox Series S runs the Xbox One S versions of BC games, apparently. If that just means a lack of 4K enhancements, that's fine, but I was wondering two things:

• Is the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 considered a BC game, since it'll take a while for next-gen patches to release?
• If so, does that mean the Series S won't run it any better than a One S would?

No, when they talk about backwards compatible games, they specifically mean original Xbox and Xbox 360 games but not Xbox One games. Backward compatible games will use the Xbox One S version on Series S but improved: filter texturing, frame rate, loading time and auto HDR.

If you play an Xbox One game on Series S, e.g., Cyberpunk, you'll play the Xbox One version of the game on Series S until the Series S version is released but of course it will run much better on Series S. Frame rate is going to go all the way up thanks to the next-gen CPU and if the current-gen version uses dynamic resolution scaling, you'll get the top end, 1080p, while Xbox One S will struggle big time to run the game at all even at lower resolutions. It has been confirmed that Series S and X will use all of its power for Xbox One games.

@BlueOcean Nice, thanks. I only care about the framerate, really. Even if it runs at 900p or 720p, it'll still look fine.

I'm just remembering how The Witcher 3 ran on PS4/Xbone before patches, and this game is going to be a good deal more demanding than even that was, I think.

Well, CD PR did confirm that game would be playable on the next XBoxes as well as promising the upgrade a bit later, @Ralizah .... Every XB1 game should be at least playable on the next ones! How much better they'll run, without being specifically upgraded, will probably vary somewhat Are you still on the original model XB1? Or the S? Or the X? You might not notice much difference between the X & Series S playing something like that, for instance! Nobody yet has access to test & confirm just how much difference there is, either

@NEStalgia I understand keeping mp stuff, or games that you dip into often downloaded. But a lot of games are also "once and done," so to speak. That easily applies to most of my games.

I insist on keeping my Vita games downloaded, but that's primarily due to the fact that deleting the game means deleting the save data, too. I learned that the hard way with Odin Sphere. You can get around this with PS+, of course, but I don't want to keep paying $50 a year because Sony is holding my save data ransom.

I'm not entirely sure if I'll be preordering or waiting a while to see how the thing performs. The problem is that if I wait then it could be many months before it gets back in stock, like with the Switch. I was initially planning on just upgrading my PC, but the value on this thing is crazy: just buying a Series S-equivalent CPU would cost $300, and that's before the SSD, RAM, motherboard, and GPU.

@BruceCM I haven't owned an Xbox since the 360. I'd normally buy it for my PC, but I have no idea how it'll run on that, considering it's quite old and lacks the powerful CPU and SSD of the Series S (and, honestly, even my GPU is less capable).

Anyway, I imagine the next-gen enhancements mostly come down to 4K and RT support, which are things I don't care about. If the game will make full use of the Series S hardware, though, then it should be able to run beautifully. Whereas, you know, on PS5 it apparently won't run any better than it would on a PS4 Pro at launch.

@Ralizah No problem.

@BruceCM Yes, nobody has access to the next-gen consoles to test and confirm but Microsoft said that Series X/S will use all of their power for Xbox One games so a demanding game like Cyberpunk is going to struggle big time on Xbox One S and the Xbox One version will be able to run at 60 FPS on Series X/S and also at 1080p if it uses dynamic resolution scaling up to 1080p, which is my point, unless the Xbox One version is capped at 720p30 or something like that but I doubt it.

Fair enough, @Ralizah .... I think my PC should handle it, since I won't be trying to play it in 4k, with all the highest settings or anything stupid but in that case, at the moment, all I think we can safely say is that the game should run better on Series S than the current variants of XB1

I'll admit Series S sounds awfully tempting, but better judgement will probably keep me from buying one.

I barely have enough time to split between my PS4 & Switch as it is (I only get to play the former for a couple hours during the weekend currently), I have over a dozen games in my PS4 library I haven't gotten around to because of that, and Xbox still hasn't shown any interest in VR.

There are now a good number of current & upcoming Xbox exclusives I'd like to play though, like ReCore, the Halos' (I've only played the 360 remake of the first), and Flight Simulator.

@Ralizah It's hilarious and vindicating to hear you praise the value for performance of console over PC finally

Yeah I'm a game hoarder in general as evidenced from my collapsing pile of ps4 and Nintendo games..... But I'm surprised you'd have the "games are disposable" mindset considering you've been physical focused until now. I'd have thought you'd have jumped to digital ages ago with the idea that you play and move on. I can't imagine replaying xc2 any time this decade, yet i can't imagine deleting it so it's not there if i want to either. And i tend to have adapted with digital to poke at a dozen games at once until one clicks. Adapting away from that will be frustrating.)

Technically XSeXS doesn't affect digital game hoarding, i can still connect a big bulk drive to hoard it on same as before. PS5 is more uncertain in that regard, but as an exclusives only box it doesn't matter to me as much, though it still matters.

But what this all does change is it means i can't just jump into any of those downloaded games on a whim anymore. I have to preplan what I'm playing as though it's physical. That it turn makes the hoarding more just that: hoarding for no purpose because they're not sitting there ready to play like an arcade cabinet .. They're just they're stored in an inconvenient box like physical. (I'm never playing anything from that leaning pile.. Why do i have it?).

Otoh i have gigabit fiber, so with the hdd speed no longer limiting me i could probably download fallout 76 in like 10 or 20 minutes.... But that's like 5% of the country that can say that. And the isps aren't going to play nicely if millions of gamers start saturating the line for 40gb at a time, 10tb a month.

Imagine the pushsquare and kotaku articles on Comcast alone after this launch?

@NEStalgia Well, different generation, different consoles. The PS4/Xbone were a waste of money if you didn't take their exclusives into account. They launched with really weak CPUs and very dated GPUs for a premium (especially Xbone: including the Kinect at launch was a real killer, as it was so not worth that $499.99 price point).

PS5/Series X are technological beasts at launch. Granted, the RTX 3070 makes it easy to build a PC that smokes those two without breaking the bank, but that's primarily if you want to build a 4K-capable platform. What's really impressive about the Series S is how thoroughly it routs PC in terms of a 1080p build. It's not uncommon to see people in Xbox communities think of it as sort of a gimped platform, but it's really not, since most of the extra GPU horsepower is flushed down the 4K toilet. The real gamechangers this gen are the SSD and more powerful CPUs in these machines, and Series S has near parity in that regard.

I'm not sure why you think I'm some big physical game person. Nearly all of my Switch games are digital, as are 2/3rds of my PS4 games. The only platform I'm unreasonably bullish about with regard to only buying physical is Wii U. And, now, 3DS, although I still own a number of downloads for that platform from the past as well.

@Magonigal @Peach64 Thanks for the Flight Simulator impressions, I can't wait to at least try it on Series X because my computer is... well, this old laptop.

@Ralizah Yeah, this gen was pretty trash from the start. I've thought for years now that the pro/x felt like the console the laugh models advertised they were at launch. Between wiiu and what felt like mid gen launches from ps360 it didn't really play well early on. Everything felt like it pushed ps4 harder than it wanted to go, and i can't image og xbone.

But this gen was odd. All other generations were heavily subsidized to bring expensive tech cheap. This gen both companies didn't want to take a hardware loss at all which basically meant the tech they already had at a loss was more or less the at cost tech they could afford. If you recall neither company even wanted a new gen. They weren't ready for the jump even at 7 years. They got pushed into it by publishers and retailers that demanded something new to boost sales, and publishers that only really cared about getting x86 in homes. It was a fun, but weird wasted gen.

Still if I'd built that pc you guys wanted me to build instead of getting x two years ago, id have to scrap it and build all new again for the new pci for the 3070s etc.....pc gaming still is a money sink. It's upgradable only if the io isn't different..... And in my experience the io is always different with any jump anyway. A3070 build is 500 for the gpu, then you need mobo, ram, psu, chassis, cpu, ssd (nvme anyway?)....1500-2000+ vs 500.... X is a bargain as well. And even if theres mid gen refreshes again, another 500 still just matches a gpu upgrade anyway!

Still, it's funny, coming from you of all people!

Ahh, the other day i thought you were saying you were on the fence about digital still and sounded primarily physical. I'm principal so am i but convenience (send leaning towers of games) won me over