Xbox - Series S/X: Thread 01

[dataDave]

Increadbile showing. 343 Nailed HALO. Crossfire and Desntiny 2 upgrade looks incredible too. Can't wait

Nailed it as in nailed it into a coffin, right?

[Lyris]

So I haven’t watched the reveal and haven’t read much about this, only snippets here and there on social media. Do I have this correct - one of the new machines is called the Xbox Series X which is not the same as the Xbox One X currently on sale? And the games will play on the existing system and the new one?

Also, is Xbox Game Pass something that streams video of the game to your system, or does it run the code locally?

This is feeling sort of Wii U like.

[Family Fry]

Xbox Series X is the new console due this November (more likely) spec wise it’s a lot more powerful than Xbox One X which was the mid gen refresh which is a more powerful version of the Xbox One. Series X also has an SSD hard drive as standard.

Any game that plays on Xbox One currently, including the backward compatible 360/Xbox games, will play on Series X some of them may even perform at higher resolution/frame rate just with the Series X spec boost.

Game Pass doesn’t stream anything to your Xbox, you subscribe to game pass and you can just select what game to download direct to your Xbox.

X-Cloud is the streaming version which will be getting added to Game Pass Ultimate later in the year, meaning you can play your Xbox game library on mobile/tv/laptop or stream any game that’s on game pass.

[Team Andromeda]

Nailed it as in nailed it into a coffin, right?

Nailed the Classic HALO combat and music (insert classic gfx joke here) It looks so good and so much like the combat and feel of the original

[Team Andromeda]

Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah. Hang on just catch my breath.

Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah.

Good one.

Coming from MR SONY, I like the irony. Please... do continue

[nonny]

I wonder how this is going to impact the next 3 months or so before launch? Surely 343 are in epic crunch mode already and it's a given that COVID is making that difficult for any large teams operating in lockdown.

It makes me wonder whether this would actually impact the entire series X launch?

Just for some positivity, there is no way MS is going to let this one fail. I mean, it's Halo and it's the only Halo we're getting and it's a platform for future expansion.

Does anyone remember how poor Halo Combat Evolved looked in the run up to launch? Maybe they're replicating that game right down to its difficulties in development. Ha.

So yeah, even if this does come out lacking graphical polish on day one, it's going to get more polish. It's going to get free reign to make it right same as they did on the MC debacle. The difference here is I think the gameplay and general scope they're going for is perfect as a reboot for the franchise. Really it's only the graphics, pure and simple it's not looking as detailed as has been promised in earlier development.

On that basis I am sure it'll look a lot better at launch and I am sure it will continue to look better and better as it "evolves". This is actually reminding me quite a lot of Destiny. Anyone remember what an absolute mess that was at launch? The campaign was weak, it has a dinklage dial in for giggles and generally it was barebones. But it played good, really good.

To me this has a different issue but similar solutions. Keep going, the core is right. And when I say the core is right I mean it's supposed to be a throwback to the original with a few things in the mix. So it's intentionally waxing on tropes of the series decades old. I'm good with that, provided there are a few surprises. This isn't a remake after all.

My guess is the core game is Halo Combat Evolved but the map traversal is akin to metroidvania where the upgrade equipment is concerned.

[MartyG]

I've rewatched this now and Halo doesn't look as bad as some people are making out, it just looks like they haven't finalised 4K textures and need to tweak the LoD pop-in, framerates looked smooth enough. The comparison shots have clearly tried to find the worst frame they could as some of the mountain stuff looks far better than the grabs are suggesting.

There's no way that Infinite on Series X is going look worse than Halo 5 at final release - still not a great presentation given the lack of gameplay shown in the rest of games but I'm not writing off Series X just yet.

[Cassius_Smoke]

You can't write the console off yet. It very early days and it's not a total shower of ****. My real concern is I'm not sure I've seen anything fun. Everything looked a bit serious. PS5 I guess had ratchet and clank and Bugsnax I suppose. Where are games like Lumines or a 3D fighter? Or a just a fun piss around driving game?

[Lyris]

It really doesn’t have a “wow” factor at all though. But I guess that’s the stage we’ve reached with console graphics - it’s diminishing returns from this point.

Given how blank I feel with new consoles today, I feel fortunate to have grown up around a time where new systems meant lusty new graphics.

[randombs]

I really liked the Halo Infinite demo. However, I’ve been binging on MCC and am playing Halo 3 so it was a bit surprising to see not much has changed. I liked the zipline melee move. As for the graphics, I thought Chief’s glove looked wicked when he was going up in the lift thingy. It looked much better than the screenshot Dave posted above, and I was watching on my iPhone.

The 3D map was cool, but I’ve been enjoying how Halo gives the illusion of a huge open world but is actually ushering me between checkpoints. I hope it doesn’t involve lots of traipsing about for ages.

I couldn’t place the pilot’s accent. I think it was meant to be Irish, but it also sounded South African and sometimes a bit Spanish. What’s up with that?

[MartyG]

It really doesn’t have a “wow” factor at all though. But I guess that’s the stage we’ve reached with console graphics - it’s diminishing returns from this point.

Given how blank I feel with new consoles today, I feel fortunate to have grown up around a time where new systems meant lusty new graphics.

The biggest issue with Halo Infinite (aside from the poor feed) was the lighting looked very flat in it - it's going to get a ray tracing patch and that will transform how it looks, lighting makes a massive massive difference to look and feel - it's here that you're going to see your biggest next gen differences.

I think perhaps Infinite wasn't quite ready for such a big public display, so maybe 343 were pushed into showing something, which is to the detriment of the game. As I understand, it wasn't running on Series X hardware either.

It's worth having a look at the 4K video of Infinite as it has loads more detail than the compressed stream we initially saw.

You can't write the console off yet. It very early days and it's not a total shower of ****. My real concern is I'm not sure I've seen anything fun. Everything looked a bit serious. PS5 I guess had ratchet and clank and Bugsnax I suppose. Where are games like Lumines or a 3D fighter? Or a just a fun piss around driving game?

Pretty sure that Psychonauts 2 isn't going to be very serious

[prinnysquad]

I wasn’t impressed at all with the Halo footage. It looked dated and flat. One might almost say that it had a 3D clipart feel to it. Only a truly blinkered fanboy would look at that and think it looked like a true advancement.

On the flipside, not being a complete oozing helmet, I’ll wait and see what improvements are made to the final product. There’ll be no doubling down round these parts. I want it to be good, and it’ll get more than 2 hours of scrunched-up faced, resentment and bitterness-filled gameplay before I make a final judgement.

[Digfox]

For me it was a very bad show, but some of that wasn't a surprise. I think they (Microsoft) still consistently fail to land their messaging and some of that may be from the top. In addition they don't control the narrative after their events and seem to always be fire fighting afterwards. I feel that the Xbox needs a new marketing team, or big changes in that department.

Four months out we still have seen no real detail. The move to services aside, Microsoft are expecting us to drop large sums of money on new hardware that we haven't seen (and we still don't know when or how much). Sony's PS5 showing weren't perfect and overwhelmingly their show screamed '2021' to the point most commentators picked up on it but they are much more consistent in how they present. Whether it's a reality of the current pandemic or the usual pipeline/development challenges all the interesting stuff seems to be 12-24 months away - for both consoles.

There seems to be this greater emphasis on CGI/pre-rendered trailers and very limited reveals that help restrict how little of games we see until release that have become tiresome. I feel like it's all done for the mainstream 'streamer generation'. My greatest hot take this summer in all these bad presentations has been; don't watch live and but just play the VOD afterwards to skip through the fluff and not waste time.

Regarding Halo Infinite, there clearly isn't smoke without fire. It doesn't look ready or they simply bodged the demo. Either way there are red flags that indicate that game is having a difficult time and it clearly looks like a game that was designed for current gen and shifted to be cross-gen. Aaron Greenburg's overly defensive responses about the pandemic are baffling. If the game or hardware isn't ready then the obvious response to him is DON'T RELEASE!!!. And even if that was the case, in the grand scheme a few months won't hurt anything. Trying to shift blame just feels unprofessional when Microsoft themselves called a show and then didn't foresee the issues with presenting 'that'.

All the confusion over Xbox Series X exclusives games, lack of clarity on what the game was running on, and last minute marketing sites changes all seem to add to the feeling that they just aren't 'on point' with this stuff.

PS. I seem to be in the minority of how the new Halo sounds. A lot of people seem to hate the new sounds on the guns. To me it sounded 'good'.

[CMcK]

So I watched the 4k version of the Xbox presentation last night and have mixed feelings about it. The format is plain boring but there's not really much you can do about it at present. Non interactive presentations of interactive media are never going to work particularly well IMO. It would have been good to have more interviews with developers between the games rather than PR speak.

Must admit I'm quite hyped for Halo Infinite now. It seems to have the classic CE look and feel. The grapple mechanics should be more integral to the game than the addons in the last couple of Halo games which felt largely superfluous to me. The presentation was a bit of a mixed bag. The cutscene on board the ship looked pretty good but the shadows were a bit off. The model of the Chief looks great though. Once it got into the game properly the evening lighting while quite nicely done did make things look a bit subdued. Great geometric detail though and shadows seemed better than the cutscene. The colourful outburst from the various weapons looked great too. Once we can play this in HDR and with the ray tracing stuff added I think it'll look fantastic. I do worry that this close to launch the ray tracing stuff isn't ready to show but I suppose that's not something that will affect gameplay ultimately.

[CMcK]

So I haven’t watched the reveal and haven’t read much about this, only snippets here and there on social media. Do I have this correct - one of the new machines is called the Xbox Series X which is not the same as the Xbox One X currently on sale? And the games will play on the existing system and the new one?

Also, is Xbox Game Pass something that streams video of the game to your system, or does it run the code locally?

This is feeling sort of Wii U like.

I thought the Series X would be right up your street with all of the HDMI 2.1 support and the HDR stuff in the display controller that can display any title in HDR with a machine learning based reverse tone map process for SDR games. This technique will even work with original Xbox games and doesn't carry a performance penalty.