Topic: The everything Xbox thread

@DarthNocturnal LOL!

@DarthNocturnal to be fair it's not really heresy. Microsoft showed off switch at the last two e3s like it was their very own Vita

@NEStalgia Yeah, the cloud is not going away, and they'll want to push it, but I suspect that it's not going to affect console gaming yet, to a point that we'll only get streaming boxes. In computing and in business, it's another thing altogether, and that already happened decades ago. I should know: I sold HP Blade server parks to companies...

I still don't see how you think that Microsoft is going to be happy if they aren't going to be able to sell Scarlett to current customers, let alone new ones. There is no gain for them to let people use their current consoles ad infinitum, so they'll want and NEED you to buy that shiny new box at some point, and for them, at some point would preferably be sooner, rather than later...

Oh, and you should most definitely get Split/Second, it's a GREAT game, and really brought something new in the arcade racing genre altogether. A damn shame that it never got a sequel. I think that if you go and try it out with Game Pass, you might just be tempted to actually buy it to own. The main game is already quite entertaining (and quite extensive as well), and then there's also so much variety in the levels and objectives that you have to reach. It has a bit of a Death Race 2000 flavor, in that, just like the movie, it plays out like a sponsored TV show, and that you must try and destroy all the other racers, in all kinds of crazy ways, which ranges from dropping oil drums or containers into their path, to collapsing complete flight towers on top off them, while racing along an airport.

Crazy but highly entertaining stuff. And then there's also the option to change tracks during races, by implementing triggers or destroying certain areas, which will then open up a new route or shortcut, so no two races are ever the same. Heck, in some levels, no two laps are the same...

Here's some Xbox 360 BC gameplay on the Xbox One:

P.S.
It's now 1.15am over here, and the Xbox One is still busy installing games. Five more in the queue...

@ThanosReXXX
Thanks, I looked them up and they were...
'Sign of Gambit' (also handed out at e3)
People are selling these on Ebay for £50!!!!!
And the other took a bit more finding but gets you an exclusive 'sparrow'?
(and also sells on ebay!!!)

I gave the codes to @redd214 yesterday so hopefully they are not the one's I saw on ebay lol

Totally worth it. I also bought an Xbox for Rare Replay and now I have more than I can handle that I want to play on Xbox. It's the best addition to your Switch.

Viva Piñata is my most played backwards compatible game. I got everything I could get and I still want to play the expanded version (Trouble in Paradise) 100%. It makes Animal Crossing look boring.

Games on Rare Replay perform and look better than the original versions, including 360 games because the backwards compatibility service has been technically improved since launch.

@NEStalgia Apparently, mouse players would be separated from controller players. On Fortnite that's the case on every platform unless you have a member of your party playing on another platform. However, "casual" Sea of Thieves mixes Xbox and PC players and it's unfair and everybody is complaining about it. I can see PC players aiming at light speed, only cool when he's playing cooperative with you.

Mouse and controller players should be separated unless you accept joining. We move like Bowser and they move like Sonic.

@ThanosReXXX You are right. I said it. @NEStalgia Can I be the judge for once and break the loop?

@DarthNocturnal Cool, I wanted to try Shantae Half-Genie Heroe and Wolfenstein The New Order. I didn't like Shantae and the Pirate Curse much but they say Half-Genie is quite different. Solid offerings there along with Overcooked (it was briefly part of Game Pass) and Metro games.

Please don't post so many times in a row, edit your first comment if you wish to add more.

@Yosheel I am on my phone and it is difficult to do...

@dew12333 I believe the Sparrow is a gun of sorts.
Here's hoping that you didn't give away too much money...
But then again, one good deed deserves another, so I'm sure you'll see something coming your way at some point. And if you gave something really unique to @redd214, then I'm all but sure that you two are now friends for live...

@BlueOcean Thanks. I'm hoping to see it confirmed by Phil Spencer, though, but til then, I'll stick to my views. And if I'm wrong, I'll make another generous text wall, confessing my mistakes...

I know, I just merged your comments into one in my phone.

@ThanosReXXX I still don't really understand how we ended up with "cloud" even in the business computing world. The whole of the 90's was all about the rise of the personal computer, the end of the mainframe-terminal model and the start of the client-server model with an internet based on peer-to-peer communications so as to avoid an independent internet devoid of a single authoritarian body and single point of failure, where every node could be a server and information could exchange freely. Then somehow in the 00's Google and friends came along and sold us right back into mainframe-terminal and people applauded this as progress. We already had "the cloud". We called it AS/400 and AIX and it was horrible....why are we back to this with applause?! Might as well dust off the old VT-100 and call it the future. Except even in the mainframe ere there was more than just 3 companies making up. Lets just put AT&T/Ma Bell back together (it mostly is already anyway) and go back the 80's after all. I don't see the point of 30 years of technological progress to just go full circle right back where we were only worse.

Now splitting: XBox 1 X forward compatibility for a portion of the generation as one possibility. Streaming as the forward compatibility as the second possibility.

If it's the former, I agree, part of the generation. My bet is Scarlett in 2020, Scarlett X in 2023 (and that cuts off X1X and enrages forums.) But in that case the focus is on status quo: Generational hardware with the new tick-tock scheme.

However, if the focus is a streaming future (think a reprise of XBone Mattrick DRM everything is digital!) but "softening the blow' with one last normal console, I don't think they'd really care about selling Scarlett: Selling the service is the point and any hardware that gets subscribers is all that matters, if you already have an X1 sign up today for only $89.95/mo! (Taxes, fees, and surcharges apply). If it's really about pushing the service they really don't need to push Scarlett, as it would actually be an X1X vs S like "premium catalyst" (I know you don't do the ABCs yadda yadda, but I can't help but throw those marketing buzzwords at you ) to further drive the "mainstream" streaming, just as X was set as a low seller to drive the S.

Business wise for MS it's touch. Protect the WIntel monopoly with hardware or push the new cloud-first MS with streaming?

I certainly hope it's not a big streaming push like that. But I'm darkly cautious this time around. I can see where the industry is buzzing, and MS diving into it headlong at E3 timed with the industry trend has some unsettling portents when combined with other MS business models.

I now have 1.5TB copied between drives. 2TB to go! I just let it run overnight in waves.

Destiny 2: I still have mixed feelings. It's really cool in some ways. Yet I'm in the EDZ doing the first missions with the knightly sniper guy's church area. And it feels all so....hollow. Run around while things infinitely spawn and other people do other quests and pretend they're not there as you do your quest and random people run past you. It feels like a Boy Scout jamboree with (more) guns, as random mock events are going on around you for other activities, rather than an apocalypse where you're the only hope. It's fun, somewhat but also feels kind of like a "time waster" more than a meaningful experience.

Xbox One X gets stronger.

https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/xbox-one-x-growing-faster...

@BlueOcean Pretty good, though, that looks like it's one UK retailer's numbers, not worldwide sales figures, so I don't know if that's a reflection of the region or overall.

I'd rather MS still be an underdog. It's better for us that way

LOL Who would have thought that you would be the one to something like that? It's just great that Xbox is recovering from Mattrick Disaster after Spencer doing things right, just wanted to link good news. I didn't say that this was worldwide dominance or anything like that, that's just on your mind.

@BlueOcean Hey they only brand I'll go fanboy over is Nintendo. The others are fair game! I'll gripe about Nintendo's screw-ups but overall no matter how much I enjoy any other platform I tend to gravitate towards Nintendo's as the "main." (As long as we're not in the Wii era. Wii era can die in a hole.)

@NEStalgia I don't know, nor do I care who came up with the term "cloud" or "in the cloud", all I do care about is to what degree it will negatively impact me. The TV provider story I mentioned earlier, who traded local storage for cloud-based, is one example of that, and while it has its conveniences, it definitely also has its bad points.

The whole "leaked celebrity photos and videos" thing is a prime example of that: most people just never realize that all of the pictures and movies they make with their smartphones, are automatically backed up to the server, unless you disable that option manually. And then when things go sour, they wonder how the hell someone was able to "hack their phone". I am not for people stealing other people's private media, but if you don't take care of it, you're asking for it, in some ways. I for one would never make those kinds of pictures with my phone anyway, and if I would, I would most certainly store them somewhere offline...

What actually annoys me the most, is how easily the masses accept all this, without ever thinking about it. Much like with all those adamant supporters for digital only games, and people thinking/believing they'll forever be able to re-download the games that they now own, in case something happens to their hard drive or console, but they never stop to think that if the servers are closed or not replaced, or a company moves on or goes bankrupt or whatever, then their game or games are gone forever, regardless of whether or not you've paid for them.

It's a stupid, short-sighted frame of mind, with millions of people being lulled into some kind of all-accepting stupor without realizing that none or almost none of it is to their own benefit.

But the cloud per se doesn't even exist, really. Technically, it's just a network of computers and servers, which isn't all that far removed from a "normal" peer to peer network, in some ways. So, it's just a fancy label, that somebody gave to it, nothing more.

Anyways, enough techno babble. And let's just hope that we'll still get a normal console this time around.
We're still not agreeing on the "Microsoft doesn't need to sell Scarlett" point, because no one can make me believe that this is going to work with the X, let alone with the S, because streaming or not, the older hardware will never be up to the task for the duration of that life cycle, so something's got to give at some point. And even though they will drive towards the whole online-centered environment, they still can't afford to either alienate people, or hamstring their new console, by keeping it tied to older, weaker hardware.

And sure, streaming isn't as tasking as local computing, but still... So, no: that just isn't going to fly with me, not ever.

As for Destiny 2: that part you're in right now, is indeed a bit boring or slow, but the story itself gets more compelling along the way, so I'd say just stick with it for a while longer, until you've met a few more of the key players and have actually battled some of the tougher enemies.

But to take your mind off of all of these things, go and play a bit of Split/Second. I'm all but sure that you're gonna love it...

@ThanosReXXX What amazes me most is not the people that don't understand it. It's a difficult concept to understand in general to non-techhies. It's the people that once it's explained to them still defend it and have a bizarre trust for global corporations as some sort of benevolent force for a good harmonious flat society of earth! (remember when those were called empires? )

I mean people actually trust corporations to be good natured, helpful and seek only to provide helpful utility to people! They have a magic good faith that if you tell them all these bad implications it'll all be fine, the corporation will make sure it is! There is no enlightenment, there is no intellect, and I have no idea under what criterion schools are churning out graduates, because from where I stand most of the population is as utterly moronic as the most illiterate 8th century peasant. How do these people hold careers and earn money?! How do they even manage to tie their shoelaces?!

Yeah, I used to cringe at the buzzword "the cloud", however it's becoming ever more appropriate. It really only started because on flowcharts a "cloud" shape always represented the nebulous external network of the internet or "whatever" was the other end. Then the marketing gurus (no offense) did what they always do and coined it into a memorable mesmerizing buzzword. But at this point "the cloud" consists mostly of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google hosting almost the entirity of the internet as a trio of mainframes. This is the total opposite of everything the 90's internet was supposed to create. We were supposed to all be hosting our own servers, not everyone connecting to 3 central global server clusters. And the whole world wasn't supposed to be plugged into one giant extranet that was used, of all things, for commerce...nobody in their right mind would put the US, China, and Nigera on one network with all the world's financial transactions on it. Nor is it what the internet was ever designed for.

As for video streaming, it again depends if their actual business objective is to sell generational consoles, or if it's to sell the cloud services. That part we don't know (but other MS business hints at it.) If they structure it so that all XBox games can be streamed, then selling the XBox Store/Microsoft store is the real product, and the XBoxen are merely gateways. No X1 would be too weak to do so. Game streaming is literally the same as video streaming with some upload overhead and BT input. The new rumored "latency mitigation" hints at some local prediction being involved. But nothing so taxing it can't be run on a Windows phone which is typical less powerful than an Android phone due to less overhead of the OS. OGX1 is way more overkill than a streaming platform needs. The X360 could even do it, but no streaming client will be made for PPC, of course.

For reference GeForce NOW is probably the high water mark for streaming right now. System requirements (PC) are pretty low:
25MB/s internet for 1080p streaming (15 for 720p), a bit higher than Netflix.
Any dual core 2GHz cpu.
Windows 7 64bit
any DX9 GPU (it doesn't use the full power of D3D, it just needs the DD9 components for video.), which goes back to 2012 GPUs at least.

Obviously 4k would take a bit more as with any 4k streaming. But not also that you can also just use the Android based Shield TV or Shield Tablet (a weaker Tegra unit.)

Remember you're not running the game at all you're just streaming video like a movie, and uploading the inputs, so the processing requirements fall in line with what a Roku can do. Not exactly X1 power. All it needs to do is process video more or less. The new functionality may have some local processing for prediction if that latency mitigation (read: Hiding) is real, but again it will work on phones and tablets, waaaay below the power capabilities of even a bare X1.

So if they're bent on streaming, then absolutely every piece of hardware they get their client on they'll do it. And X1 could do it "forever" at least below 8k. For comparison, though, we can look at the current client for Streaming XBox games. I tested it last night, 1080/60/stereo from my 1X to my Surface Pro i5 with the native Win10 XBox client: It barely used any CPU at all, a few percent every now and again. Most of the decoding is in hardware (as it is for X1 as a media device as well) and the unit didn't even get warm. XBox game streaming is already available. You're just using your own XBox rather than theirs in Azure. I mean, really, if it comes down to buying an "XBox Streamer", a "Scarlett X" or a Surface Pro and stream it.....the Surface Pro CoreM is only $150 more than an X1X (sans Type Cover.) So absolutely, positively definitely no X1 could ever hold back the streaming service for the next gen (and likely beyond.)

It's all about what they want to sell, not what is possible to sell. The decision will be business plan driven, not technology driven.

But of course we have the whole "but the internet doesn't actually work for that" problem

Destiny 2: Ok I got to Titan and so far that was interesting. Just got to the part with the shared world again though so we'll see how I favor that.

Also, did I mention the Elite and Wolverine controllers are flipping awesome? Because they are.

Ooh, is Split Second available yet? Cool! (Busy week for games: AC: Odyssey, Forza Horizon 4, Mega Man 11, wow!)

@NEStalgia A Wolverine controller? I'm almost tempted, since he's one of my all-time favorite characters, but I have to restrain myself, since after Black, the limited edition Forza Horizon 2 pack and the 4TB external drive, I've spent more than enough money for some time to come...

Split/Second is available thru GamePass. I kinda assumed you were still using that. But even without GamePass, this game is well worth the purchase. In fact, all this talk about it, has made me install the game on my Xbox One, to replay it for myself.

As for Destiny 2: you have to see the shared world as a sort of an open world gym, to grind and level up your character, to prepare for the next battle/campaign in the main story line. And there's also the timed events, in the shared world. Get yourself a vehicle (speederbike-like thingies, that you can steal from the aliens) to travel around faster. These events are well worth it, because it makes the grinding go considerably faster, and it might also yield some nice upgrades.

No need to use any paid upgrades or loot boxes, since I myself have finished the entire main story without ever spending a single dime. Did it all with in-game credits, currency and free upgrades.

As for the cloud thing: not stepping into that one anymore. Like I said: enough techno babble, and it doesn't really belong in this thread as a main topic. So, even though I could say much more about it, I'm not going to. Let's get back to the Xbox.

And speaking of Xbox, I just don't see the need or the reason for upgrading to whatever Scarlett is going to be, then, in your scenario. I know how streaming works and that it, in and of itself, doesn't require really powerful hardware per se, but the video quality WILL suffer from being displayed on simpler/weaker devices.

And the thing is, that Phil Spencer himself has said that more traditional gamers needn't fear, because there WILL be dedicated, local hardware, so I just can't believe that this is only going to be a streaming box. That's not a real console, that's a Roku...

And don''t worry: I don't trust companies, except in some aspects, such as the quality of their product or their service, such as how I know by now that I can rely on how good and stable Xbox Live is, making it the best online service around today, bar none. But other than that, I only trust companies as far as I can throw them. Like my mentor used to say: trust is good, control is better...

Oh, and I'm not the least bit offended by your "marketing slang", and I've never heard of or used the term "premium catalyst" either...

@ThanosReXXX wolverine is just the model name, sadly, so you're not missing out on a character accessory

So i take it you're holding off on horizon4? I pegged you for having planned on that day1. (Or do you still have your game pass sub?)

Ohh, yeah i do still have game pass (that's how I'm getting horizon 4), but i thought split second landed on the 1st.

I'm pretty sure video quality won't be suffering on "weaker" devices. They all steam 4k video from actual cameras that are way more detailed than any video game will be this decade or more just fine. . Even roku . (my auto-correct is now trained to automatically make it 六 apparently...ok then... Thanks for separating the IME auto correct Google!)

I should either find it heartening or worrying that I'm familiar work marketing buzzwords you aren't. How long before the conversion intoa Reggie is complete, and can i complete any quests to reverse the transformation? )

@NEStalgia As for Split Second: I don't know if it's going to be released on the first. If I remember correctly, @DarthNocturnal was the one that mentioned it being on GamePass. If not, my bad @DarthNocturnal.

And I actually do have GamePass now again: with the officially licensed 4TB external hard drive, came a free two months of Game Pass, so I can activate that whenever I want, but right now, I don't have too much spare time left for gaming, so I want to get the maximum out of those two months, so I'll have to wait and see when that's going to be.

But I'm still getting my Forza Horizon 4 fix regardless of that, because I downloaded the free demo...

As for you being familiar with marketing buzzwords that I'm NOT familiar with: perhaps you should take into consideration that I'm still active in that business, and the simple fact that I am not familiar with those supposed buzzwords, should probably tell you that they're either not all that commonly used, or that they may be kind of well over their best before date...

Wow, XBL is almost totally down right now. Their status page says its up but neither of my xboxes can log in (or sporradically can), and any of the network/nat tests fail. The PC XBox app is also failing to sign in. So much for best network